Visuals are very important to enhancing any kind of experience and be intentional with the visuals that you provide.

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are and wherever you're watching from. Mine's not here, Tosted Visual Lounge. We're talking about today a couple things. We've got a fantastic guest that we're gonna be talking a little bit about making decisions around visuals to achieve your end goal. But we're also, I'm hoping in our conversation we're able to get to talking about the role of practice as professionals, what that means, what that looks like, why it's so important, particularly as we're learning to create and design and develop uh materials for whatever our role might be. So with that said, uh we're gonna dive right in, and our guest today is um Melissa Millaway or Mel Millaway. We're so grateful that she's here. So, Mel, welcome to the Visual Lounge.

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat with you today.

Uh Mel, it's always always great to talk with you. You have uh obviously you're out on social media and you're doing some amazing work, like showing off kind of like what you do and just like things that are uh side side projects essentially. But for those who have not yet been initiated to kind of who you are and and what you're known for, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Yeah, so um obviously Mel Millaway, and I've been in the field of learning for a little over 15 years. I have to keep remember like trying to figure out like, wait, is it 15 years, 16 years? I don't know. Um, I've primarily been in like the tech sector and I've really focused on building learning design teams. So teams that really focus on like the multimedia, like distance learning, um, those types of things, and doing a lot around um things like user experience and what does that look like within our learning experiences. And so I'm excited to chat today more about visuals and how I use um some practices in my own work.

Yeah. So so let's talk about visuals because obviously a lot of the work we do in learning development is in just inherently visual, right? There's things that we need to show, whether it's you know, my my kind of bread and butter is on the screen. A lot of people are are working in environments that are physical, that need, you know, you gotta orient people to them. So for you and your work, how

What Role Do Visuals Play In Learning And Development?

what role do visuals play in kind of learning and development? Because I also know you've done like uh stuff that's not necessarily like uh how to do this thing. It's like some leadership, some orientation stuff around like organizational kind of things. So what how are visuals showing up for you?

Yeah, there's so many different ways that uh like I consider using visuals in my work and even the visuals of how things are like placed within my own work. So a personal project I'm working on right now for the Dev Learn conference that's coming up is it's a 911 um training scenario. So it's to train operators on how to handle ambiguous calls where they have to figure out whether it's they got a dispatch to fire, police, medical, all of them, none of them, like a mix and match kind of situation. So it's really building that skill of decision making with not a lot of information. Like, how do you do that? So for me, what's really important in considering visuals is um what is that scenario? So when you think about like 911 operators, like it's something that's like very intense, like it's very dramatic. Um, so what I wanted to pull in was thinking through things like that would really engage people. So um I think we talked about this before, but I was looking at like ride tropes from like theme park rides, like Universal and Disney. And so what they do really well is storytelling. So I was like, how can I bring storytelling in this with visuals? And so it was really important for me to think through what could this look like. So I use like cool tone colors with um my characters. I develop these characters who fit a specific persona because you know when you go into like a ride or something, like you meet a character and they're like briefing you on what's about to happen and preparing you. So I really wanted it to feel like that because that's kind of what someone goes through when they're taking a call, like they're about to hop on a call, they gotta be prepared, like really immersive and immersing them into that environment. Um, and something also I wanted to make sure that I do is consistency is key to me for some of the imagery that I'm using. I'm not a great illustrator and it's a personal project, so I am using AI. Um, so how can I create consistent imagery that doesn't look so much like AI? Because I think it's also important to create a project that holds trust to people. And if people think it's something that wasn't really well intentionally designed, they may not trust it as much. So those are just a few of the different things that I'm considering for this project.

