Participatory Environmentally Friendly Message Design: Influence of Message Features and User Characteristics.

Labels and declarations are one of the tools of environmental management aimed at improving human behavior with regard to the environment. The development process of environmental labels and declarations has been strongly recommended to include participatory consultation with users. Research studies on participatory design of environmentally friendly messages, however, have never been seen. The purpose of this study was to examine participatory environmentally friendly message design with consideration for the effects of message characteristics and user factors. Forty Hong Kong Chinese people adopted a participatory draw-and-tell approach by drawing 26 environmentally friendly messages related to eco-products, energy conservation, and recycling and waste management, and then verbally described their design drawings. The results showed that environmentally friendly messages which were familiar, concrete, easy to visualize, and contained clear context were favored by users, and users with high object imagery preference benefited most from the participatory design through the draw-and-tell approach. This study fills the gap in the literature about participatory design in environmental labels and declarations which are used for promoting eco-friendly behavior in daily life. The findings should help facilitate the participatory development process of environmentally friendly messages for conveying pro-environmental actions.

Color associations among designers and non-designers for common warning and operation concepts.

This study examined color-concept associations among designers and non-designers with commonly used warning and operation concepts. This study required 199 designers and 175 non-designers to indicate their choice among nine colors to associate with each of the 38 concepts in a color-concept table. The results showed that the designers and non-designers had the same color associations and similar strengths of stereotypes for 17 concepts. The strongest color-concept stereotypes for both groups were red-danger, red-fire, and red-hot. However, the designers and non-designers had different color associations for the concepts of escape (green, red), increase (green, red), potential hazard (red, orange), fatal (black, red), and normal (white, green), while the strengths of the 16 remaining associations for both groups were not at equivalent levels. These findings provide ergonomists and design practitioners with a better understanding of population stereotypes for color coding, and consequently to effectively use colors in their user-centered designs.

Comprehension by older people of medication information with or without supplementary pharmaceutical pictograms.

This study examined the benefits of pharmaceutical pictograms for improving comprehension of medication information for older people. Fifty Hong Kong Chinese older people completed a medical information comprehension task for five drugs. Participants in the control group were presented with text labels while those in the experimental group were given the text labels plus supplementary pharmaceutical pictograms, and then all reported their understanding of the medication information conveyed. Lower educated older people had poorer understanding of medication information. The addition of pharmaceutical pictograms significantly improved the comprehension of medication information for older people. The majority of older people tested with pictograms favored adding pictograms to text and thought the pictograms were useful for conveying medical information rather than using written text alone. The findings suggested that pharmaceutical and health care professionals should include pharmaceutical pictograms on labels to better convey instructions on medication to older people.

Subjective measures in sit-to-stand task in post-stroke hemiparesis: comment on Brière, Nadeau, Lauzière, and Gravel (2013).

In a recent study, Brière, Nadeau, Lauzière, and Gravel (2013 ) examined the perceptions of individuals post-stroke on their weight-bearing distribution and knee effort distribution in sit-to-stand tasks. The present comment emphasized the importance of the feeling of post-stroke hemiparesis in sit-to-stand task and identified areas of improvements of the target study.

Effects of line length, line spacing, and line number on proofreading performance and scrolling of Chinese text.

OBJECTIVE: The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effects and interactions of line length, line number, and line spacing on Chinese screen-based proofreading performance and amount of scrolling. BACKGROUND: Proofreading is an important process, and much of it is now done on screen. The Chinese language is increasingly important, but very little work has been done on the factors that affect proofreading performance for Chinese passages. METHOD: Three display factors related to screen size, namely line length, line number, and line spacing, were selected to be investigated in an experiment to determine their effects on proofreading performance and amount of scrolling. Correlations between proofreading performance in time and accuracy and scrolling amount were also analyzed. RESULTS: The results showed that line number and line spacing had significant main and interaction effects on both proofreading time and detection rate. Line length and line number influenced scrolling amount significantly, but there was no interaction effect for scrolling. Scrolling amount was negatively correlated with proofreading time and typo detection rate such that more scrolling movement was associated with faster proofreading, but lower detection rate. There was a trade-off between time and accuracy. CONCLUSION: For balancing time and detection rate and improving performance for on-screen Chinese proofreading, the display setting of medium line length (36 characters per line) with four lines and 1.5 line spacing should be used. APPLICATION: The findings provide information and recommendations for display factors and the screen design that should prove useful for improving proofreading time and accuracy.

Perspectives toward the stereotype production method for public symbol design: a case study of novice designers.

