Designing and Evaluating Interfaces that Highlight News Coverage Diversity Using Discord Questions
This addresses a problem for news readers by providing incremental improvements in interface design to enhance exposure to diverse news coverage.
The paper tackled the challenge of helping readers navigate diverse news sources by designing three interfaces that highlight coverage diversity, finding that the Annotated Article interface allowed users to answer questions 34% more completely than existing methods while maintaining ease of use.
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.