Information Design

EDBOK Guide

What is Information Design?

For information to have an impact, it must be easy to find, simple to use, and instantly understandable. Information design is the defining, planning, and shaping of the contents of a message and the environments in which it is presented, with the intention to satisfy the information needs of the intended recipients.

Why is Information Design Important?

The ultimate goal of any and all communications is to clearly connect the user with the thought. The purpose of information design is to make that communication clear. Utilizing best practices in information design avoids visual confusion, redundancy, and makes content easy to understand. When this happens, effective documents are created.

Best Practices

Information design is informed by a large body of theory and research. It focuses on  clear, easy-to-understand language, well-organized content, grouping of like information, use of font weights and sizes to help create a hierarchy of information, graphically-pleasing layout, psychology, and usability. Following best practices in ensures that the result is clear communication. This allows all stakeholders touching a communication to easily find information, understand what they have found, and act on it.

There are many different types of communications and different types of documents; each has a purpose. All documents, whether they are letters, statements, bills, regulatory notices, or forms, fit into the broad category of communications. The difference is the purpose, whether it is imparting information (a letter), requesting information (a form), or communicating status (a statement or bill).

While information design covers ALL communications, the focus of this section is on information and document design narrowed to specific types of paper and electronic communications: letters, notices, forms, bills, and statements.

For any communication to be successful, three things must fall into place. First, a reader can find the information they are looking for easily and quickly. Second, the recipients of the communication can easily comprehend what they have found. Last, the recipients can do something with the information they have found and comprehended.

Users – Psychology

Successful communication requires an understanding of all potential users so that the best practices in information design can be applied appropriately and directed to the stakeholders involved. You may view the stakeholder as the customer or end user, but most documents affect more than one stakeholder. There are internal as well as external users and all of their needs must be considered to create documents that work effectively.

Consider, for example, a bill (utility, telecom, etc.). Before the bill is sent out it must be inspected to make sure the bill generation system is working properly. For data-intensive transaction documents testing the system means ensuring that the data and the calculations are correct.

Then there is the recipient of the bill, who needs to know the amount due, the transactions or reasons for the amount due, when payment is due, and information about late payment penalties. Customer service representatives may need to answer questions from the customer about the bill. The accounts receivable staff that processes the payment relies on information in the bill to apply payment. Each stakeholder is looking for different information so that they can act in an appropriate manner.

On the other hand, consider a hospital pharmacy medication label whose small size creates a challenge to the information designer. Users of the label are all looking for different information: the lab technician identifies use and dosage; the pharmacist compounds the medication; the assistant adheres the labels to the medication; the person delivering the medication to the floor and, don’t forget, the nurse administering the medication.

Each document needs to help many people find different information easily and quickly, therefore, all stakeholders must be considered.

Purpose

To be effective a document must have only one main purpose. Too often organizations try to add too much into a document making its purpose unclear. Is it a bill? Is it a marketing piece? What is the recipient expected to do? Many bills look like marketing brochures and some get thrown away inadvertently!

Consider a hypothetical auto lease bill (based on real examples; see below). It has two sheets of paper, each printed just on one side. Ninety per cent of the second page is blank. The only data on page two is the detail of the payment: principal, interest and monthly loan amount. This is on the second page because there are seven messages on the first page that take up about two-thirds of the page. All are under the heading Important Messages. (More about messages later.)

Generally speaking, only one or two messages are truly important, and more than that will dilute the value of ALL of the messages. In this case, the messages are all valuable, but none are critical or fall under the criteria important. They are: view statements online, how to make automatic payments, pay by phone, accident information, mailing payment information, and contacting the company. All valuable, but not worth the extra costs involved.

Figure 1- Sample Generic Leasing Statement.

Messages

Messaging is very important and can be a useful tool in marketing and maintaining customer loyalty, but it must be done appropriately. There is a fine line between success and failure in messaging. If customers receive monthly statements with the same message repeated two or three times in a row, not only will they stop reading the message, but future messages will be passed over, too. In the example above a better decision would have been to spread the messages over multiple months. This would achieve four things: there would be a fresh message every time, each message would stand out by itself and become more important, there would be cost savings due to fewer sheets of paper, and there will be a better customer experience.

Document Design

Most people are familiar with pure graphic design – making the document or marketing communications look good. But many of these pretty documents fail because they do not communicate or, in the case of the electronic document, cannot be rendered. How often has a company designed a form, bill, or statement only to find that the development tools or the printers cannot produce it because it does not fit within the parameters of the equipment?

