Voices of UX
Skating through UX: Design skills for on and off the ice
Figure skating has been a core part of my life for as long as I can remember. Not long after I took my first steps, my mom laced me up into a pair of figure skates and guided me out on the ice.
I entered in competitions and showed off my skills in seasonal shows until I started college. As much as I wanted to continue the sport, focusing on my studies and staying cooped up in design studios didn’t leave much room in my schedule. The hours of practice I used to put into skating started to dwindle. I would have to put it on pause for a while to pursue learning about design and UX. Recently, I laced up my skates once more — and realized these two areas of my life may not be so different after all.
Parallels between figure skating and UX design exist in three main areas: Storytelling, ideating, and improving.
Let’s jump right in and put an interesting spin on user experience design!
Storytelling is all about the audience, the story, and its characters.
When preparing for a competition or exhibition performance, you first choose a piece of music; this will turn into the story you tell. Many skaters like to skate to movie soundtracks because it allows us to envision the context of the music and then translate that into a performance. It’s easier to tell a story with your performance if you have an idea of what your music represents.
As for the music itself, the piece you pick will depend on your audience. Traditionally, skaters choose instrumental pieces for competition and vocal pieces for more standard shows. The teens may vibe to your contemporary pick, but 57-year-old judge number three may not be so appreciative of the pounding bass in Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings.” Guess which opinion matters more in a competition?
While avoiding landing on your butt is a great goal, skaters also strive to mesmerize their audience. By physically portraying a character, you give more strength to your story. Expression and artistry are key: You want the audience to feel what you’re feeling (unless it’s stage fright).
It has been said that design is centered around empathy; so is skating.
In UX, your audience could be your stakeholders and users. You might convey a story in the form of a task flow or user journey map, and the characters will be your personas. Stories flow through each step of the design journey, and the strength of our designs depend on the ways in which we engage with and respond to them.
The ideating phase involves learning by doing, creating from existing components, and avoiding overuse. Trial, error, and iteration are key — something figure skaters know well.
Choreographing a skating program often requires testing new sequences and trying them over and over until something clicks. Footwork is very precise, so you need to make sure you nail each step. This process involves a lot of effort, awareness, and reflection.
For building designs and skating routines alike, ideating often involves starting with a component-based approach.
It’s overwhelming to stare at a blank art board or think about how much you have to choreograph at the beginning stages of your work, before you have anything to show for it. Kickstarting the creative process on screen and on ice means first addressing the building blocks you need for a complete design or routine.
For skating, it helps that there are certain components you need to include in a program, depending on the level you compete at. For example, in an Olympic level ladies short program, you can expect to see a double or triple axel, a triple jump, a jump combination, two spins, a spin combination, and a step sequence. These performance specifications function like a template. Once you understand what needs to be in your program, you can start to fill it in with specific elements.
Designs gain strength the same way skating routines do: Practice, practice, practice.
I’ve found the best way to make strong designs is to just keep iterating. Exploring different layouts and visuals is how you discover what works well — and what doesn’t. Similar to working with choreography, sometimes you can keep altering little things, and sometimes you just need to start fresh to operate from a different perspective. When working with a design system, it’s easy to make several designs quickly using a symbol library that provides ready-to-use visual elements like icons and character styles. Having a symbol library also aids in consistency.
A successful skating program follows the same path as successful UX design: You need to observe what you have, determine what you need, and design a way to get there.
As I prepare for a COVID-contingent intercollegiate competition, I’ve been revisiting this process. While each skater may have their own choreographic approach, mine begins off the ice. Before I play my music on the rink’s sound system for the first time, I’ve already listened to it on loop for days. This approach allows me to become familiar with the rhythmic nuances and prominent elements. I get a rough idea of where I want to place certain jumps and spins, since I want them to align with musical components. I even try out different movements and steps in front of my bedroom mirror, though my carpeted floors don’t quite lend themselves to gliding gracefully. By the time my skates hit the ice for a practice session, I’ve already gotten a feel for how I want the program to go. From a design perspective, these listening and mirror-dancing sessions become my initial wireframes and sketches. They’re the lo-fi resources that guide and shape a more detailed version on the ice.
