Tag Archives: Visual communication

Help your readers see what you mean with informative graphics

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As Forbes.com contributor Naomi Robbins says,

Despite the fact that graphs are now ubiquitous in virtually every field of business, very few people have received any training on how to read or design  a graph.

Naomi ran a graph makeover contest in which she explains why the bar graph shown here

Source: Simon Queenborough in Alternatives to the Pie/Donut Chart in the Graph Makeover Contest at Forbes.com

is a much better choice than the original pie/donut chart: the bar graph “shows that we can draw an eye-catching, attention-getting figure without sacrificing accuracy.” Follow the link to her explanation of why the pie/donut chart is inaccurate.

Creating informative graphics is briefly explained in Chapter 5 of Revising Professional Writing in Science and Technology, Business, and the Social Sciences (3rd edition). If you’re using the book in a formal setting, you’ll find many exercises in that chapter, requiring you to practice identifying the best type of graphic and then designing and integrating it into a workplace document. But here are some additional resources to help you learn to use graphics:

  • a sample document, including both an original and revised version
  • a brief video tutorial
  • a list of research articles supporting my guidance

Enter feedback in the comments below if you have a suggestion for making these resources more helpful.

Sample Document

Take a look at page 10 in the  Outsourcing Report adapted by me based on a report produced by the Datamonitor Group (http://www.theblackbookofoutsourcing.com/). The document’s context can be described as:

  • Writer: employee in a business information and marketing analysis company
  • Readers: managers at the company’s original client, as well as at other companies that provide human resource services internationally
  • Bottom Line Message: a compilation of customer satisfaction data
View this document on Scribd

Here’s a revised version of the information on page 10 of that report with more effective graphics.

View this document on Scribd

Video Tutorial

The outsourcing report is included in this video about informative graphics in workplace documents. My goal is to provide a succinct (~9 minute) guide to the essentials of using graphics to inform and persuade readers at work.

Related Readings

There are posts here at Pros Write that deal with informative graphics in workplace documents. Just enter “graphics” in the search field near the top of this page. There’s so much to read in this area, it’s hard to tell you where to go. But if you want to see the research supporting my guidance, you might start with the following sources.

Amare, N. & Manning, A. (2013). A Unified Theory of Information Design: Visuals, Text & Ethics. Amityville, NY: Baywood.

Ancker, J.S. et al. (2006). Design Features of Graphs in Health Risk Communication: A Systematic Review. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 13(6),  pp. 608–618.

Tufte, E. R. (2001). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Unexpected results of research on format and parallelism

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I regularly advise writers to use grammatical parallelism and visual formatting to influence document quality. (Use the links if you don’t know what I mean.) But I saw some evidence presented by colleagues at a recent conference that led me to refine that advice. Here’s the bottom line for those who don’t want the details:

  1. Use both parallelism and format to improve readability reading efficiency and accurate identification and recall of information.
  2. Use format alone to improve readability reading efficiency and accurate identification and recall of information.
  3. Don’t use parallelism alone to improve readability accurate identification and recall of information.

It pains me to offer you #3. It runs counter to what I’ve long held to be true. I suspect that’s true for many of you as well. But I can’t ignore the evidence. Ugh. Details below.

July 22, 2014 Update: I’ve tweaked the wording of my guidance based on more investigation of related research. See this post for details.

Some Background on the Research

The researchers did two studies where they asked people to read documents and then tested their recall by asking multiple-choice content questions without allowing them to look back at the documents.

Study 1. To test the effect of grammatical parallelism and visual formatting on readability, 100 people read a version of a passage from Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy from 1866. (This limited the possibility of influence based on previous knowledge.)  There were 4 document versions: (a) parallel [P+] and formatted [V+], (b) parallel and unformatted, (c) nonparallel and formatted, and (d) nonparallel and unformatted.

They found that accuracy was most affected by visual formatting and not much at all by grammatical parallelism. These results are the basis for my first two pieces of advice at the beginning of this post.

Study 2. To test the effect of grammatical parallelism and visual formatting on emotional response, 87 people read one of the four versions of the same passage from Study 1 followed by a question measuring their emotional response and then received either (a) parallel [Q+] or (b) nonparallel multiple-choice content questions again followed by a question measuring their emotional response.

