Trust Study

“Relatively trustworthy.”

In local news, trust is everything. It’s the reason why readers stick around and don’t just rely on the big news sources with the bigger headlines and the louder anchorpersons. 

Advance Local maintains a media garden of ten (or so) local news websites, covering everything from the entire state of Pennsylvania to news particular to the residents of Staten Island. These websites are where readers look for scores after the lights go out on Friday Night, where they seek out information about which local politicians did what and why, where they get to know about the place they call home.

To this end, my team of user experience researchers took on the task of determining just how that trust was holding up. 

To find out, we set up a speak-aloud test where we asked participants what parts and parcels of our properties they found more or less trustworthy, as well as a click test to allow testers to point and pick the parts of our actual pages made them feel safer or not.

In the end, we were able to determine our properties were “relatively trustworthy.” Additionally, we came up with a stack of recommendations to shore up that trust, possibly to improve it. This included everything from an increased dedication to curation, to ensuring more local reporter by-lines, even improved photography.