This study investigated the practices and attitudes of novice designers toward user involvement in public symbol design at the conceptual design stage, i.e. the stereotype production method. Differences between male and female novice designers were examined. Forty-eight novice designers (24 male, 24 female) were asked to design public symbol referents based on suggestions made by a group of users in a previous study and provide feedback with regard to the design process. The novice designers were receptive to the adoption of user suggestions in the conception of the design, but tended to modify the pictorial representations generated by the users to varying extents. It is also significant that the male and female novice designers appeared to emphasize different aspects of user suggestions, and the female novice designers were more positive toward these suggestions than their male counterparts. The findings should aid the optimization of the stereotype production method for user-involved symbol design.

Effects of display factors on Chinese proofreading performance and preferences.

This experiment investigated the influence of four display factors, viz. typeface (Ming Liu and Jheng Hei), font size (10-point and 14-point), text direction (horizontal and vertical) and copy placement (left-right and top-bottom) on Chinese proofreading performance and subjective preferences. Proofreading performance was measured in terms of time and accuracy, and preferences were examined in terms of comfort, ease and fatigue. It was found that the horizontal text direction resulted in faster proofreading than the vertical one, but the other three factors were non significant. The faster proofreading using the horizontal text direction was valid for both the left-right and the top-bottom arrangements. There was an interaction between typeface and font size such that, for the smaller character size (10-point), the Ming Liu style produced a faster performance than the Jheng Hei style. However, for the larger character size (14-point), the Jheng Hei style produced a faster performance than the Ming Liu style. Regarding proofreading accuracy, the number of non-detected missing words and related false alarm in left-right copy placement setting was significantly larger than that in top-down setting. Greater accuracy was obtained in proofreading at the cost of a speed-accuracy trade-off--the higher the accuracy in the proofreading task, the longer the proofreading time. Font size and text direction had significant effects on proofreading preferences, but typeface and copy placement did not. Practitioner Summary: This study examined four display factors on Chinese proofreading performance and subjective preferences. The findings of this experiment provide information and recommendations that should prove useful for the design of proofreading interfaces to improve proofreading time and accuracy, and to satisfy proofreaders' preference.

The guessing of mine safety signs meaning: effects of user factors and cognitive sign features.

This study investigated the effects of user factors and cognitive sign features on the guessability of mine safety signs. Sixty naïve participants guessed the meanings and rated the cognitive sign features of 42 Mainland Chinese mine safety signs. The results showed that some user factors were significant predictors of guessing performance, while some were not. As expected, guessability scores varied significantly with the cognitive sign features of familiarity, concreteness, simplicity, meaningfulness and semantic closeness. The findings emphasize the need to create awareness of the importance of mine safety and promote understanding of mine safety sign meanings amongst people in their work environments. To design more user-friendly mine safety signs, industrial designers should develop and evaluate signs with consideration of the significant user factors and the 5 sign features tested here.

The effects of user factors and symbol referents on public symbol design using the stereotype production method.

This study investigated the influence of user factors and symbol referents on public symbol design among older people, using the stereotype production method for collecting user ideas during the symbol design process. Thirty-one older adults were asked to draw images based on 28 public symbol referents and to indicate their familiarity with and ease with which they visualised each referent. Differences were found between the pictorial solutions generated by males and females. However, symbol design was not influenced by participants' education level, vividness of visual imagery, object imagery preference or spatial imagery preference. Both familiar and unfamiliar referents were illustrated pictorially without much difficulty by users. The more visual the referent, the less difficulty the users had in illustrating it. The findings of this study should aid the optimisation of the stereotype production method for user-involved symbol design.

Investigation of the effectiveness of traffic sign training in terms of training methods and sign characteristics.

OBJECTIVE: This research investigated whether different training methods had any effect on the effectiveness of traffic sign training and whether there were any relationships between traffic sign characteristics and effectiveness of the training. METHODS: Thirty-six participants were randomly assigned into 4 equal-sized groups (control, paired-associate learning, recall training, and recognition training) to study the learnability of Mainland China traffic signs. In paired-associate learning, participants studied each traffic sign along with a referent describing its meaning. In addition to being informed of the meaning of traffic signs, both recall training and recognition training provided participants with questions and feedback. For recall training, the questioning process was a recall task in which participants had to produce a meaning for a given traffic sign from memory. For recognition training, the questioning process was a recognition task that required participants to identify the most appropriate referent corresponding to a given sign. No traffic sign training was given to the control group. RESULTS: Each training method significantly improved comprehension of the meaning of traffic signs. Participants from recall training performed better in a posttraining test than those from paired-associate learning and recognition training, indicating that the recall training elicited a deeper level of learning. In addition, questioning and feedback had a positive influence on training effectiveness. Performance in the posttest was found to be better when the questioning process matched the test process. Regarding the traffic sign characteristics, semantic closeness had a long-lasting effect, in terms of the timescale of this experiment on traffic sign comprehension, and traffic signs were perceived as more meaningful after their intended meanings were studied. CONCLUSIONS: Recall training is more effective in enhancing comprehension of traffic signs than paired-associate learning and recognition training. The findings of this study provide a basis for useful recommendations for designing symbol-training programs to improve road safety for road users.