Well, I want to ask you, because I I'm putting on my kind of organizational hat, and I can hear there's some manager out there or some leader who's saying, if if this was their project, uh gosh, you you know, you're you're spending all this time with these visuals that seem like they're extra, they're maybe non-essential, or the fact that it's blue-toned, cool colors, maybe that's not really all that important because honestly, we just need them to role play, we just need them to practice, you know. Like, I don't want to get into the practice conversation, but I can see that the kind of the argument is like you're the the things that you're creating are just for the audience, they're like, it's very cool, it's a very cool project. Uh but I can see the leader to be like, you know, like do we need all this stuff? Is it just kind of extra? Does it really make a difference when it comes to the learning? So why are those things for you maybe important to invest in? And and some of it I know is like, because this is a passion project, something you're you're spending time on. But like if I

Making A Justification To A Business Leader

if you were having to make a a justification to a business leader, like a lot of us have to do. What what might you say?

Yeah, I think it really depends. So for for me, um, a lot of the decisions are not are not decisions necessarily like that leadership would ever care about or I would even articulate to them or or even necessarily anyone else. Like choosing colors isn't something that like takes up time or anything like that. And for me, um in our experiences that like my team has created in the past or that I focus on, every little thing needs to be intentional and have a place there. And you need to be able to articulate, whether it's to anyone or not, but at least to yourself, to your manager, to your team, that you're like immediately working with why you made that decision. How is that helping? Because all the little things do add up. So if you start to have imagery that's inconsistent, people start to be focused more on that just from a user experience perspective. The thing that sticks out, like a sore thumb, is the thing that people focus on. That's from like the user experience perspective. There's also like these things like I'm really intentional about spacing, like white spacing is very important to me.

The "BFFs" Of Spacing

So there's like this UX resource that's called the the BFFs of spacing. So it's like best friends forever of spacing. The closer things are together, the more related they are, the further out, the less related. And you see a lot of folks who are new to learning design where that is a massive gap. It's one of the biggest visual gaps that I will skill gaps that I see in in learning designers. The AI doesn't even necessarily always do very well for them. And it's it's um like when you think about like a card, like say you have a card, you have a blue background and you have a white card on it. Sometimes people will put the video for a like a practice question above the card above the card. And it's it you need to watch the video and then answer the question. People have they see a um, they don't see the relationship between those two things because they're separated by space and color. They're outside separate fields. So for me, all of the decisions I make, I don't have to justify to anyone, but I need to know them as an expert and my team needs to know them to be able to create learning experiences that don't that are focused on challenging people to build skills, not to focus on the visuals, not to get confused when we because visuals can be something that gets people to build skills, is seamless, like looks, looks like beautiful, like there's no the focus is on the content, or it can be like a kind of like garbage fire, like where there's stuff scattered all over the place, like you don't know why this thing is there, and you're kind of like not focused on practice. Um, so I don't know that I ever have to justify. I think that the justification would maybe sometimes come from like a medium. So, like, are we doing like a really simple video with simple animations and it's gonna be a low budget or we don't need a budget and it's just us doing it? Or is it something where we need to bring in like like special animators that maybe we don't have, or like those are the more the decisions that like I've had to justify. And it comes down to what is the cost. So for instance, if we really need something high production to get across something to save people's lives, like that might be a justification. But if it's if it's something where we can do it low cost and it can still get the same output and it's low risk, try it. If it doesn't work, try something else, like iterate.

Yeah, I know I I I appreciate that answer. And the and and yeah, I I don't expect that someone's gonna be looking at like a singular visual, but uh, but I love that. And I I want to go back to something else that you said. You you talked about kind of the storytelling and the immersion, right? And I I'm wondering, like, even in what you just talked about, like if someone's in an environment and anything's distracting from them feeling like they're in their environment, I I've got to imagine from all the the kind of papers I've read, the theory there is an impact there, right? Because we know that learner, when you kind of like learn in a circumstance, it that's what like a particular friend, so maybe it's a bad example, but if I study in one particular way and then I go and test and it's completely different, that can really affect my outcomes for but it's uh so it does seem like with your example of kind of an emergency 911 calls, like even those things can be familiar, um, that's helpful or set the right tone because when I want if I have to make a 911 call, I really want someone to feel like that they're on top of their game. Right. And that that like there's the pressure or the circumstances feel reminiscent and like that the hours they put in training equate to actual performance differences. Um where so that I think it's really interesting. And so I I guess any other thoughts about the value of immersion in the learning experiences?

