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Theoretical background
The History of Newspapers
Around the seventh century, it is believed that China and Japan had invented one of the first printing techniques. The two countries were carving ideograms into wooden blocks and made it possible to print a whole page, multiple times. This technique is called block printing (Briggs & Burke, 2009).It was not until 1450 that printing took off in Europe. It was probably Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz who invented the printing press. He used movable metal type which made the printing technique more flexible than block printing. With movable metal type, there were no need to carve out a whole page on the same block but could instead re-use the letters for another page by rearranging them. Although, China had some struggle with the printing press since they had many more ideograms than Europe had letters, so the shift in China went slowly. However, people in Europe who had been doing everything by hand was now amazed over the amount of copies that could be created in the short amount of time. A revolutionary invention which gave birth to the process of publishing (Briggs & Burke, 2009).As the time passes, printing techniques got more advanced and it spread rapidly across Europe. By the seventeenth century, people were able to publish the first modern newspapers and people could now regularly get information of events around the world in a printed publication. It made it possible for ordinary people to stay updated about the news and made communication in Europe easier. (Briggs &Burke, 2009) A result of the growing newspaper industry was the further development of printing techniques. The quality of newspapers grew as there were better choices of news which in turn increased the attractiveness of the newspaper (Weber, 2006).
The Internet Revolution
The Internet grew its roots early in the twentieth century, but it was not until 1995 that the internet grew into becoming what it is today. Although, the internet was created much earlier, dated far back to the 1960s. Back then, the internet was shared between a few universities and research departments where the users were primarily engineers and physicists. In 1989, the term World Wide Web was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, who suggested the idea of information from different computers being shared between one another (Briggs& Burke, 2009).In 1993 the World Wide Web browser Mosaic was launched which displayed images and text together.Created by Marc Andreessen, it was one of the first web browsers with a graphic user interface that allowed users to click on icons, menus and windows (Graphical User Interface, n.d.). This resulted in an exponential growth in traffic on the web. The Internet would allow people across the world to inform and educate each other on a common global platform (Briggs & Burke 2009, p. 266). News could spread faster, as the time for an event to occur to having it printed and delivered to people was shortened.Between 1993 and 1994 the design of websites was in the hands of those with knowledge of the programming language HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Although the process of creating and editing web pages included an excessive amount steps. When the program AOLPress was released this process was reduced to less steps as the program allowed editing of the web pages while browsing (Moschovitis, Poole, Schuyler & Senft, 1999). In the beginning of the twenty first century, newspapers started to implement their content onto the Web. Smaller newspapers faced a lot of competition already from newspapers that were for free and relied on advertisement (Briggs & Burke 2009, p. 299). The added competition of news published online forced these businesses to either adapt to the new environment or go bankrupt.
Defining a Good Web Design
In the process of designing a website, numerous guidelines exist in order to aid in creating a successful product. The process usually starts with user research, where the intended target audience of the website is studied and analyzed for the purpose of creating a website that best fits its users’ needs and goals. The two aspects used to determine whether a web design is good or bad usually comes down to usability and aesthetics. These two aspects need to be combined in harmony as one without the other will result in a bad web design. A website that looks good but lacks functionality might attracts users but will not keep them there as their goals cannot be completed. On the flipside, a website that works as intended but lacks a pleasing design will not keep their users there for long as they will not enjoy their visit (Beaird & George,2014).Another important aspect of a web design is the theme. Consistency is key to avoid confusing the users.Elements such as colors, navigation menus and text should be consistent throughout all pages of the website, so users recognize the pages they are on belong to the same website. The design of websites usually also resembles their real life counterparts. Newspapers for example, make great use of hierarchy as they group together titles and images in different sizes depending on their relevance. This structure can be seen online as well (Krug, 2014). Furthermore, clickable links on a website should clearly convey that they are such. This is one of many rules to follow to create proper web design. The navigation of the website should be easy to find but not take attention away from the content. The type of navigation may vary but a recent trend has shown that a horizontal navigation with a drop-down menu has become more occurring as opposed to the vertical left navigation, also known as the sidebar navigation (Comeaux, 2016). The content itself should be visible to the users at a quick glance as people’s patience and attention span online is minimal. Though it is not necessary, many websites have a footer with contact information and copyrights. There are different types of footers, but the common denominator is that it is always located at the bottom of the page. Another important element of a web design is white space, or negative space. This is when there is a significant amount of space between images, sections and text in order to create a pleasant environment. A website where all content has no white space would give users a feeling of being in a crowded room (Beaird & George, 2014).
Abstract
Sammanfattning
Keywords
Table of Content
1. Introduction
1.1 Background
1.2 Purpose and reseach questions
1.3 Delimitations
1.4 Outline
2. Theoretic albackground
2.1 The History of Newpapers
2.2 The Internet Revoluton
2.3 Defning a Good Web Design
2.4 Tends in Web Design
2.5 Definition of UX-design
2.6 The Online News papersi the Study
2.7 Related Work
3. Method and implementation
3.1 Data Gathering
3.1.1 Questionnaire
3.1.2 Usabilitytest
3.1.3 Interview
4. Finding sand analysis
4.1 Findings of collected data
4.1.1 Participants
4.1.2 Aftonbladet
4.1.3 Jnytt
4.1.4 Interview Finings
4.2 Analysis of findings
5. Discussion and conclusions
5.1. Discussion of method
5.2. Discussion of findings
5.3. Conclusions
5.4 Further studies
6. Reference
8.Appendices
