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Communication comes with a cost.
Hasty communication, poor information, and careless content accumulate a debt - one that, sooner or later, will need repaying.
According to the thermodynamics of design, there’s no such a thing as a free lunch.
Like technical or design debt, a lack of investment now means a future toll. When we do not put in the time and effort to communicate with clarity and intention now, someone will have to pay for that in the future.
And we witness this debt daily, both at work and in life.
Maybe we avoid a tough conversation or don't speak with the right person.
Perhaps we overlook the time, thought and effort it takes to make sure that our team is on the same page.
Our messages don't land, attempts to communicate helpfully fall flat. People don’t read us - or what they’re reading doesn’t make sense to them. They don’t engage with, act on, or even remember it.
"Why aren’t they reading the email? Why can’t they find that information in the document? Why am I repeating myself endlessly?"
Misunderstandings, misalignments, and constant rehashing of decisions ensue.
On a smaller scale, communication debt is the time and effort it takes to decipher a long-winded email or attend another agenda-less hour-long meeting.
On a larger scale, it's the barrage of calls to a support line because the website content is a mess.
It's the existence of whole organisations that interpret complex information and advice for people.
It’s the emotional labour of navigating tides of information day in and day out, and the mental toll of constantly putting out fires.
Poor communication isn't usually deliberate. Yet good, well-designed information usually is.
No one sets out to confuse. We don’t know what we don’t know, and we often assume that what’s obvious to us will be obvious to others.
Putting oneself in other people’s shoes, and being aware of different experiences, knowledge, and mental models is hard.
But when we assume others are on the same page, we create debt.
When we send that long, rambling email instead of simplifying it as much as possible, we create debt.
When we publish content without testing, we create debt.
When we add more detail "just in case," we create debt.
A compounding debt that will need repaying by our users, teams or organisation.
In time and energy, effort and money - or the slow grind of entropy.
Our highlights
✍ Content design
Civilla
Whenever someone asks for case studies about content design in the real world, this is the one we point them to. A perfect illustration of communication debt, where residents had to complete over one thousand questions, and staff had to prioritise paperwork over people.
💡Ideas
Rich Prowse, Director of practice at Content Design London
Speaking at a content strategy meetup in Australia, Rich talks about the role of cognition and decision-making in content design. (If you don’t have time to watch the video, you can read the blog post.)
📣 Culture
Will McCarthy, Longreads
A wandering long read where Will McCarthy reflects on how this tool for consumer reviews became a digital guestbook for anything and everything in the world.
🔮 Trends
iNews
“International students will be particularly at risk from outdated information. Unlike domestic students, they’ll be far more reliant on these figures to help them understand the cost of living in the UK, and prices from two or more years ago could easily be 10 to 20 per cent lower than today.”
💻 Digital
Alex Pasternack, Forbes
As part of Forbes’ 1994 week (the “year of the web”), Alex Pasternack shares stories of 15 webpages from 1994 and the start of the information superhighway.
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Connect with us on Twitter: @AdrianJOrtega and @NiaRCampbell
Get in touch to work with us: hello@tidycontent.com
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