CHALLENGE

The overall goal of the project was to better understand young audiences’ habits when it comes to news. For young audiences, we mean users aged between 16 to 24 years old.

In particular, we wanted to:

• understand their general habits online
  • when they check the news
  • how much time they spend checking the news
  • how they check the news
• understand what news mean to young audience
  • why they check the news
  • which type of news they are interested in
  • how they check the news (newspapers, radio, TV, online)
• understand which media type young audiences use and work best for them (articles, videos, images, etc.)
• understand the news products and brands used by young audiences

APPROACH

We recruited 20 participants aged between 18 and 24 years old; a mix of female and male users, students, and workers.

Diary study
We asked them to keep a diary (in the form of an online survey) to fill in every time they checked the news during the period of four days. The diary study helped us collect information about their behaviour, activities, and experiences over the four days.

Interviews
We then conducted face to face interviews with our participants to discuss in more details their behaviour, motivations and needs. We discussed and were interested to understand the place and environment where they checked the news, the time of the day when they checked the news, and why that specific time (where they bored, on a break, or they received a notification, etc.). We also wanted to understand which type of news/article they read, why they read that specific article, and what caught their attention and made them read the article (the headline, image, video, etc.).

 RESULTS

The findings were extremely well received by the team and all stakeholders, as they clarified our young audiences behaviour, motivations and needs when it comes to news. We were able to draw a timeline of when our young audiences read the news, which device they use the most, and why, and we were able to understand which type of articles they were most interested in. These helped the design team to implement changes to the design of news articles, making them more appealing to young audience.

Research technique: diary study, interviews.