Old and Young Users’ White Space Preferences for Online News Web Pages

In the future, the importance and usage rate of the Internet will increase gradually year by year. However, in the case of frequently browsed news web pages, mass news information derived from visual design elements or different layout designs may affect the preferences of users from different demographics and socio-economic backgrounds. This is due to the dissimilarities between their physical and psychological limitations. The purpose of this study is to investigate users' white-space ratio preferences for news web pages. We tested the top ten online Chinese and English websites, 20 news web pages in total. Two statements were picked from the system usability scale (SUS) and the visual aesthetics of website inventory (VisAWI) to evaluate these samples. We took these two statements as questionnaire questions. They are the following: Q1 “I think that I would like to use this system frequently” and Q2 “Everything goes together on these web pages.” The design of the questionnaire was based on a five-point Likert scale. The research variables include age, gender, education, occupation, white-space ratio, along with the other demographic properties. Our results indicated that there are significant differences between age, white-space ratio, education, occupation, news sources, computer usage time, and computer usage history. The group aged between 31-45 years old scored all samples higher than other groups. None prefer too high (90%) or too low (50%) white-space ratio. It is necessary to accumulate more preferences from different groups prior to the coming age of AI and machine learning.