3 Tips for Starting a Passion Project, Side Hustle, or Lifestyle Business
Approach your creative business like a user experience designer
User experience (UX) designers innovate digital products using a design thinking methodology, and I wanted to share how I’ve applied my own experience as a designer to approach my own creative lifestyle business.
User experience is all about connecting and bringing value to people, and not letting the technology get in the way. It’s the reason we like iPhones and Keurig machines, and other things that just seem to intuitively work. People gravitate towards simple, easy-to-use products, services, and experiences, and a user experience designer’s role is to craft that intentionally.
Generally, user experience design brings together a lot of related (and seemingly unrelated) fields from psychology, sociology, software development, graphic design, architecture, and marketing. The designers who come into this field are also diverse, and I’ve met designers who come from healthcare, sociology, architecture, graphic design, fashion, marketing, development, and psychology (like me!).
So, it got me thinking: If anyone can seemingly move into user experience from a different career path with maybe a year or two investment into building up some skillsets, what paths can you move into with a user experience skillset?
I think what excites me the most these days (especially during lockdown when we’ve all had the time to reflect) are the opportunities provided by the growth of the passion economy and creating a business that generates passive income through what people personally enjoy. In particular, what I’ve been interested in is creating a digital lifestyle business or what people typically consider “turning your passion into profit.”
The purpose of a lifestyle business is to improve the quality of life of the business owner. Usually, this is through providing a service or product and generating passive income. There is no limit to how the business makes money, but this way you’re not pressured into scaling it with venture capital and involving investors (until you’re ready for it, of course).
Here are 3 tips from the design world to apply to a side hustle, passion project, or lifestyle business if this is a path you’re considering.
1. Understand your ICA by creating a persona
Who do you want to help? To help get clarity on this, create an ICA or “ideal client avatar.” In the design world, we call these personas. A persona typically includes demographics, behaviors, and goals for using a product or service. Consider this: Who will find the most value in your products and services?
In addition to brainstorming who you want to serve, the next step is then to interview real people that are similar to your persona and to validate what you wrote down. What are the similarities and differences in people’s answers, and what are the themes that keep coming up? Use these insights to further refine your ICA and ultimately who you want to serve.
You may end up with 2–3 distinct personas, and that’s great. However, for any product or service you deliver, you’ll want to select a primary persona to focus on.
2. Creating your use cases
In design, we write out all of the use cases we want to solve for in the following format:
As a (persona type), I want to (action) so that I can (goal).
As you start brainstorming ideas, this will get you to start building empathy for your future clients and customers. Here are examples with our own persona:
#1 As a career explorer, I want to get clarity on the future I want so that I can start my ideal career.
#2 As a career explorer, I want to improve my mindset on life so that I can feel more confident in my job search.
#3 As a career explorer, I want to develop my skills for the job market so that I can be more prepared for interviews.
By writing problem statements in this way, not only will you continue to develop empathy about your clients but you will also start to hone in your niche.
For Life Experience Design, we tackle #1 and #2 above, but not #3. There are a lot of other places that do that!
3. Don’t settle for the first solution
When you think of a designer, you probably think of a group of people in a meeting room with a whiteboard, a bunch of sticky notes, and a lot of hand-waving to get their ideas across.
I mean, it’s not wrong.
However, if you peel beneath the surface layers of this scenario, true creativity involves making a lot of connections from a lot of different sources and bringing them together to create something new. Something that never existed before. This is a result of divergent thinking.
Divergent thinking simply means reserving judgment and the urge to throw away any possible ideas or solutions too early. Anything goes! Whether you capture these ideas in a list, a bunch of sticky notes on a whiteboard, or a mind map, what matters is the quantity and not quality at this point. The number of ideas will make it easier to narrow into the quality ideas later on and makes your first idea less precious.
This is also why it’s important to tap into diversity, whether it’s from different people’s perspectives and backgrounds when brainstorming with a group, or doing a competitive analysis with products that might not necessarily be a direct industry competitor. It’s finding inspiration and interpreting it in a way that solves the problem.
So, never fall in love with your first solution. It’s all about throwing a lot of ideas onto a wall and seeing what sticks.
Conclusion
So, there you have it! These three tips of creating personas, prioritizing your use cases, and generating a lot of ideas will help you get more clarity on what excites you, start validating how you might help other people, and generating quality ideas. Good luck!
Lia Fetterhoff is a Senior User Experience Designer with over 13 years of experience crafting award-winning mobile and web apps at well-known tech companies like Google, Nest, and GE, and has worked and consulted at a variety of startups and companies in Silicon Valley. She is the Co-founder and CEO of Life Experience Design, about to launch a course for people to apply design thinking to life challenges. She is also the creator of Swishie, providing content and community for women of color to thrive doing the work they love. Lia’s passion is designing with intention in both work and life. She lives with her husband and two kids in Roseville, CA.
