The Power of Humility in Communication Design

I had a discussion over LinkedIn yesterday with a longtime friend that stemmed from an infographic I created about how to organize a paper. He pointed out to me that organization is an act of humility, since it shows a clear recognition that our instinctual approach and thought process may not always be what people need or want. In other words, what works for us may be the right approach for everyone else. It takes humility to soak that in.

While it’s likely that humility is not at the forefront of your mind every time you approach an email or send off a report, it arguably should be. As a producer of a communication—whatever that may be, from presentations to product packaging—you are creating something that affects another human being. Every time you create document, you become an artist, intentionally or not, that is evoking visceral, emotional, and behavioral responses from people. If your assumptions supersede what a person actually needs, wants, or feels, you may be exhibiting an unconscious arrogance that just might impede your ability to reach your audience. Stay with me on this.

Just over a decade ago, in a fantastically insightful book called Nudge, authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argued that whenever we create a communication or situation in which people will need to think and act, we become “choice architects.” In other words, the way we construct something actually physically affects people’s choices—we are the architects of their experiences. If someone entirely ignores what we came up with, it’s because the way we constructed the experience didn’t resonate with them or it didn’t even grab their attention in the first place. We likely made assumptions about them that had to do more about us than it did them.

The Assumptions We Make

When we don’t take a humble approach to communication, we often think from our own point of view. Stanford’s Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design (also know as “d.school”)—which is the front-runner in the burgeoning ideology of “Design Thinking”—argues that empathy is the first critical step to creating anything for a user. Empathy implies letting go of our assumptions and focusing on what people actually need. So what assumptions do we often make? Here are a few:

• We assume people care about what we have to say. It can be a humbling thought indeed to think that what we have to say isn’t interesting to other people. (Just ask any technical writer how they feel knowing that much of what they write is never even read.) The reality is, though, there is a ton of information out there and people will only read what interests them. If we can’t find a way to make it interesting to them, it might as well never be created in the first place.
• We assume people think the same way we do. We often get brilliant ideas and we create really cool diagrams, reports, websites, and presentations, only to discover that it doesn’t make sense to anyone else looking at. Our organizational structure, word choice, use of acronyms, navigational elements, or whatever may make sense to us, but it may not work for anyone else. Our brains are idiosyncratic and unique. Others’ brains may very well be quite different.
• We assume people read entire documents. It’s probably not surprising to you that the average office employee receives 40 emails per day (that number jumps for managers and leaders). It may be a little more surprising to you, though, that a person stays on a website for an average of less than 30 seconds. The reality is, with so much information out there, with so many distractions and messages, people don’t actually read entire documents unless they have to or they’re super interested in the topic. In general, people skim and scan and pull out only what they need.
• We assume people make logical, well-thought-out decisions. Herbert Simon, in 1956, studied the way people make decisions, only to discover that most people, in most situations, don’t read through all the material available to them and then make a logical, rational decision based on thorough insights. Rather, they satisfice. In other words, people look at the information in front of them, they quickly make connections between ideas, and they opt to try and do. The best example is on a website: when people visit a website, they don’t read everything on the page before they choose to click on something; rather, they find a key word or graphic that they think will help them answer their question, and then they quickly click on it. If that link failed them, they’ll hit the back button and try again. If satisficing fails them again, they’ll probably go to another website.

These are just a few of the more common assumptions we make. There are plenty of others. If we’re not conscious of our own assumptions—if we’re not humble enough to take a step back and evaluate our communication—we may never reach our audience the way we intend.

The Problem with Assumptions

If we assume people will read or use something just because we wrote it or designed it, we can become inadvertently blind to what people actually need. If you’re writing a proposal, for example, and there are data points or financial figures that are critical for decisions makers to act, that may be all they care about and all they’ll read. But if you don’t make those figures obvious and compelling, your proposal may fail, even if the idea is brilliant.

Arrogance—the assumption that a person will read the entire proposal just because we gave it to them—blinds us to the communicative tools we have to draw their attention. If we don’t recognize the complexity of human decision-making, if we’re not humble enough to forego our way of thinking and adapt to others’ ways, our communications may never make an impact.

How to Implement Humility

While not every document (like, say emails) will obviously have the opportunity to go through a thorough design and user-testing process, we have to have a user-centered design mentality every time we communicate. The theory behind design thinking suggests we do six things every time we communicate or develop a product: empathize; define; ideate; prototype; test; and implement. It looks something like this:

• Step 1: Empathize. Recognize what your readers/users actually need, want, and will benefit most from. Put yourself in their emotional state—why would they care? Are they happy about what you’re creating? Apathetic? Frustrated? Tired? You want to be considerate of their time, knowledge-level, and ways of thinking. In a world of information overload, this often means simplicity, clarity, and ease.
• Step 2: Define. Take the time to define exactly what it is that people need, but also what you have to give them. What is their problem? What questions do they have? What are the options for helping them solve their problems?
• Step 3: Ideate. Look for innovative solutions. Is a consecutive series of dense paragraphs really the best for your readers? Would headings, bullets, call-outs, colors, diagrams, tables, flow-charts, one-sheets, photographs, buttons, or anything else actually enhance, simplify, and clarify your document? Should you think about a different shape, size, or material for your document or product? More importantly, will taking these extra steps and innovative approaches make the lives of your readers/users easier? The communication is about them, not you. What’s the best way to reach them? Broaden your options and think outside the box.
• Step 4: Prototype. Obviously you can’t prototype every email, but you should always be thinking with a drafting/revision mindset. If your communication can and should be used by other people before implementation, do it. Get a second set of eyes on things. Try multiple solutions. Design, adjust, and re-create. This takes more time and it requires humility to think that what we do the first time may actually be terrible, but it makes for better communications in the end.
• Step 5: Test. When possible (and as much as possible), test your communications and products before launching. This is as true for physical products as it is for websites, software programs, data visualizations, and even reports. Have several people read, use, and implement your work before you send it to the masses. See what is working for them and see what isn’t. Be comfortable knowing that you may have more errors or problems than you think.
• Step 6: Implement. This step may be obvious and it’s something you would do even without design thinking. But the key concept here is to realize that, even after implementation, you may discover that your communication didn’t work as well as you intended or thought. Be humble enough to recognize that if it didn’t work for your users, it’s probably more your fault than it is theirs. Revise, rethink, and try again.

Final Thoughts

A humble approach to the way we communicate requires a conscious awareness of the idiosyncrasies of human nature. It requires that we think in terms of design, architecture, and artistry every time we create something for someone else. It takes practice. But the more we approach communication with a user-centered, humble, and design-thinking approach, the more likely we’ll actually get people to read what we create. It doesn’t matter the type of document you’re creating—instructions, syllabuses, reports, presentations/slide decks, web pages, emails, flyers, fact sheets—if you’re humble, it’s much more likely to succeed.