How to survive a design career and avoid burnout
Hi, all you UX Designers, UI Designers, UX/UI Designers, Product Designers, Product Managers, Interaction Designers and Design Engineers out there. This post is basically for everyone who feels like they belong in this picture (by Dan Saffer, re-visualised by Thomas Gläser).
I recently experienced a bit of burnout. Burnout is no fun at all. You really aren’t your best self. It takes tremendous effort and the love and support of other humans to regain your empathy, to care about anything related to work again, and to remember what it is that you have to offer the world. One also loses one’s sense of humour.
I have a theory. I think that many UX Designers will tend to burn out at some point in their career, somewhere around their 10th year in the profession, and I’d like to make people aware of what burnout is and how to prevent it. I’ve gathered wisdom and advice from people in the industry who I know and admire. I would like to share their thoughts.
I always knew burnout existed in a theoretical kind of way. Especially during my time working at an ad agency, I regularly saw what I thought of as burnout: characteristically highly detailed-oriented, enthusiastically creative and discerning people would stop caring about the quality of their work, seem perpetually exhausted from working too many late nights, and at the same time only just meet their deadlines. Or they would apathetically watch them whoosh by.
I became one of these folks in 2015. I remember reaching a point where I needed to urgently excuse myself from boardroom meetings to be sick in the nearest bathroom. Nope, I wasn’t pregnant. For a couple of months, I had been working 16-hour days, 7 days a week, eating in front of my computer, not seeing anyone besides work people and downing coffee at an alarming rate. At the time, I told myself I just needed to push through and that the next project would be better.
Fast forward to 2021, and despite making profound changes to my lifestyle (I quit drinking and smoking, get at least 7 hours of sleep a night, eat healthy food, exercise regularly, and feel like I’m basically a poster child for Fitter Happier) here I am again.
Sigh. This time around, though, I have two beautiful toddlers who deserve a parent who is not cynical, tired and physically ill much of the time. They saved me in a sense. Children give us perspective and courage as nothing else can.
For the first time in my life, I quit my job without knowing what I’d do next.
Friends congratulated me, my husband breathed a sigh of relief, and my parents looked a bit worried and asked if I was okay. For about 5 seconds I felt victorious, and then the panic hit me: what do I do now? Will my brain deteriorate? Will I ever find fulfilling and meaningful work? Will my skills become outdated? Will I be forced to return to some heartless corporate to afford my children’s school fees? WTF? Who am I?
Adding to my extraordinary levels of anxiety at the time was the occasional doubt that I was, in fact, suffering from a scientifically recognised condition, rather than some imaginary mental construct I had invented to make me feel better about quitting what I had believed to be my dream job and becoming financially dependent.
The occasional doubt is slowly dissipating, though.
You see, I’m lucky. I’ve been able to speak to a few really smart and empathetic people, including a sweet psychologist, a brilliant neurologist and a bit of a whacky general practitioner who has a lot of experience in dealing with patients who suffer from burnout. I also spoke to two friends who admitted to burning out themselves and shared their stories. If it weren’t for all of these people, I would still be listening to that merciless inner voice telling me to “Just harden up and pull yourself together, damn it!”
Also — it’s 2021 now. In 2019 burnout became an internationally recognised phenomenon. Here is how the ICD-11 describes it:
“Burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
It is characterised by three dimensions:
> feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
> increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
> a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.
Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”
Sound familiar?
There are various diagnostic tools that have been developed to determine whether one has burnout and if so, how severe it is — The Maslach Burnout Inventory being one of the most reliable. I was provided with some of these tools by my whacky GP. The results were as conclusive as they can be.
Now for the thing that really jumped out at me while I was reading up on burnout and made me think of us as a community of UX Designers (and related positions).
In 1974 Herbert Freudenberger (who was friends with Abraham Maslow) published one of the first journal articles on burnout. He went on to author three books on the subject. According to him, three predictors of burnout are:
- role conflict,
- role ambiguity and
- role overload.
When I read this, it really shook me. I read it again. And again. And again. These three things — role conflict, role ambiguity and role overload — are common amongst physicians, teachers and people in social services.
I would like to add UX Design to that list of professions.
