INFORMATION DESIGN: DEFINING BY DOING
Information designers and experts in content complement each other in a lengthy process of analysis designed to ensure the optimum way to create effective information material. User experience is also considered crucial to define the visual results of graphic information.
Most people I meet have little or no idea what
information design is, or how it differs from graphic design. The
result is often confusion - ironically, something that information
designers try to eradicate. So I m going to try to eradicate at least
some of the confusion by explaining what information design is, and how
it differs from graphic design.
My colleagues and I at the
Communication Research Institute do a great deal of information design,
but in an unusual context. We are a not-for-profit research group whose
primary goal is to take existing design practices, review them
critically and conduct research to find ways to improve them for the
common good. Thus as we design, we also experiment, research, and
reflect on the effectiveness of what we do and its social purpose.
Our
"laboratories" for this work are the many organizations that become CRI
Members to support our work and gain the benefits from it. With over
250 members over the last 20 years, we have had a lot of "laboratories"
to experiment in, and we have made some fascinating discoveries, some
of which have led to improvements in practice. We are now at the point
where we think the professional practices we and others have developed
are sufficiently stable and mature to be shared widely with our fellow
designers. Normally, it would take some time (possibly 20 to 30 years)
for these new professional practices to find their way into design
teaching, and from there into design practice. But I am impatient. I
would like many people to be doing this type of work NOW. The need for
it is overwhelming, and the demand is not far behind.
What we design and why
Most
of the things information designers design are part of ordinary life:
forms, bills, contracts, labels, instructions, waygiving systems, web
sites, text books, etc. We design them so that they can be easily used.
Our work is often at its best when it is "invisible" -
people use the information we create to perform ordinary tasks easily,
without even realising that the information they are using has been
"designed". Our job is not to stamp our identity on our designs; on the
contrary, it is to lend a quiet dignity to the tasks of ordinary life
without in any way coming between people and these tasks.
We
think of our work as a public service, rather than as an opportunity to
express our creativity; though we are not averse to being creative when
it is appropriate.
Taken together - the things we design,
and our motivation for doing so - mark us apart from many, though not
all, graphic designers. But the differences do not stop there.
How we work in the studio
Graphic
design is almost wholly a studio-based practice which mainly focuses on
the graphic aspects of documents, leaving the text to other
professionals. Indeed, many graphic designers are trained with dummy
text to enable them to focus on the "look" of the text without dealing
with its content.
In contrast, information design is only
partly a studio-based practice, and what we do in the studio is
different. In our studio we design layouts, much as graphic designers
do, but we also structure the content and write the text. Sometimes
this is done as a team, with a writer and designer working together,
but more often than not the person doing the designing is also doing
the writing.
The reason for this integration of writing
and graphic design is because we have found through research that this
is the best way to create documents that are easily usable. Moreover,
readers try and make sense of documents as a whole and don t separate
text and graphics in their reading. We take responsibility for crafting
the total reading experience.
Thus in the "studio" an
information designer uses skills in graphics, in writing, and in
transforming the esoteric into the publicly accessible.
Studio
work accounts for only about 10-15% of the time we spend on a project.
What the research has taught us is that to have a successful outcome,
we need to embed the studio work in a much more elaborate process.
The information design process
Early
in our research into information design practices we found that design
projects (both our own and others) for which we could collect data were
unsuccessful either in part or whole. There were four main reasons for
the lack of success. I will take you through each of these and the
methods we introduced to make our work more successful.
1. UNUSABLE DESIGNS
Our
studio-based designs were never as usable as we thought they would be.
No matter how much effort, sensitivity, skill, and creative energy we
put into our designs, we found that people had problems using them,
often problems that we could not have foreseen from within the studio.
Repeatedly we found that getting a design right first time was highly
unlikely.
