Does Animation Help Users Build Mental Maps of Spatial Information?

Résumé du livre

This study examines how animating a viewpoint change in a spatial information system affects a user's ability to build a mental map of the information in the space. The 20 subjects were asked to navigate family trees created in the Pad++ program by clicking on hyperlinks that were represented by yellow arrows. For each family member, subjects saw a single photograph. Above the photograph was the family member's first name and yellow hyperlink arrows with the words "parent", "child", "sibling", and "spouse", where appropriate. Two different but comparable family trees were used in the test. Subjects were presented with one family tree with animation and the other family tree without animation. They were given three tasks to perform in each family tree. First, subjects were presented with a series of nine statements about family relationships and asked to navigate the family tree until he/she could say a statement was true or false. The second set of tasks evaluated recall memory, and the third set of tasks evaluated reconstruction ability. Lastly, the subjects were asked to complete two user satisfaction surveys--one about their experience with animation and the other about their experience without animation. Speed and accuracy were measured for each task. The results show that animation improves users' ability to reconstruct the information space, with no penalty on task performance time. The study provides strong evidence for adding animated transitions in many applications with fixed spatial data where the user navigates around the data space. (3 tables, 4 figures, 25 refs.).