Clients are busy people and they never read long, text heavy [usability] reports. Design can be a useful tool to buy more time from them and make it easier for them to draw meaningful Nuggets from your documents.

Following on from my post about spin in report writing, here’s 12 report design tips to engage your time poor readers:

1. ‘Design’ your report template so that it captures your readers’ attention immediately and increases the likelihood of them reading your report. 
2. Use a designer to create the template. Don’t make the design up yourself, if that’s not your specialty, it will look silly.
3. Your report markets your brand, forever - Ask yourself, ‘Does my client feel proud of my report when they show their colleagues?’
4. Be consistent with your branding and design across documents so they can recognise/find them.
5. Be consistent with your branding and design within a document - That’s common sense really!
6. Use images that catch the eye  - we know a picture tells 1000s of words.
7. Put call outs (speech bubbles) on the images - they can be quick easy to read (if you say useful stuff).
8. Highlight the important messages with formatting and headings - so they are scannable and easily recognised.
9. Use a standard layout that highlights the priority findings on all pages - that way a people can choose the level of detail to read.
10. Use tables with images and icons - they may the report look shorter and allow easy comparison and scanning. However, you can fit lots of info in there if your smart!
11. If you have a design recommendation, don’t describe it, draw it! If you can’t draw then find an example and paste a screen shot in the report.
12. If you are using wireframes make them look ‘designed’ with some logos, curves, colour and shading. Plain black and white wireframes look amateurish!

i reckon we need to bring back the design into usability! It’s no longer about making things work, that’s a given. It’s about making them cool too!