What Makes Great Design?

By Pat McGrew, EDP, Kodak

Have you taken a good look at the bills, statements, regulatory notices and other material coming from your bank and other companies you do business with? With all of the changes across a number of industries as well as with regulations, my mail box fills up with the regular bills and statements (yes, I get the paper version), and even more notices about changes to these relationships.

When I spread out a week’s worth of these mail pieces on my desk, a few things strike me. Here we are, in 2009, and too many of these documents are still hard to read. The type is too small for me to read easily, information is poorly organized, text blocks are too dense, and sometimes it’s hard to tell who sent the piece.

In one week’s worth of mail, I received several Change in Terms documents from credit card companies. It was easy to see they had all come from the same basic template and that they had been printed offset. More than half of the text in the change notice did not apply to my type of account or my relationship with the company. Even worse, it had been printed in such a small type face that I had to put a magnifying glass on the page. Worse still, the logo and contact information for the company that sent the notice was nowhere to be found. This document failed at design in every way.

In that same batch were a half dozen bills and statements covering my relationships with a couple of banks, my utility company, a gas card, department store card and Visa card. Laid out side by side, it was sad to see that most suffered from the same problems: information on how to pay was buried, contact information for disputes or questions was spread into several areas of the documents, and while there were attempts at marketing messages, they were all irrelevant to me.

This surprised me since the timeframe for complying with Regulation Z is close and just to comply will require a redesign to provide a more customer-centric design.  Take Regulation Z out of the equation and there is still a failure to communicate with the people who provide the cash flow – the consumers.

At a minimum your customer communication should meet the following criteria:

1. There should be and easy identification of your brand. The logo, current marketing tagline and adherence to corporate design standards are important.
2. All text should be in an easy-to-read typeface. Check in your industry and you may discover there are guidelines. Minimum readability for the aging population is 10 point type in most type faces.
3. Information should be presented in architecture that groups relevant information. Contact information should be in one place, and it should match the information provided on the web! It’s worth checking to see if it works. I called one number on a bill and was immediately directed to call another number – there should be no automated transfer.
   1. Is it easy to find the payment due?
   2. Can you easily identify your transactions?
   3. Is there information on the bill that is useless to the customer (batch numbers)?

These same questions apply whether it is a bill, statement or regulatory notice. Start with these… let’s talk more next time!

Pat McGrew, EDP, is the Data-driven Communication Evangelist at Kodak. Her email address is Pat.McGrew@kodak.com, Twitter is PatMcGrew, and blog at http://patmcgrew.growyourbiz.kodak.com/.