Effects of sign design features and training on comprehension of traffic signs in Taiwanese and Vietnamese user groups

Abstract This study examined the effects of sign design features and training on the comprehension of four types of Taiwanese traffic signs in Taiwanese and Vietnamese users. Thirty Taiwanese and thirty Vietnamese, each group gender-balanced, participated in this experiment, which involved 5 design features (familiarity, concreteness, simplicity, meaningfulness, and semantic closeness), 4 types of traffic signs (warning, prohibition, auxiliary, and indicatory), and 3 training conditions (before training, immediately following training, and one month after training). A total of sixty-five traffic signs were selected as the stimuli and each was presented on a 10 cm × 10 cm white cardboard in random order. Within each training condition participants were instructed to (1) verbally describe their comprehension of the meaning of the signs, which was then evaluated by the experimenter from 0 to 1, and (2) provide subjective ratings for each of the five design features, on a scale ranging from 0 to 100. The results reveal the training effect to be positive in both user groups. For Taiwanese, the average comprehension was 0.63 before training and it increased to 0.98 immediately after training. For Vietnamese, the average comprehension was 0.41 before training and it increased to 0.89 immediately after training. Even one month after the training had taken place, the comprehension scores of both groups were still higher than groups that did not receive training (Taiwanese group: 0.83; Vietnamese group: 0.66). For the two groups, the design features of concreteness and meaningfulness were highly correlated (Taiwanese group: r  = 0.97; Vietnamese group: r  = 0.95), and the feature of semantic closeness had the greatest positive correlation with comprehension (Taiwanese group: r  = 0.88; Vietnamese group: r  = 0.80). In addition, a drop correlated to comprehension was found to be significant (Taiwanese group: r  = −0.92; Vietnamese group: r  = −0.89), and semantic closeness was the most negatively correlated feature (Taiwanese group: r  = −0.82; Vietnamese group: r  = −0.60), meaning that, the closer the semantic meaning is to the sign design, the higher the comprehension and the less decline in sign comprehension. Relevance to industry Globalization means that a country must cater to a population with a diversity of cultural backgrounds. Designing signs that effectively convey safety information to all the different groups of users has thus become an important issue. This research attempts to investigate the relationship between sign design feature and training on traffic sign comprehension in Taiwanese and Vietnamese users. The results of this study can provide insight into designing public signs and can be extended to various instructional pictures provided with consumer products designed for world-wide use.