Quarantine Will Make You a Stronger Designer
At home with three kids. In your ex-boyfriend’s place. Alone in a studio apartment. Living with messy roommates you hate. Taking care of your aging parents. Whatever your situation, this quarantine has us living a weird full-time experiment and still trying to actually do work. For me, that means being back in my childhood bedroom, with the competing distractions of tiger king memes, a terrible news cycle, and my mom trying to sneak me a glass of wine while I’m on zoom calls. However challenging your new remote work situation is, there is something to be learned from what we’re facing right now. How we adapt to full-time work from home in new places with unexpected daytime companions can shape how we become better designers in the future.
Increased Empathy:
Right now, across the globe, we’re embracing drastic measures to take care of each other, maybe the greatest worldwide experiment in selflessness to ever exist. At a time with heightened emotions, let’s listen to what we’re feeling and try to empathize with others. Take those “virus protesters” for example. While I don’t totally get the logic behind what they’re doing, I understand that what they’re feeling — fear and anger — is the same thing that we’re all feeling. Unexpected responses to this pandemic can help us understand that people don’t always react the same way, but when we name what they’re feeling and see that we’re probably feeling it too we’ll be able to better connect with each other. This empathy makes us more finely attuned to the needs of our customers, so we can create more powerful products that they’ll actually use.
New Perspectives:
Creativity is about connecting unexpected things in a successful way. Therefore, unexpected work environments are bound to provide some sort of creative inspiration. At Glassdoor, being in the office helps us collaborate, but now, we’re all suddenly working from wherever we have decided to “shelter in place.” Whether it’s mediating an argument between your children or figuring out how to lead a design thinking workshop remotely, we will come out of this with new perspectives that will inform how we approach design and our processes going forward.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.
— Steve Jobs
Beginners Mindset:
Many of my colleagues are quarantined at home with multiple children, figuring out how to get them to upload their school assignments on the e-learning platform that they’d never used before this started. As you encourage your children to learn these programs or tackle them yourself, remember what it’s like not to know what you’re doing. This is how people approach your new user flow or advertising design. How can you make the process more seamless so they don’t bounce out with the same frustration you’re currently feeling?
User Testing:
When guerilla testing new marketing copy around the office, it’s tough to get an unbiased opinion. When you have people who are completely familiar with your brand, even if they haven’t worked on your project, they might jump to conclusions much faster than the average user. While your new daytime companion/ cohabitant might not be your target demographic, they serve for a nice gut check. For example, we were about to run a bit of research on some new design styles. As a check, before fielding the test, I had my mom take it and talk out loud about what she was doing. We were able to catch a few questions that seemed a little confusing and reword them to be more clear.
Distractions Galore:
People view your work out of the context in which you design it. Now you have the real-time advantage of dealing with all the distractions of home to help you inform how people will interact with your work in the intended situation. Our Sr. Director of Design wrote an article titled “Designing with Context in Mind” about how great the context with which someone views your work can affect its effectiveness. The location, device, comfort level, emotional state, or Fido barking in the background can all change how someone perceives your design or the patience they have to interact with it effectively.
Freedom to Choose:
Designers are known for being a particular bunch, which…fair. We need to be weird in order to be highly detail-oriented — yet, constantly open to inspiration, perspective, and feedback — and still manage to get projects done on time. Use this new WFH time to figure out what your ideal rhythm is. Take your new-found space away from the office and make it work for you. Have you discovered that the 11 am standup always makes you angry? Book 10 minutes to do a quick meditation afterward. Found that you’re a morning person? You’re in luck, no one is stopping you from working early and taking a longer break during the day. For me, it’s the realization that, even if I’m in a room alone, I can’t get down to business without headphones on. Once we’ve figured out what our optimal work patterns are, we can make note of them and figure out how to bring them back into the office for a peaceful, more productive in-office experience.
At the end of the day, if you are still just barely surviving the pandemic, that’s okay. This is hard and it sucks. Working right now is not a remote vacation where we happen to get paid; it is a crisis and we’re all doing our best to survive. I’m just hoping that once we’re through it, we’ve taken note of the lessons that we’ve inadvertently learned.
