I’d already done a screenshot idea for a London Bus app after Countdown the live bus tracking system was launched, so I thought — hey, why not design a bus app? There’s loads out there just for tracking buses, so I thought, what’s the one thing we all like to do about public transport? Oh yes, complain!

So I made* an app that was all about complaining — but, y’know — quietly. Since the Great British Public doesn’t really like to make a fuss. Or talk. Or make eye contact.

*that is to say, designed, without actually programming it!

The map is actually a built-in, crowd-sourced warning tool — bus-stops where major problems are reported are flagged in red, minor problems in amber and clear in green.

People can report full buses that whizz past, loooong queues and ohgodlateagain buses while they’re in the queue, or leave a comment about the indignity of it all. And once they get on the bus — reporting priorities change. Have they got a seat? Is the bus not going anywhere fast? Or maybe some kid in the next seat has forgotten their headphones again.

Ultimately there are several major logistical problems to iron out with this idea — how to tell WHICH bus just whizzed past, for instance. And for stops with multiple buses, the queue might only be a problem for one of them. But I think it would be an interesting idea to channel our great British reserve (aka seething inner rage) on public transport into something like this. And maybe with 6 months of crowd-sourced data, TFL could actually do something about the most troubled spots!

England — now

I really believe this data transparency can help us achieve great things. So I was very happy when I first went to an open data conference and started talking about plain language, as people were very receptive.  It’s not just about the data, I tried to say — you have to make sure you’re giving people the right advice about how to interpret the data too, and for that you need plain language. Great, they said, then walked away to talk about XML or some other programming thing. Why? Well, most of them were programmers, so that makes sense. And I came to the eventual conclusion that because plain language can’t be programmed — it’s not an ‘easy’ win — people lost interest quickly.

Which is why Alice Bell’s post Making ‘Nullius’ Public really resonated with me. Open data is a fantastic goal, and I wholeheartedly support what its trying to achieve and the lengths the movement has gone to, to successfully court both this government and the last. But to be really accessible, and truly usable, it needs sound interpretation and clear communication.

From a (semi-)professional plain language perspective, I believe open data really benefits from exposure to experts and interpreters, and vice versa. Infographics can be a good example of this. However, they are usually built on a direct data-to-interpreter relationship, which can lead to mistakes, and if they’re popular, those mistakes can be compounded. The question for me is does interpreter alone necessarily have all the knowledge to get to the bottom of an issue? For me, that answer is usually no, and I’m not afraid to admit it.

For example, I really wanted to take part in the latest financial challenge from Information is Beautiful. I looked at the data, examined GDP and debt relationships — apparently external debt (what we owe other countries) is more important than internal debt for measuring financial stability — ranked countries (according to my calculations Ethiopia is one of the financially healthiest countries in the world… ahem), examined the data for patterns, but I knew, ultimately, that I was missing something too big to make doing the infographic worth my while. My interpretation, whatever it might have turned out to be, would be essentially worthless, because I didn’t have the knowledge. I didn’t know what the variables were.

In an ideal world, as a graphic and written interpreter of data, trends and world events, I’d have access to something resembling the journalistic process, an information triangle of:

1. The hard data to provide the bedrock for my argument.
2. An unbiased expert (or two oppositely biased ones, as long as they could legitimately be called experts) on call to fill in the knowledge gaps that skew my calculations.
3. My own expertise in communicating stories (such as it is).

I feel we would all benefit immeasurably from a way to reach out to each other: open data specialists and technologists; plain language writers and communications people; scientific, economic, political and other experts for help with our issues.

To celebrate Plain English day, here are some reasons to keep your language plain and simple.

1. Trustworthiness
   When people understand what you’re saying, they’re more inclined to trust you. Or rather, I should say that when people cannot understand what you’re saying without considerable effort, they’re less inclined to trust you. Long-winded language can look like a deliberate attempt to keep the facts from the people who need them.
2. Saving money
   If you want your customers to do something, it’s probably in your interest that the people you want to follow them make fewer mistakes. The more mistakes they make, the more costly it is for you — your administration costs rise, your call centre has to take more calls. One knock-on affect might be that the people with genuinely complicated issues suffer from longer response times as your business or service spends more time dealing with basic enquiries. Consistently using plain language helps reduce confusion.
3. Greater efficiency
   When you apply plain language to your processes and procedures you can see positive benefits too — it’s not just about leaflets and letters. Do people persistently fall at one particular hurdle in a form you need them to fill in? Do your customers get so far in a transaction with you, then go elsewhere before you get a chance to make a sale? The way you use language could be a significant barrier to keeping that customer. Maybe you’ve used some jargon that’s part of your internal way of working — does your customer need to see that? Or would they be better off seeing things in terms that are relevant to them? Smooth the way for them with plain language.

