Clarity, please

I've been thinking a lot lately about clarity...or more specifically, the lack of clarity in our everyday lives.  How many times each week do we have the opportunity (or burden) of trying to figure something out—whether it's assembling a box-full of parts into a single piece of Swedish furniture, figuring out how to navigate a web site, or finding our way around a new place?

Whenever we interact with a place, product or service, the designer of that experience has a great opportunity to bless us with clarity.  Where do I go?  What do I do next?  What slot does Tab A go into?  With clear answers to these and other questions we can do almost anything, and maybe enjoy doing it too!  Lacking such clear directions, we waste time unnecessarily, we feel stressed and maybe we try to avoid the whole situation if possible.  Almost certainly we try to avoid repeating the experience.

A couple of weeks ago our company switched health insurance plans, so we all had to fill out the usual forms with our life history, dependents' information and every other possible question.  The form in question was unusually poorly designed, and together with the company's web site, gave conflicting instructions—to the point that it confused many of us and caused us to spend more time on what should have been a simple task.  I'm sure mistakes were made.  And I can't help but wonder if such mistakes don't cost that company money in the long run.  It may cost them customers too.

In our work here we have to communicate tons of information to people, usually in a short period of time.  We tend to use a lot of  pictures (charts and diagrams), probably because we're visual people here.  But I also think it helps our clients understand what we're trying to tell them.  We've even had occasions where, by taking a client's own data and charting it in a particular way, we have revealed trends to them—trends they hadn't recognized.

We try really hard to continuously improve the clarity of our communications.  I know we succeed in some ways, but we also have tons of room to improve.  This web site, which I think is version 3 or 4 of strategicdimensions.com, is our latest attempt to tell our story more clearly.  We think it's an improvement over the prior iterations...but of course there will be a version 5 someday!

© Strategic Dimensions 2008