Why are our Documents so useless?

A poorly designed can-opener breaks your fingernails and mangles the can, leaving sharp edges that are perfect for your five-year-old son to damage his finger. 

By contrast, well-designed objects improve our lives.

The documents we receive today suck. They really do. Good design is missing. We have to pinch, zoom, rotate and otherwise wrangle invoices, statements, pay stubs and every other imaginable document that hits us every day to make them work for us. This frustrating experience causes us to have ill feelings towards the companies that send them. It also makes us less likely to pay that bill on time or upgrade that contract. #Fail

It is time to drag documents out of the stone age. Not much has changed since 1922 when the current paper format was invented. Sure, we have digitized the paper format and brought in technologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and tweaked the layout a little. Often, applying design to documents means adding a logo, changing a font or two and moving content around.

Nearly a hundred years on and we are still slaves to the paper paradigm. We’ve entirely missed the opportunity to reinvent the document for the modern world.  

When the modern computing era dawned on us, we started with skeuomorphism to give that sense of comfort. We used it as a crutch to bridge the gap between the familiar and the new. On your phone, the music player no longer looks like a tape-deck; folders do not look like a filing cabinet - so then why do we try and make the digital document look like printed paper. Most people have successfully managed to make the leap from skeuomorphism to the more practical and productive user interfaces. 

I often hear the legal argument, that digital documents have to look like paper to be legally compliant. In this respect, legislation is way ahead of us. No laws or regulations prescribe that digital documents must look like paper to have legal standing. Legislation, sensibly, covers other aspects such as immutability and retention periods but not the format.

Documents are ripe for reinvention. We have the opportunity to transform documents from painful and useless statements-of-record into engaging and powerful workhorses. Documents should blend in seamlessly with the way we wish to work. I yearn for a future where the information and the task at hand takes center stage and not be forced into the linear straitjacket hell of the current digital document.  

Currently, a PDF document is where data goes to die. To use the information in a document, you are limited to cut & paste or heaven forbid - print it out. Even cut & paste from digital documents is painful. A lot of manual work is usually required to manipulate the information into a workable format. 

A new style of document needs to created. It needs to be useful and engaging and be jam-packed with design and technology to make our lives easier.  

The web is arguably the single most significant change to the way we work in the last few hundred years. There is no reason why common web technologies such as HTML, AI, Video, Natural Language Processing and the like cannot be used to create a refreshing and useful modern document.

My passion, along with all my evangelist colleagues at InfoSlips is to continue to bring the modern document to life. We have proven that a new paradigm changing document format is not only possible but better in nearly every way. 

The modern document should be a pleasure to use!