Deconaby: Animations for Improving Understandability of Web Images

There are many “how-to” pages on the Web. However, on such pages, descriptions and images are often not clearly linked. As a result, it is difficult for viewers to understand which parts of the text description refer to which pars of the images. This study aims to solve this problem. With the developed Deconaby system, users can add animations just by clicking on an image on a Web page and moving their mouse. Our system then generates a URL that consists of the how-to page’s original URL and a hash ID for sharing the animation-added version with others. In this manner, our system can improve the understandability of Web pages with little time and effort. We conducted an experiment to test the effectiveness of our system. The results showed that our system succeeded in increasing the understandability of difficult-to-understand pages. We also showed that a page written in an unfamiliar language can be understood with the help of appropriate Deconaby animations.