Activity and Process

From our ongoing secondary research, it was evidently clear that revenue earned by ads on print media is declining, and that many well-known people in the print industry have started or have already transitioned to the digital news industry. But, what is more interesting is that this transition has been catalyzed by the introduction of smart phones. Smartphones are can mostly be categorized as always available devices, which can be easily used between two activities and are non intrusive. They can easily fill in any free gaps between two activities. The ubiquitous and low barrier in consuming content using a smartphone proved more fatal for the traditional print media. To gain further insights around this topic we first gathered observations from various sources such as the Pew Research and others, and plotted an affinity diagram.

What Does that Mean?

The key insight was that news media content is increasingly being read on mobile devices, regardless of the medium it’s in and moreover mobile consumption is becoming more and more popular. Furthermore, we discovered that age group plays a part in the amount of mobile consumption. Pew Research Center Project has found that more young people consume news online, especially women, and that women in the age group of 25 to 49 consumed the most content on smartphones.

However, the shift to online and mobile news consumption has also started to change not just the medium of news consumption, but also the behavior of readers consuming the news. Pew Research found that young people are more likely to “graze” the news, which means that they do not read or watch news at a set time of day as older generations used to. Research has also shown that mobile readers are more likely to read headlines on mobile, but usually wait until they are on a tablet or desktop computer to read the full article.

Implications for Design and Moving Forward

These insights tell us that we need to be aware of different age groups in our design, as well as the likelihood of developing a mobile solution. We might also want to research novel mobile interactions.

These insights reiterate the probable importance of mobile in our future research and design activities. If the trend is truly heading towards cursory reading on mobile, we also need to research the advertiser’s role on mobile platforms, especially native ads. Also, Ad revenue from subtle ads may become even more important if the reader’s attention span is short.