News aggregator services: user expectations and experience

Purpose – The paper aims to find out what users expect from a news aggregator service, and how the current and available news aggregator services compare to each other in terms of their features and usability from users' perspectives. Design/methodology/approach – Five news aggregator services were chosen randomly, and a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods were used for data collection involving users from the academic and research community. A total of 45 users participated in the questionnaire survey, and ten users participated in the interview. The researchers created the factors used for comparison of the features and usability of the chosen services based on the review of appropriate literature and a study of the chosen news aggregator services. Users were asked to comment on every feature of a chosen service using a ten‐point scale. Findings – Users identified a number of expected features of news aggregators. Survey results show that an ideal news aggregator service may be created by combining the usability features of TVEyes and the retrieval performance of GoogleNews. Research limitations/implications – This research is based on a small set of users and a small number of news aggregator services. A larger sample set may produce more conclusive results. Originality/value – Studies reporting on the features and usability of news aggregator services is not common in the literature. In that respect, this is an important and new piece of research. The findings of this research may be used by researchers or service providers to produce a new aggregator service, or improve an existing news aggregator service.