An Experimental Study on Information Presentation Method using

Four-frame Comic on Digital Signage

Kimi Ueda

, Yuta Tsuji

, Hiroshi Shimoda

, Hirotake Ishii

, Rika Mochizuki

and Masahiro Watanabe

Graduate School of Energy Science, Kyoto University, Kyoto-city, Kyoto, Japan

Service Evolution Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone corp., Kanagawa, Japan

Keywords:

Cross-cultural Understanding, Comic, Digital Signage.

Abstract:

Recently, international tourist has been increasing and mobility of human activity is increasing, so people have

had more chance to contact with various cultures different from their own. In Japan, in anticipation of the 2020

Tokyo Olympic game, digital signage is expected to be an effective information presentation tool to improve

cross-cultural understanding. In this study, four-frame comic was proposed to be an effective information pre-

sentation method, and an evaluation experiment was conducted to investigate how t o make contents interesting

or memorable by comparing four information presentation methods, four-frame comic, video, photograph and

illustration. As a result of questionnaire conducted in the experiment, four-frame comic’s humorous story and

readability could be effective to att ract viewers’ interest and the amount of information included in four-frame

comic and its humor expression could be effective to make view ers memorize information explained in pre-

sented contents. However, the effectiveness of f our-frame comic was not signiﬁcant. It was thought that the

effect of information presentation methods is differ from topic type, and more detail experiment is expected to

investigate the effective used of four-frame comic in future study.

1 INTRODUCTION

Recently, foreign tourists are increasing more and

more all over the world. The UNWTO World Tou-

rism Barom eter (World Tourism Organization, 2016)

showed that number of international tourists reached

more tha n 1.1 billion in 2015, which is 4.4 percentage

increase compared with 2014, an d moreover, it was a

record highest ever. They are expected to continue in-

creasing and people have had more ch ance to contact

with various cultures different from their own because

of increasing mobility of human activity in the world.

In this situation, therefore, cross-cultural understan-

ding is important to realize the world where p eople of

different cultural backgroun d can keep their cultural

identities and respect each other(Brislin, 1993).

Also in Japan, the number of oversea tourists has

been increasing in recent several years. Moreover, in

anticipation of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic game, Japa-

nese governm e nt decided “Action Plan to Accelerate

ICT ( Imform ation and Communication Technology)

Use in Entire Society toward 20 20”. In the plan, di-

gital sig nage of 4K or 8K images is promoted as an

informa tion presentation instrument for foreign tou-

rists. Digital signage can provide information to large

amount of people at a time when it is set in places

where m a ny people come and go by its big display.

Digital signage, which has been realized by recent

ICT, can give information in various ways such as vi-

deo, picture, illustration or even inter active informa-

tion according to Want and Schilit(Wa nt and Sch ilit,

2012).

Digital signage is th ought to be essential for a mo-

dern society, then ma ny researc h studies have b een

done about the use of it. M¨uller et al( M¨uller et al.,

2009) investigated that a viewer’s expe ctation of a di-

gital signage determined whether or not it attracted

his/her attention , and it is showed thtat a d igital sig-

nage in a shopping mall had a positive impact on con-

sumers by Dennis et al. (Dennis et al., 2010). Many

other stud ies also examined the inﬂuence of adver-

tisement on consumers (Burke, 2009)(Dennis et al.,

2014). New systems and applications have be en also

developed to improve usability of digital signage in

various ways. Instead o f a keyboard or a touch screen,

Chen et al. (Chen et al., 2009) described an inte-

raction system for controlling a digital signage dis-

play by using hand gestu re, and Clinch et al. (Clinch

Ueda, K., Tsuji, Y., Shimoda, H., Ishii, H., Mochizuki, R. and Watanabe, M.

An Experimental Study on Information Presentation Method using Four-frame Comic on Digital Signage.

DOI: 10.5220/0006927901270133

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications (CHIRA 2018), pages 127-133

ISBN: 978-989-758-328-5

127

et al., 2011) developed and deployed their networked

public display systems for coutinuous long time use.

Although many studies have been investigating the

possibility of digital signages, because of its too wide

variance of information presentation style, there is no

speciﬁc guideline of how to use digital signage to get

more efﬁciency when providing info rmation. At pre-

sent, users cre ate its contents by their know-how or

trial and error.

