Liberate Information With Design

[Note: I have placed a small addendum at the bottom of this entry for those that have already read it.] Whilst I was wandering the web in search of new information, I came across an old article by Greg Storey of Airbag fame entitled A Better Tighty Whitey. I probably saw it last year when it was written, but never followed the discussion. Intrigued by my initial perusal, I read it all.

If you have not read the article or do not care to read it, I shall summarize for you: Greg explains his dismay at the lack of design in important government documents, such as the President’s Daily Briefing. The infamous August 6, 2001 PDB was declassified last year, prompting Greg to react. His solution was to redesign the document to a better standard. A lively discussion of the redesign and purpose of design in information presentation ensued.

In all fairness, many of the commentaries differ between the necessity and usability of Greg’s redesigned PDB. The pragmatists state that the document is purposefully made to be hard to read and that the President does not actually read it at all. In addition, some nay-sayers pointed to the misleading usage of color and boldness to highlight passages in Greg’s redesigned document. These are all valid points as the color and bolding can be used to sway the reader into seeing only certain pieces of the larger puzzle, yet I would argue that if the document were peer-reviewed, the most important information would come out on top, instead of a biased subset of the briefing.

Additionally, some expressed their discontent with the large number in the “Threat Matrix,” as they argued it could be used to mean how strong the threat spelled out in the briefing really is. As things go in the intelligence community, no one can be sure because information is sketchy, unreliable and often incomplete. No real assessment can be made. While this is all true, I would agree that this number might be used to represent the overall accuracy and credibility of the information contained within the document. It would be up to the President and his underlings to decide how to use the information based on that number. Lower numbers indicate a few unsubstantiated rumors and whisperings in the intelligence community while bigger numbers would indicate information from multiple reliable sources.

Some thought this a “tongue-in-cheek” posting by Greg, yet as he stated, there is a substantial increase in usability and comprehension of information when presented in a well-designed format. Although the exact details of what documents presented to the President ought to be designed in such a manner is debatable, there can be no doubt that the government needs a few lessons in such design.

For those interested, I have adapted Greg’s original Word format template to a Pages template for all to use. If you do not have Pages, part of Apple’s new iWork bundle, I suggest you go out and buy it (or at least try it somehow) because it is far less cumbersome to use than Microsoft Word, especially if you do not use all the bloated extra features of Word that are lost on most users.

Addendum: Slashdot was the source of the revival of this post, and that’s how I found it (again): full circle one year later. Greg did post a follow up to this story in a post called Paperboy. Also, as mentioned in Greg’s later post, he mentions that this was picked up by the Wall Street Journal. I would link to the article, but their stupid subscription model prevents linking to articles older than thirty days. So, I found an alternate version that sums up WSJ’s take on this interesting revelation.