Information Design

information architecture and design

information architecture and design

Information Architecture

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the basic principles of organising information

Books on Information Architecture are coming thick and fast at the moment. Christina Wodtke’s approach will appeal to anyone who wants to learn the main principles, without having to wade through lots of abstractions and jargon. Her written style is very much influenced by web-based writing. She is concise, straight to the point, and entertaining. She starts out by looking at the basics of navigation, screen layout, subject categorising, usability, and liquid pages.

All the time, she keeps the site visitor in mind. It’s a friendly, practical approach, and she illustrates all her points with plenty of screenshots. The main novelty she has to offer is to puncture some of the common suppositions about web design. For instance she argues quite persuasively against a one-size-fits-all approach:

Beware of gurus peddling simple answers. Instead, seek better tools to help you think up better solutions. Think first. Design second.

As is common with good advice, a lot of it seems very obvious when spelled out – but it is useful to be reminded that on the homepage of a site you should ‘show people the range of your offerings’.

She also recommends ‘see also’ pages of the kind at which Amazon excel. If someone visits pages dealing in laptops and novels, there’s a good chance they will also be interested in software and magazine subscriptions.

There’s a particularly good chapter on meta-data where she explains the reason why ‘information about information’ is important. This also includes a clear account of controlled vocabularies – one of the latest issues in usability and Web promotion.

She explains the systems of what are called ‘global navigation systems’ – the links, buttons, and tabs which normally appear at the side(s) and top of every page.

The latter part of the book deals with the process of mapping out and designing a site. This is something that should be done with pencil and paper. She includes storyboarding techniques, sitemaps, content inventories, wireframes – and even illustrates how to conduct cheap, small-scale usability testing.

This is another top quality production from New Riders – who have almost cornered the market in books on this subject.

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Christina Wodtke, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2002, pp.348, ISBN: 0735712506

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Information Dashboard Design

June 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

effective visual communication of data

Dashboards have become popular in recent years as powerful tools for communicating important information at a glance. They tend to imitate motor car fascias or small airplane cockpit controls and they are used for displaying sales figures, statistics, business information (BI) and any sort of key performance indicators (KPIs). They can be used for all sorts of purposes – monitoring stock market prices, showing the weather, recording production output, or listing web site usage.

My blog for instance is monitored by a service which shows me with maps, graphs, and bar charts who has been visiting, where in the world they are located, how many entries they viewed, and which browser they were using. Stephen Few begins by looking at some examples and defining the issue of dashboards – which is not as simple as you might imagine, Then he looks as some examples of bad design. These include dial gauges with no numbers; pie charts whose slices don’t add up to 100; graphs with distorted axes; meaningless colour coding; and results presented in two and three-dimensional forms which occlude anything that happens to be behind them (as my web site analyser does for instance).

Next he deals with the principles of visual perception – how and why we see things as we do. It’s interesting that he follows exactly the same design principles as Edward Tufte, which is to simplify everything as much as possible, remove all unnecessary chart junk, and let the data speak for itself.

He shows examples of good design, and more importantly how to improve it. The not-so-hidden secret all the time is ‘Less is more’.

Next comes ‘a taxonomy of dashboard media’ – that is, an exposition of all the different ways data can be shown on screen. He shows graphs, bar charts, dials and gauges, pie-charts, and Edward Tufte’s new invention, sparklines. The merits and disadvantages of each system are very well illustrated, and he argues quite persuasively that there’s hardly ever a good reason for using a pie-chart. Reasons? They take up too much room, are hard to read, yield little, and the same information could be delivered more efficiently in other ways.

He shows how all these principles can be brought together to produce good design principles – but then finishes with something very instructive. It’s a design for a business information dashboard, followed by several alternative designs and critiques of them. He shows why, even though they might look superficially attractive, they have design flaws and don’t do the job as effectively.

This is a handsomely designed and well produced book which follows its own principles of clear presentation and efficient communication.

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Stephen Few, Information Dashboard Design, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2006, pp.211, ISBN: 0596100167

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Information Design

June 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays on the theory and practice of information design

There has recently been a great deal of debate amongst members of the design community about the status of their profession, the exact meaning of ‘information design’, and the nature of what it is they are supposed to be doing. This collection of essays is a contribution to that debate and an attempt to think about the future of information design. The first part of the book offers a number of theoretical statements, in the best of which Robert E. Horn – one of the earliest pioneers of writing about hypertext – provides a useful historical survey of designers of information.

