News in the digital era : An eye tracking study on young adults digital news reading.

The goal of our study is to analyze how young adults in the ages of 20-23 observe digital newspapers. Our main research question is: Are the visual parts of the news site more important than text for young adults? Our second research question is: How do young adult users switch between visual and text elements? Finally, the last question is: What is it that attracts users into reading an article on an online newspaper? To achieve our goal we used a method called eye-tracking which is a process of recording a person’s eye movements using a infrared camera and a computer program processes that converts the data into visual form. Additionally we have also done short interviews before and after the eye-tracking study as a supplement. A total of seven people participated in our study, three men and four women. After the initial interview, the test subject got to freely browse Sweden’s most popular digital newspaper Aftonbladet.se for the duration of five minutes. Afterwards, every person would have another short interview about their experiences of the site. Our study shows that young adults say that they don’t consider the visual elements to be as important as written text. However, the physical test data shows that the visual elements are in most cases observed before written text. Despite that, the users still spent more time on reading the text as opposed to looking at the photos or other visual elements. It’s hard to specify definitive reading habits, but we can see a pattern that the users tend to switch back and forth between visual and text objects