Digital News Conference
Digital News, Social Change & Globalization
Code 1006C
Title Evaluating text-based and multimedia-based online newspapers: A user survey study from usability perspective
Author Wen-Hao CHUANG, Lai Chong Wong
Affiliation Department of English and Communication, City University of Hong Kong
Abstract As the new media technologies keep evolving, two powerful forces have emerged to change the mass communication model. The first is the use of computers as a means of processing, analyzing, and disseminating information. The second is the constantly accelerating capacity of that technology to enhance communication so it is almost unbounded by time and space (Lapham, 1995). As digital technologies are evolving, some text-based online newspapers are switching to multimedia-based online newspapers. In this study, 12 online newspapers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, USA, were selected and were evaluated from the usability perspective. This paper focus on two aspects to evaluate the usability of text-based and multimedia-based online newspapers:
  1. Compare their navigation effectiveness, user-friendly issues, and accessibility issues from operational/technological perspective.
  2. Explore users' perceptions of different styled online newspapers in different forms of modality: text, audio, and video, from cognitive perspective.

Twenty people aged from 21 to 40, working as information officer, bankers, designers, and other working professionals were invited to participate in this study. Participants' online experiences were studied and participants were interviewed for their comments. These data were then collected and analyzed and the findings will be presented and discussed in this paper.