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. 2005 - "High Cost Banner Blindness"

Owens et al. 2011 - "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)– Static banners– Animated banners– 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 testsAll 4 versions tested - 3 experimental and controlRandomized order - to counterbalance for leaning effectsTIme on task noted - by certain criteriaData 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 distributedSphericity: Mauchlys testInterval data: Time data measured in seconds was continuous..----------------Homogeneity of varianceIndependence

- 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; x2(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.