Animation does affect one's information seeking performance. It is also true that animation has different impacts on different level tasks. The more difficult the task, the less distracting the animation, and the higher the performance score. The color plays an important role in affecting one's performance. There is no difference found for similarity or distance.
Further study is needed on similarity impact.
Since a participant has to go through the entire table to search for the target string, and the animation is placed on the border of the table, the distance from the margin of the animation to all target strings in the table may not be the proper design to test the distance effect. An alternative design would be to control the distance between the animation and the table. Also, the difference between small distance and large distance may need to be enlarged in future studies. The primary goal of this study is to test if animation is a source of visual interference and to what extend animation affects one's information seeking performance. In order to achieve this goal, many factors have been eliminated from this study.