Exploring Animated Faces Scales in Web Surveys: Drawbacks and Prospects

Web surveys have been mimicking paper questionnaires with respect to their layout and appearance for a long time. Even though the rapid development of the internet and internet data collection methods offers various graphic and multimedia design features, very little is known about the influence of animated web survey questions on the question answering process. In a web survey among university journal readers, we conducted an experiment exploring the effects of implementing animated faces in scale questions. By varying the visual appearance of faces in a scale question, we enhance their influence on the question answering process.