Generating - and maintaining - an online audience is the perpetual challenge of news websites. Whereas print readers report spending 16 minutes a day with their dailies, the average nytimes.com reader spends just 68 seconds a day on the site. 

Interactive features may be sites saving grace. USA Today's Candidate Match Game has drawn more than 2.5 million unique visitors since its launch last September, and Senior Designer Juan Thomassie reports the feature can keep readers engaged for five to six minutes.

The Poynter Institute recently interviewed Thomassie on the development and success of the project. What follows is an edited version of the transcript that appears on the Poynter Institute's website.

How did interactivity help to tell the story?

Thomassie: Some candidates had a very high profile and some were not so well-known. The candidate match game was a way to use some issues-related questions and multiple choice answers to help readers get an idea of which was closest to their views.

The presumption was that readers might not be so well-informed about candidates. We just posed them as a Q&A, a blind quiz. Each time you chose your answer, we'd reveal question by question which things matched.

We were surprised that most people who took (that version of) the quiz said, "I had no idea I agreed with this candidate."

How many ideas were on the table?

Thomassie: We actually drew up a few storyboards and kind of played around with the idea of a horse race theme. As you answered the questions, the candidates who you are most like would go farther on the track. We decided that idea was a little too light. It wasn't just a game.

The challenge for us was to find that sweet spot between newsy and informative and fun and interactive. We pulled back from the horse race and used the vertical bars format that we ultimately used.

What were the important talents involved in producing this interactive graphic?

Thomassie: A collaborative effort between the political editor, the producer and myself.

This represented many months of meetings, conceptualization, brainstorming, storyboarding, development of prototypes. As we'd get feedback from prototypes we'd rebuild things -- make significant changes to the model in key points in the process. But each time it got better and was a really useful process.

This is such an investment of resources. How did you let people know that the feature was there?

Thomassie: We promoted it heavily on the USA Today homepage, on the politics homepage and in the newspaper.

Then, thru blogs and word of mouth, it really started to get some play in the media. It steamrolled from there. We saw the match game discussed on a local TV station where they talked about how helpful it was. We saw a discussion on C-SPAN about it. It just caught on in political blogs, news blogs and interactive graphics blogs, and we were a bit surprised by the steady stream of traffic it was generating.

Again, something like this takes so much time. How do you decide what is worth the time it takes to create something like this?

If someone comes to the page, interacts with the graphic, spends time digging for more content -- spending at least 5 or 6 minutes on a page -- it's worth it. We can track that.

What about interactivity for daily publication?

Thomassie: On a daily basis, if it's a breaking news story, then there's a compelling push to do a news graphic. But to determine if it should be interactive, you have to ask if it will be of interest in two weeks or down the road.

With 14 months before the election date; We knew that there would be a long-term interest.

Though it took weeks of development, the results we got from this are a resounding "yes" when we get hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, for months and months and months.

Source: Poynter Institute