They found the greatest inconsistency of emotional response in document versions without visual formatting and with grammatical parallelism of both the reading text and the multiple-choice questions. These results are the basis for my third piece of advice at the beginning of this post.

So What’s Wrong with Inconsistent Emotional Response?

If you’ve read this far, I’m pretty sure this is the question you’re asking. Here goes.

Unity is a fundamental quality of human perception. Humans actively seek and prefer experiences that we can interpret as unified. This idea from Gestalt psychology is one I wrote about extensively in a 1995 book on document design. The lack of unity or consistency in color is the reason Smashing Magazine used the website shown at right in its Ugly Showcase.

My colleagues, Nicole Amare and Alan Manning, argue that unity or consistency is especially important for types of textual elements they call “decoratives.” That includes grammatical parallelism (and color). Decoratives are aesthetic. Parallelism does not convey information itself. Rather, it evokes a feeling about that information. Many people describe parallel text with terms related to organization: tidy, orderly, tight, neat, uncluttered, etc. As Manning said,

Parallel but visually unformatted text evidently disrupts that unified feeling and is therefore less desirable.

Visually formatted but nonparallel text was not a problem, confirming visual format is far more salient to readers than parallelism. I suspect inconsistent feelings slow down cognitive processing and distract us from our quest for comprehension. I’ve long believed parallelism affects efficiency more than effectiveness in documents with a primarily informative function. But that research hasn’t been done — yet.

References

Amare, N. & Manning, A. (October, 2013). Grammatical and visual parallelism in business communication pedagogy. Association for Business Communication Convention, New Orleans, LA.

Amare, N. & Manning, A. (2013). A Unified Theory of Information Design: Visuals, Text & Ethics. Amityville, NY: Baywood.

Campbell, K.S. (1995). Coherence, Continuity & Cohesion: Theoretical Foundations for Document Design. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

What do your format choices mean to readers?

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Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz summarize the implications of some recent psychological research on format this way:

Any variable that facilitates or impairs fluent information processing can profoundly affect people’s judgements and decisions. [Writers] are therefore well advised to present information in a form that facilitates easy processing: if it’s easy to read, it seems easy to do, pretty, good, and true.

Let’s explore this using a memo with a simple plan for reducing energy costs in an office as an example.

Memo A

Simplicity of typeface determines perceived simplicity of content

The actual content — every single word — and its arrangement is the same in Memo A and Memo B.

Memo B

But we can predict readers of Memo B will believe the content is difficult to understand or the recommendation is difficult to implement because of the typefaces chosen.

  • Memo A uses MS Word’s old defaults: Arial for headings and Times New Roman for body text.
  • Memo B uses Forte for headings and Mistral for body text.

If readers considering the proposed recommendation could choose between reading Memo A or Memo B, Memo A would win out nearly every time. That’s because typefaces influence how fluently information can be processed. We equate easy to read with easy to understand or do.

Familiarity of typeface and words determine perceived risk within content

Memo C

Another problem with using the typefaces in Memo B has to do with their lack of familiarity. It turns out that we associate risk with the unfamiliar.

Here’s another example of this principle. The content of Memo A and Memo C is identical except Memo A uses the word “reduce,” while Memo C replaces that word with “curtail.” Nothing else is different between the two memos.

Yet we can predict that readers of Memo C will believe the recommendation is more risky than readers of Memo A because of the use of the less familiar “curtail.” In this case, we’re talking about a difference in style rather than format. The point is that we equate easy to read –whether because of familiar typeface or word choice — with safety.

Legibility determines perceived truthfulness of content

Memo D

Memo D is exactly the same as Memo A except that it is less legible because of the low color contrast between the black text on the blue background. We can predict that readers of Memo D will believe less in the truth of its content than readers of Memo A. We equate easy to read with true.

In sum, your format choices influence what readers think of your content. Is it difficult or easy to use and understand? Is what you’re talking about risky or safe? Is it the truth?  All excellent reasons to learn a few principles for choosing a successful format for your documents. My video tutorial (see the link below) covers the basics of using typefaces, page layout, and lists.