So we developed our own methods for
diagnostically testing designs to identify the problems, fixing them,
and then retesting them to make sure that the faults were no longer
there. Our methods were, in a sense, clinical - much in the way that a
doctor looks for symptoms, applies a treatment, then looks to see
whether or not the symptoms have gone. We were very tempted to get
other professionals more skilled in testing to undertake this work for
us. But after many trials we discovered that the best people to do this
work - most cost effectively, and achieving the best results - were the
information designers responsible for creating the designs. This meant
that we had to expand our skills and undertake a proportion of our work
outside the studio.
We began experimenting with this
iterative process of designing, testing, and refining in the mid 1980s.
At first it was slow, expensive, and cumbersome because we were
dependent on phototypesetting and offset printing to create each new
version of a design for testing. But from 1985, with Apple Macs and
laser printers, we were able to massively speed up the process and
reduce the costs; what would take weeks with hundreds of dollars
printing costs per iteration took hours with negligible printing costs.
And now, with Internet-based designs for the Web, the costs of
iterative redesign and creation of new prototypes is even cheaper.
Because
testing is new to many designers, it is often greeted with scepticism
and many questions: is it hard to do, must I test lots of people to get
useful data, won't it inhibit my creativity? I will deal with each of
these briefly.
Is it hard? We have found that it is
possible for designers to learn the basics of testing in a simple
two-day intensive training program. As long as this is followed up by
supervised practical work, most designers can become proficient at this
type of work fairly easily.
How many people do you need to
test? The answer is none! You are not testing people, you are testing
designs to find design faults that you can correct by better design.
Thus, regarding participant numbers, we ask a different question: how
many people do I need to help me find all the faults in a design? The
answer is: the first 5 or 6 people you invite to use the design will
identify most of the faults. To err on the side of caution, we often
invite 10 people to participate in this type of testing, and we choose
people who we think may have some difficulty with the type of
information we are testing, so that we maximise our opportunities for
finding faults.
Does testing inhibit a designers
creativity? Far from it; indeed, the very reverse. The first time you
perform diagnostic testing is like an epiphany; for the first time you
get a glimpse of what it is like for someone else to use your design.
This is a profound moment of insight and revelation. Few look back.
Moreover, the interaction between other people and your design leads to
fresh insights and often to different and better ways of designing
information. In other words, testing leads to more, not less,
creativity and originality.
The lessons from testing are
many, but two stand out. First, we can now achieve a much higher
standard of design from a user s viewpoint than has ever been possible.
Moreover, we can support that claim with evidence. Second, through
testing we have developed a much clearer sense of how to formulate
information design briefs and demonstrate to clients that we have met
their brief, and that they have gained substantial benefit from our
work. This is worth elaborating.
Testing is highly
specific. To use an analogy from medicine, if you want to have your
blood tested, you have to be quite specific about the kind of test you
want: is it for cholesterol, liver function, blood sugar? The same is
true of diagnostic testing in information design. So we work jointly
with the client and other interested parties to draw up a list of
things we should test for. Most commonly in functional documents like
labels or bills, it is a list of tasks (performance criteria) that we
have agreed people should be able to perform with the document. The
testing then consists of asking people to perform these tasks, and
finding out whether or not they can perform them and how well or badly.
If people can perform these tasks well, we have done our job. If they
cannot, it s back to the studio for another iteration. In the end we
can demonstrate that we have met the brief.
2. IMPRACTICAL DESIGNS
Even
when we achieved successful designs for the people we cared about most,
the eventual users, we kept discovering practical constraints - usually
after we finished the work - that had major impacts on the
implementation of our designs. Even if we had been thoroughly briefed
by a client, we found that constraints originally considered
unimportant could be critical to the outcome. We started to itemise
these constraints, probing our laboratories to find out where they were
and how they might affect outcomes, and found patterns of constraints
across the various organizations. Today, we have a check list of some
twenty items that we routinely investigate in an organization before we
commence work in the studio. These investigations take place during the
Scoping of our process. Again, they take us out of the studio and use
about 15% of the total effort.
