Designing and Evaluating Interfaces that Highlight News Coverage Diversity Using Discord Questions

TL;DR

This paper introduces three novel news reading interfaces designed to help users discover diverse news coverage, validated through usability studies with journalism experts and novice readers, demonstrating improved coverage understanding.

Contribution

The paper presents three innovative interfaces for highlighting news coverage diversity and evaluates their effectiveness through user studies with experts and novices.

Findings

Annotated Article enables 34% more complete answers.

All interfaces reveal coverage diversity effectively.

Annotated Article is user-friendly and enhances coverage understanding.

Abstract

Modern news aggregators do the hard work of organizing a large news stream, creating collections for a given news story with tens of source options. This paper shows that navigating large source collections for a news story can be challenging without further guidance. In this work, we design three interfaces -- the Annotated Article, the Recomposed Article, and the Question Grid -- aimed at accompanying news readers in discovering coverage diversity while they read. A first usability study with 10 journalism experts confirms the designed interfaces all reveal coverage diversity and determine each interface's potential use cases and audiences. In a second usability study, we developed and implemented a reading exercise with 95 novice news readers to measure exposure to coverage diversity. Results show that Annotated Article users are able to answer questions 34% more completely than with two existing interfaces while finding the interface equally easy to use.