A Study Of The Effect Of Interactive Elements On User Behavior In Data Journalism

Under the wave of Internet,though data journalism has played a unique role in media industry,it has exposed some problems like low production replicability and blind content composition.There have already been widespread controversies about the interactive elements,mainly including interaction diagrams and multimedia,in data news:On the one hand,interactive elements are considered to enrich the forms,optimize the expression,and arouse readers' participation sense;On the other hand,they are doubted to distract readers' attention and increase the production cost.Based on the problems in production practices of data journalism and the controversies about the effect of interactive elements,this study raises the question:Do the interaction diagrams and multimedia elements in data journalism keep or distract audience's attention more?As data journalism is also an internet product,the research methods of user behavior of internet products could provide some advice for this study.After reviewing the research methods of user behavior of internet products,the paper focuses on the method called A/B test and makes A/B test be the research method for this study.After determining the question and the research method,this study designs and builds the experimental system of A/B test,which involves developing a web application for data news production,tracking the data of user behavior with Google Analytics and so on.Finally,it turns out that the interaction diagrams can keep audience's attention more than the static diagrams,while the videos cannot obviously keep or distract audience's attention.In terms of research significance,the web application developed in this study can be used to quickly make data news,which may bring hope to solve the problems of the long manufacturing period and the high cost of data news production.Besides,this study brings the way widely used in optimization practice of internet products to data journalism field,thus providing a possible approach to study the user behavior of data journalism.What's more,this study is a practice of applying data to journalism:no matter the making of data news demo,the developing of the web application,or studying the user behavior of data journalism by data-driven method,it may bring some thinking and inspiration at what data means to journalism.