Benefits of animated scrolling

We examined the benefits of animated scrolling using four speeds and three different document types in terms of task speed, accuracy and user preference. We considered reading tasks involving unformatted and formatted text documents, as well as counting tasks involving abstract symbol documents. We found that, compared with non-animated scrolling, animated scrolling significantly improves average task time, by up to 5.3% using 300 millisecond animations for reading documents and by up to 24% at 500 milliseconds for symbol documents. Animated scrolling also significantly decreases error rates for reading tasks by up to 54%, as well as improving satisfaction.