Enhance Comprehension of Over-the-Counter Drug Instructions for the General Public and Medical Professionals through Visualization Design
2026-04-10 • Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Computer InteractionGraphics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how to make over-the-counter (OTC) drug instructions easier to understand by creating two different visual designs tailored for regular people and medical professionals. They tested these new designs and found that people could use them faster and found them easier than regular text instructions. They also made a system to categorize different types of OTC instructions and got positive feedback from experts. The authors shared a step-by-step method for designing such visual instructions that could help improve other similar drug guides.
over-the-counter drugsdrug instructionsvisualization designusability studyhealth communicationtaxonomyiterative designresponse timemedical professionalsuser study
Authors
Mengjie Fan, Katrin Angerbauer, Yinchu Cheng, Yingying Yan, Xiaohan Xu, Tianfu Wang, Michael Sedlmair, Yu Yang, Liang Zhou
Abstract
Drug instructions are crucial for guiding the rational use of medication. We conduct a visualization design study to enhance the comprehension of over-the-counter (OTC) drug instructions, targeting both the general public and medical professionals. We devise two tailored drug instruction designs for different audience groups through an iterative design process. A controlled user study reveals that our design outperforms traditional text-based instructions in terms of response time and usability, and the availability of two versions is also found to be beneficial. This study also motivates a taxonomy based on a systematic classification of OTC drug instructions sampled from an official drug database, which received positive expert feedback. Finally, this study summarizes a workflow for a visualization design strategy based on our design exploration and user study feedback, which can be generalized to other OTC drug instructions.