If you call yourself a UX Designer, UI Designer, UX/UI Designer, Product Designer, Product Manager, Interaction Designer or Design Engineer or whatever, I am willing to bet that you’ve been in a situation or two where people expected you to do much more or much less than you believed you had to, or you were expected to do things outside of what you think of as your domain. (Luckily or perhaps unluckily, people who decide to dedicate themselves to any of the UX Design-related roles are typically also people who love to learn new things and neglect their boundaries).
Perhaps you’ve found yourself delivering work only to find that another team member had already done it or had made decisions regarding the direction of the product that nullifies or damages your contributions. I bet every UX Designer has been in this kind of scenario: you expected to be involved in the design and build process from the get-go, but instead, you are asked to do UX “magic” once all the fundamental design decisions had already been signed off by stakeholders.
If Freudenberger was right, and role conflict, ambiguity and overload are predictors of burnout, many of my UX peers must be burned out already or well on their way.
I decided to call up people who I love, respect and admire in the UX design world, and who seem to be flourishing and to ask them how they felt about their work.
I want to understand how some people seem to not only survive UX Design, but prosper and overcome truly difficult circumstances to deliver real value to end-users and do work that they themselves are proud of.
My conversations have been special and surprising and I want to share them. Maybe, just maybe, this will help other UX Designers not only to not hit rock bottom but to flourish and be the joyful people they deserve to be in their work. After all, we get into UX Design because we want to make the world a better place for our end-users. And that’s a worthy and meaningful goal.
So here goes. I’ve decided to dedicate one post to each conversation I’ve had so far, starting with these three:
- Stanley*, Design Director at a commercial bank
- Jen*, Chief Experience Officer at a digital agency
- Anouk*, Senior UX Specialist at an ambitious Norwegian startup
*I’ve decided to give them aliases because I’d like the real Stanley, Jen and Anouk to stay friends with me and not get fired.
Your Crew, your Rocket, and your Trail of Destruction
I’ll begin with my conversation with Stanley. I can’t give away too much about the man, because it would then be pretty easy to identify him. Let’s just say that he’s a guy with a mind like a diamond and a sense of humour that hits home. I’m still not sure how he ended up in digital design. He is impressively qualified in a domain that’s pretty non-related.
We worked together for a while about 5 years ago, directly and indirectly, in a corporate consulting environment. Corporate restructuring happened one too many times and he left for the banking world, and I left to join a startup.
We met over Zoom. I live in Melkbosstrand and he works in Johannesburg, about 1200 km apart. Stanley was in a collaborative office space, so not at home and not at the bank.
We had the usual chat about Covid and adjusting to remote work. Stanley asked if I had read the research on how we are able to trick ourselves into becoming more focused by only doing specific tasks in specific places or while sitting in certain chairs. I hadn’t. But the conversation stayed with me and I’ve played with the concept. There’s something to it.
We also spoke about our children and the incredible cuteness of little humans learning to speak.
He asked if I was looking for work, which I wasn’t. I told him I was just talking to people because I needed to understand how some UX designers seem to survive and prosper. I’ve done project-based work in the bank where Stanley is, and I’ve seen how some people behave towards one another there. It can get pretty rude and aggressive. I remember a specific incident one day about 4 years ago. I was still a consultant and assigned to a project at the bank where he had moved to.
Stanley joined our project team in a boardroom and was drawing and explaining a process concept on a whiteboard. One of his colleagues, tall, beautiful and slim, dressed in a tailored dress suit, clicked in on high heels, rudely interrupted the session and then claimed the rest of the meeting for herself. Without skipping a beat. I mentioned the incident to him, and he smiled and thought for a moment before replying.
Here’s the advice, which I am paraphrasing from memory.
“You see, you need a crew in these difficult environments. And you need to understand that you won’t make changes happen quickly. Your crew is important…You need a vision. And you almost need to strap yourselves into this vision, like a rocket ship, and leave a trail of destruction behind you. And when things go wrong, it’s fine, because you have one another, right? And you can have a few drinks together and move on. And over time, you see change happening.”
I giggled a bit. And we spoke about the future and where we picture ourselves in the next few years and promised to chat again (which I know we will). Then we said our goodbyes. (I sent him this piece in the meantime to sanity check it!)
I thought about what he had said a lot:
You need a Crew
You are not an island. Hopefully, there’s nothing surprising here, right? Trying to make change happen on your own, no matter how skilled or talented you are, especially if your job title has the word “designer” in it, is an exercise in futility.
