Less is More: a Lesson from an Emergency Department

I was recently admitted to a university hospital's emergency department. It led to an operation that luckily went well, and the quality of care was excellent. This article is not about that — it is about a single poster in the waiting area.

It is no coincidence that "patience" and "patient" share a root. Waiting is inextricably linked to being a patient — certainly in an emergency department, where every wait feels long. The poster explained to patients why they must wait, and that everyone is treated fairly. A commendable, smart initiative. The only problem: during the two hours I was there, not one person looked at it. Why?

The original emergency-department poster: twenty steps, many icons and colours — The original poster: 20 steps, 10 green frames, 5 black icons, 6 explanation boxes.

The communication is too complex

What is too complex requires too much effort — so nobody looks at it. Three reasons:

Too much information. Our brain can handle at most about five things of the same kind at once. This poster has 10 green frames, 5 black icons and 6 explanation boxes. It doesn't work at a glance; it demands study.
Inconsistent coding. The more consistent the visual coding, the easier the understanding. "Waiting" is black — good. But everything else shares one colour, and the green boxes mix actions ("registration") with states ("critical condition").
The process is drawn from the communicator's perspective. Twenty steps that matter to the hospital, where the patient experiences ten. For the patient it makes no difference whether you were "transferred" by ambulance staff or arrived on your own.

And the message is missing. The poster's real message is: "Waiting is inevitable, and we treat everyone equally — here is how it works." Without that message stated, every reader guesses their own: "this will take forever", "I'm just a number in a factory"…

It could be better — so, from my hospital bed…

While waiting, I made my own version:

The redesigned poster: message on top, ten steps, consistent colour coding — The redesign: message on top, 10 steps, consistent coding — 59 words instead of 108.

A clear visual distinction between types of moments, each with a colour: arrival/departure (green), caregiver-initiated moments (blue), transitions and waiting (black and grey) — and never more than five elements of the same kind.
The process radically simplified from the patient's point of view: steps that feel identical are combined; the number of arrows drops from 20 to 10; the critical path gets its own arrow.
Every waiting moment marked uniformly, with a clear reason why.
A clear message on top — "Waiting is inevitable. We treat everyone equally." — so the reader can decide whether to read further at all.
From 108 words to 59 — more information, less effort.

This applies to any business communication

The second poster takes no more work than the first. It only requires thinking consciously and in a structured way about how to make it simple. And this matters well beyond hospital walls: the simpler and clearer the process, the figures or the research, the easier — and better — the decision of the manager reading it. Every unit of effort spent decoding your communication is brain power no longer available for building the flawless reasoning that leads to the right decision.

Better presentations lead to better decisions, time saved, and less frustration.

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