UX everywhere
UX lessons from Adventure Time
User experience advice can be found in the most distant of lands.
Adventure Time, a one-off rejected Nickelodeon short-turned cult-followed favorite, turned 10-season award-winning Cartoon Network series, is beloved by people of all ages. The show follows Jake the dog and Finn the human, two heroes who battle against forces of evil in a magical, post-apocalyptic universe that may or may not represent a distant version of our own.
Adventure Time is of the unique genre of media that’s kid-friendly yet engaging, complex, and emotionally layered enough to appeal to people of all ages. Among those ranks include Studio Ghibli films, Star Wars, and many Disney movies… I’d like to argue that that genre should be way more saturated than it already is, but that’s beside the point.
In the Candy Kingdom of Ooo and the distant lands in its proximity, we learn from all sorts of strangely relatable characters and situations. From Finn overcoming hopeless crushes and true heartbreak, to Jake learning about both sharing and fatherhood, to the Ice King sacrificing his sanity and then rediscovering friendship… Adventure Time explores a vast range of experiences through both hopelessly immature comedy and unexpectedly deep, thought-provoking reflection.
It’s this duality of wacky and weird, but very human, stories that touch the hearts of viewers and earned the show its smash-hit status.
It’s this aspect of relatability that links Adventure Time with user experience. Now, it’s “adventure time, come on, grab your friends, we’re going to…” get into 4 UX lessons.
Note: At the expense of context, I’m avoiding spoilers to spare recent (or future) Adventurers.
1. Expect the unexpected.
“Maybe the lesson is that when you are grown, you won’t ever be able to tell if everything is going to be totally haywire, or maybe if truly everything is perfectly fine.” — BMO
Ah, BMO. Who knew such a small sentient robot could be host to so much knowledge?
The sentiment of this quote is very much applicable to growing up, experiencing life changes, and never feeling like you understand where you’re headed…
But it’s also a great description of what it feels like to work in UX. Times change fast, and so does technology. You can never look into the future and know if your users are going to love or hate your new update, or what the next sprint will bring.
What you can always do, though, is anticipate everything becoming totally haywire. It might not, but as BMO pointed out, you never know.
Anticipate the worst, and future-proof to make things as easy for yourself as possible.
Expect your users to get lost in your UI, and make an effort to make every page’s purpose clear — no matter how someone might end up there. Incorporate components that make your users feel safe, like breadcrumbs, back buttons that take you back to exactly where you were before you progressed, and easily accessible navigation (yes, even on mobile).
2. Your first try probably won’t be perfect.
“Suckin’ at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.” — Jake the dog
No one starts out with experience, and no one gets sorta good at anything without making some (or a lot) of mistakes along the way. Hey, even experts make mistakes.
When you feel dumb, it’s because you’re smarter than you were a moment ago.
Some great ways to suck at UX to get good at it include:
- Recognizing you don’t know the answer to a problem and conducting user research.
- Looking at other products for inspiration.
- Trying something new — even if you think it may not work.
- Failing at something… and then using that failure to inform your next decision.
Honestly, just doing the thing is better than wishing it was perfect. Doing it badly is better than not doing it at all.
3. There’s opportunity everywhere — you just have to find it.
“Everything small is just a smaller version of something big.” — Finn
One frustration of the UX field is the ambiguity. One phrase I hear often is “some days, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
I think this comes with the territory. UX is a vast, quickly growing and changing field. Every person dips their toes into a little bit of everything — from visual design, to content design, to development and marketing (to some extent, at least — everything lives on a site that has its own UI, right?).
The ambiguity can make UXers feel like their work is just a small drop in a huge bucket. Figuring out how to make a big impact when you’re spread thin across all of your daily tasks is daunting.
But here’s where I found inspiration from this quote — every small task you work on is a tiny part of something that could end up being really impactful. It just comes down to mindfully choosing those tasks when you can.
