I recently had a painful experience with my bank where they presented my reporting transactions in a manner that gave me a very hard time understanding.

To make things easy I called the bank to clarify the transactions I did not recognize based on what I printed from their online access.

They understood it well

To my dismay, the person in charge fully understood the reports and explained to me in a manner that emphasized how simple it was. It did not actually matter if she understood the reports because I did not, and I was the target audience of those reports.

I already wrote a lot of applications for a number of the biggest banks in the world and never have I seen a reporting practice similar to my bank. They combined transactions into single entries and placed a general description alongside the amount. The banker I talked to explained to me their policies and rules on reporting.

Conclusion

I don’t care about their rules, policies or pseudo codes in reporting, all I care about is for them to at least put a decent description on the breakdown of combined amounts so I would be able to trace and track the transactions.

People should always think of their target audience when delivering a message or presenting information. One should put aside their technical depth and realize that people would not need to go out of their way to study things outside their profession just to understand simple things.

[tags]Communication, Management, Leadership [/tags]