Document Type

Article

Date

1997

Keywords

Multimedia, User interfaces, Visual interference

Language

English

Disciplines

Information and Library Science

Description/Abstract

Multiple presentation modes, or multimedia, have become a very common feature of user interfaces, especially web pages. For example, text, graphics, and images may all appear on one screen during a user’s information seeking and processing. When surfing the Internet using a web browser, one can easily access many pages with vivid animation jumping on the screen. Certainly animation enriches the web pages, and rapid development of web design facilities makes web pages more colorful and even more attractive. On the other hand, since human peripheral vision is very good at perceiving moving objects, animation may also cause visual interference that affects information seeking performance. For example, one may find that it is hard to concentrate on the pertinent information when there is an animation around the information. Thus it may take longer to get the information correctly. Few research results can be found that report animation effects on individual information seeking and processing performance. Thus it remains questions whether animation can really decrease performance and to what extent animation affects one’s performance. In this paper, we report a study that answers these two questions. The study is believed to be valuable in guiding web page designers to use animation carefully in web environments. The study also suggests that the designers of any type of user interfaces should consider possible visual interference sources that may affect an individual’s performance.