UX on screen: 5 user experience lessons from “Schitt’s Creek”
Uncanny, unpredictable, and unique, this television sitcom is full of Golden Globe winning parallels to UX.
This year, beloved television sitcom Schitt’s Creek won a Golden Globe for best TV Comedy Series, a continuation of its award-filled 2020 sweep.
Schitt’s Creek wins awards and viewer hearts with its charmingly dry account of the Rose family’s fall from riches to rags. As their company finances lay in ruins, the Roses are evicted from their extravagant mansion and forced to relocate to Schitt’s Creek, a country town their father bought years ago in jest.
It’s nothing short of upheaval for this band of luxury-loving elite. Matriarch Moira weeps over forfeiting some of her vast wig collection, daughter Alexis tries (and fails) to orchestrate a private jet rescue, son David gawks at storing his high-end threads in a motel dresser, and patriarch Johnny sits at the helm of it all, surveying the ashes as his video store empire—and family’s sanity—burn.
The Rose’s severe case of culture shock makes for amusing setbacks, droll dialogue, and (you guessed it) riveting comedy.
But what does comedy have to do with user experience?
The cheeky dialogue in Schitt’s Creek doesn’t discuss wireframes, user personas, or inclusive design. But the family’s struggle to acclimate on screen communicates some valuable lessons about how we can help users acclimate off-screen, in our own products and interfaces.
Watching Schitt’s Creek won’t expand our UX portfolios or fortify our resumes, but it invites us to laugh and reinforce some conceptual UX lessons along the way.
5 UX lessons from Schitt’s Creek
1) New contexts are intimidating, and users won’t always meet them with excitement.
Schitt’s Creek’s protagonists meet rustic living with anything but enthusiasm. Their begrudging acceptance (or lack thereof) mirrors how users might feel when they’re dropped into a dramatically new release.
Adjustment begets friction: The Rose family keeps their expensive clothing and attempts to operate how they used to despite encountering new fiscal and physical barriers to their previous — and preferred—workflow. In an unfamiliar environment, they lean on and hold fast to what they know. As they stumble their way through adjusting to life in Schitt’s Creek, we witness what happens when users are jolted into new contexts with negligible support. It takes the family several years to fine-tune how they relate to their new environment, a lengthy turnaround that isn’t optimal for anyone — especially not our users.
As writers, designers, developers, and UX professionals, we do well to build onboarding flows that facilitate a smoother transition into new territory. By leading with new and crucial information, guiding users through product tours, and providing ample in-context help, we’re able to ease potential anxieties and better prepare users to find their footing on new terrain.
If our users feel like the motel-marooned Roses after a new release, we’ve failed them.
2) Real-world users won’t always fulfill predetermined personas.
Schitt’s Creek is a humble town with a close-knit, albeit campy, community. The Roses don’t fit the town’s M.O. by any means — but they still wind up relocating there, defying what citizens may expect from newcomers.
From a UX perspective, we might reframe this unlikely move into two key design concepts:
- The product: Schitt’s Creek itself.
- Its expected user personas: The people who typically live there.
If Schitt’s Creek were a product, its anticipated user personas might be individuals and families looking to relocate to a rural environment, with ample track record living in similar locations. The Rose family exists outside this user base. They don’t arrive with the same small-town context others might. Local patterns like town hall meetings, barn parties, and festivals weren’t familiar features in their previous setting, so the family struggles to onboard into their new community-centered world.
While we can’t necessarily design for all unexpected users—edge cases—we can embed contextual tools into our content, design, and code to help newbies and novices get situated. Adjustment isn’t always pretty, but we can provide support to facilitate and smooth that transition.
3) Learning isn’t linear.
Schitt’s Creek spans six seasons, and the Rose family hasn’t fully adjusted to their new home by the series end, but they do form a functional relationship with their environment. They learn how to navigate life in Schitt’s Creek, even if they never fully assimilate to its whims. Throughout the show’s run, each family member follows an individual adjustment arc. They experience major strides and major setbacks, and no two learning paths look alike.
The same can be said for onboarding and familiarizing new users with an interface. Becoming comfortable with new patterns takes time, and it isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. Some users will need more support than others, and we need to design with those users in mind.
The Rose family was dropped into Schitt’s Creek cold. They didn’t receive so much as a welcome pamphlet to get acquainted with their new home. And we can pull some UX takeaways from their resulting trials and tribulations:
Critical information should be findable, front-loaded, and digestible. Tours, step-by-step guides, and onboarding documentation can ease transitions into new spaces.
Understanding can’t be canned, but we can do our best to outfit our products and interfaces with resources to guide users as they adjust to new functions, features, and flows.
4) Agency averts apathy.
Nobody likes feeling like everything is out of their control — especially the Rose family! Reflecting on a slew of misadventures, David voices an experience we never want users to have:
“It’s just one long string of really bad luck and I don’t know what kind of carnage I inflicted in my past life to deserve it. I must have been Dracula or a spin instructor or something.”
— David Rose
So how can we avoid making our users feel like spurned reincarnations of Dracula or overzealous spin instructors? Ownership.
Invite users to own their journey. Use verbs and calls-to-action to generate momentum throughout workflow steps, especially in button and link text. Meet users where they are and provide the tools they need to customize and drive their own experience.
And be sure to stress when that ownership doesn’t apply. Use specific and detailed error messages to avoid assigning blame when something goes wrong. A user confronted with a vague error might feel like they’re responsible, or worse: Like they’ve somehow sparked a string of karmic misfortune.
5) Expect (and design for) the unexpected.
Whimsical happenings drive the plot of Schitt’s Creek, and despite cinematic exaggeration, they’re delightfully relatable. Comedic hyperbolism aside, Schitt’s Creek works because it mimics a pattern we experience in real life: Unpredictability.
We can anticipate this same trend in our UX work. For every expected user behavior, you’ll find curveballs. Certain words and phrases might be misinterpreted by users who arrive from unexpected contexts. As UX professionals, it’s our job to design, develop, write, research, and create for these uncanny circumstances. Even the newest of users should be able to navigate to a feature or page and understand, at a high level, what it says and does.
Plays on context work well for laughs, but not for day-to-day workflows. In Schitt’s Creek, one-liners often stem from conversations gone sideways. Take the curveball answer Moira gives when her daughter Alexis asks about her favorite season:
Alexis: What’s your favorite season?
Moira: Awards.
Technically, Moira’s response isn’t too far off the money. Awards season is a season. But it’s not quite one of the natural options Alexis has in mind. Misinterpretations like this can happen any time and anywhere — as we build products and user interfaces, we shoulder the burden of narrowing the margin for these kinds of well-meaning errors.
Clear design and clear language drive clear usage. How precisely we present, collect, and describe UI actions directly impacts how users complete them. Our interfaces and products aren’t television sitcoms; they should leave no room for miscommunication.
Next time you press play on your favorite show, see if any UX parallels surface.
Whether you’re designing a new product feature, creating a user test plan, or structuring your next user flow, scripts supply narrative patterns to inspire how we contextualize, build, and shape our users’ experiences.
Don’t shy away from reading (or watching) between the lines: UX inspiration often comes from unlikely places.
Have a story of your own? Write with us! Our community thrives on diverse voices — let’s hear yours.
