Throwing away the mail

I've just discovered the American poet Wendell Berry, who writes beautiful reflections on life, the countryside, the seasons, belonging. 

Throwing away the mail

Nothing is simple,
not even simplification.
Thus, throwing away 
the mail, I exchange
the complexity of duty
for the simplicity of guilt.

From The Peace of Wild Things, published by Penguin.

Information design meets gardening

I caught up with Paul Matson at the recent Vision Plus conference in Birmingham. Paul did the MA Information Design at Reading when I was teaching there. He works for the Institute of Physics in Bristol, creating web sites but as a sideline he's created a great gardening concept, Sowhow.

Paul sells organic seeds, packed on information cards that explain how to grow it, store it and cook it. I particularly like the link between garden and kitchen (I'm a fan of Monty and Sarah Don's Fork to Fork, not just for the clever title).

I have read and understood...

At the Simplification Centre we're looking at fresh ways to approach the small print - the contracts we sign when we install software, get a mobile phone, borrow money. I was speculating that if we sincerely want people to understand these things, wouldn't we apply best practice from textbooks - a genre where people genuinely have to and want to understand the content. In a textbook we expect summaries, explanations, definitions, diagrams... and even aims and objectives, and self-test questions. We expect legible type, plenty of white space, and pictures to relieve the tedium. A photo and short biog of the author on the back, too, of course.

Jenny then suggested going one further: if we are really sincere about communicating contract conditions, people should sit an exam before they can sign.

Of course the opposite could equally be true. Instead of sitting an exam at the end of their university course, students could simply sign a declaration: 'I have read and understood this course'. Thank you ma'am: here's your car keys/loan/degree certificate.

Clarity 2010

Went to Clarity 2010 in Lisbon the week before last. Very stimulating, and met up with a lot of old friends. Three things stood out for me.

• Plain language is happening in more and more countries, and is taken seriously enough for governments to take action. For example, the Portugese government used the conference to announce a new initiative, and while we there President Obama was signing the new Plain Writing Act in the USA.
• While much discussion of plain language hasn't changed in thirty years (short sentences, common words, active voice), there were frequent mentions of information design, and several sessions looked at visualisations that clarify contract law.
• Many of the meetings were visualised by Susanne Hoogwater of Legal Sketchpad - she is one of a growing number of people who make a living from recording meetings using visualisation. She introduced me to a new book, Visual Meetings by David Sibbet. Worth a look.  And there is an interesting link on her website to the use of visualisation in conflict negotiations: http://peacemapping.com/. The physical mapping of different views makes it less easy to ignore what the other side is saying, and reassures participants that their view has been recorded. Not that any fights broke out among the speakers.

Before and after: it had to happen

I suppose if I hung around long enough in this business it was bound to happen - one of our designs appearing in a case study as the bad old 'before' in contrast to the shiny new 'after'.

In this case I couldn't help noticing our T-Mobile bill design as the 'before' to the new design developed by Boag Associates and Tullo Marshall Warren, illustrated in Borries Schwesinger's The Form Book. While not wanting to take anything away from the new design, I thought it might be worth looking at why designs become obsolete and need revisiting.

 

The bill we developed started as the One2One bill, developed by Karen Moate and Abi Searle-Jones (forgive me, other colleagues, if I have mis-remembered). It was pretty revolutionary in its day - colourfully branded, and designed to work both on paper and on screen. The key information is in the top half of the page, to allow for on-screen viewing as a PDF, and information on other pages is flagged on tabs at the top of the page - designed to become clickable on screen, and to act as an iconic access device on paper. To achieve this top half focus, we moved the postal address into the bottom third, where it was folded to appear in the envelope window, either on its own, or incorporated into the payment slip for people who paid by cheque.

A key constraint of this design was that it had to be implemented in the Flexible Bill Formatter application that is integral to the Amdocs billing platform. Amdocs dominates mobile phone billing and although at this time (the project started in 1998, I think) their formatter was very primitive compared with dedicated systems such as Doc 1, we had to use it... and were surprised to find that it could not cope with double column layouts. That's why in our design the customer information block is to the right and below the main billing information – Amdocs could not get it to sit in the white space above.

