Using think-aloud and psychometrics to explore users’ experience with a news Web site

The present study is part of a research programme that aims to develop and test a psychological model of end-users’ experience with news sites. An exploratory study of interaction experience with a news Web site was conducted. An online questionnaire was used to collect information on demographics, Internet-use and news-site use behaviour of users of a particular news site, and to recruit participants for a think-aloud study. The protocol analysis of screen-capture and audio recordings of participants, who used a news site while thinking aloud, yielded five categories of experience: impression, content, layout, information architecture and diversion. These categories are regarded as spontaneous, self-reported aspects of users’ experience with a news site. A set of interaction-experience questionnaires revealed significant differences between regular users and non-users of a news site. Correlation and regression analyses demonstrated support for Hassenzahl’s model of interaction experience. The study presents a first attempt to empirically investigate the aspects of interaction experience in relation to online news sites.

► Research of interaction experience with news Web sites.
► Protocol analysis of verbal data recorded under think-aloud instructions.
► User-reported aspects of experience derived from verbal recordings.
► Strong differences in experience between users and non-users of a news site.
► Results inform future work on modelling interaction experience with news sites.