Exploring online news credibility through aesthetics and user-contributed content

This study explores how interactive features on a news website affect a user's perception of credibility and quality. A between-subjects experiment (n=122) was conducted online using four websites with varying levels of user-contributed content to determine if there was an effect. No significant difference in user judgments was found between the four websites. Further analysis showed sub-dimensions within the credibility measure and specifically found significant differences between groups when making judgments regarding accuracy. The study concludes by offering design recommendations to encourage user-contributed content on news websites and suggestions for future work in the field of design-related credibility research and online news websites in general.