Experimental Evaluation of Emotional Awareness regarding Arrangements and
Animations of Pictograms

Overview

• Introduction (background and purpose)

• Experiments comparing linear pictogram layout with Picture Text

• Experiments animating pictograms

• Summary and future work

• Q & A

Background

• Our project investigates about communication using pictograms
• Our main targets are people who have difficulties to communicate using text
  • small children, aged people, foreign people, the physically challenged people
• We proposed a new expression method that uses arranges in two dimensions of pictograms (called Picture Text)
• In our research on pictograms and Picture Text, we created about 950 basic pictograms, and have developed software to easily create Picture Text    

Publicly available at http://sa.carc.jp/pict/

Please have a look at them

Layouts of Pictograms

Purpose

1. Experiments comparing linear pictogram layout with Picture Text

   

2. Experiments animating pictograms

   

Experiment of Picture Text

• In the first experiment, we evaluated the understanding and degree of intuition of linear layout and Picuture Text

  
  

• We used pairwise comparison between five methods of expression: Picture Text, Linear Layout, Illustration, Written Text and Photograph
• In addition, we asked the subject about their degree of intuition

Example of Problems

        

• The subjects had to select one of six possible solutions (1-6), or 7 to express that they did not understand the problem
• Subjects then evaluated subjective degree of intuition for each problem on a scale from 1 to 7

Subjects and Problems

Results about Correct Answer Rate

• We explain the results of this experiment from the viewpoints of degree of intuition and correct answer rate
• Picture Text did not perform significantly differently from written texts, photographs, or illustrations
• The correct answer rate for linear layout is lower
• The correct answer rate for Picture Text hardly falls with age
  
  
  

Results about Degree of Intuiton

• Linear layout also performed significantly differently from other expressions
  • Using a t-test to compare the highest value with the lowest value for problems (p < 0.05)
• Picture Text also did not perform significantly differently from written texts, photographs, or illustrations
  • Using a t-test to compare these expression methods (p < 0.05)

Degree of Intuition

				no difference
Problems Choices	written text	photo- graph	illust- ration	Picture Text	linear
written text		6.07	6.29	6.19	4.58
photo- graph	5.75		5.81	5.70	3.53
illust- ration	5.62	5.92		5.86	3.74
Picture Text	5.57	6.18	6.32
linear	4.12	4.15	4.27		lower

Experiments Animated Pictograms

• Explorings various issues concerning static and animated Picture Text through the sentence
• We do not show which in more efficient, static or animated Picture Text
• The purpose of this experiment is to explore: where communication is better, where static Picture Text is better, and how to design animations that are easily understood
• The subjects were shown static or animated Picture Text, and then had to select one of six possible sentences
• The same choices were used for animated and static problem variants

Let's Try to Solve a Example

	comparing
Animated Picture Text		Static Picture Text

Overview of the Experiment

• Prepared 11 problems
• Each problem was designed for a different purpose, and was shown for a fixed amount of time
• The subjects were shown the list of possible answers
• The subjects were 64 students between 18 and 25 years of age
  
  
  

Insights Obtained by the Experiment part 1

• This is an example where static Picture Text performed better than animated Picture Text
• At the moment where the train stops, the animation disappeared
• This invited misunderstanding
• Our insights in that animations may require some more time beginning and ending