Thursday, April 16, 2009
We are used to change. Technologically speaking, we live in a time when everything changes rapidly. I am not yet forty but I have already seen the introduction of personal computing, electronic gaming, wireless telephones, the internet, email and social media.
And as a designer and communicator I am so familiar with change and the need to remain up to date with the latest developments that the temptation to explore all of the possibilities that technology presents on every project is often irresistible. I take my job and responsibilities very seriously, but like many designers, I have a reasonably low boredom threshold. So what better way for me to remain engaged than play with all of my new toys at the same time.
It comes as something of a surprise, then, to come across an important piece of online design that doesn’t need bells and whistles, nor Flash animation, Delicious links or a Twitter site. It just needs to be read and trusted.
The Annual Report and Accounts (ARA), that metaphorical doorstep of a document, has actually changed a lot over the years. Many of the changes have been dictated by regulators or auditors, but technology has played its part. Companies have taken advantage of changes in the law that mean ARAs no longer have to be printed and delivered to every shareholder; fully audited accounts just need to be made available. The result is that most organisations now publish their ARA online in one form or another, but with varying success.
Fully animated versions of Annual Reports that combine design, video, audio and surveys are not uncommon and are becoming more and more prevalent as those responsible embrace the changes made available by widespread access to broadband technology.
Even the biggest ARAs commonly appear as fully functioning online tools, complete with animated flow charts and hyperlinks to the CEO’s video. All fine and dandy and pretty much expected. What’s interesting is that the research into online ARAs we’ve recently carried out reveals a lot about the way people use the documents and their attitudes and prejudices towards the internet.
Because of the way the web has developed, it is by its very nature fluid. Content changes and is updated on an often minute by minute basis. This is great for many communications, but for the analysts, journalists and fund managers who want to be able to rely on the information in an Annual Report, this is a nightmare. How can they trust the figures in a document that can be changed so easily? How do they know if the figures relating to performance, profit, loss and the remuneration of executives (always the most popular pages) can be trusted?
What our research has revealed is that stable and reliable online formats, such as pdfs, are much preferred over the alternative all-singing-and-dancing HTML versions. One site we’ve recently reviewed had over 800,000 pdf downloads compared to just 8,000 viewings of the HTML version. This suggests that professionals and shareholders alike regard online pdfs as a reliable, virtual library and that something about their ‘fixed’ format gives them credibility that HTML based interactive pages just don’t have.
At first I chalked this attitude down to shareholders being Luddites. ‘Why can’t these people trust the web, what is this, the stone age?’ But if people don’t like the HTML versions of ARAs, they must have a good reason. A pdf version of the ARA is still signed by the auditors; it’s a document of record, fixed in time. And now that we know far too many companies have been a little too creative with their accounts, maybe being able to refer to something stable and trustworthy makes a lot of sense.
Simon Case
simon.case@greentarget.net