Document design incorporates information design, plain language, psychology, and usability testing in addition to pure graphic design, and – especially for transaction documents – includes the understanding of the environment in which the document lives. Too often organizations look at documents as nothing more than a cost of doing business, either because they are regulatory or they are filling a need, like a bill, which helps to fund the organization. Although this is true, good document design, using the best practices of information design, goes beyond look and feel to functionality, cost reduction, and increased customer loyalty. Therefore, involving information designers at the start of any customer-facing document project is essential. Relegating information design until the end of the design project, with the only intent to make the document pretty, is useless.

Most transaction documents include variable data. Think of a utility bill, a credit card statement, or a retirement or bank statement. They all look alike (from a graphic design and branding standpoint), but each is unique because of the data in the document.

Variable Data in Transaction Documents Methodology

The information designer brings a lot to the table when designing variable data transaction documents. In the beginning of the process, when content is on the table, a knowledgeable designer can help visualize the ways in which it can be presented. This not only will optimize the design and development, but ensure the document works for all stakeholders. Unlike a graphic designer, the information designer will understand  the development and production requirements, and restrictions. They will also understand that transaction documents need to allow for differences in content within a particular field and allow for that variation.

Color

Color grabs your attention and quickly conveys important information; imagine traffic lights without red, green, and yellow! Judicious use of color can be used to emphasize important information, but overuse will defeat that purpose.

Color should be used carefully, not only to make an attractive document, but also to serve a higher purpose: clarifying information. When using color, consider consistency so that similar information is emphasized throughout the document. Take the example of the traffic light. Everyone knows that the red is on top and green on the bottom, but think about what would happen if they were sometimes reversed. That would make  for a lot of confusion, traffic jams, and accidents. The same is true of documents. If a bar chart showing one type of information has three different colors and then a pie chart uses the same colors for different types of information, the stakeholder will be confused thinking that there is a connection between the two visuals. See Figure 2 as an example.

Figure 2 - Example of confusing color.

Proper use of color can emphasize important information, increase the reader’s attention, leave a lasting impression, and increase comprehension.

Fonts

Fonts play a large role in transaction documents. It is important to choose a font that is readable in different sizes as well as having a variety of weights (bold, italic, condensed) since most transaction documents will be data-intense and font weights will be used to create hierarchy and visual separation for readability.

Readability is improved significantly when the number of font families used is limited to a maximum of two. Except in rare cases, most information designers avoid using type smaller than 9 points. This will depend on the communications and the type of content. Most content should be in the 10 to 12-point range. For certain regulated documents the smallest allowable font size may be mandated. For instance, in a financial statement with many sections and numerous columns within a section, 10 points might be the largest that will fit.

For sections that contain a substantial amount of numerical information, a sans serif font is most readable. By using different weights and different point sizes for different types of information, a clear hierarchy will be created. But, consistency across the document is important, just as it is when using color. For fonts, using the same weight and size for similar information is very important.

Figure 3 - Before (top) and after (bottom) example of good use of fonts and white space.

The before and after example below clearly shows the value of using different font sizes and weights to visually separate information. The before example uses one font-weight and one size (8 points) while the after (taking up less space) utilizes bold that emphasizes different information from the regular weight and various point sizes (larger – 10 and 12 points).

White Space and White Space Management

An important concept to understand, and the least understood, is white space and white space management. White space refers to the areas in a document without text or images, just the background. Organizations tend to want to fill the page. In reality, white space allows the eye to travel from section to section, from concept/idea to concept/idea, easily and quickly, making the document easier to understand and information easier to find. Look at the example above. Notice that the before example is almost completely filled up, but in the after example the white space visually separates the content making it easier for the eye to follow.

Barcodes and other Codes

Transaction documents may contain many different types of marks and codes. All of these have to be incorporated into the information designer’s list of items to be considered. There are barcodes, like 3 of 9 and 2D, IMB for postal regulations, and others for inserting, and page count. Other than the postal codes, there are usually options for placement and it is the job of the information designer to work with the equipment requirements so that the codes serve their function without interrupting the flow of the content and readability.

Information Design Process

Requirements Gathering

Gathering requirements for an information design project is a vital first step. The gathering of requirements becomes a valuable internal communications tool because it should succinctly capture the document's strategy, objectives, and priorities.

This phase addresses specific business, marketing, and production requirements and includes items such as product features, existing document data, corporate branding and image guidelines, record-keeping systems, and the target document delivery environment. The analysis of this information provides the basis for the document strategy and the parameters under which the document will live. For communication to be produced in the transaction world, this is a vital step. If done at the beginning before any design it will help save time, rework, and expense.

