Less Is More: The Importance of Usable Information

Human beings have an endless thirst for knowledge. Far from merely satisfying our curiosity, we seek knowledge for the power it gives us to create new technologies and to accomplish more with those already at our disposal. This drive to understand ever more about the world is what has led us all the way from the stone age to today’s information age.

As the CEO of a SaaS company providing content management and project analytics to the AEC industry, I see this drive for more knowledge play out all the time in the BIM space. I speak frequently with BIM Managers, Coordinators and Specialists about how our product can better serve them. These conversations inevitably involve some version of the following request: “Could Kinship also tell us A, B and C about our Revit projects?”

The answer is usually yes, it could. But as software makers, our response needs to go further than simply dumping more data points on the screen. If we truly want information to help solve problems and improve outcomes, then we have to make sure that information is usable.

By usable information, I mean the following:

1) Information that is actually the most relevant to the problem being solved.

The same raw data can produce information of varying relevance to a problem depending on how it is processed. For example, if we want to know whether a model is running slowly, it’s not enough to say that we want to know the model’s sync time. Do we want to know the average sync time, the slowest sync time, the most recent sync time, or some combination thereof? Or is there a different piece of data that would give us better insight, like the time it takes to open the model?

There is a tendency in BIM to think that more information is automatically better. But without carefully scrutinizing its relevance, we can easily end up focusing on information that leads to inaccurate thinking or unnecessary distractions.

2) Information that is formatted to create minimal cognitive load for the user.

The same piece of information can be presented in many ways – as numbers, a graph, an image, a symbol, etc. The question is which of those will take the least amount of mental work for the user to interpret correctly. We often operate on the assumption that making information visible is sufficient for it to become useful. In reality, users may stare at numbers or charts without being able to tell whether that information means something is wrong or needs attention.

Usable information will be formatted in a way that makes it as easy as possible for the user to interpret correctly. Despite our instincts to the contrary, this often means we should omit details and present information in a simplified and “predigested” format. For example, rather than showing users a detailed breakdown of model warnings – giving them all the information they could possibly want, yet leaving them overwhelmed with deciding what to do – we might better meet their needs by summarizing that information in a “stop light” icon that indicates if everything is good (green), something probably needs attention (yellow), or something needs immediate attention (red). From there, we can allow the user to go a level deeper and look at all the relevant details with a clear idea of their intended action.

3) Information that is presented when and where it can facilitate the desired action or decision.

The ‘last mile’ of usable information is how we deliver that information to the user at a time and place that facilitates the desired outcome. Too often the answer here is to build a dashboard. It’s the ‘if you build it, they will come’ theory of usable information – if there is one place that has all the information the user needs, then surely it will be easy for them to find and use that information.

In reality, dashboards are often ineffective for that very reason. There is too much information to sort through, and the information is not available in a working context where it would be natural to act on. Going back to the example of diagnosing model speed, it might be better to highlight the information when the user is looking at recent model activity, or when they have opened a model and are working on it. If we do want to summarize the information on a dashboard, then how do we make it easy to go from that high level report to a context that facilitates action, such as communicating with project managers or opening the model?

While usable information will feel simple and easy to the user, it takes a lot of thought and work to get it right. But in today’s era of Big Data, the stakes for doing so have never been higher. There is so much information at our disposal that it is easier than ever to focus on the wrong information, create information overload and to put information where it doesn’t belong. If our goal with BIM is to unlock the value of information to create a better built environment, then we would be wise to focus as much as possible on making sure that information is usable.