Literature Review
This literature review is a reflective collation of findings from academic papers that report on empirical research concerning infographics and their readers. Research is taken from a range of disciplines including journalism and risk communication (since there is little research in public health infographics). The review focuses on 5 key areas: attention, comprehension, recall, adherence (behavioural change) and appeal.
The work is presented here firstly as a traditional literature review to download.
Infographics Literature Review.doc
Below are also some of the sections broken up into more digestible chunks which are hopefully easier to understand and to share than traditional academic papers. By sharing the evidence base we can a) push forward with more research to fill the gaps and b) improve the way we design.
Part 1/5: Gaining Attention – is there evidence that people really do look at infographics and look ‘into’ them?
Download this as a high quality PDF.
Methodologies – who are we testing?
The following infographic shows how, while testing on the public does occur with large samples, most studies are still small-scale and are carried out on students. This is something that we need to address as academics if we really want to understand more about health infographic comprehension, recall, attention and appeal. It also shows how particular issues such as embellishment (non-data ink) require much more research. Whilst not an exhaustive sample, the methods within the 31 academic papers give us food for thought – how can we be sure our results are repeatable? How are we accounting for diverse cultures and diverse audiences in our samples? What type of infographics are we testing?
Help us to expand this infographic – can you make further recommendations about really influential and useful empirical findings?
(download the PDF (lit-vis.pdf) for the high quality, printable version)
Visualising health: Infographics in Public Health 
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