Thanks to Cheryl Stephens for making me aware of this article in The Psychologist.  The original is worth a read to learn more about the research behind successful formatting choices.

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Looking for help with the slides for your presentation?

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Photo Credit: michael+yan via Compfight cc

Rule #1 from 7 Lessons from the World’s Most Captivating Presenters:

Start with paper, not PowerPoint

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve mentioned my colleague, Jean-luc Doumont, when offering help to those of you writing slides for a presentation. Jean-luc taught me that if you can’t make good visuals, you shouldn’t create them. Concentrate on developing content and delivering your message (body language, voice, etc.).

A few months ago, Jean-luc was in the US, giving a lecture on creating effective slides at the Center for Teaching and Learning at Stanford. Short of talking to the lecturer in person, there’s little I could offer that would help you  more than listening to that recording and applying the simple (but not painless) principles he teaches.

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Pros right visuals for presentations

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OK. I know the title of this post is a little strange because of the use of “right.” But it captures the lesson I try sharing with anyone who asks me how to be a better presenter. Getting the visuals right is the single biggest hurdle for most folks. (Read a little more before you dismiss this idea!)

Let me provide a caveat before I go on. Oral presentation is not really my area of expertise. As a researcher or coach, I’ve spent far more time focusing on professional writing than speaking, and I can claim only a single study in this area (Peer versus self assessment of oral business presentation performance). Still . . . I’ve been around other experts long enough to have learned a few things. As a presenter, I’m moderately successful compared to my peers.  And I’m always trying to improve. So here is my short list of critical points about “righting” your visuals.

Poor visuals are worse than no visuals at all. I learned this from my friend, Jean-Luc Doumont. You can listen to his brief podcast on Creating Effective Presentation Slides at the IEEE Professional Communication Society site. If you can’t make good visuals, don’t waste your time on them. Instead, concentrate on developing content and delivering your message (body language, voice, etc.). So, when I say getting the visual right is your biggest hurdle, I’m really saying you should concentrate on yourself as the primary visual in your presentations.

This appears to be precisely what Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, did in her 2010 presentation shown below. If you watch a few minutes of the video, you’ll see that Ms. Sandberg uses no visuals. The only thing projected on the screen is the live video feed of her speaking. It’s still a great talk. Poor visuals would have made it less great.

If you have spent sufficient time on how you present yourself, you can spend some time creating decent visuals.

Good visuals are not verbal. I learned this from watching good presentations, like those captured in TED Talks. (You might want to view TED’s 10 commandments for preparing speakers.)  The 2005 presentation below by James Watson about how he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA primarily uses photographs of people and some simple drawings from a book as a supplement to his talk.

I love words. And I have a pretty low level of visual literacy or graphic skill. I’m a linguist. Not an artist or designer. Or even a chemist. But those of us talking about words can use visuals that are less verbal, too. Watch a little of the 2010 talk by Alan Siegel (of Siegel+Gale) below. Mr. Siegel is talking about document design and plain language. He NEEDS to show us documents because that’s what he’s talking about. But those documents are displayed as pictures. There are few words the audience is actually expected to — or even allowed to — read in any of his visuals.

Technology might help you create better visuals. I’m always looking for tools to improve my visual IQ. I remember when my visuals were one-page typed handouts. I also remember using overheads. I started using PowerPoint in the mid-90s. Now . . . many folks blame PowerPoint for every poor presentation. But Gavin McMahon over at Make a POWERful POINT  provides excellent guidance for building effective slide decks with the most commonly used technology for creating visuals for a presentation. Gavin has also recently done a three-part series on other technologies:

  • Prezi, which I’ve been using for a few years now because it forces me to be less verbal. My video-tutorials combine PowerPoint and Prezi in a fairly simplistic way. I didn’t think anyone needed to watch my talking head so, in this case, the visual with my voice-over makes up the entire presentation. I like Prezi because it encourages me to be less verbal.
  • SlideKlowd, which looks intriguing when presenting to a large audience. I have to deliver a keynote address next fall to a large group and think I’ll try this technology out for that presentation.
  • Haiku Deck, which looks promising for presentations to a small audience. I just downloaded the iPad app and will play around with this for my next small meeting.

