Effectiveness and Preferences of Anthropomorphic Feedback in a Statistics Context

This paper describes an experiment and its results concerning research that has been going on for a number of years in the area of anthropomorphic user interface feedback. The main aims of the research have been to examine the effectiveness and user satisfaction of anthropomorphic feedback. The results are useful to all user interface designers wishing to improve the usability of their products. There is still disagreement in the research community concerning the usefulness of anthropomorphism at the user interface. This research is contributing knowledge to the aim of discovering whether such approaches are effective and liked by users. The experiment described in this paper, concerns the context of statistics tutoring/revision, which is part of the domain of software for in-depth learning. Anthropomorphic feedback was compared against an equivalent non-anthropomorphic feedback. The results indicated the anthropomorphic feedback to be preferred by users for some factors. However the evidence for effectiveness was inconclusive.