The new One2One bill was developed with live-data testing and real customers – this meant formatting around 20 real bills, with all their itemised numbers, and mailing them, followed by interviews. Reactions are far more authentic when presented with your own data rather than a scenario. All the usual achievements were noted after launch: fewer enquiries, higher satisfaction. And to crown it all, we won an award, presented at a bizarre but enjoyable dinner in Cannes. Here's a picture of our client Michael Soter receiving the award from Joan Collins. You never knew the world of billing was so glamorous, did you?

When T-Mobile acquired One2One they asked us to adapt the bill to the new brand, with the result below left. The new brand guidelines no longer allowed the tinted background that previously had highlighted the total on a white panel. But note that this is different in two key respects from the 'before' that appears in the case study (below right). In our version the customer information is anchored by the vertical line, that in the case study 'before' floats below it. And in our version, there is a prominent contact phone number at the top right, missing in the case study example (and criticised for being missing there).




The lesson from this – information design works in a shifting environment, where products change brands change, and most importantly people change. Memories fade, and designs aren't always maintained.

When we became fully integrated into Enterprise IG, following our own acquisition, we had to stop working for T-Mobile as Vodafone was a major client of the group. This was regrettable, as we had by then been asked to develop radical new designs for the bill, which, it was obvious to everyone, was no longer fit to cope with the new products and tariffs being offered by that time (2004). Here is one of the more exploratory designs we developed, never produced (designer: Richard Bland).

Impressive

It is nice to see information design reaching new areas of life. The Clear Building Survey, offered by some building surveyors, looks much easier, both to write and to read, than the traditional kind.

Simplifying Time

'The one great thing was simplification. Simplification by organization, simplification by condensation and also simplification by being damn well simple.'

 Henry Luce, founder of Time magazine, quoted in The New Yorker, 19 April 2010, page 81.

And from an early prospectus, quoted in the same article by Jill Lepore:

'TIME is interested – not in how much it includes between its covers – but in HOW MUCH IT GETS OFF ITS PAGES INTO THE MINDS OF ITS READERS.'

Extreme simplification: strip out everything they're going to forget

When I hung around in the world of branding, we used to talk a lot about essences - the main idea about a product or company. We sometimes used an exercise in workshops to tease out the essence of an idea - we asked people to sum up a concept or brand in less than ten words.

We'd start with some generic ones to get the conversation flowing:
Starbucks: OK coffee, comfy chairs
The Atkins Diet: Eat lots of meat, get thin
Credit card interest: Pay it all now, or pay more later
The off-side rule: don't hang around near the goal

Then we'd throw in some of their products to see if they could do the same thing.
BlackBerry
Pay as you talk price plans

This is a form of extreme simplification. I was reminded of it on a visit to Kew Gardens today. Kalani Seymour, who is Interpretation Manager (it means she helps visitors to interpret what they see), is setting an MA project, and showed us around her enviable workplace.

On Kew's treetop walkway, Kalani has written and commissioned design for a series of ultra-short explanations of how trees work.  The way she put it was 'you strip out everything they're going to forget'.

Here's one of them. A kind of scientific haiku, I reckon.

Please read this post in full and retain for future reference

Congratulate me, I'm now the proud owner of a chair from John Lewis. Those partners leave nothing to chance, and on the first page of the instructions we are enjoined to:

Please read the instructions carefully before use.

IMPORTANT, RETAIN FOR FUTURE REFERENCE: READ CAREFULLY

Please ensure the instructions are read in full before attempting to assemble this product.

Read this leaflet in full before commencing assembly. 

The list of tools required is particularly thorough:

So we are well prepared before attempting the actual assembly:

Making names work for users

Wayfinding projects are not just about showing people the way – they are often about making the way easier to show. Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital last year renamed many of their buildings to provide a set of names that makes more sense for patients. For example, people used to have trouble finding New Guy's House, because it was not particularly new. This means that they've had to change not only signs and maps, but appointment letters too. They've also worked with the Royal Mail to ensure that their postal address is the street people enter from (it wasn't before).

