Designing Smartphone Displays with a Focus on the Line Thickness of Figures and Pictograms

─ A Survey, and Validation, of Legibility and Intelligibility ─

Abstract

　The Cooperative museum evolution (Co-muse) navigation system mainly uses characters to provide bilingual exhibition commentary via smartphones. The first goal of this series of experiments was to clarify the objects used in the pictograms. The second goal was to produce higher quality (improved legibility and intelligibility) smartphone pictograms by optimizing line thickness. The third goal was to demonstrate its effectiveness: 84.8% of the users thought the pictogram characters were both easy to understand and easy to see. The fourth goal was to add pictograms and characters together, and to verify which were easier to understand: it was found that pictograms were generally well appreciated. Furthermore, by additional experiments and using the system continuously, the evaluation of the pictogram system was improved. It is expected that this will result in users more rapidly gaining familiarity. More experiments are planned to further verify the utility of the system.