user-centred content in print

I see a lot being written about digital content: content strategy, user-centred content and content design. Much less about user-centred content in the context of print materials. But many of the same practices and concepts apply.

For example, my family and I recently took a little holiday. One day we visited a museum, which had a restaurant guide on its front desk. Since we needed lunch, I picked it up.

Unfortunately, the restaurant guide was not useful. It was a list of restaurants in alphabetical order, ordered by the first word in each restaurant’s name. Restaurants with numbers in their name came first. Each entry described the type of food each place served, its hours and used icons to indicate if it was wheelchair accessible or open on Sundays.

Ways to organize or ‘chunk’ information

An easy way to remember different ways you can order content is with the mnemonic LATCH: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy. For example:

• Step by step = Time
• From specific to general, general to specific and from positive to negative = Category
• From most important to least important = Hierarchy

Think from the user’s perspective

I can totally imagine municipal staff just exporting data from their database of restaurants and putting it into alphabetical order. In this situation, the makers of the brochure clearly did not consider the primary user of this information: someone new to town who doesn’t know any or many restaurants, looking for a place to eat. A secondary user could be someone who lives in town but is tired of their usual haunts and wants to try something new.

There’s also a very high chance that the user will be hungry or responsible for hungry children, which means they can’t read every word. Low blood sugar inhibits thinking, so that’s a further stress. The primary user needs to be able to get the information they need by scanning, not reading every word.

The problem with alphabetical order

Alphabetical order puts a large cognitive load on the user. I have to read every single entry in full to figure out whether each restaurant could meet my family’s needs food-wise, and then hold each possible restaurant that could work for me in my memory as I go through the list. Once through the list with a group of possible restaurants still in my memory (hopefully! And also doubtfully!), I’d need to figure out which options are closest to me, and narrow down from there.

For this reason, alphabetical order, even though it’s the simplest way to present information from the perspective of the person presenting the information, is really only useful in one situation: when the user knows the term they’re looking for, and that term is used in the order — it’s often not the first word of a business name. The success of alphabetical order also depends on the term in the user’s mind being the same as the term in the list.

A hungry tourist (or a tourist with hangry children) on a first-time visit is not in that situation. Personally I was first looking for a restaurant that was very close to the museum, because we wanted to come back after lunch and it was 35C outside.

Better ways to organize a restaurant guide

There are two ways of organizing this information that I think would meet users’ needs better: by location or by category. You could use categories like Indian, Chinese, Thai, all-day breakfast, simple lunch fare, pizza, Italian, or Buffet. The specific categories likely depend on what kinds of restaurants are in town (if there’s no Thai restaurants, don’t use it as a category), but they also need to be intuitive to users.

Conducting user research with actual tourists at sites or events in different parts of town would be important, and doesn’t have to be expensive. In my opinion any user research is better than no user research.

It’s likely the categories won’t be mutually exclusive, so you’d need to decide if you had the space to cross-reference any restaurants in more than one category, or if you would choose the most applicable category.

What I would do

If I were making this brochure, I would keep two situations in mind:

• Someone looking for a restaurant that serves a certain kind of food
• Someone looking for a restaurant near their current location.

To support those two situations, I’d create a list of restaurants broken down by type of food served, and a map of the town that shows the location of each restaurant with a corresponding number. That way, a person could either start with the map and then find out what kind of food the closest restaurant serves or start with the type of food they want and then find out how far the restaurant is from them.

I would also plan to revise the brochure each year in late winter (before most tourists come), for two reasons:

• To add new restaurants and remove closed ones
• To iterate the design based on user testing and data.

On the day we were at the museum, we didn’t use the restaurant guide at all. We just asked a museum staff person where the closest restaurant was and ate there. It turned out to be in the building, and the chicken fingers were so good, my youngest child declared them the best he’d ever eaten, and he still asks to go back there. Too bad it’s a five-hour drive in good traffic to get there.