Warning Label Design and Analysis
Product Safety Warnings and Instructions
Drs. Miller and Lehto of Miller Engineering have written four books on the topics of designing and evaluating labels, warnings, instructions, owner’s manuals, and other types of product information. These books provide a framework for the following projects:
- Designing on package, within package, and on-products labels, warnings and information
- Designing warnings and instructions
- Evaluating proposed product information
- Reviewing and modifying existing product information
- Developing programs for clients to evaluate warning effectiveness
In providing assistance in this area, the Miller Engineering staff draws upon the writings and collections of historical materials from Dr. Miller’s 30+ years of experience.
Part of our library, which consists of approximately 1,200 publications, is devoted to warnings and instructions alone. Four books on warnings have been written by our staff and associates. In addition to the 15+ years of forensic and research studies conducted by other senior staff at Miller Engineering, Dr. Miller’s experience has also resulted in an extensive historical library in the areas of human factors, ergonomics, product safety, occupational safety, machine guarding, government and consensus safety standards. Our library allows us to prepare both contemporary reports and state of the art analyses geared to a specific year a product was manufactured or sold. What does not exist in our library is researched and retrieved through our local and online access to the University of Michigan library system, as well as all of the customary Internet resources.
Our research and design activities have resulted in numerous publications on a great variety of engineering topics. An extensive list of publications related to warnings can be found here. Some samples of our warnings-related work products can be found here.
How to Design Warnings
A number of models and numerous publications have been developed by Dr. Miller and Dr. Lehto to describe an orderly and reasonably rigorous methodology for researching, designing and testing warnings and other product information. Several of these appear in the following.
The first is the Linear Sequence Determining Warnings Adequacy (left). It comes from our first Warnings Book: (Lehto, M.R. and Miller, J.M. (1986). Warnings: Volume 1: Fundamentals, Design and Evaluation Methodologies. Ann Arbor, MI: Fuller Technical Publishing).
A second model, which can be chosen, was developed and first presented at a Human Factors and Ergonomics meeting and is called the Product Information Development Model. (Miller, J.M., et. al. (1991). A Model for Developing and Evaluating Product Information. In Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 35th Annual Meeting (pp. 1063-1067). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors Society.)
Warnings Books
Mark Lehto and Jim Miller have coauthored four books on the topic of warnings, instructions, and labeling.
Their first book, Warnings: Volume 1: Fundamentals, Design and Evaluation Methodologies, may have been the first scholarly book totally devoted to the topic of warnings. A complimentary searchable form of this book is available here.
FOURTH EDITION AVAILABLE NOW:
Warnings and Safety Instructions: An Annotated Bibliography is in its fourth revision with 1,200 references.
Books are available through Fuller Technical Publishing, 734-662-6822; FAX 734-747-9712.