Design as deep-sea diving
What a pandemic teaches us about product design.
I plan ahead. Both as a product designer and in my personal life. It’s a pretty common human tendency. But there’s so much we can’t anticipate when we first make those plans. Things happen — whether it’s as local as a personnel change or as global as a pandemic.
Then our plans change and our goals shift and we’re embarrassed or disappointed or angry at ourselves. Yet, if you look closely, what often results is more realistic, more informed, and more important than what we’d set out to achieve.
I began this year like any self-respecting Type A journaler: with a bulleted, month-by-month breakdown of my goals for 2020. Speak at a conference! Plan a west coast tour! Learn to surf!
The booklet I used has a grid for thinking through how to reach those goals. If I wanted to make a summer tour happen, start securing dates in March. In order to speak at a conference in the fall, start sending proposals by June. It was all very linear and pragmatic, encouraging forethought so that I could make sure, ahead of time, that I was on track.
Obviously 2020 did not go as anyone had planned. The COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, George Floyd’s murder sparked a national consciousness-raising about American White supremacy, and my January priorities are completely irrelevant.
The myth of linear progress
I’ve worked as a UX designer for eight years, and on Adobe’s Creative Cloud for five of those. I’ve worked on websites, apps, desktop products, email templates, presentations, and everything in between. I’ve designed things that shipped and became interfaces that people use every day, and I’ve worked on things that were deferred and never used by anyone.
I uncover so many complexities and dependencies as I design, that it’s laughable I once thought I knew where I was going.
If most blog posts about UX design are to be believed, the birth of any product feature was predestined, and peppered with only a few lessons learned. These retrospectives always make the process sound linear, as if the endpoint was guaranteed from the beginning. Likewise, when I begin designing any new feature, I picture a straight path of successive deadlines that ends in a pretty clear image of what I will deliver.
The truth is: in the everyday work of building a desktop application like Adobe XD, the path to completion is winding and the result is never what I expected. Scott Belsky calls this “The Messy Middle.” Even when a feature is seemingly straightforward, I uncover so many complexities and dependencies as I design, that it’s laughable I once thought I knew where I was going.
Design as deep-sea diving
Designing can feel like deep-sea diving. You plunge into the unknown with your equipment, a plan for what you want to retrieve, and how you will do it. But once on the ocean floor, you discover lifeforms you never could’ve imagined. You find discarded objects from previous divers. And you realize that what you’d meant to bring up is too heavy for one person to carry. Suddenly those new discoveries become more valuable than the original retrieval mission.
The most successful features I’ve worked on have been more like underwater exploration than an orderly progression from start to finish:
- I’m presented with a new project to add a feature that’s been requested by our users.
- I collect information from my colleagues about previous attempts to do something similar.
- I make prototypes, we user-test them, we talk to engineering
- I design solutions for stress cases.
- Everything changes.
The Plan B work
Any number of things can happen. Estimates shift, resources are reallocated, priorities are rearranged, the feature is de-scoped. Sometimes we realize that what we actually need is much simpler. Sometimes there is missing foundational work that’s necessary for the original feature’s success.
The newly uncovered design work has an unshakable sense of purpose and everyone can align around it.
This work — the Plan B work — is humble and not flashy, but it’s critical. Maybe it’s a prototype that someone began last year, or maybe it’s a workflow that only makes sense now that the new area has been thoroughly explored. This shift can be disappointing, but it often means that the newly uncovered design work has an unshakable sense of purpose and everyone can align around it.
That is so much of design — the little things, the loose ends, last year’s deferred dreams. That is how we progress, little by little, towards making something that is responsible and sustainable for the people that spend their workdays in XD.
Unintended Accomplishments
I still revisit that pre-COVID plan at the end of each month, but now it’s an exercise in humility. In the section for “what did you accomplish this month?” I write things that sound half defeated and half-enlightened: “I learned how to slow down.” “I let myself do less, and then even less.”
Meanwhile, though, I’m starting to notice the things I have accomplished that weren’t among my 2020 goals. Things that had always been wishes, but were perpetually deferred for their non-urgency, or even things I didn’t know I wanted.
For example:
- I’ve read a ton.
- I’ve gotten good at making curry and inventing dinners from what’s in the fridge.
- I’ve seen movies that I’ve been meaning to see for years.
- I’ve become the type of person who takes evening walks in the beautiful San Francisco parks that I was always too busy for.
- I learned how to sharpen my own knives!
- I’m better at knowing when it’s time to stop for the day.
- I’m better at recognizing when something does not matter.
I didn’t start the year intending to accomplish these things. If a pandemic hadn’t swept the globe, they certainly wouldn’t have happened. But in lieu of all of my external, extroverted goals being stymied this year, all of these internal, quiet ones have taken their place.
The beauty in foiled plans
When I think about what I thought I’d be shipping in any given year, and compare that to actual outcomes, my work goals share a theme with my personal goals for 2020: begin with very little information and an overly-specific vision, be disappointed, and then end up with an expanded understanding and something totally unexpected and precious.
When you can’t go outside, work on the inside
This pattern, to me, highlights the beauty in foiled plans, the ingenuity of design as a profession, and the unflappability of the human spirit. When you can’t ship the big things, fix the little things. When you can’t go outside, work on the inside.
It’s not that thinking ahead is useless. Rather, that we should have a sense of humor about our initial approach and build flexibility and humility into it. We should treat every plan like a guess, because it is. Sometimes the structures we set up ahead of time act as guideposts from start to finish. But most of the time they’re just a diving board.
