Be Repetitive. Yes, Be Repetitive: 
Saving time and boosting usability by repeating your visuals

by Patrick Hofmann

Hi, my name is Patrick and I have a problem: I'm lazy. I have a habit of procrastinating; I have a tendency to take shortcuts. When there's an opportunity to repurpose something that I managed to complete before, I use it.

But honestly, is that so wrong? In a world where we are rightfully encouraged to reduce, reuse, and recycle, can we not apply these three Rs to the elements of the work that we produce?

Of course we can, especially 'within' our work (as opposed to committing copyright infringements by plagiarizing the work of others or repurposing our published products for several companies or clients). In the documents that we write, we should repeat our common instructions and phrases, our chapter organization and sentence structures, and our titling conventions and layout, to make our work consistent and more user-friendly. Likewise, in the illustrations and images that we render, we should repeat our image views and angles, our object positions and sizes, and our line and colour attributes, to make our work consistent and more user-friendly.

If repetition is such an effective tool to promote consistency and improve the usability of our work, why do so many instructions, especially visual ones, fail to use repetition? The reasons stem from many participants:

• documentation developers take their visual images from too many different sources and applications (clip art, CAD illustrations, engineering schematics, and screenshots) and, in the worst cases, are combining them together into a single illustration or instruction;
• illustrators are attempting to use as many features in their new CAD tools and illustration applications as they can, where lifelike 3D rendering, shading, manipulation, and maneuverability are far more accessible and easy to use; and
• traditional product sellers, marketers, and publication managers, discourage us from creating visuals and instructions that are too brief, minimalistic, and repetitive, as they apparently degrade the technical integrity or superiority of the product and deem our documentation as lacklustre and boring.

For example, the following two-step instruction has two common elements -- a camera -- but it fails to repeat its many attributes:

Before

In the above image, the inconsistencies include:

• the view or angle at which we view the camera
• the relative size of the two cameras
• the line attributes and shading
• the conventions used to show the highlighted element or the focus of attention
• the caption text and the step numbers
• the positioning of the cameras within the boxed frame.

By taking each of the above attributes and making them consistent within the two steps, the visual image is dramatically improved and its inherent meaning is greatly amplified.

After

The effects of good visual repetition are most apparent when you perform a 'blink test' on the illustrations. Go to the 'Before' example and close your eyes for three seconds; open your eyes for no more than a second to look at the visual, and then close your eyes again. In that amount of time, what did your eyes see? What meaning did they discern from the visual?

Repeat the above steps with the 'After' example. What meaning did you gather from it?

Although the instruction may not be immediately clear in such a brief time, the repetition in the 'After' example makes the contrast between the unextended and extended zoom lens much clearer. Even in that brief moment of observation, we know the visual's topic is likely about the zoom lens. Furthermore, we also notice that our rapid eye-wandering is greatly reduced in the more repetitive version, because the patterns and similarities are almost immediately apparent. In the 'Before' image, we have to spend considerable time determining and discerning what the two objects are, and whether they're indeed intended to be the same object, since they are illustrated so differently.

As our readers scan through our manuals and scroll through our online pages, this ocular activity is constant. Whatever we can do to streamline their eye movement and minimize eye-wandering is essential to good readability and solid usability. Repetition is one of the greatest tools to achieve this goal.

As you can see, laziness does have its advantages. When you put the right spin on it, laziness is really just another word for efficiency.

Patrick Hofmann works at Quarry Integrated Communications. You can reach him at phofmann@quarry.com.