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distillpub / post--communicating-with-interactive-articles

https://distill.pub/2020/communicating-with-interactive-articles
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Zhi et al. [62] is a desktop-only study not applicable to today's digital news #23

Closed rkaravia closed 3 years ago

rkaravia commented 3 years ago

The article cites this study by Zhi et al. as follows:

Regarding the format of interactive articles, an ongoing debate within the data journalism community has been whether articles which utilize scroll-based graphics (scrollytelling) are more effective than those which use step-based graphics (slideshows). McKenna et al. found that their study participants largely preferred content to be displayed with a step- or scroll-based navigation as opposed to traditional static articles, but did not find a significant difference in engagement between the two layouts. In related work, Zhi et al. found that performance on comprehension tasks was better in slideshow layouts than in vertical scroll-based layouts.

Unfortunately, the study by Zhi et al. was performed exclusively on desktop devices. This is not stated explicitly, but "mouse" is mentioned 6 times, "hover" 17 times, "phone" and "mobile" both 0 times.

However, the majority of readers of digital news today (and in 2019, when the study was performed) are accessing them through their mobile device (see e.g. [1]), so a desktop-only study is IMHO completely inadequate in the context of digital news, since news organizations have to optimize content for their readers, and not for an unrealistic test scenario.

I would therefore suggest to remove this reference, or to mention the limited applicability of its findings.

[1] Americans favor mobile devices over desktops and laptops for getting news

mathisonian commented 3 years ago

Hi @rkaravia,

I think this is a fair point, although I don't agree with you that we should completely remove the reference. This is one of the few empirical studies we have on this point, and while limited, is valuable information, both for folks in the journalism community, but also for other groups like educators and researchers where the devices used by their audiences may be more constrained.

We will add a note to provide that context about the study being done on desktop devices. McKenna et al, was heavily skewed towards desktop as well (although it wasn't exclusively desktop devices). I will close this issue once that info has been added to the text.