He summarises his argument by claiming that there now exists a ‘visual language’ in which words, images, and shapes are combined into what he calls a ‘unified communication unit’. In another interesting essay, Romedi Passini discusses the issue of ‘wayfinding’ – which he points out is not merely a matter of signs. People navigate their passage through known and unknown terrain using markers and semiotics more subtle than pointing fingers and boards saying ‘This Way’. This essay is crying out for more illustration, which is rather surprising in a study of design.

Part two is concerned with practical applications, and offers examples as broad as tactile signage in an institution for visual disorders, graphic tools for thinking, and visual design in three dimensions. The longest and possibly most successful contribution is by C. G. Screven on signage in museums and other public places – successful because it unites theory and practice.

The third part deals with design in the field of information technology. An essay by Jim Gasperini breathes some new life into the collection with his consideration of fiction, drama, and hypertext, and there are brief excursions into fractal sculpture and multimedia.

If ‘information design’ is now a coherent discipline and an honorable profession, then it could do with asserting itself more forcibly than do some of the contributors here. [Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web should be compulsory reading for all of them.] However, it’s a start, and one which anybody engaged with the current debates will do well to study.

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Robert Jacobson (ed) Information Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp.357, ISBN 026210069X

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Information Design a bibliography

October 28, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, ISBN: 0801855780. Details at Amazon

Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, ISBN: 0195019199. Details at Amazon

Laura Arlov, GUI Design for Dummies, Foster City (CA): IDG Books, 1997, ISBN: 0764502131. Details at Amazon

Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking, Berkeley and Los Angeles (CA): University of California Press, 1969, ISBN: 0520018710. Details at Amazon

Robin Baker, Designing the Future: the computer transformation of reality, London: Thames & Hudson, 1993, pp.208, ISBN 0500015783. Well illustrated coffee-table book on product and information design, with emphasis on graphics and the arts.

Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay and Ben Shneiderman Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, pp.686, 1999, ISBN 1558605339. A collection of scholarly papers, mainly from researchers at Xerox PARC – very technical – for specialists only.

Alan Clarke, Designing Computer-Based Learning Materials, London: Gower, 2001, pp.196, ISBN 0566083205. Guide to the principles of designing training and instructional materials – from conception through to testing and evaluation.

Marlana Coe, Human Factors for Technical Communicators, New York (NY): John Wiley & Sons, 1996, ISBN: 0471035300. Details at Amazon

Stephen Few, Information Dashboard Design, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2006, pp.211, ISBN 0596100167

Jennifer Fleming, Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience, Sebastapol (CA): O’Reilly, 1998, pp.253, ISBN 1565923510. Excellent guide to the principles of web design and navigation. Focuses on information architecture plus site usability effectiveness rather than HTML coding. Highly recommended.

Ben Fry, Visualizing Data, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2007, pp.366, ISBN 0596514557

Jesse James Garrett, The Elements of User Experience, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2003, pp.189, ISBN 0735712026.

Thea M. van der Geest, Web Site Design is Communication Design, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001, pp.165, ISBN 9027232024

Robert L. Harris, Information Graphics: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference, New York/London: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp.448, ISBN: 0195135326. Details at Amazon

James Hartley, Designing Instructional Text, London: Kogan Page, 3rd edn 1994, pp.183, ISBN 074941037X. Guide to the presentation of instructions – from paper size, through clear writing, to the use of diagrams and illustrations.

William K. Horton, Designing Web-Based Training : How to Teach Anyone Anything Anywhere Anytime, John Wiley & Sons, 2000, pp.640, ISBN: 047135614X. Best-selling guide to all aspects of instructional design and writing for web-based training materials.

William K. Horton, Illustrating Computer Documentation, New York (NY): John Wiley and Sons, 1991, ISBN: 0471538450. Details at Amazon

William K. Horton, Designing and Writing Online Documentation, New York (NY): John Wiley and Sons, 1994, ISBN: 0471306355. Details at Amazon

Bob Hughes, Dust or Magic: Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design, London: Addison-Wesley, 2000, pp.264, ISBN 0201360713. Amusing and thought-provoking study of working on multimedia projects – from web design to CD-ROM and interactive video.

