case study: information design

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Client: Government of Ontario
Project: a number of internal government projects
Role: Lead Consultant, Information and Knowledge Management

Situation:

A centralized government ministry performs common services (such as human resources and information technology) for other government ministries as clients. Staff within one of the units in this centralized government ministry were using information management tools that were not helping them complete their tasks. Their problems included:

• a) Unusable tools:
  • During a records and information management project, a client was often given an unwieldy 130 page, 687K reference book as a ‘tool’ and asked to use it to evaluate their information assets and files. Clients and our staff both found the reference book cumbersome to use
• b) Lack of accurate products:
  • For project management staff would track progress of a project using Microsoft Project software, but our clients often had no access to Project or to the information within it. Additionally, Project had no way of adequately displaying information about delays in the project which was often crucial to the project’s timeline
• c) Lack of documentation:
  • In some cases, new staff had no formal documentation as reference material on how to create the information management products needed by clients.

Tasks:

The existing employee ‘tools’ needed to be refined, and new guides needed to be created to document the existing processes in a formal manner. Our clients often could not understand why we used the processes we did, and we often could not justify those processes, which added to miscommunication, translating into project delays and less-than-adequate products.

Actions:

I refined existing tools and created new easy to understand tools on my own time, by my own initiative to address these problems:

• Soliving a lack of usability:
  • To address problem a (‘unusable tools’), I created a smaller, easy to use and understand checklist sent to clients
• Solving a lack of accuracy:
  • To address problem b (‘lack of accurate, easy to understand products’), I extracted information from the Microsoft Project file into a simple chart in Word accessible to everyone. This chart visually displayed the project’s progress, specific milestones, and the overall process. It also provides more room for commentary by staff or clients
• Solving a lack of documentation:
  • To address problem c (‘lack of documentation’), I created new documents, including a guide and accompanying process flow charts which documented the processes, procedures and best practices in creating our products. These could be used by staff and clients to aid in their comprehension of how we create and use our products. Additionally, various new internal office documents were created to track weekly project progress for management, invoice sheets to aid in billing, and standardized emails to send to clients during a project

Results:

Clients – my coworkers – now had easy to use, low cost to reproduce deliverables that allow them to understand and use their information in more effective ways. By linking good information design to the use of that information, end users are able to perform their daily tasks more effectively without the burden of poorly designed tools.