Validated Animated Pictograms for the Advanced Design of a Disaster Assistance Application

Abstract

In recent years, there is an increment in the development of applications that have the purpose of supporting people in diverse situations. Our research focus is on the development of an application that will contribute to an effective community self-relief in case of disaster. In this specific area, software developers should propose easy to use and easy to understand interfaces. For that reason, we propose the design of a front-end application that uses animated and non-animated pictograms as graphical communication for an understandable interface. The animation of the pictograms was possible by the addition of simple animation patterns. In this study, we included the examination of the understanding effect of each pictogram by subjects with different cultural backgrounds. Additionally, we performed a comparison between the animated and non-animated pictograms. With this examination, we intend to identify a possible increment or change in each pictograms' degree of understanding. After the validation process, it is possible to determine the viability of using these pictograms in our user-front application.