August 2018 | An intellectual bender
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MARKET RESEARCH LIMITATIONS
I went on a bit of a Malcolm-Gladwell-video-talks bender recently. He finds patterns where others haven’t noticed them, and he scours research to find unusual themes, thread them together, explain why we are how we are, and even, sometimes, how we can detangle those threads and become better.
I could read his books, sure, but I’m more of a fiction fanatic myself, and anyway, watching him speak is like getting a crash course in the history of the world, or why our behavior is so contradictory, or what to look for if we want to be better.
He describes, in his video about the Kenna problem, how market research fails us. I work with researchers on a daily basis (and appreciate what I learn from their work), so I was intrigued by Gladwell’s explanation of how market research is biased into choosing boring things, similar things. There aren’t a lot of breakthrough, market-scrambling ideas coming out of market research. Why? Because we’re uncomfortable with things that are unfamiliar, so we might not choose something unfamiliar even if it’s going to be the best thing ever. We put boundaries around what sounds good, tastes good, feels good because we are creatures of habit and love to feel cocooned in familiarity.
What is this Kenna problem Gladwell speaks of? Here’s the story: An amazing, groundbreaking, unique-sounding musician, Kenna, gets his music in front of some execs from this and that record label, and they all freak out. He’s incredible. They love him, love his work, know he’s gonna be a star. But then, they put his music into radio testing, and he fails spectacularly. No one wants to listen to Kenna, so they say when polled in market testing. And if no one is going to listen to Kenna on the radio, the labels won’t back him.
And why does he fail market testing? Because the way he’s tested is people listen to a few seconds – a snippet – of his music, and they don’t experience the whole song or the whole album, and those snippets don’t convince them that they want to listen to more. But if they did, if they had, something wonderful would have happened. A little more magic would have entered our world.
When we confine our decisions to market research alone, we lose out on wonder, on those indefinable good things that we like just because. It feels good, it sounds good, it tastes good. Why? Indefinable. Ethereal. Wonderful.
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DESIGN SYSTEM VALUES
Shopify’s UX team is amazing. Shopify was an early adopter of UX and has a robust team of designers, content specialists, and researchers, a.k.a. the three pillars of UX Design-with-a-capital-D.
We’ve talked about (and implemented!) design systems within my current team, and they help a ton. It’s great to have a single source of truth. But as with all things, design evolves and evolves and evolves, and maintaining the system becomes a full-time job. And that’s okay. I argue in favor of applying full-time hours to design system maintenance. It’s worth it because it saves everyone who uses the system hours of their time. Plus, congruity! That slippery goal that’s so hard to reach. We’re all individuals, and yet we’re contributing to a whole, an unbroken whole, something that should be smooth, consistent, that has its own individuality, whose individuality is not interrupted by a rogue writer’s preferences (these things happen).
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SPACE HURTLER
Oh, jet lag. My dear friend. We’ve never gotten on well. I need sleep. I don’t flit from continent to continent like a sprightly fairy. No, I collapse in a hazy mental fog, blurrily, blearily trying to crawl my way out, up, into the sun, into the day, but no, my body says sleep. It’s 3 PM. Sleep. It’s 3 AM. WAKE. WAKE. GET UP. EAT SOMETHING. DO SOMETHING. Do things in this foreign country, in this foreign language, when the light is at its most beautiful. When everything is closed. When no one is around, not even a stray dog. Walk around with laser-sharp eyes, with burning lids, with more focus than you’ve felt in ages. Walk until the fog rolls back in, blanketing your mind and you can’t decide whether buying €100 of Frigor was brilliant or ridiculous (it was brilliant), and you don’t know if you’re going to make it to dinner (you won’t), but you’re so hungry, and you’re so tired, and everything is hard, and you’re never going to find your way home.
And then four days pass. Four. My magic number. Four days in a new time zone, and I am golden. I am a local. I’m still buying €100 of Frigor in a single shopping trip, but this time I’m doing it with confidence because I know where I am, and my mind is aligned with itself, and I am firing on all figurative cylinders.
Beating jet lag. Is it possible? Some people claim to be fine with dramatic time zone changes. Not I (obviously). Some take melatonin at this time and drink coffee at that time and wake up early or go to sleep late for days prior to their trips. (I’ve tried that waking up progressively earlier thing; all it did was make me feel off balance days earlier than I arrived in a new country, upon which I had to deal with four days of jet lag, so what was the point?)
Here’s what I know helps: Go outside. Get off the plane, and get in the sun. Remember that your body was not meant to go hurtling through time zones, that you’re not built for the speed at which you can travel now. Relax. Eat a pastry. Eat two. Buy some Frigor. Eat dinner at 3 PM (and save a little bit because you’re going to be starving at 3 AM but everything is going to be closed), window shop, buy some more chocolate, go to bed when it’s still light out. You’ll adjust. Your body just hurtled through time and space. Give in to the slow pace of adjustment. It’s okay. You’re here. You’re a space traveler. You’re on the other side of the world. It’s time to marvel.
If you’re a color nerd (and if you’re reading a UX design blog, you’re probably a color nerd)—or even if you’re simply a history buff—you’ll enjoy scrolling through the eras by color.
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HISTORY BY PALETTE
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THE STUFF THAT ANCHORS
I’m engaged in a daily battle with stuff. On the one hand, accumulating things gives me the warm fuzzies (briefly); on the other, it adds stress in the form of more to manage, more to keep clean, more to keep track of, more to store and organize. Yes, it’s very handy to have a tart pan (or three), but recently I made a tart recipe in a springform pan, and it worked great, so what’s the point in having all those tart pans? Do my tarts really need fluted edges?
Single-use items, fast fashion, stuff stuff stuff—I want to free myself of it. And yet, I love my cookie cutter collection (I had to buy a special basket to house them – one more stuff, but worth it!); I don’t want to get rid of all our blankets (because blanket forts); and I sure don’t want to winnow down my library of books. But.
I am an environmentalist. I care about human rights. I don’t want to support stripping our planet’s finite resources, nor do I want to support the slave labor that makes most of the products I buy. This is a battle worth fighting because it’s a battle for people, for our earth, for our time, and for our sanity. When I choose not to buy something, I choose not to support the stripping of earth’s resources, I choose people over products. And that always feels better than some new stuff.