Effectiveness and usability of an online help agent embodied as a talking head

An empirical study is presented which aims at assessing the possible effects of embodiment on online help effectiveness and attraction. 22 undergraduate students who were unfamiliar with animation creation software created two simple animations with Flash, using two multimodal online help agents, EH and UH, one per animation. Both help agents used the same database of speech and graphics messages; EH was personified using a talking head while UH was not embodied. EH and UH presentation order was counterbalanced between participants. Subjective judgments elicited through verbal and nonverbal questionnaires indicate that the presence of the ECA was well accepted by participants and its influence on help effectiveness perceived as positive. Analysis of eye tracking data indicates that the ECA actually attracted their visual attention and interest, since they glanced at it from the beginning to the end of the animation creation (75 fixations during 40 min.). Contrastingly, post-tests marks and interaction traces suggest that the ECA's presence had no perceivable effect on concept or skill learning and task execution. It only encouraged help consultation.