User Experience Design on Online Newspapers : A study of how the user experience design of self-financed Swedish online newspaper is

Sammanfattning: In this paper the study has audited the user experience design of the two self-financed Swedish online newspaper Aftonbladet and Jnytt. The eleven participants were in the ages of eighteen and twenty-six and had no earlier expertise in web development, due to one exception where a participant had taken a short web design course during a couple of weeks. The importance of having participants without earlier knowledge in web development was to make sure the user experience tested on the online newspaper were applicable to people who might use the site regularly without knowing the basics of building a website. The purpose of the study were to investigate if online newspaper had a good structured and whether or not they create a good user experience. Earlier studies of user experience design on online newspaper is limited and therefore this study will contribute with more research within the field. It is not accurate to generalize this study for all self-financed Swedish online newspapers since only two have been compared due to the lack of time, which is a limitation in this study. The study was executed with a usability test where participants were asked to fulfill tasks on the two sites and say what they were thinking out loud, supported with a short questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. The questionnaire was to make sure the participants were potential end-users and the semi-structured interview gave more clarity to the test as well as gave an insight of their first impression and preferences. The study gave a result showing that neither the sites had fully potential user experience design in focus and could be improved. However, Jnytt was the preferred online newspaper over Aftonbladet in terms of being less cluttered, more thoughtful placements of ads, a working search function and better color scheme. Some new findings were made on Aftonbladet where the search function did not work as planned, which annoyed most participants who came across the issue. When asked if the participant would consider visiting the online newspaper more often if there would be major changes to online newspaper over all, some of them said they thought it would as the experience would be more pleasant while some participant had other reasons to not visit the page, such as their lack of interests for news, and therefore do not believe that the web design and a better experience would affect it.