From Risk Visualization to Human-Centred Interfaces: A Scoping Review of Digital Technologies for Risk Communication

Abstract

Digital risk communication increasingly relies on interactive technologies to transform complex, uncertain, and probabilistic information into forms that can support human understanding and decision-making. Yet the literature is fragmented across application domains, technologies, and interaction paradigms. This scoping review maps how digital and interactive technologies are used to communicate, represent, visualize, or enable users to experience risk, with particular attention to the relationships among risk type, representation, interface, interaction, target users, and outcomes. Eligible sources described a human-facing digital or interactive risk communication solution, and study characteristics were charted using an eight-dimension taxonomy. Searches of Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection, and PubMed identified 457 records. After removing 119 duplicates, 338 unique records were screened; 258 were retained for eligibility assessment. The final synthesis included 199 studies after the removal of one retracted source, with 57 records excluded during eligibility adjudication and one report not retrieved. Data visualization was the most frequent interface family (n = 122), followed by VR/AR/XR and web/mobile interfaces (both n = 46). Healthcare/public health (n = 87) and natural hazards/disaster (n = 67) dominated the corpus, while interactive exploration was the most common interaction mode (n = 82). The synthesis shows that technology alone does not explain digital risk communication: effectiveness depends on how risk is represented, how users interact with the interface, who the users are, and which outcomes are targeted. A human-centred framework—Risk → Representation → Interface → Interaction → User → Outcome—is proposed to support the analysis, design, and iterative evaluation of future risk communication interfaces.