Department names are also changing:

• 'Paediatrics' = 'Children's services'
• 'Ophthalmology' = 'Eye department'.
• 'Renal unit' = 'Kidney unit'
• 'Surgical appliances' = 'Patient appliances'.

 Hurray for common sense.

Still transforming after all these years

Robin Kinross recently published The Transformer, an essay by Marie Neurath supplemented by his own writings on the subject. It is a beautifully produced and timely contribution - timely given the growing interest in the work of the Isotype Institute. But make sure you ask for 'The Transformer: principles of making Isotype charts', and not 'Transformers - all hail Megatron' or 'Transformers - revenge of the fallen'.

Many years ago when I worked for the Open University, we took the Isotype concept of the transformer role, and applied it in the new community education courses being developed. They were on topics such as parenting, health, and retirement. To help the specialist academics write in an accessible way, we set up processes that encouraged them to write in page units - each topic had to be a single page or a double-page spread. They had to write a series of linked stories, which had to be within a recommended word limit, and accompanied by a sketched layout of how they anticipated them appearing on the page. The idea was to stop academics from simply expounding on their topic, and to help them imagine a reader with a busy life who needed to support from the visible structure of text to help them read strategically and actively. So the transformer role was partly accomplished by people, and partly by processes.

Pam Shakespeare (now Professor of Practice Based Open Learning) gave her inaugural lecture at the OU last week, and I went over to hear her. I hadn't previously realised that the transformer idea had made any kind of lasting impact, but it seems to have. A video of her lecture is online at http://stadium.open.ac.uk/berrill/ (it starts about 6 minutes into the video).

Making reading digestible

Still on a scriptural theme... the Reader's Digest Bible cuts out the ‘boring bits’ – the genealogies or details of the Old Testament law – in an effort to make it less of a weariness of the flesh. But quite often when you look at other translations, the boring bits are actually graphically signalled, helping people read strategically (ie, helping them skip those parts).

In this page from Numbers, I've highlighted the section of the Reader's Digest Bible that is the equivalent of a spread from an edition of the New International Version (I designed the one shown some years ago for Hodder & Stoughton). 

The sections shaded pink are the ones left out of the RD version – I hope the image is clear enough to see that the list of tribes is spaced and indented in a way that makes it easy for the reader to simply skip over, noting the authenticity of the historical record (the main function of that passage for the modern reader). The spacing was not introduced by me but by the scholars and theologians responsible for the translation.

On another occasion I tried to take an even more explicit information design approach to Bible design. The Contemporary English Version is translated to be easier for people without a religious background to understand – it avoids theological terms, for example. I tried to make it look less bibly and to use genre cues to help readers approach it in a more strategic way. I could not avoid double columns (for space reasons) but I was able to use single column for poetry, so the line endings would be clearer. I used a three column ‘fine print’ approach for the boring bits, and bold headings.

Ruff, Gaff and Guff

Here are three short text passages. How would you simplify them?

Two Hearts by West was not a pretty contract. North led the queen of spades and South overtook with the king and returned the queen of clubs, preparatory to a defensive crossruff. Declarer won the club and led with his diamond. North won the ace, gave his partner a club ruff, and South followed with two more top spades, North discarding a diamond, then a fourth spade, ruffed with the nine and overruffed with the jack. North gave his partner a final club ruff, then came a fifth spade, declarer’s ruff with the ten winning. From the bridge column of The Times newspaper.

