Number of animations to use?

["Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)" <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Melanie Albrecht is <<...now struggling with decisions about the
extent to which the online tutorials should be accompanied by
animations of the user's tasks... Should we have long-ish animations
showing many tasks, or should we have lots of little ones?>>

I lean strongly towards lots of little ones. Why? Let's say I'm
pretty comfortable with the description of steps 1-5 and 7-12 of a
15-step procedure. I don't want to have to sit through 11 useless
steps, particularly if they're long ones, just so I can see steps 6
and 13-15. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but the point is still
that I prefer to let the user determine how much to watch, and longer
animations remove much of this freedom. Plus, speaking strictly
from a practical viewpoint, the longer the animation, the harder it's
going to be to develop and debug and recompile after each debugging.

<<And should we have animations for only those tasks which
are complex, leaving the simple ones to text-only descriptions, or is
consistency more important, so that all tasks should have
animations?>>

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."--Hobbes

Kinda like that one, I do. <g> The important consistency is to use
animations for _all steps that require them_, not just for all steps.
The real trick is to identify where a dynamic visual description is
more effective than a text-plus-graphics description. I'm not aware
of any global advice on how to make this decision other than asking
your audience (i.e., testing the usability of the two solutions).
After a fair bit of time working with that audience, you'll probably
develop a good "gut feel" for which aspects require animations, but
at least initially, you'll have to do a bit of research.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Patience comes to those who wait."--Anon.


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