The Value Of Immersion In The Learning Experience

Yeah, yeah. I love um the the value of immersion is you are putting someone as close as you can to the practice that they're going to actually experience so that when they get there, it's not like a whoa, like kind of like a situation. And it reminds me of one. I know in the beginning of this, we talked a little bit more about like people doing something in more of like the physical world and not digital. And when I first started at Amazon, I was in Amazon logistics. And so what my area was responsible for was training the station operations managers. So packages go from a fulfillment center to like a sort center to a delivery slash sort center or delivery station. So I was focused on delivery stations. That's like the last mile where the package goes to get closer to you and get delivered. And what we did for the training was um for all the ops managers and shift managers was very realistic because this is something we wanted to get right. We wanted to the customers are the most important things at Amazon, customer obsession. So what we did was um we had this activity where we had, and I think we probably could have made it even more immersive. We had the like little package scanners that everyone had. And to practice delivering packages, we would have these posters of houses, and you would like look at the house and see where everything was visually on the house, and you would have like a little bit of information about the house, and then you had to decide where to leave the package and like where you would have to scan the package and those types of things. And I remember um doing it before I ever delivered a package and then going and delivering packages and being like, wow, this is actually like exactly the what like maybe we didn't have like a whole set, you know, but it was exactly what we were doing. And so it felt going into it felt like less intimidating and it felt like I could successfully do it. But if I were just answering quiz questions or like not even answering, if someone was just telling me what to do, I don't think I would have remembered that. I don't think it would have been as impactful.

So with that, um, you know, obviously Amazon has lots of uh availability of resources. They cared about that enough to invest in it. Uh I think a lot of people in our our field feel that like, man, my backlog of courses is so long. We don't have time, we you know, we're trying to crank things out, but uh gosh, a quiz and a quiz is so easy to write. Uh it's so hard to it's like a basic kind of like uh and you know we won't we won't get into whether it's a good quiz or a bad quiz or not, you know. But like I I feel like there's just uh there's a lot of pressure there to to get things done. And maybe not as much pressure to really engage in like let's create the best possible experience for realistic. I mean, that's what sounds like a fantastic experience for so for people who are on tight time budgets, type just you know, monetary budgets, or and they're trying to do as much as they can to make uh really great experiences, because that's what I mean, I'll be honest, that's what I want to deliver. I want to deliver great experiences, but I have lots of constraints. What advice do you give to those folks who are are maybe feeling like, well, that's cool, Mel, that's you got to do that. Amazon's got the resources to do that. I work at, you know, little company over here, and we we don't have anything like that.

Yeah, I think um something that that helped our team, um, another team that I was on at Amazon, uh, we did not have any budget whatsoever, just to just so people know this. Um, we we were really, really, really focused on visuals as a team because we knew how much it could impact the experience in people's practice. And something that we were running into is we had like, I don't even know, like 200, 300 requests per year for like the five, six people on my team. And some of them were things where they were like massive programs, they weren't like projects, they were programs. So we struggled with keeping up. So we designed something called a design system.

