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- Title
Empirical Proof for Presenting Screen Captures in Software Documentation.
- Authors
Gellevij, Mark; Van Der Meij, Hans
- Abstract
The article examines the influence of screen captures on switching behavior. User of a manual must deal with several information sources and input devices simultaneously. Screen captures can help the user switch attention by prompting the user to attend to the screen at the right moment and providing a clear point for reentry into the manual after attending to the screen. The visual manuals were expected to have a positive effect on attention switching as compared with the textual manual. Forty-two students from the Faculty of Educational Science and Technology at Twente University participated in the study. To assess the relative number of switches, the behavior for each instruction was scored as a switch or a non-switch regardless of the number of times the user switched attention for that particular instruction. For five participants, more than 10 percent of observations for the expected switching moments were missing. In about 97 percent of the moments in which a switch was called for and expected, users did look up from the manual toward the screen at least once. Study shows that there is no difference between switching modes for action steps and the influence of screen captures on switching modes.
- Subjects
ATTENTION; USER interfaces; TECHNICAL manuals; COLLEGE students; UNIVERSITIES &; colleges
- Publication
Technical Communication, 2004, Vol 51, Issue 2, p224
- ISSN
0049-3155
- Publication type
Article