Need for Safety Cards: The NTSB-AAS-74-3 “Special Study” of an emergency evacuation showed that passengers who did not read the safety card suffered 3 times the number of injuries as passengers who did read the card. In another accident report (NTSB-AAS-74-15) all survivors acknowledged that they had read the safety card. In a rapid decompression of a B747 in 1989 the noise was reportedly so loud that the only way the crew could communicate was to hold up the safety card. Survivors of accidents have reported seeing other passengers and even their own spouses frozen and unable to move from their seats. By providing training and/or leadership in stressful conditions such ‘Freezing’ or ‘Behavioral Inaction’ has been greatly reduced in test conditions (Pronko & Leith, 1956). Safety Cards provide information and training that the passenger does not get from other sources. Because passengers may review safety cards at any time during a flight, for as long as they like, and even during an emergency, they provide a unique and vital training tool. Clearly, safety cards can and have helped limit and prevent injuries in aviation emergencies. 

Effective Styles of Instruction: As a matter of common sense, for both literacy and language factors, the form of the instructions should be primarily pictorial. There is little question among researchers that individual objects that are depicted are remembered better than words. Numerous studies have demonstrated this. Most of which are concerning how children learn, but at least one, which tested adults (Paivio & Csapo, 1969), demonstrated that memory of line drawings of objects was better than corresponding verbal labels. In addition, colored pictures are remembered better than B&W pictures. This has also been demonstrated using adult subjects (Farley & Grant, 1976; Borges, Stepnowsky, & Holt, 1977).

Purely pictorial cards may be gaining in popularity as a way to overcome literacy and language barriers, and to eliminate the need for purchasing translations, but they may not be the best way to instruct. Text exists today because it is a useful tool. It expedites learning, it relays conceptual messages more clearly, and in many instances takes up less space than pictures. Studies conducted on the learning of concepts, symbology, and memory of sentences or strings of pictures back up the inclusion of text in instructions. For instance, pictures in series presented rapidly (perhaps as one might quickly review a safety card) are recalled in series with less accuracy than text (Paivio & Csapo 1969, 1971). In 1961 Runquist and Hutt, while studying concept recognition, found that text relayed the information more quickly than pictures.

At least one study specifically concerned with safety cards, “Passenger Emergency Evacuation Briefing Cards: Recommendations For Presentation Style” (The Douglas Aircraft Company), established that people preferred instructions with both pictures and a minimum of text. This preference was over instructions with just pictures. We believe that this preference is because text adds confirmation that the viewer has understood the pictures properly. If we can assume that confirmation of one’s knowledge leads to heightened confidence then we can expect greater performance from instructions with both pictures and text.

Though we have striven to make the most understandable picture instructions available, we prefer to include text on safety cards where the conceptual or symbolic nature of the instructions dictates. Ultimately, we let our clientele, who know the makeup of their passengers better than we do, determine how much text and which languages, if any, they wish to have on their cards.

Testing Safety Cards: Recommendations have been made by the NTSB and others to test safety cards for their effectiveness. There are basically two types of tests that can be used to evaluate safety card: Behavioral and Conceptual. A behavioral test can be done in an aircraft or a simulated environment and involves evaluating actual passenger response. A control group can be established which guides you as to what should be stressed in the instructions or what should be depicted at all. Also, the control group gives you a baseline from which you may evaluate how the use of the safety card improved performance. Behavioral is the preferred test method because the passengers’ physical actions establish any lack of comprehension or flaws in the instructions. With a behavioral test, the results you get are the results you can expect from your passengers. One obvious drawback to this type of test is the cost involved in creating a test environment or making an aircraft available to do so. Also, test subjects must commit more time to a behavioral test than a conceptual test and, when physical performance is required, there are liability issues to consider.

Conceptual testing, or comprehension testing as it is sometimes called, is another matter. In a typical conceptual test the safety card, or in some cases the individual drawings, are shown to people selected at random in shopping malls or on the street. They are then asked to respond verbally to the instructions.

Limitations of Conceptual Testing: There are obvious, and some not so obvious, drawbacks to conceptual testing of safety cards. Verbal communication skills of the test subjects are necessary, which limits the focus group to those who speak and understand the language of the interviewer. More importantly, you are relying on the subject being able to put the required function into words when what you are seeking is whether they can produce the appropriate action.

You cannot establish a control group in a conceptual test unless you have use of the aircraft. Lacking a control group, you get no feedback on whether you have depicted and emphasized the functions that would result in successful completion of the task. What you are actually testing is the subject’s response to the art. This will not tell you whether you have chosen to depict the most important aspects necessary to complete the task, or if what you have depicted is correct. It cannot even tell you whether the subject would recognize the equipment. As recognition is an integral part of comprehension, we do not consider this type of conceptual test a comprehension test.

Obviously, there are severe limitations to conceptual testing of safety cards, and the results you get may be very different from the results you might get from your passengers. A test subject who demonstrated comprehension of the art may not be able to recognize the actual equipment if the drawings do not look like the equipment, are a different color, if important features are left off, or if the drawings are depicted from a point of view other than how the passenger would see them from on the aircraft. If you remove what may be a distracting and seemingly unnecessary elements of the aircraft interior or emphasize others to achieve a higher conceptual test score you can’t know if you have helped or hindered performance.

Because the feedback from such a test is of such limited value, it is not clear whether a safety card which has been revised due to the dictates of a conceptual test will improve passenger performance. For this reason, we rely on our many years of experience in designing safety cards, our knowledge of passenger behavior, aesthetics, and a good deal of common sense before we depend solely on conceptual test results when designing these cards.

Value of Conceptual Testing: There is currently no requirement to test safety cards. We have, however, conducted standard conceptual testing on our artwork as described above with consistently excellent results. Our competitors, with only one exception that we are aware of, do not test their cards, and no safety card company that we are aware of performs behavioral testing of their work. One reason for this may be that graphic artists are not typically trained to conduct interview testing of instructions. Few are trained in how to illustrate for instructional applications. Our testing experience has provided us with insight as to how people generally ‘read’ instructions. This insight allows us to make better judgments when designing safety cards. By our review of test results we have developed an understanding of what gets attention and what distracts, what types or sizes of drawings might get overlooked, how few drawings we might use and still convey the message based on the complexity of the equipment and functions being depicted. It is clear that without such background we could not produce instructions which are as effective.

Evaluation in Practice: One way of evaluating both the effectiveness of a safety card and those that provide them, not mentioned above, is whether an airline continues to purchase cards from a supplier over time. Significantly, our cards are used worldwide every day and, regardless of events that occur, our customers overwhelmingly continue to use our cards. Since our company began in 1985 we have maintained an extraordinary client retention factor of over 90%. This may be the clearest determining factor of the effectiveness of safety cards. It is certainly one very good reason to give Aero Safety Graphics Incorporated a call.

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