Authoring animated Web pages using “contact points”

Abstract

This paper explores how 'contact points' or co-references between an animation and text should be designed in web pages. Guidelines are derived from an eye tracking study. A dynamic HTML authoring tool is described which supports these requirements. An evaluation study is reported in which four designs of animation in web pages were tested. KEYWORDS Web Page Design, Authoring Tools THE PROBLEMMore and more web pages contain text and animated media, yet little work has addressed how to effectively design such combinations. Existing guidelines give unfocussed and contradictory advice which encourages the use of animation while warning that it can have unspecified, detrimental effects. For instance, Nielsen [3] concludes that animated web pages are useful for providing 'enriching graphical representations', but warns 'unconstrained use of multimedia results in user interfaces that confuse users and make it harder for them to understand the information.' This paper introduces the notion of 'contact points', or coreferences between text and animation as a solution to effectively combining the two types of media. Contact points are places in the text where the content needs to be related with the animation. Contact points allow the viewer to integrate the content of the text with a referent in the animation eg for details of an object's appearance, or how to perform an action. The key issues for design concern how to form a 'contact point' : l How to provide linking references and synchronisation between text and visual streams. l How to ensure that the message thread can be followed between the text and visual media.

Pervasive and standalone computing: the perceptual effects of variable multimedia quality

“…The former study explores both visual attention (given by eye-tracking patterns) and information recall of subjects being presented with a single multimedia educational application, displayed with optimum quality of service parameters. The authors then went on to propose a series of guidelines to be used in web animation based on 'contact points' (co-references between text and animation obtained from the initial eye-tracking study) (Faraday and Sutcliffe, 1999). Thus, the first study only focuses on the informational assimilation component of 'Quality of Perception' (the user-centric perceptual measure used throughout this paper), neglecting the satisfaction side of the multimedia experience.…”

The Perceptual and Attentive Impact of Delay and Jitter in Multimedia Delivery

“…Instead, in these cases users sometimes appear to determine their conclusions as a result of reasoning, arriving at them based on intuition, past experience or pre-knowledge. Consequently the use of eye tracking was proposed in future user-perspective studies in order to identify perceptually relevant areas of user eye gaze and thus provide an answer as to why people do not notice cues in the multimedia video material, thus providing a better understanding of the role that the human element plays in the reception, analysis and synthesis of multimedia data [15], [16]. Moreover, monitoring eye movements offers insights into user perception, as well as the associated attention mechanisms and cognitive processes, since the eye naturally selects areas that are most informative [17] in the context of high-level processes (see Table I).…”

Infotainment across access devices

“…To this end, the relationship between eye movement and user perception of multimedia has been investigated in [6], and [17]. The former study explores both visual attention (given by eye tracking patterns) and information recall of subjects being presented with a single multimedia educational application, displayed with optimum QoS parameters.…”