Rob Waller

Simplification Centre

This paper addresses a debate that frequently arises when contract simplification is discussed. For business users, a clear contract is one that helps them understand the deal, implement its terms and encourages a productive business relationship. Legal teams, on the other hand, often worry about their responsibility to protect their client against...

Contracts with a high proportion of boilerplate or small print are not designed with readers in mind, and so few people read them. We need to go beyond surface-level optimisation (plain language and legible type) to develop a transformational approach rooted in an understanding of user needs and behaviours. The roles of strategic reading, literacy,...

This paper addresses the issue of incomprehensible consumer contracts – the small print. I argue that when people suffer loss because they did not understand a contract condition, we should view it as a cognitive accident. This changes our perspective to one of duty of care, and risk management. I argue that processes are as important as templates...

This research center profile describes the Simplification Centre, from its origin as a university research center to its present status as a not-for-profit dedicated to education and advocacy. We address the problem of poorly designed complex information in societies where a significant proportion of people have poor functional literacy. Our main a...

Opioid overdoses are a concerning and potentially deadly health issue, but they are treatable with a short-term antidote called naloxone. Naloxone kits are increasingly available for use in emergency situations, not only by emergency services but also by people with little or no medical/first-aid training. So the instructions are critical. This pap...

Multimodal studies are essentially interdisciplinary, crossing boundaries between the verbal and the visual, between creation and consumption, and, it is argued here, between academic analysis and professional practices. This paper presents a practice-based perspective on multimodal document genres which feature typography and page/screen layout. I...

This paper reports a case study of an innovative contract simplification project. The context is an energy industry facility to be built in northwestern British Columbia, Canada, where it is important to gain social license from Aboriginal communities by sharing employment opportunities. However, the complexity of contract documentation was seen as...

This paper reports on design explorations made for a series of consultation workshops organised by the UK government's Clear Law initiative in 2013/14.

Pattern libraries, originating in architecture, are a common way to share design solutions in interaction design and software engineering. Our aim in this paper is to consider patterns as a way of describing commonly-occurring document design solutions to particular problems, from two points of view. First, we are interested in their use as exempla...

Page layout is dominant in many genres of physical documents, but it is frequently overlooked in academic analyses of texts and in digitized versions. Its presence is largely determined by available technologies and skills: If no provision is made for creating, preserving, or describing layout, then it tends not to be created, preserved or describe...

These working notes summarise a genre theory that accounts for document layout in a three part communication model that recognises not only the effort of the writer to set out a topic and the purposeful effort by a reader to access information, but also the professional and manufacturing processes that intervene. I suggest that layout genres use co...

What can information designers learn from the way we navigate physical places, ? And what can architects learn from the way we read text? They frequently use metaphors from each other’s domains: information designers speak of user journeys, and navigating a document or a website, as if it were a spatial environment, while architects speak of readin...

This paper describes a corpus-based approach to the analysis of graphic text sig-nalling in complex information documents. To make the task of populating the corpus tractable, we have developed software to automate as much of the annotation process as possible. OCR output is first obtained in OpenDocument format. This is post-processed semi-automat...

This study combined three research methodologies to inform the choice of a typeface for signs at London's Heathrow Airport. The methodologies were legibility testing, qualitative consumer research, and expert review. The study showed that, contrary to a number of expert predictions, the serifed typeface performed as well as the sans serif in legibi...

Focusing on a critical aspect in the relationship with consumers, Rob Waller and Judy Delin urge designers to create “cooperative” communications—media that are relevant, clear, concise, truthful, and informative. These attributes strengthen brand and build loyalty. Ignoring them causes confusion and doubt, weakening the connection with customers....

Written in 1974 while the authors were with the Open University, this paper first appeared in the 1976 Penrose Annual. The original abstract, written by the Penrose editor, read: Break down the barriers in the interests of the reader. Take responsibility for the success or failure of the communication. Do not accept a label or a slot on a productio...

This thesis presents a model that accounts for variations in typographic form in terms of four underlying sources of structure. The first three relate to the three parts of the writer-text-reader relationship: topic structure, representing the expressive intentions of the writer; artefact structure, resulting from the physical constraints of the me...

This chapter discusses a way to test design alternatives that are available. Since the mid-1970s, there has been remarkable growth in developing new process measures to aid document design. These process measures provide those interested in text design with the means to conduct direct assessments of the processes subjects use as they attempt to han...

Designing usable texts contains a wealth of information and advice for document preparation. The book covers theoretical and practical aspects of writing, editing, and evaluating a document and also includes information concerning the use of graphics in text design.

This paper describes a case history of the design of a government form. In particular, three kinds of problem are identified and discussed: contextual problems of relevance and interpretation; problems of reading sequence and conditional branching instructions; and a range of typographic problems. Typography is seen as a particularly important way...

A case is made for the inclusion of graphic and spatial factors in the linguistic analysis of text, and in common rules and guidelines for clear writing. Some conceptual problems are considered and a parallel is drawn between the roles of punctuation and typography at the micro-and macro-levels of texts. The gradual codification of punctuation, fro...

Although functional objectives have concerned designers for many years, and psychologists have published research on issues related to graphic design, fruitful cooperation between the two specialisms has only rarely been achieved. In this paper it is suggested that the traditional objectives and methods of neither group are sufficiently oriented to...

The use of illustrations in textbooks is reviewed and seven functions of explicative illustrations are presented--descriptive, expressive, constructional, functional, logico-mathematical, algorithmic, and data-display. (RAO)

Information theory, while having a limited direct impact on the study of graphic communication, left a metaphor for communication that, reflecting the transient nature of electronic signals rather than the permanence of the printed media, is, it is argued, unhelpful and somewhat misleading. The metaphor is adapted to draw attention in particular to...

The term “access structure” refers to the co-ordinated use of typographically signalled structural cues that help students to read texts using selective sampling strategies. In spite of their prevalence, however, the research literature contains very few references to access devices which include contents lists, headings, glossaries, and so on. Thi...

The purpose of legibility research is not to discover universal truths, but to improve the practice of typography and design. Research should be directed to specific decisions in particular, practical situations. This article suggests a practical research style which makes use of the tacit know‐how of typographers and designers. The idea is to pref...

study how language is actually used by collecting together real examples in computer databases known as corpora (Latin for 'bodies'). They can search each corpus to see, for example, how frequently particular words are used, and which words tend to be used together, or in which kinds of text. This research paper describes a project to extend this a...