KEY CONCEPTS
WHAT IS DATA COMMUNICATION?
Communication is defined, for the purpose of this paper, as the sharing of information between statisticians and users in a way to maximise understanding.
WHY DATA COMMUNICATION?
2 Principally to maximise use of information to fulfil the mission of national statistical offices; to minimise misuse of statistics by ensuring the contexts, caveats, and other limitation of the information is understood.
HOW TO COMMUNICATE?
3 To maximise communication, we will need to understand how the mind comprehends information. ABS research into cognitive psychology suggests there are three key cognitive processes involved in comprehension, namely perception, attention and learning.
4 Whilst the cognitive psychology theory is of general applicability, a number of issues need to be borne in mind for web communication, as follows:
Web surfers are users, not readers
5 They scan and skim read the material on-line to look for the information they are after. The term "satisficing" was coined by cognitive psychologists to describe the behaviour that they will stop looking once they come across something they think satisfy their needs (Simon, 1957). Accordingly, we must design our statistical releases to aid on-line users of the information eg concise writing, information in dot points to assist scanning;
Context shrinks when accessing information on screen
6 Unlike holding a hardcopy publication, web users do not generally know if they are at the end of an electronic publication, and will be looking for presentational cues to tell them where they are in the publication. Cues could be as misleading as useful eg metadata information between statistical stories could be misread as cues signalling the end of the publication, and product designers have to be mindful of these types of pitfall.
Cognitive load and overload
7 The mind can only handle limited "chunks" of information at one time - the literature suggests 5-9 chunks of information (seven plus minus two) where a chunk is any meaningful unit (Miller, 1956). If there is more information available than the mind can handle, filtering occurs. To avoid filtering, information needs to be presented with cognitive load in mind.
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