In response to the international research trend in medication labels, which has shifted from the optimization of isolated visual elements toward evidence-based and standardized approaches to content, presentation, and information architecture, the work aims to explore age-friendly design strategies for pharmacy-generated medication labels. A mixed-method research approach is adopted to analyze 36 outpatient medication labels in Guangzhou, alongside interviews with elderly users and pharmacists. Readability tests involving three font types and three font sizes are conducted on 60 community-dwelling older adults (aged 60 to 81 years, who are capable of independent medical consultation and medication self-management, excluding individuals with severe visual impairment or diagnosed cognitive disorders). Internationally used United States Pharmacopeia pictograms are selected for comprehension test and subsequent optimization. Formative evaluations are then conducted on the optimized medication label and three types of medication instruction sheets. The font experiment indicates that Heiti performs better than the other fonts in reading time, accuracy, and visual comfort, with 16-point Heiti showing the best overall performance. This indicates that readability depends not only on enlarged font size, but also on character contour, stroke clarity, and the efficiency of key word recognition. The pictogram test shows that internationally used pharmaceutical pictograms are not inherently cross-culturally universal among elder Chinese users. Of the 17 pictograms tested, only four are adequately understood. Misinterpretations mainly stem from differences in daily life symbols, ambiguous action features, and unclear representation of temporal relationships. The semantic matching of the optimized pictograms related to medication timing improves markedly. The evaluation of medication instruction sheets for multiple medications shows that the time-sequence-oriented architecture is selected by 70% of users, suggesting that elder users prefer medication information to be reorganized into an executable sequence integrating drug name, dosage, timing, and precautions. Age-friendly medication label design should be developed across three levels: textual display, pictorial semantics, and executable information structure, thereby forming an evidence-based system integrating "content, format, and structure". The findings of this work are primarily applicable to community-dwelling older adults with basic capacity for independent medical consultation and medication management.
Key words
older adults /
medication labels /
font readability /
pictogram comprehension /
design research
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