Information Design Journal. http://www.benjamins.nl

Robert Jacobson (ed) Information Design, Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 1999, pp.357, ISBN: 026210069X. Collected papers setting out arguments for the professional status of information designers – with examples of their work.

James Kalbach, Designing Web Navigation, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2007, pp.394, ISBN 0596528108

Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller, Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design, London: Phaidon, 1996, pp.211, ISBN: 0714838519. This is a beautifully designed and exquisitely illustrated book which is a must for anyone interested in graphics, information design, typography, or media studies.

Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton, Web Style Guide, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, pp.164, ISBN: 0300076754. Excellent web site design guide. Originally written for medical students at Yale. Concentrates on design principles and navigation.

David Macauley, Cathedral: The story of its construction, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973, ISBN: 0395175135. Details at Amazon

Robert McKim, Experiences in Visual Thinking, (2nd edn) Boston: PWS Publishing Company, 1972, ISBN: 0818504110. Details at Amazon

Peter Morville, Ambient Findability, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005, pp.188, ISBN 0596007655

Kevin Mullet and Sano, Darrell, Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques, Englewood Cliffs (NY): Prentice Hall, 1995, ISBN: 0133033899. Details at Amazon

Jennifer Fleming, Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience, Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 1998, pp.253 plus CD-ROM, ISBN 1565923510

Jakob Nielsen, Usability Engineering, San Francisco (CA): Academic Press Professional/Morgan Kaufmann, 1994, ISBN: 0125184069. Details at Amazon

Jakob Nielsen, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, Indianapolis (Ind): New Riders, 2000, pp.420, ISBN: 156205810X. Nielsen puts speed and simplicity of access above all else in this tutorial on Web site design which pulls no punches. Fully illustrated with good and bad examples. Recommended.

Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir, Homepage Usability: 50 websites deconstructed, Indianapolis, (Ind): New Riders, 2002, pp.315, ISBN: 073571102X. Neilsen shows the strengths and weaknesses of famous web sites – and offers his own makeovers of their home pages.

Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (formerly The Psychology of Everyday Things) New York: Doubleday/Currency, 1998, ISBN: 0385267746. Classic study of usability in modern product engineering – establishes the principles of user-centred design. Highly recommended.

Elizabeth Orna, Information Strategy in Practice, London: Gower, 2004, pp.163, ISBN 0566085798.

Elizabeth Orna, Making Knowledge Visible, Aldershot, UK: Gower, 2005, pp.212, ISBN 0566085631.

Elizabeth Orna with Graham Stevens, Managing Information for Research, Buckinghamshire: Open University Press, second edition 2009, pp.271, ISBN 0335221424

Elizabeth Orna, Practical Information Policies, Hampshire: Gower, 2nd edn, 1999, pp.375, ISBN: 0566076934.

James G. Paradis, and Muriel L. Zimmerman, The MIT Guide to Science and Engineering Communication, Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 1997, ISBN: 0262161427. Details at Amazon

William Pena, Problem Seeking: An Architectural Programming Primer, (3rd edn) Washington (DC): American Institute of Architects Press, 1987.

Jonathan and Lisa Price, Hot Text: Web Writing that Works, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2002, pp.507, ISBN 0735711518. Professional-level manual on how to write, structure, and edit information for the Web. Highly recommended.

Louis Rosenfeld, and Peter Morville, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Sebastapol (CA): O’Reilly, 1998, pp.224, ISBN 1565922824. Advanced level web design concepts, focussing on the principles of efficient labelling, searching, and navigational aids. Highly recommended.

Jeffrey Rubin, Handbook of Usability Testing, New York (NY): John Wiley and Sons, 1994, ISBN: 0471594032. Details at Amazon

D. Sano, Designing large-scale web sites: A visual design methodology, New York (NY): John Wiley & Sons, 1996, ISBN: 047114276X. Details at Amazon

Karen Schriver, Dynamics in Document Design, New York (NY): John Wiley and Sons, 1997, ISBN: 0471306363. Wide-ranging academic and practical study in design theory and applications – with arguments for professionalism in design. Recommended.

Nathan Shedroff, Experience Design, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2001, pp.304, ISBN 0735710783. Double page graphic spreads of photos and web sites, with accompanying comments – all in avant garde [hard to read] typographic layout.

Jenifer Tidwell, Designing Interfaces, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005, pp.331, ISBN 0596008031.

Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Cheshire (CT): Graphics Press, 1983, ISBN 096139210X. The first of Tufte’s now-famous, beautifully illustrated books on information design in theory and practice. Highly recommended.

Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information, Cheshire (CT): Graphics Press, 1990, pp.126, ISBN 0961392118. The second in the Tufte Trilogy – focussing on ‘increasing information depth on paper’. Just as attractive as the other volumes. Highly recommended.

Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations. Images and quantities, evidence and narrative, Cheshire (CT): Graphics Press, 1997, pp.156, ISBN 0961392126. More from Tufte – arguing the need for accuracy, detail, precision, and truth in the presentation of quantities. Highly recommended.

Jeffrey Veen, The Art & Science of Web Design, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2001, pp.259, ISBN 0789723700. How the Web works, and why user-centred design is necessary. Analyses of successful sites, and how to use style sheets to control the layout of your pages. Highly recommended.

Toni Weller (ed), Information History in the Modern World, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp.211, ISBN: 0230237371

Peter Wildbur and Michael Burke, Information graphics: Innovative solutions in contemporary design, London: Thames and Hudson, 1998, ISBN: 0500018723. Details at Amazon

Robin Williams and John Tollett, The Non-Designer’s Web Book, Berkeley (CA): Peachpit, 2nd edn, 2000, pp.304, ISBN 0201710382. Beginners’ design manual – with emphasis on graphic design. Well illustrated and nicely designed. Details at Amazon

Christina Wodtke, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2002, pp.348, ISBN 0735712506. Gentle and easy-to-read introduction to the main concepts of Information Architecture. Well illustrated with screenshots. “Think first. Design second.”

Richard Saul Wurman, Information anxiety: What to do when information doesn’t tell you what you need to know, New York: Doubleday/Bantam, 1989, ISBN: 0553348566. Details at Amazon

H. J. G. Zwaga, T. Boersma & H. C. M. Hoonhout (eds) Visual Information for Everyday Use: Design and Research Perspectives, London: Taylor and Francis, 1999, pp.338, ISBN 0748406719. Details at Amazon

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Information History in the Modern World

February 9, 2011 by Roy Johnson

studies in data design 1750-2010

There’s a general tendency to believe that ours is pre-eminently the Age of Information. We speak of ‘information overload’, ‘data glut’, ‘digital anxiety’ and use various other metaphors of being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of knowledge, facts, and statistics at our disposal. But in fact information history has been around ever since people began making records and storing the results, even if those were marks on clay tablets. The difference is that we now have more immediate access to it, from a multiplicity of sources.

This collection of academic essays seeks to put down markers and make a contribution to a growing field of study – ‘the histories of information’. The use of the plural indicates that there is no single theory of the development of informatics, and ‘the Modern World’ in the book’s title should be taken as indicating the period from 1750 to the present. The individual studies cover an amazing range of topics and disciplines. They begin for instance with the recording of personal identity in public information systems. That is, the official data that tells you who a person actually is. The sources range from parish registers, lists of vagrants and householders, birth and marriage certificates, to the advent of ID numbers – which have still not found favour in the UK.

Many of the heroes of this pre-history were librarians, and there are sketches of the early information architects, including the seventeenth century figure of Théophraste Renaudot. Starting from an impulse to record the unemployed poor, he assembled what was an early form of labour exchange which also doubled as a pawn shop, a citizen’s advice bureau, and a publishing house for the Gazette de France – a combination of weekly newspaper and eBay.

There’s also a chapter on the design and completion of official government census and tax return forms which is (if you can believe it) almost amusing. First because of the appalling layout of the documents and the demands they made of people who might well have been illiterate and innumerate. Second because the understandable response of the recipients is to scribble illegibly, omit information, or give contradictory answers.

Other chapters include studies of the Imperial Institute (an empire of information) and the company staff magazine (information as paternalistic control). Although this young discipline is so far dominated by work done in the UK, the studies stretch themselves geographically to cover Denmark and Uganda.

The collection ends with a very theoretical examination of the notion of history itself, taking a view that in the digital age we cannot know the past because the ‘narratives’ by which we explore it in digital texts become too ephemeral. Like many other heavily theoretical arguments, this one does not bother stooping to examine any concrete examples but contents itself with a series of generalizations linked by mention of the most fashionable surnames in the genre of critical theory – from Baudrillard and Barthes to Eagleton, Derrida, and Foucault

This is something of a let-down after the fascinating studies which precede it. But like most theoretical writing of its kind, it will undoubtedly fade rapidly into oblivion, leaving the real life, hard work, concretely researched studies to speak for themselves. The study of information history might still be in its infancy (according to these authors) but with approaches as diverse as the best illustrated here it seems to be in safe hands.

