December Meeting Review:
Picture and Profits (Patrick Hofmann)

by Jim Korth, LSC Public Relations Committee

“Keep it simple…take risks…less is more….cheaper is better.” These sound like the warmed-over and tired clichés that today’s cost-driven management continually drums into us. But for visual interaction designer Patrick Hofmann, these are practical lessons he has learned from customer interaction in the field. Patrick tirelessly evangelizes this knowledge in promoting the value of visual images in usability testing and product documentation.

Mr. Hofmann was the featured speaker at the STC Lone Star Community’s December meeting where he presented on “Pictures and Profits: The ROI of Visual Information Design.” With an amusing and eye-opening presentation, Patrick demonstrated how just a few intelligently designed images can replace hundreds of lines of expensive and tedious documentation text. He also showed how this simplicity can also have a significant and visible effect on cost savings and product improvement.

Patrick is by training a writer, but he is more recently an illustrator and usability consultant. So while his field is still technical documentation, Patrick deals more often in images than words. He admits that he likes pictures. People, and specifically users, often think more in images than in words, especially when they are trying to work their way through a procedure for something new, like a manufacturing product.

Patrick’s talk concerned three very different cases in which text documentation and its accompanying training materials were far too expensive, too cumbersome, or just plain wrong for the product involved. Patrick and his colleagues developed and conducted simple usability testing with actual users or test users brought in by temporary agencies. The result in each instance was simple, visual, image-driven help media with great cost savings.

Example #1: Patrick and the Leatherworks Factory

Highly skilled operators of laser-guided leather-cutting machinery were exasperated with a remote control device used for layout despite four days of training. Keystroke combinations to operate the device were difficult to memorize. The client’s management thought a ten-page manual created with no user input would solve the problem. The client, in effect, expected Patrick to create additional text documentation to address poor mechanical design.

Patrick’s client, the manufacturer of the leather-cutting machinery, felt it was not necessary for him to even view the machinery in operation by actual users. Patrick took it upon himself to visit a nearby footwear manufacturer using the equipment. He found that the machine operators spoke a wide variety of languages and had created handwritten keystroke instructions in their native languages and taped them up on the wall. Patrick realized that text documentation in English was not the answer.

The result was a one-page online help poster showing keystroke combinations in images and almost no text. Patrick’s client initially was aghast, yet trusted him. The outcome was improved operator productivity and satisfaction. Training was cut from four days to a half-day, and the manufacturer saved $250,000 in documentation costs. The increased efficiency also led to additional orders for the machinery.

Example #2: Patrick and Sprint-Canada

Sprint in Canada wanted its dialing instructions documented for its users, many of whom were recent immigrants who spoke little or no English or French. Patrick saw that translating and printing multilingual versions would be too costly. He instead conducted usability testing with people brought in by temporary agencies. Storyboard boxes were created with brief caption text inserted. He evaluated a combination of purely wordless, highly visual, and textual instructions in two rounds of iterative design/usability testing. Huge savings and immediate sales increases were the result of Patrick’s visual instructions and simple text captions.

Example #3: Patrick and Hewlett-Packard

Finally, Hewlett-Packard (HP) sought to simplify its product documentation. For each release, HP translated and re-created its 200-page assembly guides into nearly 20 languages. HP had dabbled in wordless manuals, but wanted a traditional documentation solution. Patrick’s team videotaped HP technicians trying to assemble an unreleased computer and showed their tapes to the HP executives. The wordless instructions Patrick ultimately created were praised by HP as far easier to understand. Print costs were cut from as high as $12 per unit to 80 cents. Customers in China and Japan were particularly happy with the new wordless manual. The success of this project encouraged HP to pioneer wordless documentation in its other divisions.

Patrick pointed out that each case required his people taking significant risks and appealing to the trust of the client’s management in working out of the box. He called his practice “guerilla customer insight gathering” and achieved success in using temporary agencies instead of recruitment vendors to quickly assemble inexpensive usability testers. Remote testing using webcams and WebEx permits further savings.

Patrick's Tips

Tips that Patrick left us with are that:

• Any feedback is better than none.
• Test and gather information any way you can.
• Get close to the user and observe.
• Replace cumbersome text with images.

Patrick Hofmann has proven in the field that the thoughtful use of visuals and guerilla usability testing methods produce measurable savings, user satisfaction, and an impressive return on investment.