title: Creating a better picture of chronic pain: improving pain pictogram designs through systematic evaluation of user responses.
abstract: This article discusses the challenges of visually representing pain qualities in pictogram design. An existing set of 12 pictograms designed for people with literacy problems was evaluated to understand more about misunderstandings of pictogram interpretation. Two sets of university students from different disciplines were asked to interpret the pictograms, and a novel classification system was developed to categorise answer types, as 'location', 'affective', temporal' or 'literal'. Several design recommendations are made as a result that will help improve the design of pain pictograms as a whole as well as guide designers of related pictogram work. We demonstrate how, through the robust classification of incorrect responses, it is possible to extract useful comprehension error patterns to inform future design.
authors.affiliation: School of Design, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Stones
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Sciences & the Hull York Medical School, University of York, York, UK.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Knapp
authors.affiliation: School of Healthcare, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.
authors.forename: S Jose
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Closs
keywords: Pain; graphic design; pain assessment; pain quality; pictograms; user testing