Open-ended comprehension testing is a commonly-recommended form of evaluation for safety symbols, but such testing can be costly in terms of time, effort and expense. The present study examines several issues related to symbol testing. First, two alternative rating methods intended to approximate open-ended comprehension results were evaluated in both Study 1 and 2. The first method, used previously in the literature, had participants estimate the percentage of the population that would correctly interpret the symbols meaning. The second method involved providing participants with the symbol and its meaning and having them provide a rating of the correspondence between the two. Results demonstrated that both ratings correlated highly with participants open-ended comprehension results. A second issue relates to the way in which people perceive various qualitative aspects of the symbols (e.g., quality of the drawing, clutter, legibility and the extent to which the symbol conveyed a sense of hazard or danger) and how these variables relate to one another. Implications for symbol evaluation are discussed.
Arcia, Adriana, Lisa V. Grossman, Maureen George, Meghan Reading Turchioe, Sabrina Mangal & Ruth M. Masterson Creber
2019. 2019 IEEE Workshop on Visual Analytics in Healthcare (VAHC), ► pp. 41 ff.
Piper, Adam K.
2014. Rapid Semantic Annotation as an Evaluative Tool for Warning Symbol Design. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting 58:1 ► pp. 1894 ff.
Waterson, Patrick & Alice Monk
2014. The development of guidelines for the design and evaluation of warning signs for young children. Applied Ergonomics 45:5 ► pp. 1353 ff.
Farias, Priscila & João Queiroz
2006. Images, diagrams, and metaphors: Hypoicons in the context of Peirce's sixty-six-fold classification of signs. Semiotica 2006:162
Foster, Jeremy J. & M. R. Afzalnia
2005. International assessment of judged symbol comprehensibility. International Journal of Psychology 40:3 ► pp. 169 ff.
Hartley, James
2005. Is this chapter any use? Methods for evaluating text. In Evaluation of Human Work, 3rd Edition, ► pp. 335 ff.
Wogalter, Michael S., Tondra A. La Murray, Barbara L. Glover & Eric F. Shaver
2002. Comprehension of Different Types of Prohibitive Safety Symbols with Glance Exposure. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting 46:19 ► pp. 1753 ff.
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