“Can you simplify this?”

Before You ✂️Cut✂️ Information, Try This Instead…

“Can you simplify this?”

“There’s too much information — you need to focus more.”

“What’s the key takeaway?”

“Just tell me what I need to know.”

“Do we need all these details?”

These are all too familiar responses to what can feel like an overwhelming amount of information.

We could be talking about…

• points in a presentation
• questions to consider
• to do items
• form field in an interface
• a collection of links
• and so on!

Whatever the information is, there’s too much of it. Or is there?

4 Ways to Simplify Too Much Information:

1/ Cut

When challenged to make something simpler, most people opt to cut information (I’m especially thinking about presentations).

While cutting information is sometimes good (and sometimes we do need to cut in order to focus), it’s often the only way people know how to simplify information. ‘Simplify’ and ‘cut’ are often used interchangeably, suggesting they are synonymous.

But…

There are other ways to simplify, that do not require cutting. It’s a little more effort, but you can organize for understanding, in at least three* ways:

2/ Chunk

You can chunk things together to make the very same information easier to understand. Chunking is simply organizing lots of things into smaller, manageable groups.

Assuming there are close relationships between the various pieces of information, you can group things into categories (e.g. ‘toiletries’, ‘clothing’, ‘equipment’) or priorities (e.g. ‘must know’, ‘should know’) and in doing so, make it easier to understand.

That overwhelming (and forgettable) 9-bullet point slide — it can be organized into 3 themes. See, no cutting!

[See this Wikipedia entry for more on the phenomenon of chunking as a memory mechanism.]

3/ Sequence

You can also sequence things over time. Here, information is revealed just as it’s needed. Skilled presenters use narrative structures to unpack their points. Necessarily long forms can be feel simpler by using progressive enhancement.

Sequence can be linear as with step-by-step directions, or have branching paths as with flowcharts or conditional “if-then” survey questions.

4/ Structure

There is a fourth option which is to structure things; to create a visual that serves as conceptual map for yourself and/or others.

This can take the form of concept models, canvases, frameworks, maps, diagrams, or any number of designed visual representations. The key here is going deep to explore and represent the relationships between the pieces of information.

[Following this post, I’ll be sharing a few structures I’ve recently created for myself, to make sense of various topics!]

Next time someone says “there’s too much information,” before you cut stuff — especially what that could be vital information — try to organize for understanding. Try to chunk, sequence, or structure your information.

*Yes, there are other general ways to simplify things — sort, hide, displace, contrast, compare, support interactions, and so on — and even more non-general ways specific to different contexts!