About Information design
"The goal of information designers is to employ words and pictures to help readers accomplish their personal goals. So to me, whether or not something is a marketing product is a matter of degree. Obviously, there is a big difference between marketing as principled persuasion and marketing as unprincipled manipulation. But both have an emotional side".
Will the Web influence on Document Design
"As information designers, our work is different from advertising and marketing in that those areas promote the economic goals of organizations rather than the goals of readers, users, or stakeholders. The goal of a marketing piece is to promote a service or product through words and pictures. By contrast, the goal of information designers is to employ words and pictures to help readers accomplish their personal goals - such as learning (e.g. understanding the science of global warming), doing (e.g. changing the batteries in a smoke detector), or making a decision (e.g. choosing among health care programs). When information designers do a good job, stakeholders get the benefit of usable content, but they may also gain a feeling of satisfaction about what they now know.
Most of the theoretical foundations of information design are the same (e.g. the centrality of understanding stakeholders' goals for the content), but applying those ideas to Web design requires a shift of thinking. For example, although taking seriously our stakeholders' needs for content is important regardless of medium, designing for the Web challenges us to consider those needs as they might unfold in real-time. Let me give three quick examples.
First, the Web requires us to think about using words differently. Instead of 'telling the whole story', we must frontload the content that will enable stakeholders to see immediately how their goals will be met if they continue reading. It means our titles and leads must be brief and designed to match stakeholders' interests.
We need to know when to stop generating more words and replace them with a tighter integration of text and graphics. We need to remind ourselves that people are much more impatient when they read on the Web and our strategies for reaching them must respect their need for brevity and concision. That often could mean, for example, that key content normally presented gradually over several paragraphs must be rewritten into one-sentence teasers.
The writing strategies employed on the Web are now being used in print magazines.
Although professional writers have always needed the ability to take lengthy texts and make them shorter while still retaining the integrity of the content (e.g. in executive summaries, abstracts, and the like), they must now have the smarts and flexibility to be able to find the shortest and punchiest way to present their content, day in and day out. Those who can write well under the constraints posed by the Web as well as the typical political constraints posed by organizations tend to be those who are making the most difference in the quality of writing on the Web.
And interestingly, the writing strategies employed on the Web are now being used in print magazines. In short, writing for the Web is changing how we write for paper. For example, Harvard Business Review offers capsule summaries of its articles in the form of brief abstracts or itemized lists. The same summaries appear on the Web as previews of articles for purchase. The Amazon.com-like rhetoric is if you like the content of the abstract or itemized list, you'll like the whole article.
Second, the Web requires that we think about color not as a static property of the text but as a potentially active one. Information designers still take as a core principle that in signaling the structure of information, we should use color appropriately. But Web design, in contrast to designing for paper, asks us to use color differently to signal content. For example, rather than using a single color to highlight important related information as we might in an annual report, assuming that all links are read in the same sitting, online design demands that we consider the temporality of the shareholder's experience. This means using more than one color (or shade of the same color), one for already visited links and another for new destinations. The whole notion of moving through time and space while engaging with content feels materially different on the Web.
Third, the Web has changed our ideas about what designing spatially means. Earlier visions of the field saw the two-page spread, the poster, or the book as the primary information landscape in which we work. Now the shape, size, and continuity of the landscape are moving targets. For example, consider computer screens, handheld devices, HDTV, and multidimensional spaces such as Imax planetarium shows. Additionally, the Web has required us to expand our repertoire to include full-motion video, animation, and sound in ways that were impossible a few decades ago.
Our theories have not kept up with the technology, and we have as a field tended to be reactive more than proactive. But that said, the Web has forced researchers and practitioners to think more critically about what we are doing and how we are doing it."
