The issue in this title is currently preoccupying regulators all over the world. So I am writing this specifically for you: our hard-pressed, under-resourced guardians of the public interest.

Over the last twenty years we at the Communication Research Institute have worked with many government and industry groups to answer this question. We have done so in Europe, the USA, and Latin America as well as New Zealand and Australia. And we have done this work in many product areas: health, finance, insurance, food, agricultural and veterinary products, utilities and so on.

Usually we approach the problems faced by regulators on a case-by-case basis, separately, within each jurisdiction and product group.

But life is short, and we have found that many of the principles for effective regulation of consumer information are common across all areas. So here is a summary based on our research and experience.

1. Forget about content

It may come as surprise to many of you regulators that we advise you against developing the content—the specific wording and layout of regulated information. Within this injunction, we include templates, model documents, and guidelines.

The first reason for this is that you typically don’t have the professional information design skills you would need to do this work: writing, editing, typography and layout for public information. It takes about 4 to 5 years training and a few more years of practical experience to become proficient in these crafts. No amount of two-day workshops in Plain language writing, typography, or information design will give you the necessary proficiency and skills. The best such short-term workshops will do is open up to you some of the problems and issues in these fields. So don’t even try. Your attempts are almost always embarrassingly inept.

(I could give you many examples, but I’d like to help rather than put your backs up.)

The second, and by far the most important reason, is that even if you had these skills, you would be hard-pressed to come up with a model document that works effectively across the range of products over which you have jurisdiction.

Research repeatedly shows that effective information is determined by the context in which the information is used, far more than any other factor. Simple things such as the shape of a particular package, where the folds occur in a document, where the product is used, and the specific characteristics of the product and customer all play a much larger part in determining the effectiveness of the information than the wording and layout. One size can never fit all; it doesn’t even come close.

If you think this sounds like a council of despair, think again.

2. Focus on performance and outcome

Start with a simple question: What do we want people to do with the information that we regulate? The quick answer is usually something like: ‘We want consumers to make informed choices’. This is a high level, wide choice answer, but you need to be much more detailed because a wide choice is usually made up out of a lot of narrower choices.

Here is a practical example from over-the-counter medicine labelling regulations (TGA 69A).. The regulations say:

For non-prescription medicines, the aim is that the information on the label is presented in such a way that consumers can:

choose an appropriate medicine on their own;

use the medicine safely and effectively;

readily find the information they need, understand it and act on it appropriately;

and access further information, if they want to know more about the medicine.

That’s the high level statement in the regulations.

The regulations then refer to a more detailed list of requirements in the industry code of practice:

what should people be able to do with labels
Consumers who say they are able to read English should be able to use the label as stand-alone information, without help, to:

find at least 90% of what they look for on a label

use appropriately at least 90% of what they find.

…..Below is a list of tasks that consumers should be able to perform with any non-prescription product at the point of sale, and later at the point of use.

at the point of sale	at the point of use
identify and select	use	store	dispose of
can locate and read product name can locate and read quantity can identify what the product is used for can identify circumstances under which the product should not be used	can locate, read and understand product description can locate and read product ingredients can locate, read and understand dosage and usage instructions can locate, read and understand any warnings can locate and read information/enquiry number	can locate, read and understand storage instructions	can locate and read expiry date

Most of the stakeholder consultation in formulating these regulations and code of practice took place around the specification of these particular tasks.

We have helped develop similar regulations and industry codes of practice in a wide variety of jurisdictions and product types.

How do the final documents look?

Well, that is up to the industry. This is where all the competitive skills of industry are brought to bear. No two solutions need look the same, as long as industry can satisfy the regulator that the product information is usable in the way required in the regulations.

How do you, the regulator, know that the product information is usable as required?

To satisfy medicine information regulations, industry has to submit proof that it has applied an appropriate professional information design method, and has submitted evidence from testing that the information is as usable as they claim. It is the same as when a pharmaceutical company submits a new product for registration; they have to satisfy you with appropriate data from clinical trials that the medicine will perform as they claim. Medicine information needs a similar requirement.

There are many products like medicines which are unusable without adequate information. Further, there are products like finance and insurance where the products themselves are the information. In all of these, the information for consumers should be of the highest standard.

So instead of writing and layout skills, the extra skills you will need as a regulator are:

1. ability to identify when professional information design services are used
2. ability to appropriately interpret the result of testing submitted to you by industry.

Finally, with this type of regulation, you do not have to unduly restrict competitive behaviour. There is plenty room for innovation and new ways of designing product information to seek competitive advantage. I commend it to you.

Communication is a highly ambiguous activity, dependent on a myriad of contextual factors. In many cultural contexts ambiguity is highly valued. There is something mysterious, magical and perhaps powerful in meanings that defy and resist being pinned down. But in other contexts, ambiguity needs to be minimised. One such context is the providing of information: giving directions, explanations or instructions, sending out bills and forms, describing the legal or financial obligations of a situation, and so on—that is, those contexts where people have to act on information, and where the consequences of inappropriate action could be disastrous.

Designing information so that people can act on it appropriately is not easy. There are so many problems: problems of ambiguity of meanings; problems of how we read and use information, where we look for it, what we expect, and how we react; problems of literacy, choice of words, illustrations, typography, layout, tone…I could go on, but these are enough problems for now.

Approaches to the useful and efficient design of information vary, and at bottom are based on how information designers understand the nature of communication.

One extremely common view is known as the sender-message-receiver (SMR) model. This works as follows. Person S (the sender) wants to communicate something to Person R (the receiver). S knows precisely what he (or of course she) means to say, and clothes this meaning in words (encodes it, to use the jargon) to produce a message, which he then sends to R. R having received this message undresses (decodes) the message to reveal S’s meaning beneath the words. As long as S has chosen the clothes carefully, according to a set of rules, the result is a beautiful symmetry or transparency between sender and receiver (or speaker and listener, writer and reader, information-giver and information-finder, etc).