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Toni Weller (ed), Information History in the Modern World, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp.211, ISBN: 0230237371

Information Strategy in Practice

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

practical information architecture – projects and policies

Elizabeth Orna is an information architect and strategist whose earlier work Practical Information Policies has become a classic text in this field. Her latest work Information Strategy in Practice is designed for a number of potential readers: students preparing to enter the information professions; working professionals; and senior managers in other specialisms who have responsibility for information activities. It’s something of a reworking of her earlier material, because the practical case studies on which it is based have been revisited and the lessons to be learned are presented here.

She starts out with some definitions of knowledge and information, stressing the interdependence of one on the other with a witty quote from Samuel Butler: “a chicken is merely the egg’s way of making another egg”. The organisations she investigates range from The Australian Securities and Investment Commission, to the Surrey police and the Tate Gallery. Her claims for the improvements that have been brought about by clear information policies there are well born out if you look at the Tate’s web site which has improved enormously of late, and is a model of clear structure and transparent navigation.

She recognises that although the people in organisations are supposed to work co-operatively and honestly towards a common goal, they often don’t. Information is sometimes not shared. I wish she had taken this further to consider departments which work in competition with each other, withhold information, and (in government) spy on each other.

There’s a very interesting and persuasive defence of the importance of taxonomy, classification systems, labelling, metadata, and indexing. Information architecture buffs will like this.

She finishes with some practical lessons gained from ‘difficult’ projects and some very clear guidelines for avoiding the worst mistakes. It’s not as substantial a work as her earlier Practical Information Policies, but this is one which information scientists will want to add to their list of recommended reading.

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Elizabeth Orna, Information Strategy in Practice, London: Gower, 2004, pp.163, ISBN: 0566085798

Making Knowledge Visible

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

practical information architecture – projects and policies

Elizabeth Orna is a big hitter in the field of information architecture and design. Her previous studies – Information Strategy in Practice, Practical Information Policies, and Managing Information for Research have all been very well received. This latest study Making Knowledge Visible sets out her ideas for making information more accessible and more useful. It is based on practical research projects conducted at institutions as diverse as the Co-Operative Bank, Essex County Council, The Tate Gallery, the National Health Service, and the Inland Revenue.

In the first two chapters she sets out her terms and definitions, then presents an overview of her arguments. Her central idea is a distinction she makes between knowledge and information. Knowledge resides in people’s brains: it is transformed into information when they express it in some form and make it available to someone else. That second person inverts the process by absorbing the information and transforming it into personal knowledge. She uses the term ‘Information Products’ to describe the medium in which these transformations take place: these could be books, reports, data bases, or web sites.

In any organisation these information products constitute a very valuable asset, and they ought to be complete, up to date, documented, and searchable. So much should be quite obvious, but anybody who has worked in industry, commerce, or government knows that this is often not the case. Orna is quick to observe:

I gave up being surprised a long ago by how often those essential products look as if they had been designed to repel all boarders, drive users to distraction, dissuade potential customers from purchase of goods or services, and impede staff in their work.

Fortunately, she goes on to give examples of organisations who have profited from making their own IPs explicitly to themselves. Those who have taken the trouble to value their information have profited from doing so.

But she doesn’t shy away from negative examples There’s an excruciating account of trying to bring rationality and coherence to the Department of Trade and Industry which makes you feel glad you don’t work there.

A lot of the discussion of information is often abstract, but she does make the interesting point that the value of information and knowledge are unusual compared with other commodities:

Transactions in them among people can benefit all parties
They don’t wear out from use
Information can be used in multiple ways by many people simultaneously

Most of the ‘black museum’ cases she exposes result in financial losses inefficiency, and employee frustration; but she also includes the example of the Cambridge police mishandling of public records which resulted in the employment of Ian Huntley as a school caretaker, even though he had a police record for attempted rapes. The result was the tragic murder of two children.

She also deals with some interesting examples which come to light as a result of the Freedom of Information Act. Institutions are obliged to comply with the new requirements to make certain of their information publicly available – but how can they do so accurately unless they have a complete and up-to-date inventory of their own data?

