Vision paper · house archetype, sample content
A vision for didactic government documents
Why a public document must teach before it is read, and the four rules that get it there.
Start reading →Government documents are written to be correct, not to be understood. This paper argues that a document teaches at the moment the eye lands on it, before a single word is read, and sets out four house rules that get a document there: read pre-verbally first, hold to one colour, give space its job back, and reuse a small set of blocks instead of inventing a new layout every time. The rules are shown here, in this page's own layout, not only told.
Contents
01 Why documents fail to teach
The clause-first habit
A permit notice, a tax form, a benefit rule: almost all start the same way, with the legal basis, then the scope, then finally the part the reader came for. This order is correct for a lawyer checking the text against the statute. It is the wrong order for a citizen trying to find out whether they qualify.
The fix is not to write less law. It is to put the citizen's question first on the page and let the legal basis follow, available but not blocking.
What the reader actually does
Eye-tracking research on how people read on screen finds that most readers scan rather than read start to finish, and that the share of a page's words actually read falls fast once a page runs long (Nielsen Norman Group). A document written for a linear reader is written for a reader who, in practice, rarely shows up. No comparable study exists yet for government forms specifically, so the second figure below is left blank rather than invented.
02 The pre-verbal principle
The five-second test
Cover every word on the page. Does it still show what the document is, what step the reader is on, and whether anything is wrong? If the answer is no, the page is not yet finished, no matter how well the text reads.
“Once we hid the paragraph and left only the checklist and the stamp, people stopped asking us what the page was for.”
Field note, usability session on a permit renewal formConfirm, don't repeat
Once the layout has done its job, the text has one job left: to confirm, in plain words, what the eye already suspected. Text that repeats what the layout already showed wastes the reader's attention twice over.
03 One accent, generous space
Grayscale first
Design the page in grey, then add the single accent colour last, only where it earns its keep: a link, the current step, a warning that must not be missed. A page that still reads clearly in grayscale was built on real hierarchy. A page that collapses without colour was leaning on colour to do work that size and space should have done.
Space by doubling
Default markup has almost no air. A designed page has deliberate air, and the gap between groups of related things should read as clearly larger than the gap inside one group. A reader should be able to tell where one idea ends and the next begins without reading a single word.
04 The block vocabulary
Ten blocks, one grammar
The blocks below are not decoration, each answers one recurring need in a didactic document. Reused, they teach the reader the page's own grammar within the first section, so every later section reads faster than the one before it.
| Block | Job | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Segment | Groups a topic into one visible unit | A wall of text needs a boundary |
| Callout | Marks one fact as worth stopping for | A summary, a warning, a rule |
| Steps | Shows an order: first, then, finally | A short, linear procedure |
| Statistic | Gives a number visual weight | One figure the reader should remember |
| Table | Compares several things on the same terms | Options, versions, criteria |
| Pull-quote | Slows the reader down on one sentence | Sparingly, once or twice a document |
Why reuse beats novelty
A new layout for every idea asks the reader to learn a new visual language every time. A small, fixed vocabulary of blocks, reused without change, asks the reader to learn it once.
05 What good looks like
The three checks
Cover the words: does the page still say what it is? Turn it grey: does the hierarchy survive without colour? Trace every font size, margin and gap to a fixed scale: does the page hold together, or was each spacing decision made on the spot? A document that passes all three is not guaranteed to be good, but one that fails any of them is guaranteed not to be finished, see plainlanguage.gov for the same discipline applied to the words themselves.
Where this template starts
This page is that starting point: a hero that says what the document is in one line, a strip that gives the reader the date and the short version, a single control to jump anywhere, and five sections built from the same six blocks. Copy this file to start the next vision paper, and change the words, not the shape.