iSchool Capstone

The Effects of Visual Presentation on the Perceived Veracity of News Sources

Project tags:

information behavior & user research

mobile or web development

ux & interaction design

Project poster

In online news, as in many forms of media, the appearance of content influences the reader, possibly even more than the content itself. Our experiment investigates this possibility further by researching how certain content-supporting attributes, such as links and pictures, affect how judgments are made about unfamiliar news sources, independent of any informative content. Studying how people evaluate the credibility of news sources is important because our society is increasingly turning to online news sources, while simultaneously becoming more adept at creating them. We hope our research will provide new insights into what factors influence what consumers of news believe.

Project participants:

Anya Hsu

Informatics

Michael Magee

Informatics