Evaluating Animation in the Periphery as a Mechanism for Maintaining Awarness

Small animated displays such as tickers and faders are increasingly being used to convey information on computer screens. Relatively little is understood, however, about their use as peripheral displays, that is, tools for communicating lower-priority awareness information to people. This article describes two experiments that examine the tradeoff of communication capability versus distraction in peripheral displays. We found that the presence of animated textual peripheral displays did not distract people from a central information browsing task, and we identified particular animation and display characteristics that facilitate different information-centric tasks.