What We Can Learn from A Brain Aneurysm?
June 20th, 2006
I think this image, from the Mayo Clinic site, is impressive:
It’s impressive to me on two levels:
First, it does an excellent job of communicating something that would be very difficult to communicate with words. This is what we call a content graphic. Content graphics communicate useful information to the user.
Informing a friend, family member, or someone with a potential brain aneurysm what is happening and the potential outcome is something that would be hard to do verbally. This image does it cleanly and with style. The artist needs to be commended. If only we could all have content graphics this well done on our sites.
On the second level, it shows the skills necessary to pull something like this off. The artist creating this image wasn’t only skilled in Illustrator or Corel. They also had skills in anatomy and medical science.
The layers of images — the outside of the woman’s head; the features of the jaw bones, cranial cavity, and spinal cord; and the image of the arteries with the budding aneurysm (plus the inset of it bursting) — show this artist knew their stuff and how to effectively communicate it.
Creating excellent content graphics, whether showing important medical information, demonstrating financial transactions, or representing how information flows through complex networks, requires more than good artistic skills. It also requires extensive domain knowledge and the skills to clearly communicate it.
As we continue our research into what makes excellent design teams, we’re seeing the best teams are more likely comprised of people with many different areas of expertise, not just a single, refined skills set. On your team, is each team member growing their areas of expertise? Are they becoming knowledgeable in various domains? If so, you’re marching in the right direction, or so our current research is suggesting.
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June 20th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
There is an excellent site (blog) called Information Aesthetics that chronicles information graphics and the varied ways information can be presented. Here it is: http://infosthetics.com/ It’s a fascinating site to just look through, but also gives many ideas for presenting information visually.
January 20th, 2008 at 5:32 am
I had an aneurysm- left anterior communicating artery- six years back, and recently found a magazine article with full colour photos of the operation- staples and all! I had no idea what it was about until I saw what everyone else at the time saw- no-one thought to take any photos..and it really bought it alive for me. So when I see shots such as this one from the Mayo Clinic, again, as a “consumer”, it demistifies the whole thing and provides me with another tool with which I can understand what happened.
Thank you.
John Hansen
Auckland
New Zealand
April 27th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
[...] to the practice of user experience, I think we already see physiatry-like combos happening. As I mentioned earlier this summer, the artwork from the Mayo Clinic site demonstrates they have people who straddle multiple [...]