The main lesson which emerges is very simple and quite obvious – but it is seldom implemented. That is, there needs to be an organisational overview and a coherent approach to the management of information within an organisation – and the strength of Elizabeth Orna’s approach is that she does show how it is possible.

One other feature of her work I found attractive is that she moves easily between the world of print and the web, seeing the benefits of both. For those who want to pursue these issues at a more advanced level, she also considers metadata and the Dublin Core.

Information design is a subject which spins out in all directions to include other subjects – information architecture; typography and graphic presentation; usability; web design; systems analysis; and organisational structures. One of the strong features of Orna’s work is that she takes them all into account.

All her claims are meticulously documented, and each chapter carries its own bibliography and list of relevant URLs. It’s also worth noting that the book itself is very elegantly designed by her usual collaborator Graham Stevens.

This is a book aimed at information and systems analysts and managers, web designers, communication specialists, plus teachers and students of business management. I think librarians, project managers, and business consultants would also have a lot to learn from what she has to say.

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Elizabeth Orna, Making Knowledge Visible, Aldershot, UK: Gower, 2005, pp.212, ISBN: 0566085631

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Managing Information for Research

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

practical strategies for data management and research

Most people feel challenged when faced with the prospect of a research project. And why not? After all, it’s not something we do every day. The biggest problem (usually) is knowing how to cope with both the shape and the volume of information. Elizabeth Orna’s advice in Managing Information for Research is that we should concentrate on managing the process of research. She deals with the essential questions which are asked by anybody undertaking a project. What am I looking for? Why am I looking for it? How shall I set about the task? Where shall I start looking? And she answers these questions by showing practical examples and demonstrating how to both define and limit the task. Her evidence is drawn from a long and distinguished career, working in education and government.

What she is offering here are “ways of thinking about information, and practical techniques of applying the thinking that are characteristic of the disciplines known variously as ‘information science’, ‘librarianship’, ‘information management’, or ‘information studies’.” This is not how to grub around for your data, but what to do with it when you’ve got it.

She discusses for instance the simple practicalities of organising information – on cards; on A4 pages; and in indexes. [This section is crying out for extended hypertext consideration in the next edition.] She also gives an excellent example (culled from a negative experience on an MA course) of why it is important to keep a full documentary record of a research project – complete with a list of the documents required to do it. This is first-rate advice, generated from first-hand educational experience.

There’s also a section on time management, complete with guidance on estimating how long it will take to complete tasks – and what to do when you can’t realistically meet your deadlines. The purpose and readership of a project should be kept in mind so that it’s designed to meet the requirements of an intended audience – and there’s a useful checklist of questions you can apply to any work you produce.

She covers a number of possible ways of presenting your results – which leads into a consideration of what is now called ‘information architecture’. That is, thinking clearly about the way in which data is displayed in order to be useful, easily understood, and effective. This points towards the sort of work being done by Edward Tufte and the University of Reading, both of which sources I was glad to see listed in the excellent bibliographies of further reading which follow each chapter.

The latter parts of the book deal with the importance of effective page layout and good typographical design in the presentation of data. Graham Stevens points readers towards that most important feature in the principles of good design – over-riding the default settings of your word-processor. He covers the details of font choice, line length, margins, grids, word spacing, heading hierarchies, and close editing in its relation to the effective visual display of information.

The publishers have had the good sense to let him completely re-design this hugely enlarged second edition of the book. The result is tremendous improvement on the first. It’s now a production which follows the very same principles it lays down for the efficient presentation of information. It’s also an excellent piece of work which will help anyone who is prepared to learn about the most effective manner of organising and presenting information.

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Elizabeth Orna with Graham Stevens, Managing Information for Research, Buckinghamshire: Open University Press, second edition 2009, pp.271, ISBN: 0335221424

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Numbers, Tables, and Charts

May 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

practical guidance on the visual presentation of data

Have you ever seen a document containing numbers, tables, and charts – and been unable to understand the information being displayed. Of course you have; and the fault is not yours. The data has simply not been presented effectively. This book deals with the data presentation skills required to show numbers, tables, and graphs in documents and presentations. Many people assemble their data honestly enough when writing reports and giving presentations, but they often do so without thinking how incomprehensible it might be to the audience.

