Over the last months I found several references to Rolf Hichert & Jürgen Faisst's booklet on business communication standards [1]. It draw my attention especially because it attempts to provide a standard for reports and data visualizations, which frankly it seems like a tremendous endeavor if done right. The two authors founded the IBCS institute 20 years ago, which is a host, training institute, and certification body of the Creative Commons project called IBCS.
The 150 pages booklet considers various standardization techniques with the help of more than 180 instructive figures, the overall structure being based on a set of principles and rules rooted in an acronym that spells "SUCCESS" - Say, Unify, Condense, Check, Express, Simplify, Structure. On one side the principles seem to form a solid fundament, however the fundament seems to suffer from the same rigidity resulted from fitting something in a nicely-spelled acronym.
Say or conveying a message reflects the principle that each report should convey a message, otherwise the report is just a data collection. According to this "definition" most of the operational reports are just collections of data. Conversely, lot of communication in organizations revolve around issues, metrics and decision making, scenarios in which the messages conveyed can be powerful though dependent on the business context. Settling on only one message can make the message fall short.
Unifying or applying semantic notation reflects the principle that things that have same meaning should look the same. There are many patterns out there that can be standardized, however it's questionable how much complex visualizations can be standardized, respectively how much liberty of expressing certain aspects the standardization allows.
Condense or increasing the information density reflects the requirements that all information necessary to understanding the content should, if possible, be included on one page. This allows to easier navigate the content and prioritize what the audience is able to see. The principle however seems to have more to do with the ink-information ratio principle (see [2]).
Check or ensuring the visual integrity reflects the principle that the information should be presented in the most truthful and the most easily understood way. This is something that many data visualizations out there lack.
Express or choosing the proper visualizations is based on the principle that the visuals considered should be as intuitive as possible. In theory, the more intuitive a visual the easier is to be understood and reused, however this depends on the "visual vocabulary" and "visual grammar" of each individual. Intuition is something that needs to grow through the interplay of these two areas. Having the expectation of displaying everything in terms of basic elements is unrealistic and suboptimal.
Simplify or avoiding clutter refers to eliminating the unnecessary from a visualization, when there's nothing to take out without changing the meaning of a visualization. At least, the principle is correctly considered even if is in general difficult to apply because quite often one needs to build something more complex and reduce the complexity through iterative steps until the simple is obtained.
Structure or organizing the content is based on the principle that content should follow (a logical consistent) structure. The interplay between function and structure is an important topic in itself.
Browsing through the many data visualizations given as example, I'd say that many of the recommendations make sense, though from there to a standardization is still a long way. The reader should evaluate against his/her own judgements the practices described and consider what seems to work.
The book is available on the IBS website as PDF, though the Kindle version is 40% cheaper. Overall, it is worth a read.
Previous Post <<<||>> Next Post
Resources:
[1] Rolf Hichert & Jürgen Faisst (2022) "International Business Communication Standards (IBCS Version 1.2): Conceptual, perceptual, and semantic design of comprehensible business reports, presentations, and dashboards" (link)
[2] Edward R Tufte (1983) "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information"
[3] IBCS Institude (2024) About (link)
No comments:
Post a Comment