Board portals: some Do’s and Don’ts

Dismissively assuming that it’s just like reading the papers on paper. It’s not. The eye and brain work differently when picking up information on screen – even if it still looks like a paper. If the task becomes more difficult, naturally the reader starts swiping through, making their review much less thorough and possibly risking important points being missed. And whilst some people will adapt reasonably well, others simply don’t see any point in complaining.

Allowing the portal simply to be an electronic library for the same pdfs you would have produced on paper. If you were designing a website you’d invest in making sure it’s readily readable and has a logical flow to guide the reader visually. Shouldn’t you be putting the same effort into thinking through how the information you’re providing will appear when read on a screen?

Saying “just expand it!” That’s not the right answer. When the reader has to “expand” and then move around the screen, whole lines can’t be seen and the flow is lost. The impact or meaning of a graphic will be harder to discern if only part of the picture is visible at any one time.

Landscape is fashionable but long lines – edge to edge in landscape format – require the eye to follow it all the way across. This takes time, effort and concentration that would be better spent reflecting on the meaning of what’s being read.

Failing to consider how people use tables. In general, board papers should not have many tables – or at least not without commentary. But, where they are needed, little thought is given to the difficulty (or impossibility) of using tables on a screen. If it doesn’t matter whether it can be used easily, don’t include it in the first place. If it does matter, think through how you can best structure the information. Expanding is not usually the solution as titles and headings are lost and trends across a row are no longer discernible.

Thinking you can get away with unnecessarily lengthy papers because it’s not so obvious as when you use up sheaves of paper. Just because people are not going to complain about weight anymore doesn’t mean throwing in extra detail and appendices just because you can, and avoiding the challenge of producing short papers.

Leaving it to authors to guess what’s needed. They can’t be expected to know automatically and the end results will be all over the place. Page templates will help. But guidelines will also be needed for papers that have odd structures or incorporate tables, graphics, etc.

Letting the directors be the guinea pigs, without anyone else having tried to use the papers before they have been submitted.

Allowing different parts of a paper to appear as a string of separate files that the director has to navigate through. The structure and “route” might be obvious to the author and Company Secretary, but it may not be intuitive or logical for the person who has to read it. And this matters a lot when there are many different board papers that have to be found and, possibly, opened separately. Again, authors and company secretaries need to take responsibility for delivery and ease of use, not just for content.

Uploading “surprises” for directors who suddenly find something new during the course of the board meeting. Or even worse, losing a director’s notes and annotations when a new version of the paper arrives – this still happens even though it is entirely avoidable with the proper set-up.

It’s easy to upload a paper that’s late, and less noticeable than sending out a separate email. It needs real discipline by Secretariat – backed up by the Chairman and CEO – to prevent this turning into a permanent excuse for submitting papers late.

But don’t just assume that the bigger screen will fix all the problems of lazy drafting. For some documents, it will help – for others it won’t. We have seen far too many which are hard to read in any screen format.