Information /Instructional Design

Information Design is a visual method of explaining, interpreting complex information and data, to achieve a certain objective. The key of information design is about breaking things down, making sense of information through the use of various visual elements. When we look at a certain information design, we always need to think, what kind of message this particular design is trying to deliver to the audiences. If one particular information design can not let the audiences see its message, then this informarion design is failed.

Today we see a lot information design in people's everyday life, such as, line graphs showing people's birth bouce through a year, Bar charts showing the wages of diffirent people in a company. Those information invovles huge amount of complex data, it's not approriate to show the information through writing a report, it would be a lot easier and clearer to show through graphs, and this is where information design comes in. Information deisgn also could be advertisement, billboard, poster, etc.

There are different types of information design invovled in people's everyday life, the 3 main types of information design are:

-Navigational information design
-Instructional information design
-Statistical information design

Here, I'll mainly talk about instructional information design,instructional design is about creating instructional tools or content, translating the rules of learning and instruction into plans. The key is to help users to learn through the translation of instructions. An example of instructional design could be a sofware installation guide, which invovles a series of diagrams, teach users the moves of installation step by step. People love instructional design, because it's obvious and eay to follow the graphs to do stuff, rather than looking at instruction book, working out by themselves. A good instructional designer, would translate the instructions into graphs precisely, make all the instructions clear, easy to understand, easy to follow.