Using Taxonomies to Analyse Children's Drawings of Health Data Visualisations

Drawing is a fundamental communication tool in research involving children, offering familiarity and ease compared to writing. However, despite its use in co-design to convey ideas, children’s drawings are rarely the central focus of analysis. We aimed to gain a deeper understanding of drawings created by 10 - 11 year olds in co-design workshops that focused on developing smartwatch health data visualisations. To achieve this, we developed an initial analysis framework by combining and refining three existing taxonomies to ensure that we categorise a wide range of meaningful features efficiently. We show that this framework can systematically identify common themes and previously unnoticed elements of designs while also supporting the comparison of children’s drawings in broader literature using validated tools. Although this framework is currently focused on analysing data visualisations, it could be extended and used to analyse other types of children’s drawings.