Designing for the Ick and All
A few weeks ago, I was on a Zoom call when everything I thought I knew about business changed.
It was with a company we hadn’t worked with before. I had met one of the guys a few months back over coffee, when going out for coffee was still a thing. He was kind enough to introduce me to his team. We scheduled a call with them and my team, but at the last minute, they cancelled. That morning they had to lay off nearly half their company.
And I understood. Because every morning, my business partner and I got on a call with our CFO and we ran scenario after scenario. Model after model. If this then that. If that then this other thing. We read through emails from one client. Talked about a call from another. An install date pushed. A contract languishing on a desk, unsigned. A postponed project. And then another and another and still another. I was scared. We all were.
And we would get on our daily team check-in call and we would put on our best brave good leader faces, making jokes and trying to keep it business as usual as the sirens screamed past our windows. These amazing humans with their children, their partners, their too small apartments in a too big city that was deteriorating fast. I was scared for my business, sure, but I was really scared for them.
I rescheduled the Zoom with the prospective client a few days later. And the start of the call went really well. I asked how they are doing, I listened to them, I sympathized. It was our scenario 4, financial model 2.
And as they talked about what had happened, I saw my team, avidly listening, wondering what was next for them. If next week, they too would be one of the masses lining up for unemployment. My reptilian brain kicked in and I went into survival mode. I talked about all the things we’ve done, all the things we could do. I talked about our accomplishments and accolades. I started selling to this company that didn’t need a sales pitch, they needed a safety net. And as I talked I could feel a visceral shift in the room.
I came to the end of my spiel. I saw despair. Exhaustion. Polite nods as minds wondered — maybe about their colleagues who they just said goodbye to, maybe about homeschooling their kid, maybe about their aging parents. I don’t know because I didn’t know them. In my own fear, I had forgotten that I was talking to people. Actual people who were facing unprecedented times, just like me.
The call did not go well.
At the end, niceties were exchanged, cordial thank-yous, and as they exited the Zoom call, I caught a brief glimpse of relief cross their faces.
My industry is full of marketing-speak. We talk about authenticity. We talk about anticipation, curation, connection. We say things like immersive and multi-sensory and human-centric. We create research-based user personas and give them names and characteristics — avatars of a brand’s idea of their target human. We run through walls to help our clients capture this elusive and invented person’s attention. We turn them into a data point, optimized to get us the sales, the metrics, the impressions that we promised our client. It’s at the very core of what we learned at our big fancy ad agencies and our small branding shops. It’s how I came up in the industry, how most of us did.
Back in 2012, I founded my company, Faculty, on the notion that we could do better. We’ve always hung our hat on the idea of real human-centric design. We’ve said it’s not the number of impressions but the lasting impressions that matter. We’ve claimed real human experiences for real humans. But, until now, I’m not sure if we knew what that meant or how to actually get there.
The lucky of us that have kept our jobs, kept our businesses up and running, get to go on our Zoom calls and pick fun backgrounds so people don’t see our mess. We put on nice shirts and sport them over leggings (and lest we forget that leggings are not pants, even in quarantine). From the waist up, we act like we have our shit together. But the truth is, right now, we have never been more vulnerable, more visible, more connected than we are right now.
The messy, joyful, fearful, complicated ick of being human is now being beamed into the living rooms of every single person we barely know.
Whoa.
So here’s my pandemic epiphany, folks. Human-centric design was never human or design.
Discuss.
We can do better. I can do better. This moment has shown me that it is unbelievably easy to forget the human behind the brand-persona.
Human-centric design has to be for people. Real people, not personas. It should respond to the world around it, the scary, the surprising, the things left unsaid. It has to be palpable, and generous, and full of empathy. We forget that real people experience what we make. They feel things as humans do, not an esoteric brand ideal. If we can remember that, we might just make our way through this to something truly human-centric. And anything short of that is just advertising with a touch of lipstick.
Now is the time. And it’s going to be hard to let go of our old habits, and — like everything else right now — it’s going to take a lot of people working together and sometimes failing together. But, if we succeed, the result will be absolutely beautiful.
And I’m all in.
And to the team from that ill-fated Zoom call. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that when you needed someone to see your humanity, I saw a life raft. When you were at your most vulnerable, I let my own vulnerabilities take over. I know we haven’t spoken again, but I think about each and everyone of you. On every Zoom call since, you’ve been there, keeping me present, keeping me human.
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