Effects of sign characteristics and training methods on safety sign training effectiveness.

This study investigated whether or not training methods affected the effectiveness of symbol training and if there were any relationships between sign symbol characteristics and training effectiveness. Altogether, 26 Mainland China industrial safety signs were used and 60 participants were randomly assigned into four equal-sized groups of control, paired-associate learning, recall training and recognition training. The result was that participants from all the training groups showed significantly greater improvement in comprehension performance than those in the control group, indicating that the training methods improved comprehension of the meaning of safety signs. Participants from the recall training group performed better in the post-training test than those from other training groups. It seems that the recall task elicited a deeper level of learning than the recognition task and that questioning and feedback had a positive effect on training effectiveness. The results also showed that sign characteristics had no significant influence on training effectiveness. It was concluded that recall training is more effective in enhancing comprehension of industrial safety signs than paired-associate learning or recognition training. The findings of this study provide a basis for useful guidelines for designing symbol-training programmes and for designing more user-friendly safety signs. STATEMENT OF RELEVANCE: The present study shows that recall training was more effective in improving comprehension of industrial safety signs than paired-associate learning or recognition training and cognitive sign features did not influence training effectiveness. They provide a basis for useful guidelines for designing symbol-training programmes and for designing more user-friendly safety signs.

The effects of driver factors and sign design features on the comprehensibility of traffic signs.

PROBLEM: This paper addresses the effects of driver factors and sign design features on the comprehensibility of traffic signs. METHODS: A survey was designed to capture subjects' personal particulars, ratings on sign features, and comprehension scores, and then administered to 109 Hong Kong full driving license holders. RESULTS: Years with driving license and education level were significant predictors of sign comprehensibility. Contrary to expectation, the driver factors of age group, years of active driving, hours of driving, last time driving, driving frequency, and non-local driving experience had no effect on comprehension performance. Sign familiarity was correlated with comprehension score for licensed drivers, whereas sign concreteness, simplicity, and meaningfulness were not. IMPACT ON INDUSTRY: The results of this study provide useful guidelines for designing more user-friendly traffic signs in the future. It identified particular driver groups who lacked good understanding of traffic signs, and this information may assist the relevant organizations to better allocate traffic training resources, and better target future studies of traffic sign comprehension.

Lateral foot-movement times in sitting and standing postures.

This study examined the effects of foot-side, sex, movement amplitude, and target width on lateral and nonvisually controlled foot-movement time with a reciprocal foot-tapping task in sitting and standing postures. 9 male and 9 female right-foot dominant undergraduates (ages 20 to 25 years) with no reported physical and health problems with their lower limbs voluntarily participated. Analysis indicated foot-movement time in a standing posture was much faster than that in a sitting posture. Target width and movement amplitude had significant effects on foot-movement time, while the effects of foot-side and sex were not significant. Multiple regression models with inclusion of the significant factors were examined which should be useful in predicting foot-movement time required for different tasks in sitting and standing postures. Possible applications of the results may be made to the design of work and foot controls in terms of the related task factors for person-machine interfaces with two or more pedals.

The guessability of traffic signs: effects of prospective-user factors and sign design features.

This experiment investigated the relationships between the characteristics of prospective-users of traffic signs (people who will use the signs in the future) and the guessability of traffic signs, and also examined the effects of sign design features on the guessability of traffic signs. Forty-one Hong Kong Chinese subjects guessed the meanings and rated the sign features of 120 Mainland Chinese signs. Contrary to expectation, cycling experience and previous experience with sign information had no effect on sign guessing. Males and females with similar education level had similar guessing performance. Previous experience of visiting Mainland China was a significant predictor of guessing performance. Family ownership of a vehicle was associated with guessing performance for subjects who intended to become a driver and for those with car game experience. Subjects who claimed to pay attention to traffic signs in daily life performed better at sign guessing than those who did not. Traffic incident experience did not seem to enhance awareness of, or knowledge about, traffic signs. Guessability of a sign varied with the five design features of; familiarity, concreteness, simplicity, meaningfulness, and semantic closeness of the sign. Semantic closeness was the best predictor of guessability score, followed by familiarity, meaningfulness, concreteness, and simplicity. In order to design more user-friendly traffic signs and effective ways of using them, it is suggested that designers develop and evaluate signs according to the relative importance of the five sign features.