Use animations to support knowledge transfer built on the understanding of the non-experts’ mental model

Sammanfattning: Knowledge visualization as a recent branch of visualization science was established by Burkhard [1] at 2004. In his theory, animation was mentioned as one of major visual formats for knowledge transfer. However, there is a lack of  further research about its impact on the transfer of knowledge. The aim of this study is to understand key characteristics that constitute to the mental model of non-experts on domain knowledge. Subsequent to this, it is investigated how animations support knowledge transfer to non-experts. In this study, home automation planning is used as a case to explore the characteristics that best constitute a good animation for knowledge transfer. The results showed that non-experts’ general attention was placed on cause and effect relations of a typical automatic lighting control and non-experts had misconceptions possibly because of different life experience, knowledge background, information vagueness, and overconfidence. The event segmentation in non-experts’ mental model was used to guide animation design which resulted in higher perceived clarity, less misconceptions during knowledge transfer to non-experts. In addition, our results from exploratory observation indicated that animations have potential to facilitate collaborative knowledge transfer and decision making process.