What You See is What Matters

Picture this: you are on a train platform. It is a gray, rainy morning in B?blingen and you have to get to Hulb for a meeting. It's cold so you pull your collar up to protect your ears from the breeze that blows across the tracks. The chill makes your eyes red and your nose water.

You speak no German. You know no one. No one knows you.

You take out your mobile phone and you find the website for the S-bahn. With some difficulty you find the train schedule. After some time spent watching a small circle of lines circulate while it loads, a PDF comes into view:

You realize you need glasses.

And lessons to read a timetable.

In a best case scenario you can push out your pinched fingers to make the image larger. Then use your finger to maneuver around until you can find your station. Then try to drag it across the screen to get to the time of arrival.

PDFs on a mobile device? Not good. It's simply not what it was meant for. It's too small, too static, too non-interactive. It's old school.

And it's cold and rainy. You feel fatigued, despite all that coffee you had in the hotel, bone weary, exhausted...

...I could go on from here--maybe something dramatic, like: the protaganist drops onto the tracks and runs to the next station, fearful that he will be late to his meeting. Or he rushes from the station to take a taxi. Or, channelling Kafka, he runs to the nearest policeman and asks for help--but is denied!

Because, of course, this is fiction, a made-up scenario. Fortunately, in real-life what the s-bahn authorities actually provides for commuters is much, much better. Rather than the eye chart above, it looks more like this:

In this screen capture, the S1 to Herrenberg has left Rohr and approaches Goldberg, next stop B?blingen and then Hulb. A S1 going toward Stuttgart is on the opposite track, leaving G?rtringen.

I can see it easily and know from experience that I have ten minutes or so before the train arrives. The site lets you see the movement of the trains in real time. Awesome stuff. Real-time. New school.

This is the information that matters. The rest of it is, to use a communication term, just noise.

The point is, what you want to see is what matters. This is true of all information, unless one is just killing time and/or browsing.

It's all about the content, dummy.

The device itself needs to decide what the document looks like.

There is value in something that allows you to see what matters. There is value in a fast loading, sharply rendered, real-time view of what matters.

You know what doesn't matter? The format. The fonts. The layout. In the above scenario where the setting is in Europe, they standardize printed documents on A4 size paper instead of our beloved but confusing 8 1/2 by 11. When I am looking at a document on my phone, does that matter? Not one bit.

What matters is the content. If it is rendered in an appropriate way, alles gut. I can sit in a cafe and sip coffee, confident that my train will be there for me when I need it--instead of freezing to death on a cold train platform.

There is value in what matters; there is no value in the rest of it (the formatting, the fonts, etc.).

That is my simple message: it's basic communication 101.

• For message recipients: what you need to see is what matters.
• For message senders: what you mean for someone else to understand, is what matters.

For communication technology buyers: buy technology that makes it possible to send messages in a way that what you see is what matters.