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Transforming existing communications means going beyond mere optimisation
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Transforming existing communications means going beyond mere optimisation
If you’re faced with poor documents, there are various basic things you can do to improve them – editing them to improve readability, designing them neatly and legibly, and adding aids to navigation such as headings and links.
However, you will have optimised what you’ve been given, but you probably won’t have transformed it. These things are really hygiene factors – they should never have been wrong.
Transformation goes further, and requires more effort, more negotiation, and more investment:
Deconstruct/reconstruct: ideally, faced with a poor attempt at communicating, you take the whole thing apart and start again – identifying users and their needs, understanding the context and the topic, treating it as an entirely new project.
If this goes too far, there are some less drastic things you can do.
Easification: you add learning helps such as explanations, definitions and links to online videos. This makes it easier for readers, but the document is longer.
Visualisation: you use diagrams, and visual formats to lead people through difficult concepts. On the downside, this makes your document a challenge to read on a smartphone or with a screen reader.
Layering: you break up the content into layers at different levels of detail. Your document is now longer, and less straightforward to lay out, but easier to use for different purposes.
Each strategy brings particular gains, but any radical change brings risks.
Waller, R. (2011). Simplification: What is gained and what is lost (Technical paper 1). Simplification Centre.