When choosing the best format of your content there are a number of things to consider: 3t5k5o
- work best for reading offline, sending as an email attachment and printing
- Spreadsheets work best for sharing tabular data
- Presentations work best for slides to accompany a presentation viewed via a projector or video conferencing software
- Videos are most effective for practical demonstrations to complement written instructions
Before deciding on a format for publishing information it’s important to understand the way that this information will be used.
How will the read the content? 1r2r16
When developing your digital content, you need to consider if people will read the content on screen or print a copy out?
Office and PDF documents tend to be optimised for A4 paper aspect ratio 1:1.4 portrait whereas a computer monitor is usually landscape 16:9.
Multi-column layouts tend to work well for printed documents but don’t scale down well to use on smaller screens especially where the text size has been increased and only one column is visible at a time.
What devices will be used to read the information? vh4f
The way that documents open online varies from device to device and between different browsers and system configurations. For example, Chrome may open a PDF document natively within a browser window, but on another device the same browser may be configured to treat PDF links as documents to be ed in the background, often without the ’s awareness.
Where will the content be accessed? 31x2g
The s’ location is most relevant when considering the speed of their internet connection (if any) and their ability to and view large files.
A valid use case may be for someone to a file now to read later in a location where they have no access to internet.
Does the content need to be read in its entirety in sequence? 4qy45
Documents do not work as well when a requires a subset of the information from within a document.
How will s get to the content? 2e3k6x
Increasingly people are arriving deep into websites via search and social media and if a link takes them directly into a document they may not get the same context to the information they’re reading as they would if they were reading the same content within a webpage eg organisation branding, relationship to other content from breadcrumb, url path and navigation.
Will s read the content once or will they need to refer back to it again? 6v565k
The expectation is that a web page is dynamic and will be updated but the converse is true for a able document. Once a has saved a document they may continue to refer to this content in the future and not know that it has been updated/changed.
What will the do after reading the content? 2z5x3a
A document can represent a dead end to a ’s journey as it offers limited options to explore further content. This may be a missed opportunity for the publisher to signpost other relevant content.
How will the interact with the content? – copy/paste, read, input data, share 6f4d26
Will people just read the content or will they want to copy and paste sections of text to reuse or share?
They may want to bookmark a page or send/share a link
Will they want to copy data into a spreadsheet?
Data collection 431s1b
Is the purpose to collect data from s? Document based forms tend to be more cumbersome and less accessible than HTML forms.
If we are collecting data we need to consider
- How the data is being transmitted – is it using an encrypted channel?
- Where is the data being stored? What country will it be physically stored in? What system will it be held in and for how long?
- What are we collecting and why? Do we already hold some of this information?
For any data collection we’ll need to prepare a DPIA (Data Protection Impact Assessment).
If data is to be submitted electronically we can use MsForms and the sportscotland website to build forms that are more accessible and provide better workflow options than document-based forms.
What is the native file format? 1f5o1v
Sometimes we need to publish files where the native format may not be accessible to all eg. CAD drawings which require specialist software to open. In such cases there may be a good reason to publish the content in a portable format (although CAD files could be presented as images in a web page).
Similarly, we may have to publish official information with signatures e.g. signed off sets of s. In this case it’s important that the majority of the document is machine readable and only the handwritten declarations are presented as flat images.
How often will the content be updated? q471m
If content is likely to change over time a PDF may not be the best way of distributing information.
s may save a document on their device and refer back to it in the future without knowing that an updated version has been issued. This may be more important for legal advice, standards and guidleines which may be subject to change especially where there is a safety critical element to the information published.
How do we inform people when a document has been updated? 5g373z
Where a new version of a document had been issued it may be located at a new URL – any previously shared (email, social media) URLs will become dead links or possibly link to the out of date version of the information. This is especially the case when a document is published with date/version information within the filename meaning that the link cannot be reused for future versions.
It may also be worth including a change log at the start of the document to quickly let s see what has changed and when.
What is the process for updating the content and managing versions? v6y2o
PDF documents cannot be easily edited which means the organisation will need to store and manage the PDF and the original source document. This creates an overhead in of storage and introduces the risk of versions becoming out of sync.
Publishing information in web pages 3y4p35
In many cases publishing your content in a web pages has several advantages over using documents:
- Responsive to screen size and orientation
- Works consistently across all devices/browsers
- Speed
- Sets context of the current information and provides navigation to move on
- Content can be tagged and discovered in multiple ways
- Sharing via email, social etc using existing thumbnail, short description etc.
- Search
- Bookmarks
- Copy and paste information
- Easier to manage and update
Further information f2256
NNG Group – Avoid PDF for on screen reading