Gellevij, M., & van der Meij, H. (2002). Screen captures to support switching attention. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 45(2), 115-122.

Gellevij, M.; van der Meij, H

2002

Gellevij, M., & van der Meij, H. (2002). Screen captures to support switching attention. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 45(2), 115-122.

geen

The study set out to validate the supportive role of screen captures for switching attention. Forty-two participants learned how to work with Microsoft Excel with a paper manual. There were three types of manuals: a textual manual, a visual manual with full-screen captures, and a visual manual with a mixture of partial- and full-screen captures. The findings show that participants in all conditions looked up from the manual to the screen on about 97% of the cases in which such a switch was called for rank order analyses showed that users of the visual manuals switched attention significantly more often than did users of the textual manual. No differences were found between conditions on learning effects and training time.

The main aim of this study was to find empirical support for the view that screen captures stimulate users to switch attention. Although the findings from this study are not entirely conclusive in this respect, based on the results of the rank-order analyses, there are indications that a manual with screen captures may stimulate users to switch more often between manual and computer screen than does a textual manual

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