Considering today’s circumstances of Japan, the

purpose of this study is to investigate the effective

method of information presentation to foreign tourists

by using digital signages. Japanese unique food cul-

ture is dealt with as the presented information in this

study. Especially this study focused on four-frame co-

mic as an effective information presentation medium,

which is showed to be effective for learning in some

studies (Park et al., 2011) (McVicker, 2007) by their

colorful illustration a nd representation of text.

2 PROPOSED METHOD

The effective method of information presentation is

investigated for providing information using digital

signages in this study. In case of pr oviding in forma-

tion of Japanese un ique culture for foreign tourists,

it is im portant to satisfy two require ments, (a) a dis-

played content can attract their interests and (b) it can

be easily memorized. Thus a method using comic has

been proposed as an effective information presenta-

tion meth od on digital signages in our conventional

study (Tsuji et al., 2017). There are relevant stu-

dies about using c omic (Sumi et al., 2002) (Kurlander

et al., 1996) thoug h, this study par ticularly focused on

a fou r-frame comic.

A four-frame comic is deﬁned as a comic consists

of only four frames, that is popular and traditionally

established in Japan. It has 5 features as shown in

bellow;

(1) It is a part of popular culture in Japan.

(2) It can emphasize what they want to give by using

illustrations.

(3) It can describe a story.

(4) It has a sense of humor.

(5) It can be displayed as one ﬁgure on a digital sig-

nage.

Based on the se features, fou r-frame comics are ex-

pected to be an effective method of information pr e-

sentation.

Therefore in this stud y, two hypothesis about four-

frame comics comparing with typical med ia types of

digital signage, photograph, illustration and video,

were proposed a s follows;

H1. When presenting Japanese culture inform ation

on a digital signage, four-frame comic can attract

more foreigners’ inter e sts than photograph, illus-

tration and video.

H2. When presenting Japanese culture inform ation

on a digital signage, the contents presented b y

four-frame comic can be memorized easier that

those of photograph, illustration and video.

3 INVESTIGATION

EXPERIMENT

To verify two h ypothesis n oted in chapter 2, an ex-

periment was conducted including two investigations,

“Interest Investigation” to verify H1 an d “Memory In-

vestigation” to verify H 2.

Experiment was schedu led from Jan 20th 2018 to

Jan 28th 2018 and 49 foreigners staying in Japan par-

ticipated. Wh e n recruiting the participants, it was ex-

plained that this experimen t would be conducted all in

English. The detail of participants is shown in Table

1. No.22’s answer was incompleted and there was no

detail information about him so tha t his experimen-

tal data would be omitted from the results. Figure

1 shows the experimental room a nd Figure 2 shows

iPad used to provide contents assumed to be on a di-

gital signage. In this experiment, to avoid effects from

other par ticipants, iPad was used to privately present

different method for each participant.

Figure 1: T he conditions of the experiment.

3.1 Displayed Contents

In this experiment, all contents had been prepared in

four presentation meth ods, four-frame comic, photo-

graph, illustration and video. Examples are sh own in

CHIRA 2018 - 2nd International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications

128

Table 1: List of participants’ detail.

