From reducing costs to making life easier for customers, good information design is of crucial to the success of businesses, say Mark Barratt and Sue Walker
Information design can offer a host of business benefits for example:
- Good instructions can reduce accidents, as well as calls to help desks or customer centres
- Clear forms usually cut customer 'errors' which lose sales and create delay
- Straightforward bills and payment demands can help ensure prompt payment, which in turn will improve cashflow
- Comprehensible annual reports help shareholders and other stakeholders make better, more informed decisions
- Simple process descriptions and procedures promote quality and traceability
- Good signs in the right places save everyone time and spare their frustration
- Information design is often critical in ensuring that multi-disciplinary teams actually deliver something that customers and partners can understand and act on
Customer communication is becoming ever more complex. Brand values now inform letters, forms, call-centre dialogues and shop-floor conversations as well as advertising and manuals. Backing up that communication is a range of systems whose development and maintenance involves IT and business process analysts as well as operations management and logistics professionals. Information design is the glue that binds information systems, operations and marketing to ensure the customer gets a usable information product.
Applying information design principles to internal documents such as forms, spreadsheets, databases and reports helps to ensure the efficient and effective gathering, processing and dissemination of information. Decision-makers will benefit particularly from clear internal reports and presentations.
Information design can dramatically improve people's relationships with public services through user-friendly documents and systems. Effective information design can enhance the efficiency with which these services are run, improve the uptake of services, and help to create a positive relationship between service suppliers and service users.
UK public services led the world in information design practice from the pioneering London Underground map, through work on forms by the Organisation and Methods division of the Treasury in the 1960s and Jock Kinnear and Margaret Calvert’s UK road sign systems, to the development of research-driven forms design in the 1980s following the Rayner Review.
Today, public service delivery is more complex, and there is a huge opportunity for UK public services to rise to the challenge of ‘transformational government’ set by the Prime Minister in 2005, committed to using service design principles to deliver ‘citizen and business centred services’ across public services. Some early signs are good - work in the NHS by the National Patient Safety Agency, and in the wider area of health by the Design Council are encouraging.
Like business, public services benefit from more efficient internal communication: better decisions come from better-presented data. Fundamentally, democracy is enabled by an informed electorate; information design can significantly assist the explanation of issues, trends and decisions.