That’s my little bit of wisdom on getting visuals right for a presentation. Let me hear from you if you have suggestions.
Photo Credit: jurvetson via Compfight cc

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A lesson on the bottom line

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The AACSB peer review team left this morning after a whirlwind onsite accreditation visit to our business school. I shared a copy of our report with you a couple of months ago. Today I want to share a lesson on bottom line messages.

Some background. One area in which the College is reviewed is called Assurance of Learning (AOL). Also sometimes referred to as assessment. Reporting on our AOL activities allows us to document that we know what our students learn in our degree programs and that we continuously improve those programs to enhance student learning. In our accreditation report, we followed a prescribed arrangement of materials with AOL information contained within one section of the body and within the appendices in summary tables. Here’s an example of one of those tables for our undergraduate program (with around 6,500 students currently enrolled).

There are four basic types of information in this table identified with red circles for you (but not in the original document).

  1. The portion of the table devoted to Learning Goals describes the target knowledge or skills for students in a specific degree program. (There are five for our bachelor’s degree.)
  2. The entries for Assessment Tools describe how the learning goals are measured. (Two of these are writing assignments from required courses, which were collected from hundreds of students during spring of 2011 and scored using a faculty-developed rubric by independent raters.)
  3. The content in the Results section describes performance of students on the chosen measures. (For instance, although our students met the target of 80% meeting expectations for professional writing, there was a significant decrease in the percentage who exceeded expectations compared with a couple of years ago.)
  4. The bottom of the table is devoted to Resulting Improvement Initiatives in three categories: curricular changes, assessment procedure changes, and co-curricular changes. (One of the curricular changes recommended in this case was to hire more full-time faculty instead of relying on graduate students to teach professional writing.)

Back to my lesson on the bottom line.

Here’s what happened when our reviewers read our report: They recognized that we had appropriate learning goals and were collecting measures of that learning. However, they questioned whether we were actually using those measurements to drive improvement in our programs. (In the assessment world, this is called “closing the loop” and is obviously of critical importance.) Luckily, when our reviewers visited with our faculty and asked about continuous improvement, we were able to describe examples from lots of degree programs, including the bachelor’s degree.

So what went wrong? As the writer, I failed to understand what the bottom line message of these summary tables was for my readers.  If I had recognized the improvement initiatives as the bottom line (rather than thinking the bottom line was about the appearance of all four aspects of the process), I would have highlighted the improvement initiatives.  How? What is first (or biggest or loudest) has salience. (I’ve written about the psychology behind perception in information design before.) So I could have used some change in typeface or size or color to make this section of the table more salient. Or I could have moved this information out of the table and made it more prominent by discussing it first. Etc.

Here’s what I think is important about this lesson. It’s another reminder that the bottom line message is critical. And that it’s not the same for every reader. In addition, it shows that soliciting comments from readers on drafts (ours saw two versions of the report before it was officially submitted) doesn’t guarantee success. Despite the fact that our readers praised the quality of our report, this bottom line message wasn’t clear to them. So perhaps the critical lesson is about keeping open the possibility of conversation to supplement any written documentation even in — or especially in — a bureaucracy.

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Amateurs don’t show when they tell

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Everybody loves show and tell. Check out this monthly event in Brooklyn. Sadly, the workplace equivalent of “showing” typically consists of PowerPoint slides filled with text. That’s tell and tell rather than show and tell. Everybody complains about PowerPoint. A Google search showed that “Death by PowerPoint” appeared 11,100 times in newly created web content in the past week. Geez! That might qualify as an epidemic.

There are certainly other software options for workplace presenters. I like Prezi because it forces me to be visual rather than verbal. (It’s a struggle since words are my passion.) But it’s overly simplistic to blame software for a presenter’s lack of skill in using it to show the audience something meaningful and interesting. Gavin, the author of Show is better than Tell

is a PowerPoint obsessive, who has managed to figure out a way to use PowerPoint to communicate and message very effectively.

Gavin’s blog demonstrates what he’s preaching. It’s visually fun without being frivolous. Check it out.

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