How Comedy Can Help You Become a Better Designer.

Comedians have been in the user experience business for a long time. 

When we are passionate about design, we tend to notice when something is not quite working (or even plain wrong) with a product. We identify elements or flow that can be improved, and do our best to fix them. Twitter feeds of user experience experts, like Jared Spool, are regularly filled with comments on things they are doing or experiencing at a particular moment (specially when it’s flawed). Seeing everything under the light of user experience design becomes a reflex. Designers are not the only ones who react like this, though. Nor the first.

“It’s funny because it’s true!”

Before Don Norman coined the term “user experience” and user experience design emerged as a craft, stand-up comedians have been joking about the bugs that exists in our everyday lives. They have been making comments about anything, be it parking tickets or waking up. They point out the absurdity of the resulting situation, and make us laugh in the process. After all, those laugh tracks had to come from somewhere.

“I bought a donut and they gave me a receipt for the donut.
I don’t need a receipt for a donut.
I’ll just give you the money, you give me the donut. End of transaction. We don’t need to bring ink and paper into this.”
Mitch Hedberg

What I find absolutely brilliant is that they manage to reach out to the practice of UX design on more than one level. I am constantly inspired by the creativity of these artists. Their words could help create value if we listened to it more closely.

“How is that even possible?”

One of the most frequent patterns of a stand-up comedy show is to exaggerate flaws in everyday things or processes. Their criticism we can relate to and is often dead-on. Comedy writers point out the same errors in design you may find in a UX report. It’s all these little things that make no sense, that we, as users, have all experienced.

“ ‘As my first decision of the day, I will go back to bed.’ How many plans has the snooze bar destroyed?”
Jim Gaffigan

They ask the same questions designers do, and answer them from another angle. In doing so, they kind of reverse-engineer the product. They try to find out why, how, and when design process went wrong. Of course, their solution to the problem is, well, different than what a designer would have come up with.

“The thing about skydiving is why do they even bother with the helmets? Can you almost make it ? You might as well wear a party hat, what’s the difference?”
Jerry Seinfeld

It is safe to say that, when a specific item becomes the object of a popular joke, something can (has to?) be done to improve it. What better answer to give for the company that produces this item? To be able to listen to consumers and fix the issue is the mark of a responsible company.
Stand-up comedians are cynicism experts. It powers their observational skills and provides punchlines. The reputation of a product or a brand depends on how the company — and its design teams — chooses to react.

Besides everyday things, human behaviour is another favorite theme. I’m not talking about relationships between two people, but people’s relationship to things. It links again their work to another aspect of user experience design, through psychology and sociology. They might not analyse it, but they will identify the phenomenon.

“Why can’t you behave like a human being?”

Comedians have the ability to easily notice when a behaviour strays from a given norm. They can sense the silliness of it, and use its comedic potential. There is, however, much to gain, from a UX point of view, when it is about how people use products in ways never imagined by the makers. It can also be a caricature of how some people behave when using a product, say for example, a phone.

“I never saw a person going ‘Look at what my phone can do!’
Nobody does that. It’s always ‘This &?%*! thing sucks’.
Give it a second, would you ?
It’s going to space, can you give a second, to get back from space ?”
Louis C.K.

Frequently, the punchline compares this behaviour to the norm, to make sense of it. This can prove to be very useful, for several reasons I’ll develop right now.

It may put the light on edge cases and identify extreme behaviours.

The caricatures depicted on stage are based on real people, real behaviours. Many will agree, when creating user scenarios, identifying every edge case is a hard exercise. How many times do we forget a specific use case that declares itself after the launch. I’m in favor of taking any help I can find. Of course, it remains necessary to do a reality-check. We still have to compare these assumptions to more conventional data taken from user research. Watching the entire Monty Python production will not make you an expert in human behaviour (it will however give you advice on how to run a successful pet shop). Still, stand-ups can be a great starting point to realize you overlooked something.

It gives insight on how the product or the industry as a whole is perceived by the domestic public.

Stand-up comedy is still a business. Popular societal topics will naturally find their way into shows, because it will help sell tickets. While a comedian can choose to have an exuberant on-stage persona, the best bet for him is to bond with his audience, so that it identifies with him. The opinions he expresses are shared by his audience (minus occasional shock value). So when he explicitly makes fun of a company’s flagship product, we understand that it is more than some personal gripe.

“Pepsi started with the new advertising campaign. Pepsi, it’s the cola.
Oh really Pepsi, you’re the cola ?”
Gary Gulman

As public figures, stand-up comedians have the capacity to reach and shape general opinion. So when one of them criticises a campaign by Pepsi, you can be sure that the consequences will be — at least a little bit — more important than my little two cents on social media.

Watching foreign shows is a great way to discover the culture.

Of course, it’s better to understand the language (or turn on subtitles). These shows are, in my opinion, an easy way to peak into another culture. They can be used as a kind of introduction to this country’s culture and values. I’ll give a personal example. Recently, after reading a number of positive reviews and opinions about Sarah Silverman, I decided to watch one of her shows. I didn’t find it very funny; most jokes were ‘too smart’, and felt forced. We say that good design is obvious, great design invisible. I had the feeling that she wanted her audience to acknowledge the hard work she put in these perfectly crafted jokes. And they did. The audience was laughing a lot and clearly enjoying the show. At this point, I realised that her brand of humour was relevant to a certain segment of the population, more liberal and “edgy”.
In identifying the public the comedian is addressing, we can gain some knowledge of who they are, how they think, what they like. It gives us rough background for this users for us to work with. When creating personas, I try to identify which stand-up act he/she would like. It represents much more than just a type of sense of humour. It can also give some idea of his social and educational status.

It’s not rocket science.

As I have pointed out earlier, the observations made in these shows still have to be compared to the reality of the market. That does not mean that they are fake, and should be seen only as a farce. They hold a lot of information. It’s up to us as UX professionals to make the most of it. Comedy shows give us material to formulate hypotheses. While this genre is the norm in english-speaking countries, other forms of comedic shows exist. For example, French comedy has for a long time relied on the comedian playing several characters for each piece of the show (although stand-ups shows have caught on recently). While the “old-fashioned” characters of these skits still present “real” characteristics, they are not as useful from a design perspective. The caricatures are so extreme that it deems them unsuitable to use in a design process.

So much can be learned from society from its cultural production. Comedy shows provide an easy access. They offer usable information that could be used when designing a product.
What about you ? What inspires you to be a better designer, outside of the design world ?