Exploring mobile news reading interactions for news app personalisation

As news is increasingly accessed on smartphones and tablets, the need for personalising news app interactions is apparent. We report a series of three studies addressing key issues in the development of adaptive news app interfaces. We first surveyed users' news reading preferences and behaviours; analysis revealed three primary types of reader. We then implemented and deployed an Android news app that logs users' interactions with the app. We used the logs to train a classifier and showed that it is able to reliably recognise a user according to their reader type. Finally we evaluated alternative, adaptive user interfaces for each reader type. The evaluation demonstrates the differential benefit of the adaptation for different users of the news app and the feasibility of adaptive interfaces for news apps.