No. Gen-

der

Age Country Length of stay in Japan

1 F 29 Philippines 1 year

M 22 Malaysia 6 months

F 30 Germany 1 year

F 23 China 4 months

F 33 Columbia 1 year 3 months

M 19 Korea 10 months

M 44 Iran 4 months

F 35 Iran 4 months

M 22 Malaysia 5 months

M 21 Mongolia 3 years

M 23 Malaysia 6 months

M 21 Malaysia 4 months

F 29 Costa Rica 4 months

M 26 Belgium 2 years 8 months

M 24 Uzbekistan 2 years

F 27 Russia 2 years 10 months

M 16 Iran 4 months

M 27 Bangladesh 1 year 3 months

F 39 Italy 2 months

F 29 France 5 months

M 22 Argentina 1 year and 9 months

23 M 22 France 1 year

F 24 France 1 year

M 36 Palestine 2 years 10 months

F 23 Germany 1 year

F 33 Mexico 11 months

M 32 Canada 3 years 11 months

F 20 Philippines 3 months

F 26 Philippines 1 year 6 months

F 32 Croatia 1 year 6 months

F 29 El Salvador 1 year 6 months

M 27 Cambodia 4 months

M 22 Cambodia 2 years

F 24 Cambodia 2 years

M 30 Cambodia 1 year 10 months

M 28 Cambodia 3 years 2 months

M 21 Egypt 4 years 6 months

M 24 Mexico 1 year 3 months

M 28 Canada 1 year 6 months

M 27 India 1 year

M 31 Malaysia 3 years 3 months

M 24 India 11 months

M 30 Spain 3 months

F 25 Palestine 3 years 9 months

M 31 America 9 years 5 months

M 28 Indonesia 4 months

F 28 Russia 2 years 10 months

F 18 Iran 4 months

Figure 3. Contents were prepared in the same format

as shown in below;

Four-frame Comic Th e features were already des-

cribed in chapter 2.

Figure 2: A device used to present information i n the expe-

riment.

Photograph. Photograph is one of the popular for-

mat of contents on digital signages. Photograph

was presented togethe r with explanation text in

this experiment. It is based on the recent situation

that everyone can create information with pho-

tograph without any special sk ills, using recent

high-performance digital camera and software.

Illustration. Illustration is also a popular format of

contents on digital signages. Illustration’s quality

is differ from the skill of illustrator however, il-

lustration ca n emphasize the topic to be focused

on. It was also presented to gether with explana-

tion text in this experiment.

Video. Presenting video contents is impossible for

traditional signboards but digital signages made it

possible these days. Then it is popular to use dyn-

amic information on digital signage, and actually,

there are many large displays showing videos do-

wntown, be cause video is thought to have strong

impression a nd to be comprehensive. However,

video needs some time to complete showing its

contents and so viewers have to spent some time

to see all the video, and moreover, they can’t un-

derstand its meaning when they missed the begin -

ning or the end. Video was presented with some

explanation texts in this experiment.

According to the pre-experimental study (Tsuji

et al., 2017 ) , effective information presentation met-

hods can vary by the type of information. For exam-

ple, photo can easily show variety of food at a glance

and video can show a procedure clearly. Therefore,

to determine the difference between contents’ types,

two speciﬁc content types “ variety” and “procedure”

were chosen a nd experimental contents were prepa-

red based on two types. Variety type includes the in-

troduction of various examples about the top ic such

as Bowl meals and Vending machines, and procedure

type includes how to make or use the topic such as

Rolled sushi and Fish grill.

An Experimental Study on Information Presentation Method using Four-frame Comic on Digital Signage

129

(3) Illustration

(2)Photograph

(4)Video

(1) Four-frame comic

Figure 3: Examples of four types of images.

3.2 Methods

Investigation experiment was conducted in the follo-

wing the ﬂow;

• Explanation about experiment (10min)

• Questionnaires about participants themselves

(5min)

• In terest investigation (15min)

• Memory investigation (10min)

• Payment procedure (5min)

The q uestionnaires included two questions about co-

mics: “Do you like comic boo ks?” a nd “How often

do you read comic books?”, and other 18 dummy qu e -

stions. Topics of the contents u sed in the interest and

memory investigation were different from each other

as shown in Table 2 and Table 3, and half of each were

proced ure topics and others we re variety topics.

3.2.1 Interest Investigation

An experime ntal protoco l of interest investigation is

shown in Figure 4. Participants saw each 4 type va-

riations of 8 Japanese unique food topics shown in

Table 2 for each 1.5 seconds, because people walking

around stop the ir eye-sight on a degital signage for 1.5

seconds in average (MdN DesignInteractive, 2010).

Between e ach contents, a blank page was set to ap-

pear f or 1 second to make contents’ switching recog-

nized. At the e nd of every topic, participants choo se

which was most attrac tive among fo ur contents’ ty-

pes and why did they think it attractive. Presenting

sequence of 4 variation was different betwe e n every

participants to counterbala nce ordering effect on con-

tents’ attractiveness.

3.2.2 Memory Investigation

In me mory investigation, the participants saw 8 con-

tents for eac h 15 seco nds. Each of the four types of

the methods was u sed twice, and the sequence of pre-

senting topics was different from all par ticipants, to

counterbalance ordering effect on topic ’s memoriza-

tion. After ﬁnishing the contents’ presenta tion, pa rti-

cipants were required to write down what they could

remember in 2 minutes.

