Publications

These flashcards are used at our annual summer school to quickly introduce key theories and models which can inform our practice, and which contribute to a critical method for information designers.

Most people don't read the small print because it's deliberately made unreadable. That's often fine because it's not of practical importance. But sometimes it is very important, and people trip up. I argue here that many contract-related problems can be viewed as cognitive accidents and that we should change our perspective to one of duty of care, and risk management.

A new Consumer Rights Act (CRA) came into force in the UK in October 2015. One notable provision is that it acknowledges the problem of small print. In March 2016 the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills issued a Call for Evidence looking for guidance about how to make Terms and Conditions more usable, so we held a Simple Action day to put together a Simplification Centre response.

Opioid overdoses are a huge problem, but there is a temporary antidote, naloxone, which is being increasingly made available for emergency use. A naloxone injection counters the effects of overdose for around twenty minutes, giving time for medical help to be summoned. Naloxone kits may be used by untrained people, so the instructions are critical. We got together to review the instructions for one kit used widely in the UK, and show how much better they could be.

If your car is caught by a speeding camera, you get a ‘notice of intended prosecution’ in the mail, asking you to confirm who was driving. It’s a confusing document, poorly written and poorly laid out. Yet failure to respond could result in a fine or more penalty points. We wanted to see if the template we developed for Simple Action 1 would also work for this document.

In 2014/15 we were part of the UK government's Clear Law Initiative, working alongside members or Clarity. This paper explores improved typographic structures and layered formats for legislation.

Tenancy agreements are important documents, but they are surprisingly varied in content, language and design. There is currently no standard (although the UK government has recently announced it is working on a model agreement), so we spent a day rethinking tenancy agreements. In this report we show two proposals, both easily convertible from conventional agreements. Both of them see the primary audience as the tenant and landlord, rather than the law court they might end up in if the relationship goes wrong.

A conference paper from 1995 made available as a contribution to our discussions of the information design curriculum.

If you drive in the UK, the chances are that you will have received a Penalty Charge Notice at some point (if you haven’t, well done). If you stray into a bus lane, or park for too long, or park in the wrong place, you will get an official notice that’s as challenging a read as you can imagine. This report demonstrates how basic principles of simplification can make these notices much easier to understand.

An account of our design training programme, in the context of the need for professionalisation among document designers.

A commentary piece, initiating a debate about the RNIB’s Clear Print standard. We felt their recommendations went too far – all print would be so large that effective layout would be impossible – and were not sufficiently based on evidence.

A case study of document improvement, outlining a project we did to simplify letters for the UK's Department of Work and Pensions

A report comparing the criteria used to evaluate documents, from a range of organisations including our own.

A report about our origins and our first two years as part of Reading University.

Basic guidelines on typeface choice, answering questions we are sometimes asked.

A research report of a study of what people notice in typographic design, and how it affects their perception of tone of voice, purpose and audience.

A conference paper on design theory, based on Christopher Alexander’s pattern language approach – identifies and names common design solutions.

We are sometimes asked to evaluate documents, and in our early days we ran a benchmarking service. This report explains the research background to our evaluation criteria.

A report of our benchmarking evaluations for member organisations. What are they typically good at or bad at?

This early report thinks through some of the basic problems of simplification. What are the benefits, but also what are the losses – is it 'dumbing down', is important accuracy lost? In many (perhaps even most) cases, the process of simplification doesn't reduce the underlying complexity and richness of content, but improves the user’s ability to navigate it – it produces a simpler experience, or a simpler understanding. 

An academic conference paper, reporting on the building of a document corpus – a tagged database that can be used to study document design systematically. (Assumes some knowledge of applied linguistics).

A report of a document diary study, showing what people think about the documents they pick up or receive in the mail.