An in-depth analysis of replies to COVID-19 vaccination outreach reveals thanks, angst — and much more.

An interactive tool to help you take a behaviourally informed approach when designing your communications

Getting the question right is the most important component in information design, and it’s the most common point where information design goes wrong. This is because information is always relative. Always. Before you can undertake any kind of visualization exercise, you need to know what question you want to answer, and for whom. So I propose the beginnings of a theory of information relativity: 1. All information is relative, and it’s always relative: relative to the observer and the observer’s point of view; relative to the culture and its values; relative to the situation; relative to what has come before, and to what will come next. 2. The value of information is always relative because it is directly related to it’s usefulness, which depends on the user, the context and the situation. 3. Information design must therefore be driven by the context within which it will be experienced. Information design must serve the needs of real human beings doing real things. Information wants to be used.

Time/Difference/Relationships vs Head/Heart/Hands (Logical/Metaphor/Literal)

What is the best medium for communicating with consumers? It depends on the content, according to the latest research from Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger.

Improve Adherence to Health Tech. Solutions The Adherence Canvas is a tool to guide and measure the consideration of adherence to improve it during the design and development of medical technology.

A team that included writers, designers, scientists and educators worked together to put together the package of images the public saw, and the alt text was not an afterthought, Rhue said. He said the team had a relatively short period of time to produce those descriptions. He only saw the photos a week before the public did. But they had spent the previous two years discussing accessibility and working with a consulting agency to create an alt text stylebook. During that process, they practiced writing descriptions and learned what didn’t work. “I had thought that brevity was a really important thing. That’s a common misconception,” Rhue said. He pointed to the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” and said the recent images required more words than that to fully capture them. “There were more than 1,000 words written about each of those pictures, and we could keep going.”

Why are “click here” and “by this link” poor choices? And is it acceptable to use “read more”? In this article, I’ll explain popular wording and formatting mistakes and will show more accessible and informative alternatives.

Amy Jo Kim interviews Casey Means, cofounder of Levels

handwashing sign

designing for emotional states

applying behavioral science to health promotion

field of behavioral linguistics

Through a series of workshops in 2017–18, we’ve been exploring a process for generating new kinds of metaphors, and then using those metaphors to inspire concepts for new kinds of interface design which could potentially help people understand things in different ways. The intention of the workshops is that the process might be something designers can use or adapt for idea generation, or to provoke new kinds of thinking about interface design. The extent to which the metaphors merely provide initial ‘seed’ inspiration, or actually form the basis of the resulting design, varies. Download the New Metaphors cards, v.0.3 (February 2018) — 129 MB PDF, 300 dpi Download a poster/leaflet from Interaction 18 including thumbnails of all the cards, and a shortened version of this article — 2 MB PDF Download templates / worksheets — 400 kB PDF

the importance of clear instructions

BETA hosted Australia’s first ever Form-a-Palooza on 28 June 2019. It was a one-day festival of forms, designed to share the latest in form design with public servants from across the Australian Government. Forms are the most common interaction between people and the government, and there are thousands of them—most still in paper. Improving forms is a simple but important way to improve service delivery and increase public satisfaction with government. Over 200 participants from 38 agencies came along to Form-a-Palooza to learn new techniques and put them into practice. We also launched a brand new framework to guide the development of good forms—the WISER framework. It’s based on the latest research, as well as our own experience working with government agencies on forms, letters and communication.

Consider three levels: literal, liberal & lateral. Example: social proof... Literal: share the percentage of people who follow the norm in general Liberal: tailor the claims to what “people like them“ do Lateral: suggest popularity rather than stating it

Cognitive bias wall chart

"So the big question is: How can health systems be made safer when success means changing the attitudes and habits of health care professionals at a time when many are overwhelmed and deeply frustrated by all of the demands being made on them? What does it take to get them to embrace, with urgency, new ways of working?"