A Goldfish, A Squirrel & Dave's 7-Rules For Communication

During my personal life, my career as a designer and as an educator I've discovered what I call my 7-Rules,

My "rules" gained more relevance when I ran across what some call the "Squirrel Syndrome" meaning easily distracted. The second detail that came across my desk was that currently human attention span has dropped below that of a goldfish.

Dave's 7-Rules:

1. People Don't /Won't Read

2. People Like Short Words: If they read they like short words no more than 9 characters (not words). We quickly grasp words like Exit, Dog, Cat, Goldfish but struggle with words like character or improvisational. So unless we are really interested - we skip over "big words."

3. People Like Good Pictures: the world has the most visually literate population ever.

4. People Will Not Look at or understand your pictures if they are not done well.

5. People Need Context, a connection to their life, world, in order to understand.

6. People Need Logical Organization of information in order to follow and understand.

7. People Won't Ask Questions: Because they don't want to appear "stupid" and assume everyone else "gets it."

All that being said, you might want to consider that your target audience may be easily distracted, have a short attention span, won't read, can't figure out the images, have no idea of what you are showing or explaining and won't ask questions. This might be a good starting point for designing communications!