UIEtips 6/28/06: Where Visual Design Meets Usability - An Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Part II

In the second part of his interview, Joshua Porter catches up with Luke Wroblewski about the intersection between visual design and web site usability. Here is what Luke had to say.

David (Heller) Malouf’s idea was to use a similar mechanism to Yahoo!’s tour of their new home page to annotate new designs his team was conceiving. Creating a static page, with mouse-over callouts gives a quick and easy way for people to understand the new design.

UIEtips 6/22/06: Where Visual Design Meets Usability - An Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Part I

Joshua Porter catches up with Luke Wroblewski about the intersection between visual design and web site usability. Here is what Luke had to say.

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.

Aviva described a “party” she threw, where she invited all of the team members to introduce them to the personas. Instead of a regular presentation, she gave each team member the 3-fold card and placed a sticker on their back containing the name of one of the persona identities. The team then played a game of having to guess their new identity by asking yes-or-no questions to other team members. The idea was to find someone else in the room with the same identity as they had.

If you don’t create a safe environment for people to “fail” and, subsequently, learn from those failures, then people are going to be risk adverse. However, if you give team members a chance to learn in a positive and creative way, I believe they’ll quickly rise to the challenge and exceed your wildest expectations.