If you're older than 30, you may remember a time when nutrition labels on foods were difficult to understand and could tell you lots of things or almost nothing, depending on the whim of the manufacturer. But as the result of a 1990 law, the labels were standardized, and the "Nutrition Facts" format that was chosen was widely hailed as a masterful design, not only pleasing to the eye but easy to read and understand. It won awards for its creator, the jauntily named Burkey Belser.
Any designer will tell you that the world is full of terrible design that impedes our lives in all kinds of ways. Design isn't just about glossy magazines and iPods; it's also about seemingly mundane things that we never think of as being designed. To take just one example, poor design, in the form of the 2000 Palm Beach County election ballot, gave us President George W. Bush.
So it's nice to see the government making at least some effort to use good design to make people better informed. Yesterday, the Department of Transportation unveiled a new fuel economy sticker:
Not bad. There's quite a bit of information there, and some of it is new to the form (how this vehicle compares to the average vehicle, how much you'll be paying in fuel costs per year), but it is reasonably readable. An important part of good design in forms like this is taking things away, so people are able to focus on the the few pieces of information that are really important to them. This is happening in some other places in the government as well. For instance, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is soliciting comments on new disclosure forms for mortgages, to make sure people know what they're getting into (you can see the options here). That's an example where the government is actually asking people what they think of potential forms before they're produced. The new form will be radically better than the old ones, which were packed with legalese intended to make sure people didn't understand what they were buying.
I have no idea how many forms the federal government produces; it's probably in the thousands. But it would go a long way toward making people feel better about the government if they were all designed thoughtfully, with an eye toward making them as easy to understand as possible. Each one isn't as radical a change as, say, passing a health-reform bill. But every little bit helps.
