UX leadership insight #12: The space between

(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.)

How should the teams for design be built? There are thousands of handbooks how to build effective teams, so let’s not get into the generics. There’s one specific aspect of design teamwork that I would like to emphasize, and that is the collaboration of interaction design and visual design.

I may have mentioned before, that in a process where interaction designer creates wireframes and then hands them over to a visual designer for decoration, the result often is — decorated boxes. Creating something more, something that is novel, meaningful, effective, fluid, dynamic, alive, and mesmerizing, will require very close cooperation between interaction design and visual design. The boundaries between disciplines are the surfaces where the most communication problems arise, but – I claim – that also the magic happens.

The best designs are such where ingenious interaction design meets ingenious visual design. Therefore my optimal team setup would be such that there are always one interaction designer paired with one visual designer. (This is not unlike the AD + copy pairing so common in advertising industry.) They both need to understand and respect each others work, and get along very well otherwise too. When I see this connection in action, when I overhear these designers sitting side by side and arguing and developing ideas together, I know that we are doing something that very few design studios can.