When you look at your daily task breakdown, what are you putting the most energy into? Could that be an area that could make a big difference to someone else? Or are you not putting enough energy into an aspect of your job that you really enjoy or want to improve at?
I’m a content designer, and I’ve been putting most of my energy into giving the most perfect, detailed content suggestions possible for the products I work on. However, I’ve identified 2 areas that could use improvement: automating repeat content suggestions and branching out to explore more product areas to make an impact in. While my main products are the priority, perfection shouldn’t be my goal — so I’m reorganizing my days to include the things I’ve been missing out on.
While I acknowledge that these are specific to my role and experience, I think the process of categorizing your daily tasks and identifying ways to work towards big goals is universal and can help you own your role.
A related pro tip: Being mindful of how you spend your working hours is also a great way to spot inefficiencies in your workflow.
Writing progressive to-do lists can help you take an honest look at what your own time sinks are, as well as for getting some extra dopamine throughout the work day.
When you’re facing a huge assignment, break it down into small parts. This way, you can cross off way more from your to-do list (and the big stuff doesn’t seem so overwhelming).
Maybe don’t take it as far as the ice king does, though…
4. Collaboration between teams is your most valuable asset.
BMO: But, ALLMO, I don’t understand. How can I help? I mean, I’m just a little baby kid still — even though it’s my birthday — Happy Birthday, BMO.
ALLMO: I don’t know about that, but I do know about your special mind. As the accumulation of all MOs, my computing power is unmatched. Yet still, I lack the imagination to think outside my collective programming. I can only see the world as it is. But your imagination, BMO, lets you see the world how it could be, or might sort of be like. If the two of us work together, we can think up a way out of here.
New to UX? Or are you a veteran of the field?
ALLMO has good news for every one of you. Fresh ideas combined with seasoned perspectives can take your team to great places.
Adventure Time exemplifies a sense of newness and whimsy in each episode — never holding back from introducing wacky characters, changing them completely, or doing away with recurring characters suddenly.
The show runners don’t stray from change and aren’t afraid to stick side-plot miniseries in the middle of a season or story arc. For example, the miniseries “Stakes” has an 8-episode run-time, and fell right in the middle of season 7. The show also incorporates episodes in different mediums, such as claymation, stop-motion, and animation styles that stray from the show’s status quo.
The series’ directors, writers, and storyboard artists also vary from episode to episode. The creative process is an open and collaborative one, but the final result still manages to stay cohesive and impactful.
Similarly, while your UX team may be composed of people of all ages, skill sets, and opinions, you’re ultimately all working together to build the same thing: a cohesive user interface. This makes collaboration and open communication integral to your success.
After all, “Something weird might just be something familiar viewed from a different angle.” It takes a village to see a problem from all angles.
A great way to collaborate within your team to build something cohesive is to open the floor for anyone, regardless of their role, to give their feedback.
For example, as a content designer, designers often come to me with questions about how to communicate information in the UI. I’ll provide a suggestion, and that often sparks an idea on their end. They’ll come back to me with their new suggestion, and I’m not ashamed to say “that’s better than anything I could have come up with alone.”
This works the other way around, too: content reviews often influence design. A “stupid question” can lead your teammates to identify an inconsistency or an area for improvement.
This cyclical pattern of collaborative review makes everything better than it would be while working in isolation. So open up those lines of communication, and consider planning some cross-functional meetings.
UX parallels are everywhere.
User experience is one of those things that can be related back to almost anything. Video games; books; and the phones, computers, and gadgets we stare at all day all took user experience design to come into existence.
You can find inspiration to improve your UX (or your mindset) in tv shows, your home, or mundane tasks. At this point, the things that make me go “ha… that reminds me of my job” are so frequent that I think I may be turning into a “MO” myself.
That’s the great thing about the internet, though — there’s a bunch of people who are interested in pretty much anything, and there’s a lot of overlap between unrelated interests.
Hopefully, this article reaches its target audience, and someone else can find value in the connections between user experience and one of the silliest adventures of all time.
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