Decision-making succeeds when the decision produces a desirable outcome and fails when it produces an undesirable outcome. Decision-making can fail when a person does not perceive, ignores, cannot understand, or gives improper weight to a piece of relevant information.
Often, human factors interventions are directed at enhancing situation awareness and supporting accurate mental models, whereby to equip people to integrate incoming information to make good decisions. Decision-making can also fail when the interface between the world and the person interferes with information acquisition. Functionally, it does not even matter whether the missing or misleading information is deliberately compromised or inadvertently not conveyed. In the context of marketing, as well as warning and informational signs, information that is semantically blurry or obscure can interfere as much as information that is literally blurry or obscured.
Credibility is a particularly essential prerequisite for warning information even more than for marketing claims. Improving information interfaces including warnings and informational signs will probably always be a work in progress. Tiny, all upper-case font silkscreened onto a bouncing inflatable amusement device and blocked by Billy’s mommy and her giant tote bag may not be accessible information to a patron regardless of the thoroughness and precision of the warnings. Posted description of a ride as “dynamic” and a caution to those with “recent surgery” may not provide enough information for a patron to make appropriate decisions. As a 2008 Master’s thesis study by Greg Sarkisian showed, while being able to recite most amusement ride warnings from memory, patrons believed them to be simply the handiwork of lawyers and not really of personal relevance. In support of that perception, they correctly noted that many warnings are the same on every attraction, and are seemingly posted even when not applicable to the specific attraction. Ultimately, the ideal warning and instructional information may be not what is on the sign, but the apparent properties of the thing itself. “Your mind sees more / Than what your eyes see.” (Figment, 2002).
