Approach research of user experience of various target audiences’ interaction with the portal interface

Recently, much attention has been paid to the convenience and accessibility of software products, websites, mobile applications, etc. It increases interest in user-oriented product design and UX design. When developing digital products, designers use a spe cial pool of tools that allow to conduct empirical studies of user experience and model scenarios for the use of software products and services. Such methods and tools as interviews, observation, customer journey mapping (CJM), Persona Frameworks, User Stories, and heatmap have become widespread. Each of them allows to identify problematic areas of a software product or ser vice application, determine the directions of its update so that it fully satisfies users’ needs. It also solves key business tasks. The purpose of the study is to analyze and identify ways to improve the web portal based on usability testing. The official website for posting information on the preparation of draft regulatory legal acts by federal executive authorities and the results of its public discussion (https://regulation.gov.ru) has been taken as the object of the research. The portal plays a significant role in the tasks of ensuring transparency of normative activities in the field of public administration. In this regard, monitoring the effectiveness of the portal and availability of information for a wide audience on it is an urgent task. The study uses usability testing methods, decision-making interview, user feedback matrix, CJM, HotJar, SpyWord, and SemRush as tools of the research. The article describes the features of usability testing. It draws conclusions about possible directions of the portal modernization in order to achieve its convenience for a wide audience. As a result, a number of specific proposals have been formulated

Stance Inference in Twitter through Graph Convolutional Collaborative Filtering Networks with Minimal Supervision

Social Media (SM) has become a stage for people to share thoughts, emotions, opinions, and almost every other aspect of their daily lives. This abundance of human interaction makes SM particularly attractive for social sensing. Especially during polarizing events such as political elections or referendums, users post information and encourage others to support their side, using symbols such as hashtags to represent their attitudes. However, many users choose not to attach hashtags to their messages, use a different language, or show their position only indirectly. Thus, automatically identifying their opinions becomes a more challenging task. To uncover these implicit perspectives, we propose a collaborative filtering model based on Graph Convolutional Networks that exploits the textual content in messages and the rich connections between users and topics. Moreover, our approach only requires a small annotation effort compared to state-of-the-art solutions. Nevertheless, the proposed model achieves competitive performance in predicting individuals' stances. We analyze users' attitudes ahead of two constitutional referendums in Chile in 2020 and 2022. Using two large Twitter datasets, our model achieves improvements of 3.4% in recall and 3.6% in accuracy over the baselines

Who speaks for the poor? Poverty, Human Rights, Social Justice and Access to Media in Nigeria

Nigeria faces a major poverty crisis with more than half of the population living in extreme poverty. This conceptual paper delves into the critical issues surrounding the rights of the poor in Nigeria especially in regard their access to media, freedom of expression, and the broader implications for social justice and poverty alleviation. The central question explored in this study is whether the right to freedom of expression and the right to be heard by the poor are recognized and upheld within the Nigerian media landscape as a fundamental human right. Furthermore, this paper examines the extent to which the media has contributed to addressing poverty prevalence in Nigeria and the impactful ways in which this contribution has manifested. Relying on the analytical and critical methodology of study, the paper argues that access to information is a fundamental human right, and the poor, who face multifaceted inequalities, must have their rights protected. Doing so, the paper contends will enhance their capacity to escape poverty, since information and knowledge play pivotal roles in poverty reduction. Emphasis is laid on the importance of granting the poor adequate access to information through available and relevant media, to enable them make informed decisions and choices that can lead to their emancipation from poverty. Keywords: Human Rights, Media Access, Poverty Reduction, Social Justice, Freedom of Expression DOI: 10.7176/JPID/63-04 Publication date: April 30th 2024

Research, Literacy, and Communication Education: New Challenges Facing Disinformation

The information that comes through digital media and social networks is increasing. This potential access to almost infinite information makes it difficult to select relevant content with a good understanding. It is therefore necessary to generate research that thoroughly analyses the phenomenon of communication and information in the digital age. For this reason, this monograph presents different research studies that highlight the need for greater media literacy and education in order to prevent the existence and dissemination of fake news. Citizens must know how to deal with disinformation and be able to detect the source of bad intentions behind information. Therefore, people need to be aware of the new communication challenges in order to determine what is important, which media they can trust, and where information has been misused or manipulated. In conclusion, society must be prepared to face new challenges related to misinformation. An educated and digitally literate society will be able to face these problems and be prepared to face the new communication challenges, including interaction with social networks, new audiences, new media, fake news, etc

Understanding news outlets’ audience-targeting patterns

Abstract The power of the press to shape the informational landscape of a population is unparalleled, even now in the era of democratic access to all information outlets. However, it is known that news outlets (particularly more traditional ones) tend to discriminate who they want to reach, and who to leave aside. In this work, we attempt to shed some light on the audience targeting patterns of newspapers, using the Chilean media ecosystem. First, we use the gravity model to analyze geography as a factor in explaining audience reachability. This shows that some newspapers are indeed driven by geographical factors (mostly local news outlets) but some others are not (national-distribution outlets). For those which are not, we use a regression model to study the influence of socioeconomic and political characteristics in news outlets adoption. We conclude that indeed larger, national-distribution news outlets target populations based on these factors, rather than on geography or immediacy