Multi-media increases engagement and is increasingly prevalent in online content including news, web blogs, and social media, however, it may not always be beneficial to users. To determine what types of media users actually wanted, we conducted an exploratory study where users got to choose their own media augmentation. Our findings showed that users desired different amounts and types of media depending on their familiarity with the content. To further investigate this difference, we created two versions of a media augmented document, one designed for novices and one designed for experts. We evaluated these prototypes in a two-way between-subject study with 48 participants and found that while multi-media enhanced novice readers' perception of usability (p = .0100) and helped them with reading time (p = .0427), time on task (p= .0156), comprehension (p = .0161), experts largely ignored multi-media and primarily utilized text.

翻译：多媒体能提升参与度，在新闻、网络博客和社交媒体等在线内容中日益普及，然而它并非始终对用户有益。为确定用户实际需要何种类型的媒体，我们开展了一项探索性研究，允许用户自行选择媒体增强方式。研究结果显示，用户对媒体数量和类型的需求取决于其对内容的熟悉程度。为深入探究这一差异，我们制作了两个版本的媒体增强文档，一个面向新手设计，另一个面向专家设计。我们通过一项48名受试者参与的双因素被试间研究评估了这些原型，结果发现，虽然多媒体增强了新手读者对可用性的感知（p = .0100），并有助于其缩短阅读时间（p = .0427）、减少任务耗时（p = .0156）以及提升理解力（p = .0161），但专家基本忽略了多媒体，主要依赖文本。