The common and traditional way to rig the tops'l sheet (or clew outhaul) is from the clew to a turning block at the after end of the gaff, then forward and down to a turning block on the lower side of the gaff jaws, continuing down to deck level to be belayed. Traditionally, the belay point is on the main boom, near the gooseneck/yaws, and the turning block at the gaff jaws is hung from a short pendant. With the belay point on the boom, sheet tension ought to remain constant from one tack to the other (as opposed to being belayed to a pin on deck, where the lead would change). From the website of the Old Gaffers Association (hint: sailing boats)

The UK funding system introduced by the Pensions Act 2004 works on the basis that the target funding level (technical provisions) combined with the employer covenant forms the basis of security for defined benefits. If the covenant is removed or marginalised, trustees should recognise that this should substantially increase the scheme’s appropriate level of technical provisions, and they should reflect this potential change in negotiations and the mitigation they seek. From a discussion paper of The Pensions Regulator

If it was just a matter of plain English, I wouldn't do anything to the first one - according to the Flesch-Kincaid readability formula it is already grade 7.2, which is pretty good. The other two are grade 12. But even after looking up 'ruff' in the dictionary (it means 'an act or instance of trumping when one cannot follow suit'), I am none the wiser. To make this passage clear to me would require an evening class over several weeks, at the very least. Even though the sentences are short, I don't know what the words mean. Even when I know what the words mean, I don't know the rules.

On that count, the sailing example should be clear to me, though. I happen to know what most the technical words mean, and I have a boat, so I know the rules. But it is not clear, and I need to draw a diagram to be able to place the different items on the boat, and understand how they are connected.

The third item is very similar to some text I am trying to edit right now. I have no idea whether its intended audience can understand either the words or the rules of the game.

Benefits of dramatic projection

Police procedurals like CSI often include interfaces that the TV detectives use for matching fingerprints or tracking vehicles. These interfaces are unlike any normal ones you find in workplaces - graphic features have to be exaggerated in order to be legible on television. Similarly, ransom notes are always written in large legible writing.

Actually, this how everything should be designed - clear and bold enough to get how it works at first glance. It isn't a bad design principle to ask yourself: how would my interface work on TV?

"Labour kills off 'husbands' and 'wives'"

This was a story in the Mail on Sunday yesterday. Apparently the term 'partner' is now used in place of 'husband', 'wife' or 'spouse' on some HMRC forms. This is attributed by the paper to a socialist conspiracy to destroy marriage.

Well, actually it's used in the question 'Do you have a partner?' instead of something like 'Do you have a spouse, partner (defined as a person you are living with as if you are married) or civil partner?'. So this very probably points to a civil servant trying to save space and write in plain English. Do they really think the Prime Minister and his cabinet discuss the wording on a form?

The article also notes that on the Child Benefit form you are asked to select your title from 'Mrs, Miss, Ms, Mr', and attributes this sequence to a 'nod to feminism'. Well, no, actually. The legislation requires Child Benefit to be paid to the mother, unless the child is living with the father or other person. And most mothers are married women ('Mrs'), followed statistically by unmarried women ('Miss'). 'Mr' comes last because it is the least likely response to the question.

Born under a bad sign

If we had to choose a theme tune for simplification, what would it be? I'd pick Albert King's classic blues 'Born under a bad sign'. Apart from its obvious reference to poor wayfinding in maternity hospitals, it contains this lament for literacy:

I can't read.
I didn't learn how to write.
My whole life's been one big fight.

You can hear/get it at iTunes.

Just important stuff you don't need to read

Back to small print. Just got this example from O2, the mobile phone operator, who like everyone else has time to think of a clever idea for the cover, but not for making the information clear. Ho ho.

Introducing the Simpleton

I've changed the name of my blog to reflect a new multidisciplinary research centre that I'm planning, called the Simplification Centre. It will help government departments, businesses, and regulators to simplify communications about complex topics such as tax, financial services, and health. I'm moving to the University of Reading to set it up this September.


One problem with the word 'simplification' is that it's not simple. That's why my temporary logo leaves out a syllable. Who knows, it could catch on. After all, there is a precedent. So many people find 'quantitative' such a mouthful that it's only a matter of time before 'quantative' gets into the dictionary through usage.

Money laundering

Eden are an excellent information design consultancy in Amsterdam. They recently came up with new standards for consumer warnings for financial services products (eg, 'investments can go down as well as up'). To simplify the approach, they used washing instructions - a trusted information source - as their inspiration. 2022 note: I've removed the link as it's no longer working.