Hasta La Ideas

Yesterday I tried going through my cell phone bill to check some usage stats and isolate costs, a completely maddening experience made unnecesarily slow through poor design. Whomever “designed” AT&T’s billing statements was apparently tasked with flummoxing the customer at all costs. Any page you click through has several dozen if not hundreds of clickable options, most of them completely irrelevant, making the four or five things you’d like to see on your bill just about impossible to find. The language is vague, the usage of color seemingly arbitrary, the sizes of various elements in no way corresponds to their importance, and the layout is nonsensical.

Column Five—perhaps a twist on the “Fifth Column” trope?—is a California-based infographics, PR and strategy firm that put out the following informational video, simply titled “The Value of Data Visualization”:

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