The Effect of Static and Animated Help Content on Product Usability
Ersin Karaman, Engin Kursun, Faruk Saykal, Murat Say

Abstract
As primary components of information systems, hardware and software are composed of supporting documents which show users how to use these components easily. In this study, the effect of the help content presented in static and animated form on the usability of product is investigated. In this experimental study, the static-group comparison design is employed to 30 volunteer participants. The participants were divided in two groups randomly, and static help content is used by control group and animated help content is employed by experimental group. They are asked to complete four tasks in total. Task completion time is considered as dependent variable. In order to get demographic information, pre-questionnaire is applied. During the experiments, the completion time of the tasks is recorded by researchers. In addition, post-experimental semistructured interviews were applied to get deeper understanding of the findings. Results indicated that the experimental group is faster than the control group in terms of completion time of the tasks .Also while animated group found the help content easy, static group found the content boring.

Full Text: PDF