The New News Media Series

A User Scenario

May 1st, 2008 by Rachel

User Profile
Name
Bob O'Flaurghty
Age
29 years old
Location
Brooklyn, New York
Occupation
Graphic Designer
The Scenario:1 As Bob goes through an average day he wants to get information on certain news items and topics.

When Bob wakes up in the morning he makes his coffee and sits down in front of his computer, he opens up Google News to see what the latest headlines are. Since Google News is a computer-generated news site,2 he knows he will not experience any bias from any particular publisher as far as what stories are most important. The hierarchy of the page allows all of the stories equal importance (unlike the newspaper), so he can browse until he finds a story that seems interesting.

He selects an article entitled "Busy Day at Court Handling Sect's Children," he looks at the links to sources where he could read the same story and decides that his best bet is The New York Times. He clicks the link. Once on The New York Times website he begins reading. About half way through the article talks about the "Yearning for Zion ranch," Bob has never heard of this before so he clicks the link to learn more about this ranch. There he is able to see an image of the ranch along with several other stories about the ranch, he is satisfied now that he can put an image with a name and clicks the browsers back button to return him to the browser to finish reading the article.
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Footnotes
  1. In the spirit of the New News Media Series I wanted to write a hypothetical user scenario to further understanding how we intake the news. Fifty years ago a scenario like this wouldn't have been possible. This scenario covers the multitude of sources and mediums which provide us with news in our daily lives. While this is not a scenario that maps the average user, I expect that in a few years the ways in which this user consumes the news will become slightly more mainstream and common place. []
  2. About Google News []