After I take my lo-fi routine to the ice, I can tweak the timing and add in transitional footwork between jumps and spins. At this stage, I can observe how everything fits together in real time — and, sometimes, I see how it doesn’t. On the ice, I’m able to discover which aspects of my routine work better in theory than in practice. Steps don’t always flow the way I’d like them to, and rethinking is often a necessary part of helping my final routine take form. Trial, error, and deep brainstorming become the best tools for sculpting an on-ice program that glides from every twist and turn.
Once required components are taken care of, you can start to bring in all the bells and whistles: Adding arms over your head in a jump, a difficult entry into a spin, or even some cool edge elements. My forthcoming competition marks the first time I’m skating to music that a well-known skater has used before. In this case, another element in my preparation has been conducting some precedent research. Studying Jeremy Abbott’s short program performance in the 2014 U.S. Nationals helped me get a better sense of how to embody the tone of the music, which is different from what I typically choose to skate to. I didn’t want to copy and paste the exact steps that he did, but rather build from his movements and then give it my own twist. Because I’m not as familiar with the character of the music, the artistry and expression didn’t come as second nature to me. I mainly kept an eye out for times I was impressed by his charisma and the intricacy of his movements, from facial expressions to fingertips. At first, it’s challenging to be aware of how my body appears on the ice while simultaneously executing difficult elements, but with practice, I’ll get to the point where I don’t have to concentrate on it as much. Once this comfort settles in, my own personal flair can begin to shine (maybe even more than my bedazzled dress).
Now, I just need to figure out if there are too many steps crammed in the last 30 seconds, or I can’t keep up because I’m out of shape after such a long hiatus. I’ll either have to revise my program, or start cardio conditioning.
Practice doesn’t make perfect, though. In order for skating design or UX design to shine, you’ll need to field feedback from other perspectives.
When you’re doing a double or triple jump, you barely have time to think straight, let alone have an objective view. Perspectives outside of our own are crucial to getting a realistic idea for what we’ve already accomplished — and where they have left to grow. When I was in the early stages of learning a layback spin, I thought I was the epitome of grace and beauty. I soon realized this was not the case after I asked a friend to record an attempt and the playback revealed an awkward leg angle that was reminiscent of a dog peeing on a fire hydrant.
In figure skating, this feedback-based learning can also be done through analyzing your judges’ evaluations and scores. Maybe a jump wasn’t rotated enough. Maybe your footwork wasn’t crisp. There may even be a certain combination of your choreography that just doesn’t click. Without these outside perspectives, you’d never know to revisit it, learn from it, or explore something different. By applying feedback and making adjustments, you can move through iteration after iteration of your skating routine throughout the competition season until you reach the point where people say, “Ah, they make it look so easy.”
In UX, we want people to say that about our products, too. Our designs should be easy to use. Intuitive. In order to accomplish this, UX designers conduct usability tests and receive critiques on their work. Multiple perspectives make our designs stronger by removing our own biases from the equation. We might fall in love with a certain workflow or spacing that just doesn’t work in our design sequence. Colleagues, users, stakeholders, and other collaborators become our judges: Their thoughts, opinions, and evaluations can help us determine when there’s something more to explore.
Reflecting on the parallels between figure skating and UX design reveals valuable takeaways for personal and professional development on and off the ice.
You must have courage to take any leap, literally. If any doubts weigh on you while preparing to take off, you’ll fall before you get the chance to jump. In figure skating, you have to be bold. You have to trust yourself. The same can be said for working in UX design. The courage I’ve cultivated on the ice reminds me to present and defend my design decisions with poise and purpose.
Decorated figure skater Scott Hamilton says it best:
“…The fact that I liked to show off and be the center of attention really lends itself to figure skating very well.”
It all boils down to confidence — the confidence to explore, to question, to engage, and to keep getting up after you fall.
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