Oxford University Press have just brought out a series of beginner’s manuals on communication skills. The emphasis is on no-nonsense advice directly related to everyday life. The authors show you how to present numerical data to make its outcomes more self-evident and more easily digestible. This is done by putting figures into a logical order, adding focus to the data, and using layout to guide the reader’s eye towards what is significant.

They cover how to design tables. It’s amazing how much clearer these can be made by removing unnecessary grid lines, aligning numbers and column headings, creating clear titles and headings, and removing any ‘chart junk’.

Graphs should be uncluttered, simple, non-misleading in terms of scale and numbers, and used to illustrate a clear message.

They show how to construct graphs and bar charts so that they immediately reveal the significance of the data they contain. There are also examples of when to use pie charts, scattergrams, and pictographs (small icons)

There’s also useful writing skills advice on how to integrate numbers and statistics into the text of documents. For instance, don’t start sentences with figures or digits, and how to mix the use of words and digits to clarify meaning, as in nine 6-inch rulers and three 5-a-side football matches.

Most presentation of data is these days done using office software packages, so it’s good that they give this a mention, with tips for creating good handouts.

They finish with a case study which tracks the raw data of some school exam results from gathering to final presentation. The grades and numbers can be presented in different ways, and the head teacher must choose the best way for a meeting with the governors.

The chapters of this book are short, but almost every page is rich in hints and tips. The strength of this approach is that it avoids the encyclopedic volume of advice which in some manuals can be quite frightening. This is a book which will reassure those who need it.

The all-time star in this field is Edward Tufte, on whose work they draw substantially. I was glad to see him listed in the bibliography. This is a cheap and cheerful version of the same layout principles he promotes in his beautifully designed books.

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Sally Bigwood and Melissa Spore, Presenting Numbers, Tables, and Charts, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.144, ISBN: 0198607229

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Practical Information Policies

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

data management and information architecture

This is a study of information architecture and management – both in theory and practice. It is written with three groups of readers in mind – managers in libraries and information services; business managers and executives; and students of information science, librarianship, and information management. Elizabeth Orna starts Practical Information Policies by explaining why organizations need policies and strategies for managing information – outlining the benefits of having a policy, and the losses of not having one. She offers interesting definitions of the basic concepts she discusses, such as ‘information policy’, ‘knowledge management’, and ‘information management’.

When she moves on to look at how institutions are organized, she presents a very useful checklist of questions. These can be posed to query the efficiency of management systems. For instance, ‘What provision does the organization make for job handover and transfer of knowledge?’ These sorts of questions will be very useful to those people serious about systems analysis, just as they will strike fear into slack managers facing a quality assurance inspection.

These considerations form the basis for the next part of her study, which deals with making an information audit, then interpreting and presenting its findings. She sees individuals as repositories of skills and knowledge, and her basic argument is that they are both the prime asset of an organization and the agents for successfully managing change. The examples she discusses are drawn from real-life instances of ‘change’ such as ‘premises destroyed by bomb’ and ‘hostile takeover bid’.

The second part of the book is a series of case studies in corporate policy initiatives – including the introduction of a comprehensive IT policy at Amnesty International; the management of change at the British Library; and information strategies in the National Health Service, plus organizations as diverse as an advertising agency, the University of North London, and the Surrey Police.

Of course there are no guarantees that conducting even the most searching and intelligent audit of knowledge is going to save an organization from political or commercial doom. One of the case studies discussed here is NatWest bank, currently being swallowed up by the Royal Bank of Scotland. But as Orna finally observes, when dealing with information systems and large-scale corporate developments, ‘a degree of detachment, and a sense of humour are…useful assets.’

It’s worth saying that this is also a beautifully designed and elegantly produced book. It belongs in that rare category of publications which for book-lovers are interesting to contemplate, irrespective of their content. It follows the modern practice – which has its attractions – of placing short lists of suggested reading after each chapter, rather than in one long bibliography at the end of the book.

This is one for information professionals. The message of Practical Information Policies is that successful ‘knowledge management’ depends on knowledge in human minds, expressed in effective action, fed with appropriate information, and supported by the right blend of IT and systems. It offers readers a straightforward way of working out what their organization needs to know to survive and prosper; what information it requires to ‘feed’ its knowledge base; and how people need to interact in using knowledge and information effectively.

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Elizabeth Orna, Practical Information Policies, Hampshire: Gower, second edition, 1999, pp.375, ISBN: 0566076934

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practical information architecture – projects and policies

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data management and information architecture

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