Centre for Information Design Research

Just some of the information leaflets about dementia currently available in Berkshire

Centre for Information Design Research are delighted to announce a new research collaboration with the Older People’s Mental Health Liaison Team  of Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust. The goal of the research is to develop a user-centred, information pack to support people with dementia and their carers, from diagnosis onwards. The importance of providing high quality information for people diagnosed with dementia, and its role in helping them live better and stay longer in their community, is recognised in the Department of Health’s 2009 National Dementia Strategy.

Our research will not only examine what information should be provided but how it should be presented so that it is digestible and usable at the point people need to consult it. Although our focus is dementia care, our findings should be generalisable to information provision for other long-term conditions. And, while the project is based in Berkshire, we hope its findings will be transferable to other regional health care trusts.

Our research will include working with health care professionals, charity organisations and family members of people with dementia, all of whom have different perspectives of dementia care. We are starting our research by analysing all the information currently available to people have received a diagnosis of dementia (see illustration above).

The project, known as ‘Berkshire Blue Book’ is funded as part of the National Dementia Partnerships scheme.

We are delighted to hear from Carla Spinillo (pictured above) and her colleagues at Federal University of Parana that, as a result of their research-based recommendations, new regulations for Patient Information Leaflets (PILs) for homeopathic medicines have been introduced by the Secretary of Health for Parana State, Brazil. It’s hoped the regulation will serve as a reference for future national regulation.

Carla completed her PhD on the use of pictorial sequences in instructions, in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at Reading, in 1998. Since then she has been involved in research into communicating instructions, particularly use of visual instructions in health-related contexts.

Carla writes ‘this an unprecedented achievement for information designers in Brazil where, for the first time, experts in the field participated in the decision making process for regulatory documents in healthcare. It might also be seen as an achievement at international level, by the inclusion of guidelines for visual instructions on medicine use in PILs. These achievements are also a step forward in the regulation of drug information for patients in Brazil, as [the new regulation] considers not only aspects of readability and legibility but also of usability of PILs, grounded in empirical and theoretical research in graphic and information design.’

Those of you who were up early on Wednesday morning might have caught Alison Black on Sky TV or Radio 5 Live, discussing why people are drawn into broadband/TV packages that often prove more expensive than they first anticipated and, in some cases, provide services they never use.

Alison gave an information design perspective on research commissioned by the Post Office and Freeview. She described the techniques providers use, such as attracting people with partial offers that are available for the first 6 months of 24 month packages; additionally how they present detailed terms and conditions, in small (often grey) print, in multiple windows on the web. The end result is that consumers have to work hard to understand what they’re signing up for.

According to the Post Office/Freeview research 72% of people said they gave up trying to read terms and conditions when choosing a package. This figure is perhaps an optimistic report: research by New York University Law School* which tracked people’s use of the web and  found that consumers only looked at terms and conditions in a tiny fraction of on-line transactions, and usually for far less time than they would have needed to read them in full.

* Bakos, Y., Marotta-Wurgler, F. and Trossen, D. (2009). Does Anyone Read the Fine Print? Testing a Law and Economics Approach to Standard Form Contracts. CELS 2009 4th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies: 9-40.

CIDR are delighted to announce that Jeanne-Louise Moys has been awarded a PhD for her research: Readers’ impressions on typographic meaning.

Thank you to all our panel members who contributed to this research by taking part in the studies.

Jeanne-Louise has produced a poster summarising her research which you can download here.

Summary of research: Readers’ impressions of typographic meaning

Currently Jeanne-Louise is enjoying teaching students studying Typography and graphic communication here at the University of Reading and is planning to develop her research into the area of screen and electronic documents.

Good luck Jeanne-Louise!

Front cover of form

Job search journey page and some case studies to help get people started

examples of use

CIDR have been working with the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), a group of economists and psychologists working within the Cabinet Office, to help with a trial they are running to support unemployed people looking for work.

BIT had identified three areas of change to the existing job search process and changes they have already made are showing impressive results. CIDR were asked to help in the development of a toolkit for job seekers to keep a record of their commitments and activities during their job search. The aim of the toolkit is to help people looking for work to structure and focus their job search with support from advisors at the Jobcentre.

CIDR worked with the BIT and Jobcentre Plus advisors to look at the language, structure and design of the toolkit. The pack is currently on trial at Colchester Jobcentre Plus and will be extended to a further eleven sites soon. Feedback so far has been positive. We will let you know how the toolkit has been received once we have had feedback from the users.

Update: See more details of the Behavioural Insights Team’s work and discussion of this project in The Guardian, and a further announcement of the project in The Independent.

CIDR are delighted to announce the launch of our latest project with Canonical. Working with Canonical’s design team we will be looking at the use of icons within the Ubuntu operating system and its future development. Icons are an everyday part of people’s interactions with technology, whether on our computers, phones or other devices; they’re very much part of the look and feel of a product or service.