Manifest Digital Human Experience Society

Each year the member banks of the Federal Reserve publish reams of data that could be used to better understand the American economy. But much of that information has yet to be made easily accessible on the Web, much less presented in a way that a wide variety of users could put to work.

Several Manifest employees helped the Fed take a step toward solving that problem earlier this month. Brandy Taylor, Tanarra Schneider, and Laura Blaydon gave a presentation and answered questions at the annual Federal Reserve System Editors and Designers Conference, held this year at the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank.

The Manifesters’ talk focused on how institutions can effectively transition major policy documents like annual reports from print to the Web. The ideas they shared could help out not just the Fed’s member banks, but representatives of the other major financial bodies that attended, including the Bank for International Settlements, the Bank of Canada, Bank of South Africa, Bank of England, and the European Central Bank. 

Blaydon, a senior content strategist with Manifest, shared a number of examples of how companies and institutions had moved annual reports from print to the Web in ways that were more sophisticated than posting a PDF file. A few, such as the online versions of annual reports by GE and GlaxoSmithKline, demonstrated some of the interesting interactive effects that are possible within the genre. But Blaydon said that more immediately useful for the audience in the room may have been more straightforward examples like the reports released by Amazon or the British grocery chain Salisbury’s.

“It’s important to keep in mind that not every client wants a fully-designed Web module to blow the audience’s socks off,” Blaydon said.

Just as important, she said, is having a coherent strategy that relates the type of content being released to specific audiences and the role they will play in reaching an institution’s goals.

“Many non-profits and government agencies have struggled with how much information to give away and how much to restrict to specific audiences like members,” Blaydon said. “It’s really important to have a strategy for making those sorts of decisions and to think about the impact of making more information available.”

Even when they have a good idea of what they would like to do with their content online, many writers and editors who have spent their entire careers working in print are uncertain about how to actually accomplish their goals without extensive retraining. It’s a predicament that Brandy Taylor, an associate creative director at Manifest, understands well – she began her career in the print design world.

While Taylor’s desire to understand visual design online eventually led her to earn a degree in Web development, she told the audience at the Fed that there are a number of resources designers trained in print can use to achieve interesting effects with their online content right away.

“Once you start thinking in terms of rollovers and interactivity, you can come up with some great ideas, but how do you actually make it work?” Taylor said. “I showed the audiences some online libraries of Javascript programming that can bring animations and other behaviors to life on the Internet. They can find code and graphics that behave exactly the way they want, then take those examples to developers, rather than just plopping a bunch of content in their laps and saying, ‘Make it interactive.’”

Taylor also walked the audience through the process she uses to develop an appropriate visual design for complex pieces of content.

“First I take an inventory of all the assets available to me,” she said. “Then I plan a visual hierarchy that arranges those assets in an aesthetically pleasing way.”

Tanarra Schneider, one of Manifest’s senior user experience architects, said that the move from print to digital gave the Fed and similar organizations new opportunities to understand their users and what motivates them.

“An economics professor may want to emphasize one aspect of the content that is paramount for students’ understanding, while a business person may want to understand the immediate impact of a Fed decision,” Schneider said. “There are multiple ways of presenting information that are not possible in print but are possible on the Web.”

And it’s more important than ever to get that data out there, Schneider said.

“The information that organizations like the Fed has is so critical to understanding the government of this country and our shared responsibility, but you don’t see a lot of user experience people running around there,” she said. “I think it is incumbent upon us to pass on as many little secrets as we can.” 

It’s a mission Manifest will continue to pursue, according to Jason Ulaszek, Manifest’s director of user experience and a founder of UX for Good. 

Ulaszek and Manifest founder Jim Jacoby have spoken at Fed conferences on UX-related topics for the past several years. Ulaszek said it is important to him that his team continually demonstrate intellectual ownership of the field and expand its boundaries by taking advantage of teaching and service opportunities. 

“We can measure Manifest’s success financially, but the truth is we are only as good as our intellectual capital,” Ulaszek said. “One of the ways to measure our success in that area is how well we share it.”

For now, the three designers who visited the Fed said that they were happy not only to share their expertise with the many institutions present, but with each other.

“This was the quintessential Manifest experience,” Taylor said. “We brought in three folks from three different disciplines, then showed how we could work together seamlessly to achieve a final product. Manifest does that better than any agency I’ve ever worked for.”