Mel's Camtasia Design System

So we looked across all of our projects where there were things that if we could just build them for reuse, like buttons, like animations, like different things like that. And we actually use Camtasia a lot and we had our own Camtasia design system. Um awesome. And yeah. And uh so we created, we looked, oh, we need we need this types of characters and this kind of outfits, we need um this type of like code snippets for like certain things like surveys. Like we anything where we would would want to avoid recreating it, we would create a design system for it. So it's rules, it's assets, um, different things like that. And then we reuse them across projects, and that helps us to move like really quickly. And it's much easier even now with AI, like even clawed design right now. Like you can create your own design system in it and automatically apply the visuals to to uh slide decks, like uh web-based things, like anything. You can even apply it to like e-learning that already exists, like you can go like tell it to go like re restructure things, and like it's amazing what we can do now with AI. Um, but yeah, there's a ways you have to get creative. You have to to look at what you're doing and say this is something that is important to us, and we keep doing it over and over again. Can we automate it? Can we scale it in some kind of way? And then everything else comes down to decisions about like, okay, we don't have this thing. It's a one, maybe it's like a one-time thing you want to do, like for visuals. Like maybe you want to do some kind of VR thing. Is it worth it? Like, what's the worst that's gonna happen if we don't do this thing? Like if we don't do it in VR, and what's the best that's gonna happen? And then look at that across different mediums, and then you can kind of understand like what you should start with. And you don't always have to start with something like super um intricate, like VR necessarily if that's like a huge budget that you need or different things like that. Start small and test. And like the best thing I would say that's always come from like any of my team's work is like the user interviews and user testing. So we would always do prototypes before we actually committed to something, and we would get feedback from our users and see how they were using and applying our learning experiences on the job. So we would say, like, go through this simulation and then go do this thing in the tool, like just the prototype of the simulation, so we could see if if it like actually helped them to like go through and do the thing in the tool.

Oh wow. Well, I love the idea of the design systems. And I mean, I think there's a whole there's a whole we we won't go there. We don't have time to go there, but like I do feel like there's a whole world to unpack there because I think, you know, it's it's funny we think about a lot of our titles are instructional design. And yeah, design system uh the handful of people that I know that actually have used them is you know, so so small. So I I I love that idea, and I hope our listeners are taking away this idea. Um you know, we can talk afterwards about if there's any resources that you would point people to, because I do think that's uh like a valuable takeaway for um as we get close to wrapping up. I

The Importance Of Practice

I want to talk a little bit more explicitly about practice. Because one thing I see that you do, and I've known you for a while now, and it you're really good at this, is you are practicing things. Like your your 911 call center stuff is is just practice, right? It's like you're doing it for you, for your skills, grow. Um let tell me a little bit about why that's so important to you and how how has it changed maybe your view of like the work that you do?

Yeah, it's so funny because I was just having a conversation with a stakeholder this morning, and like everyone knows the well, not everyone, but people in the field of learning, a lot of people know the book Training Ain't Telling. Training, like training is not showing people, um, training is not telling them what to do. It's not grandstanding on a stage and just like shouting out like, here's what you need to do to be good at this, or something like that. It's giving the space people the space to learn and to practice and fail safely and do the thing and get feedback immediately to do it differently if they're not doing it that way. And it's so key and core to our role in learning and development now with AI. Giving people something like documentation is per that's performance support. It's a part of the training world, right? Like it's a very important part of the training world. But AI can do that for us today. Like you can make a PDF in like two seconds, or like you can put that into like a knowledge space for AI to like pull up for people. Right now, there is there could be such a big focus on practice. And the part of the reason we haven't really done a lot of practice in the past is because it's intensive to create good practice. Like it's a lot of time, sometimes it's a lot of money, but I think with the way that we have things today with AI, it makes it just much more easy to create good, structured, efficient practice quickly.

I love it. Uh so you you brought up AI a lot. And I know from what what I see out there, right? There's gonna be people who are like, yeah, but Mel, if you're using AI, are you really practicing? Or like they'll have all the AI arguments. And I don't want to argue about whether we should or shouldn't use AI. For you

How AI Speeds Up Mel's Work

though, what what does it do for you that you think speeds up and helps in your particularly in your practice that maybe would be otherwise the extra overhead that maybe isn't worth it if you were doing it all manually?

