You Have Loved Ones in Prison

I work as a user experience designer, and I love my job. It's especially perfect for my academic background. In college I majored in German and also cobbled together sort of a minor in art and art history. Back then, I was preparing for a career that at the time didn't even exist! But I was driven by two things: learning the language and culture of others, and learning how to create things.

Fast forward to now and this is exactly what I do every day. I design building management software that has a major impact on people and how they live and work. Sometimes it's hotel guests, sometimes it's customers in large retail stores, and sometimes it's teachers and students. 

But that's just the occupants. Other people impacted by this software include the owners of buildings, the managers of buildings, the technicians who service the equipment and update the software, the engineers who design systems that include our software, and the distributors who decide to specify our software for projects.

There are three main phases of user experience design, and they are all crucial to arriving at a well-designed solution: understand, create, and evaluate. Or another way of looking at it is starting with research, then designing a solution, and then testing it with customers to make sure that it works and they can figure out how to use it.

During a big project, there are hundreds if not thousands of decisions that go into the design of a product. And with the different roles involved in such projects, there are software developers who have to primarily focus on writing good code. And project managers have to focus on schedules and progress. Product managers have to make sure the team is focused on the basic requirements, and create the business relationships necessary to eventually sell the product to customers.

So when I say "I design software," you might expect that my primary focus is on designing good software, and that my decisions are driven by that goal. But that's not what I do in my position. My thoughts and decisions are all focused on the occupants, building managers and others that I listed above. And my focus is on the graphical user interface and interaction design. Because the interface and interactions are what enable people to accomplish what they need to accomplish. If the interface or interactions are poorly designed or difficult to do, it doesn't matter how good the engineering is, or if the software is delivered on time. 

To be successful at this requires a lot of empathy. The more empathy I can create, save, and spend during a project, the bigger our chances of success. But it takes a lot of time and effort. I often need to interview people, or simply observe them doing what they do, and look at where they work. I spend time with them. Essentially, I try to live like them. To a large degree it's anthropology. And the better I do this, the more I understand their jobs, workplaces, challenges, opportunities, and measure of success.

When this doesn't work out, it can be a major problem. Building and delivering a poor design is a failure, despite the fact that some people involved could still claim they were successful.  Because a software developer could still brag, "Hey, this is great. My team completed this project one week early. We exceeded expectations!" Or a project manager could say, "Wow, we're $100k under budget!" But if the user experience design team didn't get the design right, the product manager is left holding a broken product that no one wants to buy. How is that success, even if there are others on the team who are claiming success? Why wasn't everyone focused on the same goal, the success of the customers?

I have been thinking about user experience design a lot in respect to COVID-19. That might sound crazy to you, but the idea of using "design thinking" to address things beyond products is not new. Design thinking is increasingly applied to business problems and many other challenges.

What I find interesting about people's responses to COVID-19 is that they're usually thinking about themselves. Because you empathize with yourself the most -- that's easy. Then after yourself, most people empathize pretty well with their immediate family members and friends. Because they know them well. But after that, most people don't empathize with people further out from their sphere of experience. It's hard, isn't it? In fact, that's why user experience designers exist. It's a lot of work to develop empathy, you just don't flip a switch and understand others well.

But more importantly, people don't empathize with the virus. But what does that even mean? It's not even a person.

Exactly, the virus is not a person. Yet weirdly, a lot of the decisions about COVID-19 are made as if the virus were a person. As if the virus can make choices, decide to respect some people over others, or maybe get worn out and just stop infecting people. "Hey, those people are really working hard at getting rid of me. Their effort is amazing. So I'll reward them and stop infecting them! Congratulations!"

Friends, the virus does not think. It does not get tired. It does not decide who to infect and who to not. The spread of the virus in America, the spread that exceeds that of almost every other nation on earth, is due to exactly one thing: it is spread by us. By our behavior. Because that's what is happening all over the world. So why do some countries like ours have shocking levels of cases and deaths, and others do not? It's because of different behavior.

Yet we tend to focus not on the virus but on ourselves, as if our personal needs are somehow more important than the virus. But when people do this, they're comparing apples and oranges. The currency of Americans is dollars, happiness, and freedom. That currency is nothing to the virus. It has no awareness of dollars, happiness, and freedom. All it does is replicate.

If we're going to turn the corner on the coronavirus, my suggestion to people is to act more like user experience designers. And if you want an easy research project that you can do at home, here's one:

Ask a friend or external family member to help you, because you can't do this alone. Then, each member in your family picks a room (likely their bedroom) and takes most of the fun things out of the room. Then they will live there alone. If you're married, you each need to be in a separate room.

The friend or external family member will deliver your meals three times a day. The only personal contact will be conversations through the closed door. And if your room doesn't have a bathroom, your only time away will be to relieve yourself in the nearest bathroom.

How long do you think your family can do this experiment? One week? Two weeks? I bet you can't voluntarily last two weeks in this situation. Because you'll feel like you're in prison, and no one voluntarily lives in prison. 

Our elderly population didn't sign up to live in prison either. But COVID-19 has reduced their assisted living facilities and nursing homes to prisons. They eat in their rooms. They don't see family members or friends. They don't leave. Ever.

I wonder what our nation's COVID-19 policies would be if we all empathized with the elderly by trying to live like they do? Could we do it for five months like they have? What does a pandemic solution look like that is based on this empathy? 

To be sure, I understand the bikers who wanted to go to the Sturgis rally in South Dakota. I understand the families who want to send their children to school. And I understand the small businesses that are struggling to succeed. But until we develop the empathy to respond to the most vulnerable among us, we will not arrive at a solution that succeeds. We'll simply arrive at a "solution" that is easy to define, quick to implement, convenient, and cheap. But not one based on reality.

I'll end this by focusing on one of the best user experience designers ever: Jesus. Now I'm not an evangelist or born-again Christian by any stretch, but I did happen to grow up in the Lutheran tradition. So if you're Muslim, Hindu, or have no religious faith at all, don't stop reading. My point in bringing up Jesus is simply this: he had things figured out pretty well. He knew how to empathize with people. And he knew what justice and love looked like, and what solutions looked like that could address everyone and anyone. 

How did he do this? By focusing on the most vulnerable people in his society. Nearly every story in the New Testament of the Bible is about Jesus spending time with the vulnerable: the weak and disabled, the sick and dying, the outcasts, and others who were marginalized in some way by the rest of society. In short, the people most at risk. And in doing so, his teachings and solutions worked every time. Not just for those at risk, but for everyone.

So whether you're Christian or not, maybe we should give it a shot. Empathy. It works. And it's hard work. But it pays off in the currencies that matter most, for the most people. Safety, acceptance, love, happiness, and life. If these are our success metrics, we need a pandemic solution that maximizes them for all of us. Even if the solution is difficult and inconvenient to achieve. 

Success is rarely easy.