The effect of animated transitions in zooming interfaces

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Abstract

Zooming interfaces use animated transitions to smoothly shift the users view between different scales of the workspace. Animated transitions assist in preserving the spatial relationships between views. However, they also increase the overall interaction time. To identify whether zooming interfaces should take advantage of animations, we carried out one experiment that explores the effects of smooth transitions on a spatial task. With metro maps, users were asked to identify the number of metro stops between different subway lines with and without animated zoom-in/out transitions. The results of the experiment show that animated transitions can have significant benefits on user performance - participants in the animation conditions were twice as fast and overall made fewer errors than in the non-animated conditions. In addition, short animations were found to be as effective as long ones, suggesting that some of the costs of animations can be avoided. Users also preferred interacting with animated transitions than without. Our study gives empirical evidence on the benefits of animated transitions in zooming interfaces.

Publisher Link

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1385569.1385642

Citation

Maruthappan Shanmugasundaram and Pourang Irani. 2008. The effect of animated transitions in zooming interfaces. In Proceedings of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI '08), 396-399.

Bibtext Entry

@INPROCEEDINGS { shanmugasundaram08,
    AUTHOR = { Maruthappan Shanmugasundaram and Pourang Irani },
    TITLE = { The effect of animated transitions in zooming interfaces },
    BOOKTITLE = { Proceedings of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI '08) },
    YEAR = { 2008 },
    PAGES = { 396--399 },
    DOI = { 10.1145/1385569.1385642 },
}