Understanding soil acidification process using animation and text: an empirical user evaluation with eye tracking

Abstract

This chapter presents a user study in which the participant performance is comparatively measured using two ways of presenting information: animation and text. The stimuli contain equivalent information, but use fundamentally different ways of communicating this information. We designed a workplace to simulate the process as it may occur in the real world. First, a representative task from an actual website was selected (i.e., understanding the soil acidification process). 50 participants first took part in a short ‘study session’, where they were told to remember as much as possible. Then they took a multiple choice test using either the animation or the text in an ‘‘open book’’ setting. The tested media have been assessed through the classical measures of effectiveness (error rate), and efficiency (time to complete the multiple choice test). Text users achieved a slightly higher score in the multiple choice test and required less time compared to animation users. In contrast, more of the animation users considered the questions ‘‘easy’’. Thus, against all intuition (yet in agreement with some of the previous findings in literature) animation does not appear to perform better for the tasks in this experiment. To further strengthen the experiment, an eye tracking study was also conducted with the animated displays for a more in-depth effort to explore user strategies when asked to ‘remember as much as possible’.