Experimenting through Uncertainty
Photo by David Travis on Unsplash
I’ve been thinking a lot this past week about how to respond to uncertainty as the spread of COVID-19 has turned our worlds upside-down.
One thing I’ve realized is that even before COVID-19, uncertainty has always been a huge part of our lives as designers.
We can’t be certain about what we will design, because it depends on our users’ needs and goals. We can try to make something that’s usable, but it isn’t until testing it out that we find out whether it works. We design a new workflow and release it, but we can’t be 100% certain that people are going to love it or even use it. We design something we think is amazing and then it doesn’t get built because the business requirements change.
Managing uncertainty is simply what we do as designers.
How do we manage it? By using particular tools and methods. By reminding our clients and coworkers to “trust the process.” By learning to say “I don’t know, but I’ll try and find out.”
We write down our goals, our assumptions, and how we’ll test those assumptions; for example in a design brief or an opportunity canvas. We create designs and get feedback from people. We stay open-minded and iterate.
A few of the methods we use in the Product Discovery process, from a series of posters I designed
As designers, most of us learn to enjoy the uncertainty in our roles; it makes our jobs interesting and exciting.
As humans, not so much. I struggle a lot when things in my personal life are uncertain, which is hard to even write here as it goes against the image I’d like to think I’ve created of a calm and competent person. In reality, I get anxious and my mind spirals to doomsday scenarios or worse, just circles around and around wondering, “What if?” It’s tempting, especially these days, to try and numb the anxiety with Netflix, wine, or even TED talks. Or to do the opposite: to read every news article we have and turn the TV on 24/7 to give ourselves a sense of control by knowing everything that’s going on in the world.
One of the MANY of wine memes out there (not advice, btw!)
However, as Brené Brown writes in Daring Greatly,
“We can’t opt out of the uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure that’s woven through our daily experiences. Life is vulnerable.”
These words feel more meaningful than ever right now.
Lately, I’ve begun treating uncertainty in my personal life in the same way I treat uncertainty in my professional life. I’ve become a big fan of treating change not as something to numb or try to control, but something that is temporary, that I can treat as an experiment.
Experiments in the product world
Let’s go back to the topic of uncertainty in design for a minute. As product designers, we often work with our teams to run experiments or tests. We take what we know about our users’ needs and our business goals and come up with a hypothesis. Then we design a solution and test it out. We look at the results. Did the design work to help us meet users’ needs and reach our business goals? If not, we iterate.
As an example, at a review company I worked at, we knew that many of our users didn’t return after the first time they wrote and published a review. We wanted to see if we could encourage them to return to engage with our platform.
In order to create our hypothesis, we worked quickly and iteratively using the Product Discovery process. First we talked with users and learned about what might make them come back to our platform. We came up with many different ideas and chose one to try out. Our hypothesis was that if we sent reviewers an email letting them know how many people had read their review, they might come back to our site.
An early mockup that we tested with users (not the final design or words)
The designer created a mockup of an email and showed it to people to see what they thought. Based on some encouraging feedback, we then sent the email (manually) to a few actual users to test whether they came back to our site. We tested out various calls to action to come up with a successful click-through rate and ended up with an email that increased the number of first-time users who returned to the platform.
Imagine what would have happened if we had just made the first thing we thought of without talking to users or running the experiment? We would have wasted a lot of engineering and design time without any results.
Here’s my point: experiments in design help us figure out what is working and what’s not, and lead to big improvements in our products and for our users.
How might we experiment with our own behaviors?
Experiments in my personal life
Some of the best life advice I’ve received is to view any new experience as an experiment. Often, I do things because I think I should do them, not because they give me joy or are meaningful. On the other hand, I have habits I’d like to start or stop, as we all do. Finding a balance between “should” and “want to” is difficult. So I’ve started to take a different approach by creating experiments.
I try doing something new for a set amount of time—not because I “should,” but just to “see what happens.” I observe myself as neutrally as possible (if you’ve ever meditated, you’ve done this before). I use daily morning pages to check in with myself regularly. And, most importantly, I set a deadline to reflect on the experience and make a choice: whether to keep doing the behavior or stop. Knowing that a behavior doesn’t need to last forever and that I’m making a conscious choice to continue doing it is very freeing.
For an example, I’ll share an experiment I’m running with you right now: professional writing.
My goal is to write one blog post a week (except when on vacation) for two months. This was an objective I set up in January.
My hypothesis is that it will lead to people visiting my website and potential clients, as well as being an enjoyable activity for me personally since I love writing.
Because of this, I set up some key results to track. I’m measuring what happens by tracking visits to my website, noting how many people read my posts or reach out to me for conversations, as well as considering my own satisfaction with writing. I keep a running Google slide deck where I write a few bullet points every Friday afternoon to keep track of how the week went.
At the end of two months I will evaluate how it went and decide whether I want to continue.
You can do this with behaviors you want to stop as well… for example, what if you want to eat less sugar? You could try going without it for a month and just notice how you feel. It’s important not to judge yourself by saying that eating sugar is “bad”—just notice how you feel, physically and emotionally. Then at the end of the month, you can decide: is this a habit that you want to continue doing, not because you should, but because the effects are desirable?
Thinking of something as an experiment rather than something I am required to do helps me personally. I hate rules for rules’ sake, but if I can answer the “why” behind a new habit, I’m more likely to be able to stick with it.
Note: this is what works for me personally. If you want to read more about behavior change and building personal habits, I’d recommend checking out Gretchen Rubin’s book Better than Before and BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits program.
Experiments in uncertain times
So what does this have to do with our current situation?
Many of us are working from home for the foreseeable future. We’re freaking out—this isn’t what we wanted to do, and it’s definitely not in our control. It’s a scary, uncertain time for all of us and there are things happening in the world that we should take seriously. By writing this post I don’t want to imply that I am not concerned about the global pandemic (I am deeply concerned).
But as long as we stay healthy, I believe that engaging in a few experiments can help us funnel our anxiety into something useful. Working from home for a month? Treat it as you would an experiment.
Observe how things are going without judging your feelings or behaviors. You might find that you’re extra distracted these days, or that you’re lonely because you miss your daily coffee chats with your coworkers.
Come up with an idea to try out and make a hypothesis: Will making a change in your environment or trying a new behavior help to improve your feelings or situation? For example, maybe you have a virtual coffee each day with a different coworker who’s also stuck at home. Maybe you leave your phone in a different room while you’re working and turn on “do not disturb” mode on your computer.
Try out your new idea for a limited amount of time. Remember, it’s just an experiment! There’s no pressure that this has to be THE thing that you do forever. Make sure to observe regularly how it goes, perhaps with a journal or a note in an online doc at the end of each day.
Set a deadline for when you will reflect and evaluate how things went. Keep what works and discard what doesn’t.
A digital retro template (which can be used with remote teams!) from Atlassian’s blog
We do this with scrum teams by setting up test-and-learn cycles and having regular retrospectives to discuss what the team learned and what we should change (often using the “start / stop / continue” template such as the one from Atlassian above. We do this as designers by testing and iterating on our designs.
What’s stopping us from doing this in our personal lives?
Experiments won’t make the world a less uncertain place. In my own experience, however, they can help us to focus on observing how we feel and the effects of our behaviors, which leads to a bit of perspective on what we can change. And sometimes a small change can have a huge positive effect on our lives.