First impressions count!
Set the Stage
Investigate if internal communication is effective and be prepared to explain why your new document is a better plan.
Hooking your audience
Remember rule: appearances count
- 70% of what you know is based on appearance
- your reader assess simplicity, form, clarity, shape, color, highlights, density, sharpness, and contrast at a single glance
- they want to know if your document is worth their time
- they don't want chaotic, crowded, noisy documents
Use the hidden documents design to:
- get readers in the door
- encourage them to stay and read
Create Visual Appeal
Hidden power of document design is what it does for the appearance of your document. Remember the Madison Avenue lesson: "If it looks organized, uncrowded, and easy, it must really be."
Avoid Visual Clutter
Visual clutter is the result of a document that looks overwhelming; "that stuff in the garage." Two things are required for an easy-to-read and look at document:
- simplicity
- clarity
Designing for Visual Appeal
How can the clutter be controlled? By using basic design elements to make the document look easy, fast, and clear, i.e. visual appeal:
20 basic design elements
sentence length, paragraph length, line spacing, typestyle, typeface, emphasis, paragraph spacing, justification, indentation, margins, headings, graphics, visual weight, contrast, color, symbols, columns, lists, forms, white space
Why do design elements work?
1. the human brain
-can deal with as many as seven different items at one time
-can clearly distinguish among only three of the seven items at one time
Solution: use the Rule of Three
2. eye movement
-takes in about forty characters at once
Solution: consider using columns, break information into chunks
-takes in three or more words/second
Solution: use headings, sections, concise wording to make message obvious
-reads two or more words at one time
Solution: reinforce unimportant words that carry critical meaning; avoid excessive adjectives, descriptors, fancy phrases, complicated clauses
-moves top to bottom, left to right in a Z pattern
Chunking as a visual technique
- present information in small, simple chunks that are well organized
- white space: the more white space, the faster the document is read
Consistency is all
Help readers develop a rhythm for comfortable reading
7 comments:
This has probably been the most important chapter for me so far. Campbell gives some great insight into ideas on how to solve the problem of getting the user to read the procedure. First impressions count, how true this is, we want our users to see a visually appealing document that they are willing to read and not make excuses.
Creating visual appeal by avoiding visual clutter with the aide of chunking, the rule of three and other design elements listed on page 213 are all great ideas.
My biggest obstacle to overcome is the fact that I am stifled by conventions that are set by corporate, a lot of the elements that are listed in this chapter are already part of required guidelines that I am mandated to follow. I would love to use some of thes ideas on our Legacy documents, I think I would have more leeway to be creative. I am looking forward to implementing some of these ideas, and see what kind of response I receive from the user.
I have always wondered what kind of strategy goes in to designing and delivering procedure. It isn't necessarily the most appealing and desirable thing to read procedural documents. However this chapter does a wonderful job illustrating and describing ways to go about delivering these documents in order to get somebody to read them. I have often been guilty of making excuses and not been visually attracted to necssary documents because of their first impression. Campbell does a good job of describing how to avoid this.
I loved the ideas in this chapter. That is such a big hurdle - actually getting people to use the documentation that's been created for them.
Unfortunately, as with Robin, I am seeing the pitfalls of trying to control the look of documentation and procedures. Our documentation management policy at work really puts the kabosh on making documentation attractive. While I recognize there are advantages to having uniformity to make sure essential items are included, there are also disadvantages in trying to make everything fit into the same format.
This chapter really reminded me of last semester in English 271. We were creating a set of instructions for carving a pumpkin utilizing text and pictures. There were a few students who over did it with fonts, coloring, and picture arrangement and the teacher announced to the class that these are two examples that makes the user not want to use the instructions. Now that I read this chapter, it's all making a little more sense to me.
This is my favorite chapter so far in Campbell’s book. I am a huge fan of creating documents that are visually appealing, easy to read, and chunked, with plenty of white space. Our company relies on e-mail to the point of being almost ridiculous. I’ve seen so many e-mail messages that go on and on with no paragraph breaks and no special formatting. I’m sure many of them aren’t even fully read. I like to use bolded and underlined headings so the reader can skim and quickly get to the information they need. Example 6.1 and 6.2 in Campbell is a wonderful side-by-side comparison. I would really struggle to read the first one because it is so cluttered. Example 6.2 is so pretty that it almost beckons you to read it. My boss used to get annoyed when I would spend too much time on certain documents and his favorite line was, “Don’t gild the lily.” I tried explaining the positive aspects of visual communication and it was lost on him. How it was presented was not as important as the information being presented.
Appearances DO count! When I look at a document that is not visually appealing or consistent, I immediately have a negative attitude toward reading it. It seems that the most common problems with documents I've seen at my job are that they are visually cluttered. They try to fit too much information in one spot or they don't divide it up into columns or bullets (or they use bullets when they aren't needed)--it makes the information look overwhelming. The science behind design elements really helps to explain why certain things work and don't work and what is best to do to help readers use your document. I agree that this is one of the best chapters so far in this book because it gives specifics on how to make documents more readable for users--instead of just focusing on what readers need and broad ways to make usable documents. I like the consistency in this book about establishing a rhythm for the reader--this information will help me in my documentation project also.
I like all the advice for stripping down the document and making it easier and faster to read; although now i'm trying to figure out what role highlighting would have a text; if you had highlighted portions printed directly into the book, even perhaps a color coded system, would that stream line things so that people could find what they require more easily, or would it end up being to much visual clutter?
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