ABSTRACT
Abstract: Owing to the rapid growth of Internet technologies, Web site design, and online advertisements, pop-up animations have affected and will continue to affect millions of people. Our understanding of the effectiveness and the impact of online advertisements on consumers is still limited from a theoretical perspective, and the empirical evidence continues to be scant. This paper synthesizes and integrates several lab-controlled experiments conducted by the author over an eightyear period (from 1996 to 2003) on the impact of pop-up animations in the Web environment. Human visual attention literature is used to emphasize human cognitive characteristics that prevent or enable us to behave in certain ways when there is animation in our vision field. These studies, together, address the following research questions: (1) As a non-primary information source, does animation decrease viewers’ information-seeking performance? (2) If so, do location and timing of pop-up animation matter? (3) As viewers’ familiarity with online advertisements increases, do those early animation effects diminish over years? The studies also validate the applicability of visual attention theories in the Web environment and have significant practical implications for online advertising strategies, both for marketers and content providers. Keywords: Animation, Pop-Up, Information Seeking, Online Advertising, Visual Attention, Visual Interference, World Wide Web, Lab-Controlled Experiment
INTRODUCTION
Animation is a dynamic visual statement, form, and structure evolving through movement over time (Baecker and Small, 1990). Pop-up animation in a Web environment refers to animation that begins or appears on the screen as additions to the original content on the screen. Owing to the advancement of software tools and specialized graphic and animation packages, vivid and wild animations become very easy to produce and have been widely used in the Web environment. Animations are popular objects that users encounter frequently, if not all the time. They have been used for different purposes and can be found in many computing environments, especially Web pages and online advertisements. Some designers use animations to convey messages, believing they are more powerful than text within the limited display area of a computer screen (Gonzalez and Kasper, 1997), although there are cautions regarding animations’ efficacy (Tversky et al.,
2002). To online advertisers, pop-up and pop-under (in the background rather than on the surface of the screen) animations are considered great ways of reaching potential consumers and increasing brand awareness, Web traffic, and click-throughs.
