Beyond the Screen
Activities to hone your UX senses in your leisure time
On a summer evening, I had the pleasure to meet J, a design director with 20+ years of experience in UX design. I had expected it to be a casual networking meetup, but we ended up talking a lot about our side activities, what we enjoy doing after work. That may sound irrelevant at first.
But it is relevant! Some activities can help sharpen our thinking, observation, and empathy over time if we do them consistently — these can be hobbies like drawing or writing short stories.
In this article, I’m going to share some activities that help to improve my thinking and observation abilities. Moreover, they don’t feel like working at all but like hobbies I’d enjoy in my free time either way.
Hopefully, the methods can be helpful for you, too.
Learning Psychology
At some point, you’ll have finished all of the classic UX books and have realized all the content is quite similar in one way or another. Of course, knowing and applying them in real life are two different things. But geeks feel bored and want to find something new, exciting, and hackable. Well, let’s season your main dishes with psychology textbooks.
Psychology is perhaps a giant umbrella, but it’s basically the root for every existing theory about human behavior. Psychology can also be seen as the bridge between philosophy and physiology. Physiology focuses on the physical makeup of the brain, while philosophy concerns thoughts and ideas. Psychology is about mental processes, how they come and what they tell us. Sounds fascinating, right? Those are three extendable studies to kill your free time.
I mainly research this because of my interest in human behavior — I’m interested in how the brain work and the concepts of free will. Learning these subjects will make you a much much astute observer and dramatically improve your ability to read behavior. It’ll also strengthen your empathic skills. Ultimately, you’ll become an attentive listener too.
“Deep empathy for people makes our observations powerful sources of inspiration.”
— David Kelley
Writing
Writing is designing. One of the crucial steps in the design process is to lay out your thoughts, ideas, and intentions for the final proposal. An excellent write-up can communicate and sell your design effectively.
I always have problems explaining my thought clearly. It feels like many things are going on in my mind — sometimes it’s chaos. I struggle to describe those thoughts in concise language. If this sounds like you, writing may be helpful. Besides design documents, it can be anything: short stories, a blog, a dream journal. etc. The more you write down your self-talk, the better you can express your ideas faster and easier. Remember, you don’t need to be an excellent writer to start writing.
“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”
— Issac Asimov
Gardening
Gardening is therapy. Plants in living spaces can perk up your spirits and sense of well-being. Gardening also teaches us amazing lessons. Plants can adapt, transform, and grow in different circumstances.
When you grow plants, either indoors or outdoors, there’s no fixed formula for growing healthy trees. It’s kind of like a procedure with parameters that you need to adjust accordingly based on accessible resources and unpredictable crises. For example, some plants prefer a lot of water and moisture daily, like Monstera (also known as the Swiss Cheese Plant).
However, when I put them in my room, where they’re less accessible to sunlight, the plants become ill and a white, powdery coating appears on the clay pots. Because the room temperature can contain moisture and water for a much longer time, I need to cut off the amount of water by half.
That being said, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but there’s no one formula that fits all products. So as UX designers, we need to be mindful about the context and how to apply specific trends, flows, and behaviors to our digital handicraft. It may work for others but fail in our context. Do little experiments, iterate the formula, and observe. Over time, you can find a perfect recipe for your small plants.
So what did urban gardening teach me?
S = POI
Sustainability = Patience — Observation — Iteration
Iterating Your Space
Hang on — this isn’t about iterating a digital interface but your physical space, your house, and your workplace.
I’m quite a neat freak. I want things to be clean, tidy, and placed in particular positions. Besides, I tend to observe how people interact with certain things around the physical space. Thus, those two habits combined. When designing, I have an urge to keep iterating the position of certain items, seeing if it can make tasks easier or change behaviors — for instance, I might want to make returning an item to the correct place easier. I see my space as a design canvas with physical components.
This habit may annoy your housemates sometimes, but it can bring excitement and refresh the look occasionally. Does it remind you of our users when we release a new design on top of legacy ones?
I believe it increases your instinct in observation and encourages seeing your users beyond the screen and as a numbers of clicks. How do they interact with your design in busy environments — when they have more things going on their mind and no time to read your step-by-step guidelines?
Iteration is part of every creative process.
Lastly, Make a Cup of Coffee
Coffee is fuel for creativity and late-night shifts. I’m drinking coffee as much as doing design stuff.
A good cappuccino or cold-brew cup costs you $5-$7 — so pricey! So I decided to learn to make my coffee with pour overs like V60 and Wood Neck, known by the fancy name specialty, the third wave of coffee.
So what makes it unique?
Specialty coffee gives you full control for a refined taste — by only changing the water temperature 2-3 degrees, bean grind sizes, and water flow. Coffee beans for specialty coffee always have specifications like Altitude 1600–2000m/Process: Washed/Light-Dark Roast/Field Notes: Roasted Walnut, Bright acidity, sweet after taste. Every attribute let the barista understand the beans and how much they can influence your unique cup of coffee.
Similar to coffee, any design you encounter is the result of several parameters that you can pick up and influence to deliver a solution. A good design depends on how well you can control and iterate with the provided ingredients, creating a delectable “coffee” for your customers.
In a Nutshell
You don’t need to spend all 24 hours eating, sleeping, and studying UX to mastermind it. Experience is simply everything that’s happening around us.
We interact with digital products in a physical environment and with busy minds. Unplugging yourselves from works can give you more space for thinking and creativity — the aha moments tend to happen when bathing. So take a bath, make yourself a cup of coffee, and maybe start growing some indoor plants too.
Happy tech detox!
