Content formats guidance

[PeteKowalczykNHS]

What

New guidance for deciding what content formats to use — based on finding from the multimedia team, additional languages discovery, and other contributions, eg Easy Read training.

Why

We've done a lot of research around the pros and cons of using different formats and we want to give guidance to allow people to judge for themselves which formats will meet users needs.

Anything else

Pete is speaking with Rich on Friday 10 December Pete to draft a page of guidance Pete and Rich to discuss how this guidance links with the multimedia team's guidance for how to implement particular content formats.

Some notes from Slack

Pete Kowalczyk 3 hours ago Hey Rich, that doc is excellent. So much good stuff in there Can I give you a call tomorrow or Friday to catch up on what Sara and I have discussed adding to the service manual. We can see where we can cross-reference things. I've not had much time to get into details of your doc, but have some comments about the structure. I think, in the end, there might be value splitting each format into a separate document and branching out to each of those from a central page explaining when it's a good idea to try a certain format. For each format, I think keep that structure of: what it is, design guidance, then examples. But the research bits, I'm not sure if we want to surface all that in the guidance. I'd recommend hosting that somewhere else, because I'd like to shield users from it that just want to get to the guidance and then leave. (The research is fascinating and pretty scaving, so very valuable, just maybe not for all users of the manual). The bits of the guidance that we recommend in the research bit (but that still need more testing), I'd stick them into the design guidance bit, and just flag that those bits of guidance are in 'alpha' or something, and are still being validated. Same for the hypotheses.

Sara Wilcox 7 minutes ago Hi Pete, I made some suggestions for structure in the notes in the doc. I think we need to break things down further with headings. Agree about splitting each into a different format, with a central page about what format in what circumstances - which is the bit you're working on. We can then work on different bits of the image guidance and publish them bit by bit. I agree, I'd put just top-line info about research in the guidance we publish but store the detail in the GitHub issue. Worth including any research that made us do something different/unexpected in the published guidance. We have examples in design system components, e.g. this action link page: https://service-manual.nhs.uk/design-system/components/action-link.

[sarawilcox]

We now have draft guidance in Confluence (link for NHS.UK content designers). To be reviewed at next Style Council meeting.

[sarawilcox]

We have the draft guidance and refer people to it internally but are not in a position to progress it at the moment.