Substantial, Decomposable, and Invisible: Visual Context Misalignment in Instructional Videos for Physical Tasks
Abstract
Instructional videos are the dominant medium for completing physical tasks, yet rarely match the user's visual context. Motor simulation and cognitive load theories predict this mismatch matters, but how much, which attributes are responsible, and how users experience it remain unknown. We conduct two studies (56 participants, two first-aid and two cooking tasks) using researcher-prepared recordings to control visual alignment. Study 1 (N=16) compares fully aligned In-Context instructional videos (ICON) against business-as-usual Internet videos. ICON yields statistically significant gains: 11.1% higher completion quality and 15.5% faster completion. Qualitative analysis decomposes the effect into four visual context attributes: Task Object Intrinsic, Task Object State, Environmental Context, and Observational Context. Study 2 (N=40) ablates attributes one at a time. All four degrade objective performance yet users perceive no performance loss for any of them. Visual context misalignment is substantial, decomposable, and invisible to the user for any single attribute.
