I put together two web pages, both featuring the same news article; however one also included a video and pictures. I then sent the two versions to 2 sets of 10 people, who then filled out 1 of 2 questionnaires (depending on which article they read) to indicate how they rated various aspects of the article they read.
Conducting the experiment in this way allowed me to make direct comparisons between the 2 article versions and identify whether there were any clear and consistent differences between them.
The majority of the questions on both questionnaires were the same so I could make direct comparisons as previously stated. However, I also added more questions specific to each article which I believed were relevant. For example, for the text based article questionnaire, I asked what would improve the article. This allowed me to see whether people felt elements such as video or pictures would improve a standard, text-based news article.
Interestingly, 80% of those that read the text only article felt that pictures would have been beneficial to the article and 50% thought that a video would also have improved it.
Another article specific question asked whether those that read the infotainment article felt that the video benefitted the article. 70% stated that it did, suggesting that they found it useful and enjoyed receiving news in this format.
Generally the results slightly favoured the infotainment article, as it rated 7.8 out of 10 for enjoyment compared to 6.1 for the text based article. The infotainment article also rated 8.2 for how informative it was compared to 7.1 for the text based article. These results show a slight preference for news in the form of infotainment but the results were only marginal and hardly conclusive.
