Understanding the Digital News Consumption Experience During the COVID Pandemic
This work addresses the problem of designing digital news platforms to support users' informational and emotional needs during crises, offering incremental insights based on a small-scale diary study.
The study investigated digital news consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic, identifying two stages (seeking and sustaining) with evolving informational and emotional needs, and proposed six design themes for better platform support.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, people sought information through digital news platforms. To investigate how to design these platforms to support users' needs in a crisis, we conducted a two-week diary study with 22 participants across the United States. Participants' news-consumption experience followed two stages: in the \textbf{seeking} stage, participants increased their general consumption, motivated by three common informational needs -- specifically, to find, understand and verify relevant news pieces. Participants then moved to the \textbf{sustaining} stage, and coping with the news emotionally became as important as their informational needs. We elicited design ideas from participants and used these to distill six themes for creating digital news platforms that provide better informational and emotional support during a crisis. Thus, we contribute, first, a model of users' needs over time with respect to engaging with crisis news, and second, example design concepts for supporting users' needs in each of these stages.