To avoid primacy effect, 4 dummy contents were

presented before the 8 measur ed objects for memo-

rization. To avoid rece ncy effect, 2 minutes video

about Kyoto was presented and questionnaires about

the video was cond ucted as a d ummy task, between

the presentation of measured conten ts and measured

questionn aire for memorization.

Table 2: Li st of f ood cultural topics used in Interest Investi-

gation.

Topic Content

(Topic 1) Rice Ball sold in Conve-

nience Stores

Procedure

(Topic 2)

Bowl Meal Variety

(Topic 3)

Rice Cake Maker Procedure

(Topic 4)

Sashimi (raw sliced ﬁsh) Variety

(Topic 5)

Meal Coupon Vending Ma-

chines

Procedure

(Topic 6)

Japanese Confectionery Variety

(Topic 7)

The Way to Hold Chopsticks Procedure

(Topic 8)

Event Foods Variety

Table 3: List of food cultural topics used in Memory Inves-

tigation.

Topic Content

(Topic 1) Fish Grill Procedure

(Topic 2)

Vending Machines Variety

(Topic 3)

How to Hold Chopsticks Procedure

(Topic 4)

Dashi (soup stock) Variety

(Topic 5)

Rolled Sushi Procedure

(Topic 6)

Tsukemono (pickled food) Variety

(Topic 7)

Okonomiyaki (savory

pancake with various ingre-

dients)

Procedure

(Topic 8)

Ekiben (boxed station lunch) Variety

CHIRA 2018 - 2nd International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications

130

practice

Topic

Type A

1.5sec

Type B

1.5sec

Type

1.5sec

Type D

1.5sec

void

1sec

void

1sec

void

1sec

Question-

naire

void

1sec

Figure 4: Experimental protocol of Interest Investigation.

4 RESULTS

In addition to participant No.22, No.14 an d No.15

couldn’t complete their questionnaires in interest in-

vestigation, and No.33 and No.36 misunderstood the

questionn aires conducted in memory investigation.

Thus, these ﬁve participants’ results were excluded,

so results includes 44 participnats’ data.

4.1 Results of Interest Investigation

In the interest investigation experiment, v ideo con -

tents were chosen 118 times as th e most attractive

method of information presentation, which is the lar-

gest number of four methods as shown in Figur e 5.

Based on chi-square test, th e re were signiﬁcant diffe-

rence between video and other methods (p <0.01).

Table 4 shows the resu lts separated by the con-

tents’ types. In th e result of procedu re type, video

was the most often chosen method, on the other hand

in the result of variety type, photo graph was the most

often chosen method as the attractive contents.

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Figure 5: Number of how many times each method chosen

as the most attractive information presentation method.

Table 4: Comparison between contents’ types in Interest

investigation.

Four-

frame

comic

Photo-

graph

Illust-

ration

Video

Procedure 43 9 49 75

Variation 33 65 35 43

4.2 Results of Memory Investigation

Figure 6 shows the result of memory investigation.

The numbers mean how many times presented in-

formation memorized in each presen ta tion methods.

Four-frame comic and video conte nts were both re-

membered 44 times which was the most of four me t-

hods, however there was no signiﬁca nt differences ba-

sed on chi-square test.

Table 4 shows the resu lts separated by the con-

tents’ types. I n the result of proc edure, f our-frame

comic was remembered 28 times and it was the

most memorized information presentation method.

There was no signiﬁcant difference between four met-

hods of informatio n presentation though, the diffe-

rence be twe en the total memorized numbers of proce-

dure(N=92) and variation(N=63) was signiﬁcant ba-

sed on chi-square test(p <0.01) .

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Figure 6: Number of how many times each method was

memorized.

Table 5: Comparison between contents’ types in Memory

investigation.

Four-

frame

comic

Photo-

graph

Illust-

ration

Video

Procedure 28 20 18 26

Variation 16 15 13 18

5 DISCUSSION

5.1 Interest Investigation

To determine the r elationship between participants’

preference and interest investigation result, they were

divided in to two groups based on the questionnaires

condu c te d at the beginning of experiment. “Prefer

comics” group includes those wh o positively answe-

red b oth “How often do y ou read comic bo oks?” and

“Do you like comic books?”, and “not prefer comics”

group includes other participants.