This idea of communication, as a movement of ideas from one mind into another, is the theory which informs the Plain Language movement. Plain language experts clothe meanings according to the Plain Language rules. The rules are fairly simple: short sentences, everyday vocabulary, no fancy punctuation, and so on. By following the rules, they claim, they can send clear, unambiguous messages. If this seems to you sensible, even commonsense, then you too should become a plain language advocate and learn how to scrub the everyday world of public communication clean, leaving no trace of ambiguity or misunderstanding, just a beautiful transparency of ideas between minds. This is the vision splendid of a world of public discourse given over to plain language.

And, of course, we would expect advocates of such purity to practice what they preach, being a shining beacon, an example to us all.

How odd then and deliciously ironic that a forthcoming international conference on plain language should have an ambiguous title. It’s called ‚’Raising the standard’ and as if to reinforce the ambiguity in the word ‚’standard’, on the website advertising the conference is a picture of a flying flag. How is such ambiguity possible? Does one meaning reinforce the other? If I become an advocate—raising the flag/standard—will I also raise the standard of language use in our midst? Does the one idea necessarily lead to the other? If I believe in something, will it come true? Well, not necessarily.

The irony is doubly revealing. On the one hand it reveals a naiveté, a common weakness in true believers: We believe it, so it’s the Truth.

On the other hand, because faith conquers all, it reveals a disregard of simple rationality. If people claim to be raising the standard of language usage, it’s legitimate to ask what they are raising the standard from, and towards what. How are we to know at the end of the day whether or not the standard of usage has been raised? What is it today, and what do we want it to be tomorrow? On this all-important question plain language advocates are oddly mute.

As the conference is being held in Australia, not the embarrassingly backward USA, it is worth pointing out that the Australian Federal Government has had a Plain English Policy since 1983. Plain English, as a writing style, has now permeated most of the public sector at Federal, State, and Local Government. Further, it is commonly used in businesses that deal directly with the public. Most large banks, insurance companies, retail traders and service providers use the plain English style of writing as the default style in communicating with the public. There are, of course, exceptions, but they are notable for being so. Plain English is the norm.

Do Australians feel that they are living in a society in which clarity and transparency are the norm? I suspect not. Yet with all this plain English about, how can this be so? Could it be that plain English is not as clear as it seems to the true believers? Is there evidence to the contrary, despite the ‘raised’ standard? Well, yes, there is a great deal of evidence to the contrary: not only does the communication model embraced by the Plain language movement defy 400 years thinking in the philosophy of language and 100 years researching in psychology, but also there is a large amount of empirical evidence that shows that on its own, plain language is not a sufficient nor necessary ingredient of clear communication.

At the margins of this great conference, I will be giving a paper on an evidence-based approach to standards in public communication. In it I will suggest, based on evidence from many case histories, that skilled language use (not necessarily plain) plays an important but relatively small part in creating a high standard of public communication, seldom exceeding 10% of the total effort. Other factors and a range of skills, beyond those of writing in a particular style, account for a much larger share of the costs in raising the standard of public communication from its current poor level (as measured) to a measurably higher standard.

The final irony is that if someone who is an expert in Plain English tells you they can create clear and transparent communication, they may be misleading you. They can write in a style that superficially looks clear, but to use a non-plain, non-English adage, caveat emptor.

In October I will be giving two conference papers about the gap between advanced professional information design practice and contemporary Information Architects (IA) and Plain English (PE) advocates.

One paper will be at the Australian IA Conference, the latest in the series of highly successful conferences organised by Eric Scheid.
For information and to register, go to:

http://www.oz-ia.org/2009.

Good news for readers of this blog: you are entitled to a discount. When you register, use the code: DS0258.

The other conference is a PE talkfest of as yet indeterminate quality (apart, of course, from my paper). You can register at:

http://www.plainenglishfoundation.com/Conference/tabid/3270/Default.aspx

Here is a brief summary of the ground I will be covering in these papers.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, some of us in the information design research and practice community were asking ourselves: What methods and research findings will lead to improvements in information designed for people?

By the late 1980s, before the wide-scale use of the internet, we at CRIA published a number of case histories demonstrating these methods and their effectiveness. But because this research was conducted outside the emerging interest in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and later the internet, it was largely ignored by the usability communities (though one of our case histories was incorrectly cited by Jakob Neilsen in his Usability Engineering 1994), including many in the IA and PE communities.

In the 1990s, we asked a new question: could we use these methods not just to bring about measurable improvements, but to bring about consistent improvements so that all information of a particular type could be improved to a particular standard?

In 1994 we published the first of a number of guidelines and case histories that clearly showed it was possible to design information to a consistently high standard.

Once again, we saw no evidence of these types of guidelines in IA work and even less so in the PE community.

The next step was to get some of these standards built into regulation so that industry would be required to meet them. We had some unexpected success with the EU in 1998, and with the Australian Government in 2004. Around the same time, we successfully implemented these standards in the Australian and Mexican industry codes of practice and guidelines.

This process of creating information design standards is likely to accelerate, particularly with current government interest in the effectiveness of communication in both the health and financial sectors.

Thus the game has changed and keeps on changing; and the IA and PE communities are still playing catch-up.

The problem faced by both IA and PE advocates is that if they don’t catch up, their current professional performances may fall short of the standards they will be required to meet.

We will shortly offer a number of post graduate training courses to help our IA and PE colleagues catch up. Register on our web site to make sure of your place on these courses.

This is important work and we want to share the know-how. I look forward to IA and PE catching up. And I look forward to seeing you at one or both of these conferences.

Remember to use the code DS0258 when you register for the IA conference.