Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether animation can help to improve the comprehension of universal healthcare symbols for middle-aged and older adults.
Background: The Hablamos Juntos (HJ) healthcare symbol system is a set of widely used universal healthcare symbols that were developed in the United States. Some studies indicated that HJ healthcare symbols are not well-understood by users in non-English-speaking areas. Other studies found that animations can improve users' comprehension of complex symbols. Thus, we wanted to test whether animation could help to improve users' comprehension of HJ symbols.
Methods: The participants included 40 middle-aged and 40 older adults in Taiwan. We redesigned the 12 HJ symbols into three visual formats-static, basic animation, and detailed animation-and compared them to find which best improved the participants' guessability scores.
Results: (1) Middle-aged adults' comprehension of static and basic animated symbols was significantly better than that of older adults, but there was no significant difference in the guessability scores between the two age groups in terms of detailed animated symbols; (2) In general, both basic animation and detailed animation significantly improved the guessability score, but the effect with detailed animation was significantly greater than that with basic animation; (3) Older women were more receptive to detailed animation and showed better guessing performance.
Conclusion: Detailed animation contains more details and provides a more complete explanation of the concept of the static symbols, helping to improve the comprehension of HJ symbols for middle-aged and older adult users.
Application: Our findings provide a reference for the possibility of new style symbol design in the digital and aging era, which can be applied to improve symbol comprehension.
Keywords: Animated symbols; comprehension; guessability; universal healthcare symbols.