State of Local

Representatives from 10 news organizations met at the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota from Jan. 31 to Feb. 2 to kickoff the Digital Storytelling Effects Lab Research Consortium.

Funded with donations from interested news companies, the consortium is working with DiSEL researchers to answer the design and usability questions deemed most relevant in multimedia newsrooms today. The companies represented included USA Today, The Washington Post, Yahoo! News, The NY Times, Time Magazine and Gannett.

This might sound a bit boring or esoteric, but I would argue that knowing how and why visitors interact with your web site is one of the most important factors in the ultimate success of a local online news organization.

During the meetings, Amish Desai, a customer insights researcher at Yahoo! and human/computer interactions specialist, presented some information on the stages at which customers decide whether or not to click on a link or continue to interact with the web site.

He noted that there are five basic stages in the process, and at each stage, you lose about half the visitors.

1) Visitors arrive at the stage and quickly scan it.

2) Their eyes go back to something they noticed on the initial scan.

3) They actually read the thing that caught their attention initially.

4) They decide whether or not to click on the link.

5) They click on the link.

There’s a whole lot of research aimed at discovering why readers respond this way, and many of the problems are due to design and usability problems.

Those problems range from cluttered pages to headlines that are difficult to parse (i.e. is the story really going to be what they’re looking for).

But the takeaway from the study is that if you are able to engage visitors at any of the stages at a rate higher than the norm, you’ll end up with a higher click-through rate.

All of this explains why everyone in the local news industry (including Internet Broadcasting) are devoting so much effort into site redisigns and usability studies. These questions are cosmetic ones, but they have a direct impact on clickthrough rates and how visitors interact in general with a web site.

And while this presentation didn’t break out the advertising side of the story, I suspect that the same usability challenges are found in sales and business development. Placement on the page, snappy and relevant headlines, offers that are informative but not manipulative all have an impact on the success of clients online.

I haven’t seen any formal studies that are relevant to the advertising side of the local online news business, but at least from my own experience, I know these are issues which impact the overall success of an ad campaign.