Yeah, something, especially in the 911 operator training, something that um really helped me was I wanted the calls to sound realistic. And before we had AI, I would have to like record my own voice. I would have to like go out or like find someone. And I would also then have to figure out, oh gosh, like how am I gonna edit the that to sound realistic, like a 911 call to really have it be immersive? And um, what I did with AI was I used, I think it's like 11 labs um for the voice. And I used AI to tell me the speed the voice should be, like what voices I should use to make it sound like this situation. And then I also had AI help me. Um, I already have the skill of like audio editing, but it told me like what settings to use in Adobe Audition um for like the actual like making it sound like a 911 call. The what takes me like 10 minutes today would have taken me like a week of like because I would have to keep going back and forth with people re recording things, like all that. Um, so it just speeds things up immensely.

Yeah, and good and good luck finding those exact settings that someone has oh happened to publish how to make your audio sound like a 911 call, right? Um that's awesome.

Yeah, I could not find that before, but you know, like um it's Much easier now when you can just ask AI and then test it out and see if it works.

Yeah, well, I I love that. Uh as we as we wrap up here, I do just want to ask there's a lot of people aspiring to do more and they're they're they want to let rise to level. What what advice would you want to leave people with about using visuals, about practice, kind of those areas?

Yeah, be intentional. Um, look at what the problem is you're trying to solve and ask yourself, how could visuals benefit this to drive that the outcome that you're looking for? And in your project, something I may have brought up earlier is be able to say for every visual that you have on the screen why you chose that visual and what it's doing for your audience, whether that's a learner or if you're in another field, something else. Um, it's really important for me to be able to describe the why because everything on the screen should be able to um earn its place on the screen and add to the experience versus detracting.

Yeah, I I love that advice because it mirrors what we say about scripts all the time. It's like every word's got to fight for a place on the page, right? Like every same for visuals, is like it's gotta have a purpose. So, well, Mel, this has been I enjoyed this conversation immensely and enjoy talking to you. If people want to follow the work that you're doing in your practice, they want to see the things, hear from you, because you've got a lot of great things to say out there. How should people connect with you?

Yeah, I would love to connect with anyone on LinkedIn, Melissa Millaway. I'm the only one there, so that will be I'll be the only person that you find. And then um I do have a book coming out in February that is up for pre-order. It's called Getting Unstuck in Learning Design. And it's all about stories and practitioners from the field from all different areas, from um uh companies like Netflix, from consultants, my previous manager, professors, all kinds of things telling stories about when they things that move them forward in their own work. So I'm really excited to share that when it comes out, but it is up for pre-order.

Awesome. Well, we will definitely have to have you back on the show when that comes out and talk about the book. So maybe we just did though. I don't know. It's uh it's all good. Well, well, Melissa, uh as always, it's been fast fantastic talking with you. As we like to wrap up with all of our guests, what is your final take?

My final take is visuals are very important to enhancing any kind of experience and be intentional with the visuals that you provide.

Perfect. I love it. And thank you so much for joining me in the visual lounge. Thank you. All right, everybody, you heard you heard what Melissa's talking about. There's practice, there's opportunity to get better at visuals, there's opportunity to be thoughtful. I love the idea of building a design system for yourself, for your organization, for the things that you're gonna build so you can get reuse, got repurpose, you got real purpose in doing that so that way it speeds up everything that you're doing. And of course, underlying all this is we have to be practicing in a world of AI. Practice, practice the things you're using, practice how you're using AI, practice the things you're gonna be creating. Use those skills to leverage yourself to be able to do more, better, to help your learners, to help your audience to succeed. With that, we always like to hear your stories about practicing. You can leave us a message on the if you're on the website, the visualounge.net, uh, you can actually leave me a voicemail there now. I'd love to hear from you how's the show helped you? Has it helped you in your practice, it helped you in your design, has it helped you in any way, or maybe you just want to tell me off or I don't know. You can leave whatever message you want. We want to hear it. We'd love to hear from you though, and we hope what you do is take a little time to level up every single day. Thanks everybody.