Using animated icons to present complex tasks

An experiment was conducted to compare the recognition accuracy for static and animated buttons. Static and animated buttons were designed for 28 computer tasks. The tasks were categorized into low, medium, and high levels of complexity. Subjects identified the correct tasks of the animated buttons (78.6%) more often than for the static buttons (64.3%). The data were also analyzed for the number of correct responses for each task. Recognition accuracy were higher for the animated buttons (79.1%) than for the static buttons (69.7%). Further analyses indicate that animated buttons are particularly useful for representing high complexity tasks to the user. Of the nine high complexity tasks, six were found to have a higher animated mean than static mean, and a significant difference between the recognition rates for the animated and static versions of the task.