Keeping your audience in mind is the most important thing. Plain language at a science conference is different from plain language for a local council, but it’s always worthwhile making sure your message is tailored to the people who will want to hear it.

Now, I knew enough to avoid the major pitfalls. Comic sans brings me out in a rash. Papyrus sends me into toxic shock. But I’m doing a Masters degree in a Department of Typography and Communication, and I need to overcome my phobia and cautiously embrace this tricky subject if I’m going to pass.

So one of my fellow students recommended I read this book, Thinking with type, by Ellen Lupton.

And I have to say, it’s (nearly) done the trick.

I already knew that there are families of fonts that go together, but this book taught me what I need to do to match them up properly and have them look good.

I already knew I was supposed to kern and lead things, and not use these straight apostrophes and speechmarks to mean anything other than feet and inches, but I didn’t know that if you indent your (proper, curly) speechmarks they look 100 per cent more awesome, or that most running text needs tracking at least a little bit to make it more readable. I now know that italics aren’t all bad — as long as they’re not a slant, and that ALL CAPITALS is generally a bad thing, but small caps are very useful.

This book has hundreds of tips like that. Things experienced designers might know instinctively, but I sure as hell don’t. It’s really accessible, damn sarcastic, and not afraid to send up typography too.

And now I do believe a font can be light and airy, or dark and heavy.

But I’m definitely still sitting on the fence about happy. Shudder.

Infographics come in a few flavours (chocolate, strawberry and banana). There are straight-up graph types, area types, and in the grand tradition of design everywhere, misc. other.

My concern about infographics in general is that how understandable and accessible they are (mainly) is detrimentally affected by two things:

1. How much the viewer knows about reading graphs
2. The brain’s capabilities for comparing sizes and areas

Most infographics are graphs. Most of them are, in fact, bar graphs (see below). Sometimes they’re pretty well disguised. You might get some blocks arranged in a row or a square. You might be given ten little pictograms of a man. Some are more blatant than others.

But what if you can’t read a bar chart? As far as I can see, there haven’t been any real studies done on graph literacy — and it’s impossible to Google due to all those graphs of literacy around — but if you equate it with maths literacy, something like 22% — nearly a quarter — of 16–19 year olds left school, last year, functionally innumerate in anything but the most basic arithmetic.

You’ll have to do your own extrapolation to apply that to the rest of the population, and no doubt for most people, their grasp of maths (and graphs) improves with age, but even still — if that many people simply aren’t at the mathematical stage that they can read graphs, then infographics potentially have only limited usefulness.

Take for example how infographics are used in newspapers. Could these numeracy requirements be one of the reasons tabloid newspapers haven’t taken them up wholesale, while broadsheets are positively dizzy with excitement about them?

Now there are several infographic models that are extremely popular right now — and one of them is this idea of a set of squares, or circles, or whatever, with their size representing a different value, right? Us humans are masters (and mistresses) of pattern recognition. We can group objects by shape, colour, angle, proximity… but can we really compare size and areas effectively?

Take circles, for example. They’re easy to group into pretty patterns, but there’s a fundamental problem with interpreting circular infographics (among others). Now, designers have been told that they should use the area of the circle — which is generally convenient for them, as you end up with smaller circles which are easier to fit on the page, however, no-one gets to tell the viewer whether they should be looking at the diameter of the circle or the area.

Why is that important? Because as a rule, the human brain is quite bad at working out how to compare circles — if we’re comparing areas, generally we see them as representing a smaller value than they do, and if we’re comparing diameter, we generally think they represent larger values than they actually do. But hey, there’s no guarantee which one your viewer is judging, anyway!

How about squares and rectangles? Take a look at the Billion Euro-o-Gram:

Comparing squares is probably fine, because whatever measurement you use, what you see will be proportional. But what happens when you use rectangles? Could one edge being longer than the other affect your perception of it, make it seem bigger than a square with the same area? Here’s the big purple rectangle as it’s pictured, and as a square. I’m not sure I’d know they represented the same figure, if they were presented side by side, but that’s what this particular infographic asks us to do.

And if two similar-sized squares are far away from each other, or surrounded by objects of different sizes, wouldn’t the brain find it harder to tell which is bigger? In the bottom-middle there’s a load of figures around the €200 billion mark, but they’re all portrayed in different ways, making them difficult to compare.