Document Strategy

The strategy addresses high-level design and content objectives for the document and establishes the stake in the ground against which detailed content and design options will be evaluated and measured. The strategy objectives will be used to inform the content and design concept.

Usability Testing

There are many types of usability testing: attitude surveys, preference tests, focus groups, expert opinion, and diagnostic testing to name a few (some of these have other names). Focus groups are the most popular, but for information design, diagnostic testing has been proven to be the most successful. For financial and other personal documents specifically, diagnostic testing using one-on-one protocols is recommended. This method is used because the results are more indicative of how individuals view them. In this type of testing, a moderator is employed to interview a participant with questions and scenarios. In this way, testing will reveal how well the participant can find information, understand information, and navigate through a multipage document. This testing is done with these three questions in mind:

1. How accurately does the document communicate information?
2. How well does it guide the users?
3. How well does it help people in using the document to solve a problem or answer a question?

If the budget allows, testing should be done with current state samples as well as the proposed design. This is to make sure all issues and problems are identified before any redesign is started. A second test is done after the redesign. This is to verify that all user requirements have been captured and that all user problems and pain points have been identified. A document must reflect how people think about a task, how they find information, and what they do with that information. Therefore, testing should be done with actual users, both internal and external.

Testing will determine how accurately the document communicates information, how well it guides the user, how users actually use the document to verify information or answer a question, and will find out what final improvements are needed. The document is successful if it naturally fits into work routines like any well-designed tool.

Content

Before any graphic (look and feel) design is started, the content must be defined. Developing the content first will save rework and keep the redesign within the project timeline. In this phase, existing content is reviewed to make sure it is appropriate, not redundant, and whether it will be valuable to the stakeholders.

New content is considered through the lenses of stakeholder’s needs and/or regulatory requirements. The key consideration is to identify where this new content is coming from. Content is also reviewed and validated to ensure that terminology is consistent throughout the document and that plain language is used wherever possible. Here, also, is where messaging is included, not necessarily the actual wording, but instead, identifying the messaging type (marketing, regulatory, disclosure, commentary, etc.), how many places it would be used, and where throughout the document it would be placed.

Specifications

In any transaction document project, creating functional specifications, measurement specifications, and font specifications will solidify the design, form the basis for the development, and ensure that the final outcome will stay true to the efforts put in by the whole team. The functional specifications include business rules, widow and orphan rules, and other guidelines that help to define how the document will act in various scenarios. The measurement specifications will help the development team by providing the exact placement of the different elements of the document, including address blocks. The font specification details all of the font types, weights, and point sizes used throughout the document.

Validation

Since transaction documents involve many people, departments, and processes, it is important that each document is validated throughout the project. First, review content with business units, stakeholders, legal, and compliance among others. For the design review, marketing should also be added to the list. And, the development team becomes very important to verify that the design content is available, the design can be implemented in the desired tool, and it will print correctly on the desired output platform.

Because transaction documents are generally complex documents, with lots of information and sometimes many, many pages, validation along the way will keep the project on time and avoid costly rework.

The conclusion is clear: information design and clear communications will create a good customer experience and ensure the successful outcome of any transaction document project.

What is Good Document Design? – An Example

In many respects, a well-designed document represents a compromise between all of the document stakeholders.

• Marketing will be concerned with branding, imaging, and messaging elements, while graphic designers will be concerned with aesthetic elements such as layout and imaging.
• Customer service and accounts receivable will be concerned that critical data points like amount due, due date, account balance, and transactions are accurate, easily identifiable, and readable.
• Compliance departments will be concerned that legal notices, regulated text, and disclaimers are accurate for each jurisdiction to which a document might be sent and rendered in the mandated font sizes.
• Developers will be concerned that all elements in a document are placed correctly, variable data fields are filled correctly, business rules are applied properly, and all finishing marks and barcodes are placed properly on each page.
• Recipients will be concerned that they receive the correct information at the correct time and that they can find the information that is important to them.

For many, describing the attributes that represent a well-designed or poorly-designed document is not an easy task; however, most individuals have no problems identifying well-designed or poorly-designed documents when they see them. The following bank example uses a variety of techniques to create clear communications that result in good document design. In addition to color, fonts, white space management, and plain language, creating successful document designs involve understanding all the stakeholders and the purpose of the document.

Ultimately, good document design works because it allows the stakeholders to easily locate information, understand the information found, and then act on that information.

Figure 4 - Before example of information design make over. These images are not crisp due to being scanned.

Figure 5 - After example of information design make over.