Table 6 shows the relationship between personal

preference and interest investigation. 20 participants

were included in the prefer group, and they chose

four-frame comic as the most attractive method 39 ti-

mes, and othe r 24 participants were included in the

not prefer group and they chose four-frame comic 37

times. There was no signiﬁcant difference between

An Experimental Study on Information Presentation Method using Four-frame Comic on Digital Signage

131

two groups by chi-square test. Therefore, the pe rso-

nal preference of comics was not thought to have any

effect on comics can attract their interest.

Table 6: Relationship between personal preference and in-

terest investigation.

N the number of ti-

mes they select four-

frame comic

Prefer comics 20 39

Not prefer comics 24 37

Based on the results of interest investigation, four-

frame com ic was not the method which attracted par-

ticipants inter est the most, which mea ns H1 was not

veriﬁed. However, based on the reason why they

chose the four-frame comic con te nts as the most at-

tractive, some situation such as characters talking

about the topics and humors used in story were

thought to attract particip ants interest. For example,

“The comic seemed humorous so that I wanted to read

it to know jokes (about Bowl meal)” , “It is easy to

see 4 steps at a time (about Rice ball sold in co n-

venience stores)”, “It was most understandab le with

some chats and illustration (about The way to hold

chopsticks)” and “This comic explained clearly what

the event food is and I want to know more about it

(about Event food)”

Based on these results, there is so me possibility

that four-frame comic can encourage viewers to k now

more ab out presen te d information by using charac-

ters’ chat of explana tion with moderate illustration.

Humorous expression could make viewers expect that

it may provide some information in pleasant way. In

addition, because viewers can read four-frame comic

freely in their own way such as reading speed or ima-

ging contexts, such fr e edom of reading four-frame co-

mic was thought to imp ress viewers favorably and in-

terest.

5.2 Memory Investigation

To determine the relationship be twe en personal pre-

ference and the r e sult of memory investigation, the

same analysis as the interest investigation was con-

ducted and its results are shown in Table 7. The re was

neither signiﬁcant difference s between two groups by

chi-square test. Therefore, the personal preference of

comics was not thought to have any effect on whether

comics can be memorized.

Based on the results of interest investigation, H 2

was not veriﬁed. Although there was no signiﬁ-

cant difference between fo ur information presentation

methods in memory investigation, four-frame comic

Table 7: Relationship between personal preference and me-

mory investigation.

N the number of times

they rememb e r four-

frame com ic

Prefer comics 20 23

Not prefer comics 24 21

was ranked as one of the most m emorized method as

well as video. In four-frame comic contents, th e story

was p resented where characters talk about the topics

in four frames, while in video contents, 15 second

movie was presented. Therefo re the amount of infor-

mation was larger in four-frame comic and video con-

tents than in illustration and photogr a ph contents, and

this difference of in formation amount might bring the

difference of memorization. Comparing video with

four-frame comic, video is dynamic inform ation so

that video is thought to include more informa tion than

four-frame comic though, four-frame comic contents

were memorized same times as video contents. It is

thought th at h umorous stor y of f our-frame comic in-

cluding the slip end or pun ch line, promotes elabo-

rative rehearsal in viewers’ cognition to be easier for

memorization.

6 CONCLUSION

As the result of investigatio n experiment, H1 and

H2 was not veriﬁed. However based on the posi-

tive answers in the questionnaire of interest investi-

gation, four-frame comic’s humorous story and rea-

dability cou ld be effective to attract viewers’ interest.

Also ba sed on the results of memory investigation, the

amount of information include d in four-frame comic

and its humor expression could be effective to make

viewers memorize the information explained in pre-

sented contents.

There were some limitations in this study. The re-

ason why participants chose the method as the most

interesting was asked in interest investigation, howe-

ver, it is also necessary to know why other methods

don’t attract participants interest at the same time to

discuss from various viewpoints. In addition, this

study focused on just two contents’ types, proce dure

and variety types, however, there are many other to-

pic types of information what foreign tourists want to

know from digital signages. In future study, more de-

tail experiment is expected to investigate the effective

use of four-frame comic.

CHIRA 2018 - 2nd International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications

132

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