The plan is set. Three banal stories, two visual languages, two groups. But before building the test, I have to be precise about what I am actually asking. A questionnaire can only answer the questions that are put into it, so this post is about the questions themselves.
The main question of the semester is what each visual language does to the same message. That is too big to ask directly, so I broke it into three core questions.
The first is understanding. Did the message arrive? If someone looks at the images and cannot say what the story was, nothing else matters. This is the baseline of all communication design.
The second is feeling. Images carry mood before they carry information. The same simple action can feel warm, cold, funny, or official depending on how it is shown. I want to know what atmosphere each style creates, and whether the drawn version and the photorealistic version of the same story produce different feelings.
The third is trust. Which version feels more credible, more like something you would actually follow? This question has become especially interesting today, when photorealistic images can be generated without a camera ever being present. Does the photographic look still carry its old authority, or does a clear drawing feel more honest?
Around these three, I added four smaller lenses. Appeal: how much do people simply like what they see? Perceived effort: does the image feel easy or hard to read? Memorability: which version stays in the head after the form is closed? And one question that comes directly from my storyboarding semester: does the image make you want to see the next frame? A sequence only works if each image creates a pull toward the following one. Last semester I studied how sequences carry meaning. Now I can ask whether the visual language itself changes that pull.
One rule shapes how all of this will be asked. Since each group sees only one version, nobody can compare anything. So I can never ask which one is better. Every question must work on a single version standing alone: describe it, rate it, react to it. The comparison happens later, in my analysis, between the answers of the two groups. This is less comfortable than a side-by-side test, but cleaner. People judge the image in front of them instead of choosing a favorite.
Order matters too. The understanding question has to come first, as an open answer, before anything else. If I ask first how clear the instruction was, I have already told the participant that it was an instruction. A questionnaire can leak information through its own wording, so its sequence has to be designed as carefully as any other piece of communication.
Finally, the participants. The forms stay anonymous, but I will ask three things: age, whether the person has a design background, and which languages they speak. The last one matters most to me. My whole interest in wordless communication comes from living between languages. If people who move between several languages read these images differently from people who live in one, that is exactly the trace I want to follow in the next semester.
The next post will show the test itself: the three stories, and how the questionnaire is built so that seven questions do not turn into an exhausting form.
