Do Whiteboard Animation Videos Still Work in 2026? What the Research Actually Says

In a 2025 experiment with 521 US adults, people who learned introductory accounting from whiteboard animations scored higher on retention tests than people given the same narration as slides, audio or text, according to researchers at Bond University in Australia. A 2023 German study found something less flattering: whether a hand drew the pictures, pushed them in or wasn't shown at all made no measurable difference to how much students learned.

So do whiteboard videos still work in 2026? The research is encouraging but thinner and more mixed than the marketing suggests. Here's what the studies tested, where they disagree, and what it means if you're deciding whether to make one. (If you're new to the format, start with how whiteboard animation videos started.)

What "work" can mean

Whiteboard videos get credit for three different things, and the evidence differs for each:

1. Learning: do viewers remember and understand more? This has the most research behind it, mostly short online experiments.
2. Attention and enjoyment: do viewers like the format and keep watching? Studies measure this with self-reported ratings.
3. Sales: do whiteboard videos convert better than other videos or no video? We found no controlled public study on this. Claims you see on sales pages are usually vendor figures.

The study that started the debate: Türkay, 2016

The most cited experiment is Selen Türkay's 2016 paper in Computers & Education. She recruited 621 participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk and randomly assigned them to learn advanced physics topics from a whiteboard animation, a narrated slideshow, audio only or text only.

Whiteboard animations had a positive effect on retention, engagement and enjoyment. But Türkay herself wrote that she couldn't rule out that some of the effect came from novelty: people may have liked the format partly because it was new to them. The Bond authors later described her whiteboard-versus-slides differences as inconsistent; the clearer advantage was over audio and text.

Later studies mostly point the same way

Türkay ran a second experiment, published in 2022, with 299 Mechanical Turk participants learning social science topics. The whiteboard group answered significantly more questions correctly than people who watched an on-stage lecture or narrated slides. Whiteboard and audio-only groups both reported more enjoyment and engagement than the others.

The 2025 Bond University study, by Mark Brosnan and Tim Hasso, went further. It compared five groups: whiteboard animation with narration, slideshow with narration, narration only, text only and a control group that got no lesson. The slideshow was the same video with the animation removed.

The whiteboard group had the highest enjoyment and engagement ratings and the best retention scores. The control group scored about 20%, roughly what you'd get by guessing on five-option questions. 379 participants came back for a test a week later, and the whiteboard group was still ahead.

The detail that matters most is in the follow-up. Scores dropped by about the same amount in every group after a week. The authors concluded that whiteboard animation doesn't make memories last longer; it helps people learn more in the first place, and that head start carries forward.

Where the evidence is weaker or mixed

Several findings cut the other way, and they deserve as much attention:

• Not every study beats slides. The Bond authors point to a 2021 study by van der Meij and Draijer that found no difference in retention between a whiteboard animation and a PowerPoint slideshow using the same audio.
• The hand may not matter. In the 2023 study from Chemnitz University of Technology, 84 students watched an 8:44 whiteboard video made in Doodly. The hand drawing the content produced higher intrinsic motivation than a hand pushing images in, but learning performance was the same across all three versions, including no hand.
• Novelty hasn't been settled. The Bond study saw enjoyment and engagement dip, though not significantly, by the third whiteboard lesson. The authors list this as an open question rather than an answer.
• The samples are narrow. Most experiments use online panels or university students and lessons of a few minutes. Results may not carry over to a 20-minute module or a 45-second ad.
• There aren't many studies. The Bond authors write that the small number of studies makes it premature to draw definitive conclusions.

The 2023 paper adds a caution: comparing whole media formats is risky because so much differs at once, so a win doesn't tell you which ingredient caused it.

Why the format can help when it's done well

General multimedia research helps explain the results. Richard Mayer of the University of California, Santa Barbara summarizes 13 experimental comparisons in which students did much better on transfer tests when they learned from words and graphics rather than words alone, with a median effect size of 1.35. He calls this the multimedia principle.

Whiteboard videos naturally follow several others. Drawing while the narrator speaks matches temporal contiguity, supported in 8 of 8 tests in his summary. A drawing that appears exactly where you should look acts as a signal, supported in 26 of 28 tests. And a plain white background with one idea at a time fits the coherence principle, supported in 18 of 19 tests.

A badly made whiteboard video breaks those same rules with cluttered scenes, lagging drawings or decorative doodles. The Bond authors recommend designs that emphasize signaling, segmenting and synchronized narration and drawing. We walk through those steps in how whiteboard animation videos are made today.

What about sales and conversions?

In Wyzowl's 2026 video marketing report, based on 266 respondents surveyed in late 2025, 96% of consumers said they had watched an explainer video to learn about a product or service, and 63% said a short video was how they'd most like to learn about one. Explainer videos were the second most common type marketers made, at 68%. Wyzowl is a video production company and these are self-reported answers, so treat them as a signal of habits, not proof of conversion lift.

The practical answer is to test it on your own audience: compare a product page with and without the video over a set period, and watch add-to-cart rate, sign-ups or watch time. Our product page video checklist covers placement basics.

When to use a whiteboard video in 2026

Based on what the studies tested, the format makes most sense for:

• Explaining a process, a concept or a "how it works" idea in two or three minutes.
• Audiences new to the topic, where clear structure matters most.

It's a weaker choice when people need to see the real product, its size or setup; live footage or a screen recording usually does that better. And if your audience has seen a hundred doodle videos this year, any novelty boost may be gone.

For a thought experiment, see what if explainer videos had never existed.

Disclosure: some links are affiliate links; ShopperCove may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

If you decide to test a whiteboard-style video, software has made production far less labour-intensive than it once was, as the Bond authors note. InstaDoodle's offer page says you paste a script and its DoodleAI engine turns the words into doodle scenes, with your own voiceover and music, audio that syncs automatically with slides, and 16:9, 9:16 and square formats. It lists seven drawing hands, which the 2023 study suggests is a style choice rather than a learning one. ShopperCove did not test InstaDoodle for this article.

Tools that help

• InstaDoodle, AI doodle and whiteboard explainer video app. Its offer page lists a lifetime deal for a one-time payment, with the price adjusted to your country and shown at checkout, 1,000+ doodle elements, 14 project templates, 150 AI credits and a 60-day money-back guarantee.

How this was made: facts were gathered on 8 Oct 2026 (IST) from the QUT repository records of Selen Türkay's 2016 and 2022 studies, the open-access 2025 Bond University and 2023 Chemnitz papers in Smart Learning Environments, Richard Mayer's research summary and Wyzowl's 2026 survey, then written up with AI help and checked line by line against those sources. ShopperCove did not run its own experiment or test InstaDoodle for this article.

Sources

• 01link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40561-025-00420-2
• 02link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40561-023-00258-6
• 03eprints.qut.edu.au/107969/
• 04eprints.qut.edu.au/239238/
• 05unh.edu/teaching-learning-resource-hub/sites/default/files/media/2023-06/itow-research-based-principles-for-designing-multimedia-instruction-mayer.pdf
• 06wyzowl.com/video-marketing-statistics/
• 07instadoodle.com/cb-special

Related

• 01shoppercove.com/blog/instadoodle-prompt-doodle-videos-2026
• 02shoppercove.com/blog/instadoodle-lifetime-one-time-color-cb-special-october-2026
• 03shoppercove.com/blog/vidtoon-2-1-explainer-videos-for-product-pages-2026