About

Brian J. Zikmund-Fisher, PhD

Iconarray.com is a project of Brian J. Zikmund-Fisher, PhD, a decision psychologist and public health communications researcher who holds appointments as Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education, Research Associate Professor of Internal Medicine, and Associate Director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine (CBSSM) at the University of Michigan. He is also the Editor-in-Chief (2021-2025) of the journals Medical Decision Making and MDM Policy & Practice.

Dr. Zikmund-Fisher uses his interdisciplinary background in decision psychology and behavioral economics to design and evaluate methods of making health data more intuitively meaningful, to study the impact of people's consistent preferences for more versus less health care on over- and underutilization of care, and to explore the power of narratives in health communications.

Holly O. Witteman, PhD

Design of earlier iterations of Iconarray.com were also guided by Holly O. Witteman, PhD. Dr. Witteman is a human factors engineer who completed a postdoctoral fellowship at CBSSM at the University of Michigan, 2009-2011 and worked closely with Dr. Zikmund-Fisher on the design and development of Iconarray.com. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Emergency Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada.

Dr. Witteman brings interdisciplinary training in mathematics, human factors engineering and social sciences to the study of technologies for risk communication and values clarification. She advocates reality-based design, which means designing for the way people are, not the way we wish they were. Her research addresses how people use online applications when making health decisions, how technologies can make risk numbers more meaningful for people, how tools might be designed and used to help clinicians and patients better understand and talk about risks and values, and how to better design these tools in ways that improve the user experience.

The following people provided substantial input into the design of various iterations of iconarray.com or the earlier CBSSM pictograph generator:

  • Christopher Marr, BS
  • Jeffrey Rosczyk, BS, BFA
  • Ian Moore, BFA
  • Mark Dickson, MA
  • Nicole L. Exe, MPH
  • Valerie Kahn, MPH
  • James Rampton, MPH/MSI
  • Bob Burbach, BA
  • Jon Kulpa, BA/BS
icon array

Why Use Icon Arrays

Icon arrays are a type of risk display that uses a matrix of icons (usually 100 or 1000 icons) to represent an at-risk population, simultaneously displaying both the number of expected events and the number of expected non-events. As a result, icon arrays have several advantages over simple numerical displays and other types of visual displays.

  1. Icon arrays can be read simply by counting icons. This enables icon arrays to be more precisely read than bar or pie charts. Research suggests that counting icons is particularly common among more numerate readers.
  2. Icon arrays show the part-whole relationship clearly in both relative count and relative area, thus embodying one of the advantages of pie charts and providing a significant advantage over bar charts and numerical representations.
  3. Icon arrays are inherently a frequency-based representation of risk. Research has shown that many people, especially the less numerate, respond differently to frequency representations of risk than they do to percentages.
  4. The icon arrays generated by Iconarray.com are set by default to build the icons representing risk events from the bottom upwards by rows. As a result, these icon arrays have a rough height cue as well (displays of larger risks have colored icons rising higher than displays of lower risks), thus mirroring bar graphs in format as well. However, advanced users can use the Global Settings to adjust the fill patterns.

While we prefer the term "icon array" to describe this type of graphic, we are aware that similar displays have been referred to by numerous other titles, such as icon array, pictograph, pictogram, people chart, cates plot, and personograph.

We are not alone in recommending icon arrays.

Sponsorship

The development and hosting of Iconarray.com has been sponsored by the the UM Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine (CBSSM).

The current version of Iconarray.com was created by Christopher Marr and Jeffrey Rosczyk of the UM Center for Health Communication Research (CHCR).

Disclaimer

The Iconarray.com site is a demonstration project and is provided “as-is” with no guarantees of service. While we have attempted to test a variety of parameters, it is likely that certain combinations will result in non-optimal graphics and/or failures.