Information Design Process
Information design projects require careful thinking, team collaboration, and good planning. Discovery is the initial and most important step in the process. This is the time to understand the needs of the client and the potential users, including any risks that effect the delivery of the project.
Before a project starts, it is important to determine the process and make sure that everyone who is involved understands their roles and responsibilities. A work plan is a great way to help the team to plan ahead
The foundation of a successful information design is a clear plan. Knowing what we want to accomplish helps form the decisions we have to make.
The number one reason why many projects fail is because most often people forget to answer basic questions: what do we need to accomplish and what do the users needs?
If you establish what the user needs and what you want to achieve doing the project you will develop a clear plan and vision.
The planning process in information design centers around the audience. Before you start your project it is extremely important to define and understand whom your audience is. You need to ask yourself the following questions: what are audience's needs and goals?
Information design may center on a broad audiences such as, public signs in shopping malls, highways, airports or they may cater to very specific ones: information products such as invoice or telephone bills.
Information design projects are often trying to create or gain trust in users of design products. It's important that readers understand, and trust the information they are reading. The designers need to get the messaging across in ways that will reach the audience.
To help an information designer to determine the audiences needs, they need to understand emotional and physical requirements of the audience.
Ask yourself the following questions to better understand your audience emotionally:
- What do you want them to know?
- Do you want to reassure or inspire them?
- Do you want to motivate them?
Physical requirements are equally important to understand. Think critically to determine the physical context in which way audience will use the information. For instance:
- Does the audience like to read?
- Are they going to interact with the design piece?
Also, think about the following web users' needs. For example, for many different user groups coming to web sites, you might want to remember that:
- Users are very busy
- Users don't want to read very much
- Users want to get tasks done as quickly as possible
- Users may not know a lot of your technical vocabulary
Personas
" Develop a precise description of our user and what he wishes to accomplish" - Alan Cooper
To understand your audience better and make project more effective information designers make pretend users and design for them. In information design world they call them personas. In other words a persona is a brief profile of a typical user that has desires, needs, habits and capabilities. These pretended user personas are the necessary base of good information design.
Creating persona's is not always easy process. It requires detailed process and validation. First, you need to define what is you main audience type. Then, create short list of specifications for your audience type. For example, age, gender, profession, education and such. (Figure 1 Example of a persona)
Figure 1. Example of a persona
Scenarios
Scenarios are detailed descriptions of what the site will do from the user's perspective. Scenarios help you to identify specific ways how users interact with information design.
Scenarios can be very specific related to a one task flow such as flow of user completing an action with online system to purchase a merchandise. Or it could be a scenario how users interact with a specific web site. Scenarios could be specific or brief depending on complexity of the project.
Figure 1. Project Flowchart
The written content is a key element of information design. It is essential for information designer to use content that is written in a clear, concise and meaningful way. It is called plain language.
What is Plain Language? Plain language is a simple way of thinking and writing. Writing plain language does not mean to make short sentences, it means writing effectively that your audience can both find and understand the information you provide.
Why should information designer use plain language? More importantly, communicating clearly saves time and money, and it improves reader response to the message information designer is trying to deliver.
