Mixed‐methods approach to measuring user experience in online news interactions
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When it comes to evaluating online information experiences, what metrics matter? We conducted a study in which 30 people browsed and selected content within an online news website. Data collected included psychometric scales (User Engagement, Cognitive Absorption, System Usability Scales), self‐reported interest in news content, and performance metrics (i.e., reading time, browsing time, total time, number of pages visited, and use of recommended links); a subset of the participants had their physiological responses recorded during the interaction (i.e., heart rate, electrodermal activity, electrocmytogram). Findings demonstrated the concurrent validity of the psychometric scales and interest ratings and revealed that increased time on tasks, number of pages visited, and use of recommended links were not necessarily indicative of greater self‐reported engagement, cognitive absorption, or perceived usability. Positive ratings of news content were associated with lower physiological activity. The implications of this research are twofold. First, we propose that user experience is a useful framework for studying online information interactions and will result in a broader conceptualization of information interaction and its evaluation. Second, we advocate a mixed‐methods approach to measurement that employs a suite of metrics capable of capturing the pragmatic (e.g., usability) and hedonic (e.g., fun, engagement) aspects of information interactions. We underscore the importance of using multiple measures in information research, because our results emphasize that performance and physiological data must be interpreted in the context of users' subjective experiences.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it