3. ECONOMICS
To
feed at the hand of capitalism you must demonstrate that you have added
value by providing a Return on Investments (a ROI). For many designers,
this is the Holy Grail of professional design practice in a capitalist
system.
At CRI, we did not specifically set out to
discover the Grail, we just wanted to help people through their daily
drudge; but we found it, and the discovery led to benchmarking.
Usually,
clients ask us to redesign an information document because they are
vaguely aware that it is not working. Some years ago, before starting
on any redesigns, we decided to find out how well or badly the
information worked; so as part of the Scoping stage, after we had
agreed on our performance criteria, we decided to test the existing
designs. The data from such testing was often quite dramatic: 100% of
forms filled out incorrectly, fewer than 50% of customers able to use
their phone bill to perform simple tasks, fewer than 50% of patients
able to follow the instructions for using a medicine bought from a
supermarket. Such poorly-performing information was the norm, but it
had never been measured before, and no one knew exactly how bad the
designs were or how costly it was to industry.
This
testing is now routine. The testing done before a redesign shows us
where we are now, and tells us how much improvement is needed for a
design to match the agreed performance criteria. We have called this
testing Benchmarking. It provides data which is compared to the data
from testing after the redesign; the difference between the two is used
to calculate the ROI. So when we tell a client that our new design has
made an improvement - that we have added value and provided an ROI - we
have the evidence.
Benchmarking has another useful
function: it provides us with many clues on how the new design might
make the information more usable. This then saves us time and effort
later, leading to fewer iterations in testing and refinement - one of
those moments where economics and good design practice coincide.
Benchmarking accounts for about 10% of our project time.
4. POLITICS
Given
our careful scoping, benchmarking, integration of text and graphics,
testing, and refinement, one might think that our work is successful
more often than not; but this is not necessarily the case. The major
risk to a successful outcome is, and always has been, the politics that
surrounds the design process.
Even such humble
organisational documents as forms - the beasts of burden in the
information society - are subject to the tugs and pressures of
sectional interests within organizations. None of this is apparent
until you try to change them. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, erupt a
host of clamouring voices: the marketing department wants to impose its
branding requirements and marketing messages onto the design; the
information technology managers insist that the order of information
cannot be changed because of their processing software; the legal
department won t let you change the wording for fear of exposing the
company to litigation; the call centre is worried that any changes will
lead to additional customer complaints or inquiries; and so it goes on.
We contribute to these voices by representing, often for
the first time, the interests of the consumer or citizen. And this new
voice at the table - an outsider - makes quite different demands.
Managing all of these different voices to ensure an outcome that serves
the outsider's interests as well as the internal constituencies takes
up the remaining 50% of our project time, and requires skills of
statecraft, diplomacy, and negotiation.
Conclusion
In
the end, we are left with a question. Why does information need to be
constantly redesigned? We discovered that even well designed
information deteriorates quite rapidly. In 1988 we redesigned a phone
bill so that 100% of literate customers could use it appropriately. By
2003 the same design could only be used appropriately by 42% of
literate customers. The social environment in which such documents have
to work, like most of our social arrangements, is highly changeable.
For this reason we introduced our final stage, Monitoring, where we can
keep an eye on the changes and recommend action where it seems
appropriate.
This then has been my attempt to remove some
confusions about information design and how we have developed the craft
at CRI. I end with a plea. People are routinely disenfranchised because
forms and other public documents are difficult to use. People get
frustrated and lost when they cannot find the information they need.
And people suffer or die because they do not have usable information on
the medicines they take. I invite you to join me in the important work
of information design.
All of the work mentioned in this paper can be found at our website.
About the article
This article was orginally published in tipoGrafica magazine 71: year XX, June, July, 2006, pp. 08-15. It is reprinted with permission.
David Sless
David Sless is an information designer specialized in the critical review of the graphic communication of everyday objects by means of research conducted on daily practical communication problems. Director of the Communication Research Institute and professor of Science Communication. Advisor in corporate communication, and guest lecturer in the US, Europe and Asia. In addition, he is the author of over 180 publications.