Comprehension and appropriateness of complex mobile pictographs for crisis communication.

In crisis situations, illiterates and people with other linguistic challenges are unable to understand text messages to inform or be informed of a situation. Pictographic interfaces have been proposed as a solution for empowering these marginalized and vulnerable populations, including elderly, people with disabilities, and foreigners. In this paper, we follow up on previous work and investigate the comprehensibility and appropriateness of prototypical complex alerting and reporting pictographs. We present results of a field study with illiterate people in Sri Lanka and the Philippines. We show that complex representations can very well be understood with respect to incident and severity, especially if context objects are shown. Additionally, we identify several aspects where further research is needed. We discuss the findings and propose further steps toward designing pictograph-based communication, especially on mobile devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]