Student Research Abstract: A mobile news reader that turns news consumption into a game. Catherine Sotirakou Faculty of Communication and Media Studies National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece katerinasot@media.uoa.gr ABSTRACT The purpose of this research is the design of a mobile news platform that links news, games and social media networks. According to recent studies there is low engagement in news reader applications, thus changes in news consumption across the globe show a rapid rise of news audiences accessing stories through their mobile devices. We propose a mobile news reader that personalizes user’s newsfeed, gamifies user’s experience and promotes social interaction. 1. INTRODUCTION Based on the motivational theories [1], [2], [3] we are in the process of designing a platform that links news, games and social media networks, via a mobile application. We propose an alternative approach on gamifying digital news, by adjusting the effective principles of game design to a personalized news ecosystem, consisted of social media friends. The need to design such a platform came by changes in news consumption, like: • Rapid rise of news audiences accessing stories through their mobile devices. Smartphones are the main devices for accessing digital news [6]. • Social media play a huge role in distribution of online news. Readers use “Facebook” or “Twitter” as a side door to access news stories. • Stories not always load correctly on a mobile screen. • News industry faces problems reaching younger demographics, subscribing to content. According to recent reports [6] even though 70% of smartphone users have a news application installed on their phone, only a third uses it to read articles in a given week. 2. BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK As trends in digital news changed over time, news organization searched for strategies with the intent to gain greater user involvement, engagement and loyalty. Companies like “Google” [5] considered gamification as a promising mechanism to motivate people to use an application more often. Google tried to gamify its news service and introduced “Google News badges” at 2011. However the game mechanics that were followed gave poor results on the motivational aspect and the whole project ended unsuccessfully, causing Google to withdraw all the game elements months later. In our opinion, the disadvantages of the use of “Google News badges” can be summarized in the following sentences: • User could earn 500 different emblems, just for reading news stories as she already did. There was no motive to read other topics, to explore news like players do in games. • Game rules were not clear, no guidance, or instant feedback were apparent for the user to understand how to play the game. • There was no sense of progress, so the experience quickly became confusing and frustrating for the user. • The gamification layer reduced the navigational freedom and the self reported interest of the users, disrupted the main activity of reading the news and decreased the total usability and user’s satisfaction levels. • Extrinsic motivations proved not enough to engage users when they harm intrinsic motivation [2]. According to the Self-Determination Theory [2], and Nicholson’s meaningful gamification proposal [7] the gamification framework has to fulfill the three human needs, autonomy, competency and relatedness, so the player could find “meaningful connections with the underlying non-game activities” [8]. 3. OBJECTIVES The objectives of the news platform that links news, games and social media networks, are: • Design an easy-to-use mobile News Reader that imports news via RSS feeds. • Personalize user’s newsfeed, using a modern technique like context based or collaborative filtering. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). SAC 2016, April 04-08, 2016, Pisa, Italy ACM 978-1-4503-3739-7/16/04. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2851613.2852020 629