€38 billion (in purple, right-middle) looks much smaller than €40 billion (light blue, bottom-middle) because of colour contrast and because it’s surrounded by values that match it’s height but not width, squeezing it.

The trouble for me is, I quite like infographics. I like designing them. I’m even guilty of perpetuating a fair few of the complaints I’m levelling at these examples. But I can’t help but recognise that as pretty as they are, they have limited appeal.

And if we want more than the usual suspects to be able to make head or tail of them, we need to make sure the infographics we create are much more accessible.

We ran a survey to find out more about how and what children in the UK eat and drink. One of the most striking finds was how many kids were consuming full-fat fizzy pop and, yes, energy drinks, on a day to day basis (the idea of kids hyped up on caffeine strikes fear into my heart!).

I helped them make this infographic to illustrate differences across the UK:

There’s a pretty clear north / south divide, but Scotland’s relatively low consumption habits came as a bit of a surprise to me!

Well, they can if they want, but if you want the job done properly, you might think about getting an information or wayfinding designer in for that!

I saw these at the London School of Economics, and thought they were amazing — the way they work with the walls and street lines and guide your eye and feet in the right direction is very cool.

If I were to change it, I might add the function of those buildings to the sign, or replace the building names with the functions. It took me a fair bit of googling to find out the Lionel Robbins building was the library.

Inside the library was another matter, though. Got told off for standing on the wrong side of the queue barrier, when all the signs were facing towards me… I grumbled a bit and turned the signs inward as I went, so hopefully other people won’t have that problem. Sometimes it just takes a small adjustment to fix your information flow.

Anyway, that’s just one of the things Information Design is about.

Being an optimistic sort of person, I went with the worst case scenario, of course!

See how the world’s resources might be running out

What does the word ‘open’ mean to you? To me it’s linked with a few things — it means something that everyone can get hold of and get involved in, that everyone can see how it works, and that is open to people’s feedback, and their criticism. It shows you exactly what you’re going to get, and how you’re going to get it. However, to me this is more or less the opposite of what the government are proposing White Paper (that’s the kind of paper they put out to show their big ideas before they talk about them in more depth) on Open Public Services — for a good number of people in the UK they could be shutting the door and locking it.

Why? Firstly, the paper explains that the UK’s poor are suffering because of a lack of decent services in their area. Not many people would dispute that — it’s absolutely true that for healthcare and education, where you live massively affects the quality of the services you have.

Secondly, the paper sets out the areas the government wants to improve and sets out a number of ways it thinks it can achieve:

• Choice – Wherever possible we will increase choice.
• Decentralisation – Power should be decentralised to the lowest appropriate level.
• Diversity – Public services should be open to a range of providers.
• Fairness – We will ensure fair access to public services.
• Accountability – Public services should be accountable to users and taxpayers.

All very nice. However if the government really want to do what they promise to do at the very beginning of the paper and bring real choice and great services to poor areas, what they propose simply does not go far enough, and in my opinion could leave the poor and vulnerable even more exposed to bad practices and unfairness than ever before.

A big part of their plan is about encouraging businesses to fight against each other making them more efficient or better at healthcare, or education, or running a care home. Fair enough, that might work where there are enough people to support loads of companies, but what about where there aren’t? In the countryside, for example, or on a run-down estate where having two cornershops just means one quickly goes out of business — a choice of one isn’t really much of a choice.

There are other examples of ways this paper disadvantages people outside of a certain income bracket or even a postcode, for example the government wants the UK citizen to do almost everything online, a crushing disadvantage to people who can neither get nor afford broadband.

But the main thing that occurs to me is that in places that have this real lack of choice, you could get some really concerning things happening. The government has already shown itself to be broadly in favour of things like faith schools — what if they were your only choice for educating your child? And what if health services followed suit, leaving your area’s only sexual health advice centre in the hands of a rigidly ‘pro-life’ or anti-gay company.

The paper talks about places you can complain to, certificates for companies offering services, low levels of support for people who can’t afford treatment or care, and a promise that companies will have to look after the disadvantaged just as much as those who can afford to pay on their own, but they’re being very vague about what any of that means.

So I urge you to tell them that poorer and less populated areas need more protection than they’re offering, that choice should always mean real choice, and not the lesser of the remaining evils, and that fair in areas that can’t afford choice could well mean keeping existing services in place and giving them what they need to offer the people they look after the best possible care, education and advice.