Behind The Scenes

How would you define User Experience Research?

User Experience Research is a study on the user/viewer's interaction with various components of a website. Whether through habits or interests, the behavior of the user on a particular website allows web designers to determine what is effective or attractive to their viewers. It is essential to discover what will garner more attention to the site; the more traffic, the more potential there is for ad revenue.

The research conducted and feedback gathered can help anywhere from the appearance of the website to the layout of certain information. It is also important for online media to analyze user behavior and experience because it reveals a lot about their personality and lifestyle; aspects that they can use to cater their information to.

What happened?

Last Tuesday, the User Research Experience team at the L.A. Times came into the Journalism 446 classroom and conducted a session that determined what type of news junkie we are. Through several surveys, questionnaires, and question-and-answers, the team was able to see where different students stood in terms of being a certain type of news gatherer.

The information gathered also helped them understand what the demographics of college students are looking into. From the session, they can deduce what students my age are following (interest, attraction to a picture or headline, relevance to life, etc).

The research helped discover:

-what interests the user
-particular attractions (picture, headline, video, etc)
-the frequency in which one goes on the site
-the length of time one stays on a page
-the times in the day in which one uses the internet
-the behavior in which users go about finding news (through a particular subject matter, loyalty to a site, or overall interest in news)

What type of news junkie are you?

From the behaviors, students were categorized into being a news hound, a scanner, or a grinder. Only Hannah and I were placed in the "scanners" category because, from our survey, they saw that our habits were more to get a general knowledge of news rather than leaning toward a particular subject (sports, cooking) or trying to understand local news at certain peak hours of the day. We peruse everywhere and pick and choose what we click on simply out of interest.

I thought my label was extremely accurate. I tend to not care for one specific subject, and I have no loyalty to one publication, which permits me to roam several websites, reading just about anything.

What does your "label" reflect?

After being divided into groups, the L.A Times U.E.R team gave each group a stack of flashcards with various topics such as "Politics," "Technology," and "Hollywood A-Z." They requested that we categorize the cards into matching groups. This process allows them to see what our thought process is like. If we grouped "Entertainment" with "Blogging," it suggests to them that we see a correlation between the two and that we might expect to see blogs in the entertainment section. Since there were only two members in the group, deciding which topics belonged to what group was not difficult.

Through all the information gathered, web designers and product developers can determine what to put on a site, where to put it on a site, and how to catch and maintain a user's attention on the site. In return, traffic will grow, also increasing the number of sponsors or advertisements.

Overall, I thought the experience was really useful. I had no idea how much thought and effort goes into constructing/formatting a website. It was also interesting to learn the balance a news organization must maintain like making sure the fundamentals of journalism (ethics, integrity, timeliness, etc) remains a priority, but letting business (the source of employees' income, livelihood of company, etc) be a main component as well.

Photos - Courtesy of Creative Commons