Conclusions

Impact for practitioners

Half of our subjects preferred the text with graphics instruction format over the graphics-only instruction format. This suggests that graphics-only instruction format could be improved. In the following section, labelled Suggestions for future researchers, we have discussed possible alternative instruction formats.

Suggestions for future researchers

We suggest that future research should look more closely at the optimum mix of text and graphics for instruction sets. A possible instruction format would be to number each new piece in the graphics-only format. Doing this, the subjects will not have to review the picture so carefully to make sure a piece or step was not missed. We feel that this instruction format will yield faster completion times than the graphics-only instructions.

Another suggestion is to decrease the image sizes or try lowering the picture quality of the graphical instructions to see if it has any effect on completion times and errors. Attempting to find the lowest possible picture quality that still yields acceptable results is something that will minimize both the required disk space and the download times for the graphics.

A significant problem we had with our experiment is that we used some subjects that did not have English as their first language. We think that this had adverse effects on the text-only times and error rates. We suggest that any future research on text instructions should exclude subjects for whom the language in which the instructions is written is not the subject's native language.

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