Enhance comprehension of over-the-counter drug instructions for the general public and medical professionals through visualization design

2026-04-01

Computers & Graphics

AI Summary

Traditional over-the-counter drug labels are text-heavy and poorly readable, hindering appropriate medication use. This study addresses this issue by proposing differentiated visual design strategies tailored to two distinct user groups—laypersons and healthcare professionals. A structured drug label taxonomy was developed, and a user-centered iterative design process was employed to create dual-version visual medication guides. Through controlled user experiments, expert evaluations, and systematic categorization, the new designs demonstrated significantly improved response times and usability compared to conventional textual labels. The dual-version approach received strong user endorsement, and the proposed classification framework garnered positive feedback from domain experts, collectively establishing a scalable and generalizable workflow for visual drug label design.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: User Experience and Usability
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Machine Learning: Multi-class/Multi-label Learning & Extreme Classification

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Humans versus LLMs for data annotation and labeling
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

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.

Problem

• over-the-counter drugs
• drug instructions
• comprehension
• visualization design
• health communication

Innovation

• visualization design
• OTC drug instructions
• user-centered design
• information taxonomy
• usability evaluation