Abstract
Aging audiences and the shift of news consumption to an online paradigm have led to the need of finding strategies to engage aging readers with online news by assessing their news consumption habits and identifying the potential for digital platforms to assist the reader’s journey, i.e., the activities performed from access to the information to the relatedness and shareability of the news content. It is well established that the use of game elements and game thinking within the context of a community can capture the user’s attention and lead to behavioral engagement toward repetitive tasks. However, information about the design implications of socially gamified news to the aging reader’s experience is still lacking. Using a development research approach, we implemented a prototype that socially gamifies news to support the aging reader experience based on a pre-assessment survey with 248 participants about their news consumption habits and motivations. We then validated the prototype with six market-oriented representatives of Portuguese newspapers and eleven adults aged 50 and over. A model for onboarding a reader’s 6-step journey (read, react, discuss, share, relate and experience) within the context of a Senior Online Community using gamification is proposed. The game elements used can inform the design of a much more personalized experience of consuming news and news behavioral engagement.
Highlights
In light of social distancing measures during COVID-19 and the prevalence of digital platforms to access daily basis services (Seifert 2020), new challenges are posed to the Human–Computer Interaction field to meet users’ context and daily-living activities, of which online news is no exception
Social relatedness and discussion with the news content brought with gamification are of particular importance given that there seems to be a general difficulty in detecting lies and screening misinformation or manipulated images in later adulthood (Brashier and Schacter 2020)
During the period of time the tests were conducted at Step 3—i.e., from 25 November of 2020 to 11 December of 2020—it was possible to register great participation and adhesion to the gamification strategy, to the news platform and to what is still an embryonic online community
Summary
In light of social distancing measures during COVID-19 and the prevalence of digital platforms to access daily basis services (e.g., access to online social support, access to health information) (Seifert 2020), new challenges are posed to the Human–Computer Interaction field to meet users’ context and daily-living activities, of which online news is no exception. While the reading activity has been the focus when assessing news consumption (Bergström 2020), other important social dimensions inherent to news consumption (i.e., reacting, discussing and relating) have been quite neglected, which are likely to affect the news reading experience. Within this context, gamification, i.e., the use of game elements in contexts that go beyond the entertainment purpose (Deterding et al 2011), can be a digitally-mediated solution to assist the reader’s experience in a social context. On the one hand, online journalism can reach a larger audience, on the other hand, a much more personalized experience that considers readers’ context and their engagement within the context of a community is necessary
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