Design-storm | August

Alternative Reporting Formats

Amanda Makulec

John Snow Inc.

how we consume information

Two questions: 1. When was the last time you

settled into a chair in your office to read through a long, printed report?

2. When was the last time you clicked through a link to an infographic in your email to find out about results?

So how does this massive amount of public expression change the way we think? Technology—and the worldwide

audience it offers to us all—is pushing us to be smarter and more creative in the ways we share and express our ideas, Thompson said.”

We click and consume information on a daily basis. It appears constantly in inboxes, social media, streams, and web browsers, putting us in a constant state of information overload. How we consume information has fundamentally changed, though standard project reporting formats (often required by funders) have been slow to catch up.

Clive Thompson Wired Magazine

“As a global community, we write and post some 3.6 trillion words to the internet every day, Thompson said—that’s roughly equal to the contents of the entire Library of Congress.

Excerpt from “From Hackers to Health care: Five Favorite Moments from Day 1 of Switchpoint”

Design for Delight

start here

Who is your audience?

How do they use and consume information?

What story do you want to tell?

audience

(world)

Think about who you’re trying to reach and how they connect with information. Consider the detail they need, their bandwidth for connecting to visually-heavy webpages or downloading large files, and how they want to consume information. As a few examples: • A researcher may want more detail about the methods

used to collect the data and conduct the assessment, requiring a longer form, narrative report.

• An advocate may want sound bites and mini-infographics that they can share to amplify their message.

• A donor often wants to see what results have come from a program they funded, so focusing on results data presented in an easy to consume format is key.

• Public health professionals are often looking for information on context, how, and why a program was successful (or not), so consider including demographic data to frame your program results and including some qualitative information on how and why your program worked.

design

Simple graphic design principles applied to your reporting documents will ensure readability and maximize learning. You can use design elements and visual depictions of your data to assist the reader. • Arrangement: Descriptive text and its related data visualization

should be arranged so they appear together on a page. Narrative text should be left-justified.

• Color: Blocks of background color can help group cognitively-similar items or set off reporting elements like sidebars. Text intended for narrative reading should be set in black or dark gray on a white or very light background.

• Images: Written reports and presentations should always include images. Beyond just charts and graphs, photographs or drawings increase the relevancy of the material to the audience and make the report more engaging.

• Type: Generally speaking, serif fonts support readability in long, narrative-style documents produced on paper. Sans serif fonts are easier to read in electronic reporting media.

From BetterEvaluation: http://betterevaluation.org/plan/reportandsupportuse/report

Think Web

interactive

Interactivity promotes exploration, and well-designed interactivity helps you engage users in a memorable experience. The greatest benefit of interactive features is that they create a more engaging, interesting, thought-provoking experience for you user. They also let you share your big-picture, high level themes and takeaways first, and then allow the user to explore the information you’re sharing and learn more about the details. That prevents your reader from being overwhelmed with information: instead, user Professor Shneiderman’s (a master of human-computer interaction design) mantra to start big and then let the user burrow into your data.

interactive timeline

Great for: telling a story that unfolds with anecdotes and results over time, particularly if you have photos, graphs, and other visual elements to include

Platforms: Timeline.JS Tiki-Toki Examples: Fight for Democracy in the Middle East (complex, built in Tiki-Toki) MEASURE Evaluation (simple, built in Timeline JS)

slideshare

Great for: Making your presentation decks (or preferably Slidedocs) more accessible by sharing through a taggable, searchable site that provides an embed code for you to use on your project website to allow visitors to click through a presentation without having to download the Powerpoint or PDF

Platforms: SlideShare Examples: SlideShare embedded on a website (Ann Emery’s diverging stacked bar charts tutorial)

SlideShare homepage (Data Viz presentation decks & resources)

scrolling webpage

Great for: Telling your story on an elegant, scrolling webpage where elements appear to move as you maneuver around the screen (instead of a “download here” PDF link)

Platforms: You need a web designer for this one. Examples: Gates Foundation Annual Letter 2014 UNICEF A Promise Renewed

interactive graphics

Great for: Sharing data in a format that promotes exploration by your user, who can drill down to different levels of the data using interactive controls. Caveat is to think about the level of access you want to give your reader versus creating the graphs and charts for them.

Platforms: Tableau (especially new StoryPoints) Drupal Other web-based platforms Examples: PRB World Data 2014 SPRING Factors Affecting Nutrition in Uganda

don’t forget mobile

While it may not be your primary platform, keep in mind that an increasingly proportion of internet users are accessing the web entirely through their mobile phone. Think about how you can make your information accessible to those users as you’re designing for the web.

Use Metrics

use data “We should make decisions [on how, when, and where to publish] based upon data. Who will the audience be for a particular piece of content? Who are they? What do they read? That will lead to a very different approach to being a publishing enterprise. Knowing our target audience will dictate an entirely differently rollout strategy. We will go from a "publish" to a "launch." It will also lead us in a direction that is inevitable, where we decouple the legacy model from the digital. At what point do you decide that your digital audience is as important—or more important—than print?” Aron Pilhofer, Executive Editor of Digital Content for The Guardian

metrics

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Albert Einstein

Consider the various metrics you can use to measure not only traffic (unique page views), but also engagement. Are people sharing content? Commenting? And where are they coming from? Most web-based platforms let you track where your readers are connecting from, helping you

understand if you have the global reach you might want. Plus, not all numbers are created equal: while broad dissemination strategies are appropriate for some publications, others require a more refined plan, targeting specific demographic groups, organizations, or donors.

Resources

New Resource! Data+Design is a free, creative commons licensed eBook that gives a comprehensive primer on making data accessible through information. It starts with data collection, goes all the way through infographic design, and was created by more than 50 enthusiastic collaborators who love data viz. Read online or download at infoactive.co/data-design

report checklist

Evaluation Report Layout Checklist [Stephanie Evergreen] to access to the full checklist

Connect!

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