The most-read story of 2014 on the website of The New York Times was an interactive news
application called “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk.” Interactive applications may
provide value to the user experience of digital media, but they cost time and money to
produce. In this study, we examined five multimedia news packages that include interactive
applications as part of the story presentation and asked 18 millennial tablet computer users
to evaluate them. Participants said the interactive applications that were most effective in
attracting and retaining their interest maintained the flow of the narrative, provided a
personalized or playful alternative to the representation of information in other media, and
were produced by credible media organizations that designed their apps for use on mobile
devices.