Air Guitars and Keeping Loyal Customers [Good Design #5]

My dad got an Air Guitar for Christmas this year. Yes, an Air Guitar. It’s a plastic toy shaped like the head and neck of a guitar, with a laser that senses your arm’s motion through the air. When you pass your hand in front of the laser, the toy plays a sound that resembles a chord (sort of). A cheap thrill, but my dad was amused with it.

He had fun with this Air Guitar, but the instructions were nearly indecipherable. The content itself wasn’t bad (although it really wasn’t good, either). In fact, although the content itself was pretty clear, it took great effort to undertstand the instructions. The culprit was poor design—it hindered the content. Like nonverbal cues in spoken dialog, design carries great responsibility for communicating the written word.

This is the fifth in a series of posts that discuss Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design and why good design is necessary for your content. In this series we explore each of the principles and what it means for content writing and technical writing.

Today we look at the fourth principle of good design:

Good design makes a product understandable. It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

At first, this principle seems like a no-brainer. Of course well-designed content should make a product understandable—that’s what it’s there for! But in our case, the product we’re designing is the content itself. Good content design makes your content understandable. This means you can’t rely on your words alone to communicate—effective writing goes far beyond your choice of words.

Confuse Them and Lose Them

Here’s a copy of the Air Guitar instructions (click to expand). These instructions are on a single sheet of paper, a little smaller than standard U.S. letter size. Don’t ask me why they refused to use the reverse side.

Here’s just a few design flaws that make the content difficult to understand:

• The font size looks like it ranges from 2 to 8 points. Way too small! And the size varies without apparent reason (except to fit it all on one page?).
• There’s so much crowding of text that the eye gets stressed just glancing at it.
• The black triangles with numbers don’t make any sense. Do they indicate steps? Sections?
• The images aren’t bad, but the largest one at the top is too small to read clearly.
• There’s no sense of flow from one section to another—what order should I read these instructions in? Or is that what the black triangles are for?

I could go on, but you get the idea.

If the Air Guitar were my toy, I would have taken one quick glance at the instructions and tossed them out. Luckily, it’s an easy toy to figure out without a user guide, but what if it weren’t? In that case, I might give up and return the product for a refund. Or I might go online and search for help from other users, but I wouldn’t look for help from the company.

In fact, that’s exactly what millions of users do every day. Rather than go to the company for help, customers often seek out other users. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when your documentation is so poorly designed that it drives your customers away, you’ve got a problem. Your customers don’t trust you, or they don’t want to bother with you.

It’s also common for customers to return items simply because they couldn’t figure out how to use the products, and that’s costly to your business.

On the other hand, if you provide well-designed content that’s easy to understand, you’ll boost customer loyalty and trust. Supplement your documentation with  user feedback and contributions, and you’ve created a support community of excited users and loyal customers—and you cut down on your own support costs. Talk about a win-win solution!

Win-Win-Win

There’s a marketing benefit to good design, too. Smart companies are realizing the tremendous value of designing their technical documents to impress customers and give the best user experiences possible. Some are even beginning to use their user guides as marketing materials—something I’ve advocated several times (including here and here).

When you give your user guides this kind of priority, you empower your customers to get to know your product more fully, even before they buy. It’s a rewarding experience for your customers, and if the technical documentation is designed well, it also serves as effective marketing material.

How Then Shall We Design?

Remember, good design isn’t the same as a slick layout or cool graphics. You can have a cool looking document but still have poorly designed content. Good design is anything that makes your content understandable. When producing content, keep these four areas in consideration:

1. Organization. Not just a lack of disorganization, but the proper organization. Should the content be organized hierarchically or have a flat structure? What should the user see first? Can the user find information easily? Are topics organized in a way that makes sense and is usable?
2. Layout. Robin Williams uses for basic principles for designing layout: color, repetition, alignment, proximity. I highly recommend her book, The Non-Designer’s Design Book. In addition, consider your typeface, and use bullets and numbering in a consistent manner.
3. Media. Use images or videos to break up the monotony of text, to make instructions easier to understand, and to keep readers’ interest. Don’t overuse media, and only use images or video if you can justify their usefulness. If it doesn’t help improve understanding, don’t use it.
4. Simplicity. The more complex you get, the easier it is to lose your users. Simple design enhances the content, but complex design can often interfere with the message.

The design of your content is a big deal. Without giving it the proper attention, you can easily create content that is hard to understand and causes your customers to become frustrated. Frustrated customers will abandon you by returning your product or turning to others for help. Either way, you lose their trust and loyalty. Be sure your content strengthens customer loyalty by taking the time to design every piece of content.

Don’t have the time to devote to designing your content? Talk to us! We can help you create compelling, authoritative content your customers will love.

Also in this series:

• The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content
• What’s the Point of Innovation? [Good Design #2]
• How Companies Make Their Products Useless (And How to Avoid It) [Good Design #3]
• Why the iPad User Guide Matters [Good Design #4]

Photo Credit: Elmo H. Love