How People Browse Mobile News Feed? A Study for Mobile News Feed Design

摘要

With the widespread emergence of "feed" in mobile Internet products, their competition for users and their usage time has become increasingly fierce, which makes improving the feed reading experience important. This research focuses on the news feed of Chinese news applications (apps) and attempts to provide an integrated picture of user experience with mobile news feed. The research was conducted in two phases. In the first stage, we explored users' demands on mobile news feed and extracted important factors affecting users' preference for products through in-depth interviews. Excluding the influence of news contents, the graphic layout and image quality, ancillary information, and template combination play important roles in users' preference for products. On this basis, the template combination was further studied with an eye-tracking experiment. Results of eye-tracking data and subjective evaluation of six combinations show that templates and their combination influence users' browsing behaviors and their subjective evaluation. It is a good choice to combine large-picture template with consecutive single-picture templates or consecutive three-picture ones since it can be well integrated. When consecutive three-picture templates work with one single-picture template, the score on users' satisfaction of "good organization" is low, and the single-picture template is more likely to be ignored by the user, which greatly weakens the value of this piece of news. The research results provide design suggestions for the news feed of mobile news apps.