Animated banners - H1 Sigurbjörn Óskarsson

Research design Repeated measures N=32 (- 1 outlier) Task testing Control category + 3 levels of experimental manipulation 4 hypothesis on: Task completion times (H1); recall & recognition (H2); gender differences (H3 + H4)

Hypothesis 1 H1 - Animated banners will have a negative effect on user's task completion times. H0 - Animated banners will not have a negative effect on user's task completion times.

Previous research Burke et al "High Cost Banner Blindness" Owens et al "Text Advertising Blindness: the New Banner Blindness" - Both deal with how banners affect visual search on sites - Both measure performance metrics (like time on task) - Burke found that sometimes banners seem to affect performance, sometimes not. There seems to be a contradiction... - Owens found that the effect the advertisements had was connected both to their nature, the context on the site and ow people searched (nature of tasks).

Variables Independent - Banner ads made in flash and photoshop Our four conditions: 1.No banners (control) 2.Static banners 3.Animated banners 4.Crazy animated banners Dependent - Task completion times measured in seconds Other dependent variables measured and used for other hypothesis were recall and recognition rates.

Data collection Usability tests All 4 versions tested - 3 experimental and control Randomized order - to counterbalance for leaning effects TIme on task noted - by certain criteria Data entered to SPSS for analysis

Statistics chosen One way repeated measures ANOVA One way: One predictor (independent) variable Repeated measures: Within subjects design - Data for each condition comes from the same people ANOVA: 4 groups (predictors) of the independent var. Since we have more than 2 groups, we must use ANOVA but not a t-test

Statistics Assumptions of RM ANOVA Normality: Central limit theorem - distribution in samples above 30 will be normally distributed Sphericity: Mauchlys test Interval data: Time data measured in seconds was continuous Homogeneity of variance Independence - Don't apply since it is a repeated measures design...

Results Assumptions Sphericity - Mauchly's test indicated that the assumption of sphericity had been met; x 2 (5) = 9.26, p >.05 - Uses a Chi square test to test for sphericity - Allowed us to continue without any corrections to sphericity - All of the other assumptions were met as noted above...

Results ANOVA The ANOVA revealed that the negative effect of banner ads on task completion time was not significant, F (3,90) =.21, p >.05 -Simple contrasts were conducted to compare the experimental categories to the control category. None were significant. - Standard contrats in SPSS - Contrasts not really necessary though since the ANOVA was not significant...

Conclusion Mean task completion times were not significantly different in the four groups. Therefore H1 must be rejected. - There was some difference between the means of our groups but apparently it was not statistically significant. - The means for the control category and the static banners was about the same but the mean for the crazy banners was the highest. - Other hypothesis found differences e.g. between gender and in how well people notice banners of different animation levels.

Discussion Why do we still see so many animated ads? - IT should be alarming to companies how much users ignore their ads Further research could explore the effect on performance by: Placement of banners context of banners nature of banners - Text ads and "hidden" ads that look like normal content are already being used.