Perhaps you’re part of an organisation where your team and your leadership understand what UX Design is, your processes make way for it and provide time for user research and checking that your product or service is having a positive impact on the world. Then you’ll also recognise the joy of collaboration and recognition of every team member’s contribution to the end product. It’s a lovely place to be in, and a rare one.
I think that more commonly UX Designers work on their own or in a siloed department. And they work really hard and craft their contributions in solitude, believing that the best creative work is done in a kind of a safe zone, removed from the rest of the business. There’s this notion of working independently and being rewarded for crafting original ideas on your own or with other “creative” souls like yourself.
If this is you, you need to reach out. A great deal of research has been put into the concept of neuroplasticity — how our brains are continually reshaping themselves and growing new pathways. What is becoming increasingly clear is that social interactions and relationships, especially those that we experience as deeply meaningful, have a profound effect on how our brains rewire themselves. Your brain is not only closely connected to your entire body, but also to the minds around it. Considering this, our relationships have an impact on our physical well-being, building up or breaking down our resilience to stressful environments, but also impacting our immune systems and our ability to think creatively.
You need a good crew to stay mentally and physically healthy.
(I would love to take a deeper step into this and talk about theories around our minds not being able to even function in isolation, but we’ll keep that for another day. For now: your brain needs other high-performing brains and a sense of Social Safety to perform well, which includes bonding with your crew and having a sense of belonging with a wider community. Here’s a great video about it.)
As UX Designers in harsh environments, we won’t survive (very long) if we don’t connect with our team members — and that includes everyone impacted by or who has an impact on the experiences we design. Not only investors, developers, product people, copywriters, testers and visual designers, but also the teams delivering customer support, training (if you have a training department), selling the product and marketing it.
Right now, digital ethics is also a hot topic, and people like Cennydd Bowles would recommend that you get a moral ethicist or a couple of philosophers on board, or provide Product Managers with frameworks for ethical decision making.
As far-fetched as that might sound, the truth is that our world is full of complex, interdependent systems and problems. Unintended harm is being committed at scale. Coming up with creative, digital, ethical solutions and building anything worthwhile requires a team effort. But designers are still often left to themselves, and expected to make deliverables that can be handed over.
We’re still solid horizontal bars with a hard beginning and end in a Gantt chart, somewhere. Argh!
We need to learn to speak up, run ad hoc workshops, make a noise and surface our work and ideas and questions, no matter how incomplete they are, to our team members. We need to stop the handover madness. We need to build real connections with a core group of people, who we can support and who we can rely on to support us.
Optimistic, compassionate, funny people who will have a drink (or coffee, in my case) with us when things go wrong or when we feel overwhelmed.
Human beings are wired for connection.
There is no way around this. You need a team to who you feel connected.
You need a Rocket
Stanley spoke about strapping yourself and your crew to a rocket. It’s a hilarious analogy but it works. Rockets are meant to travel to the stars, which we know ain’t happening any time soon, right? And just like interstellar travel, a worthwhile vision is unattainable. It’s something we’re always working towards, but that we’ll never quite achieve.
World peace. Equality. An end to human suffering and global warming. Freedom. Respect. “Imagine all the people…”.
Being strapped together to the same rocket is important. If the people in your crew have different North Stars, things are going to diverge in a bad way.
Your product vision has to be set (I believe) by a strong, well-spoken and optimistic leader. In my experience, it’s best for leaders to be loud, very talkative and clear about what they want. And a little idealistic and mad. Thinking about your leader should conjure up the undeniable mission that your team is on. When decisions are made or projects are tackled, the team should be able to imagine the leader walking in and know whether she/he will get excited, nod serenely or have a WTF reaction.
The team has to buy into the vision and be motivated to achieve it. Some of us are designers, some of us are managers, some are builders and makers, others are communicators or administrators or creative thinkers or carers. Whatever we do, if we all do the thing we’re good at, we should be working towards the same vision. And it’s up to each team member to judge whether the piece of work she is putting effort into, is contributing mostly toward the collective goal, or mostly towards a personal goal.
You need to see a Trail of Destruction
The last part Stanley mentioned to me really emerged from a question I posed to him. At a certain point in time, the bank where he serves decided to do the innovative thing and establish a design team in a beautiful working space physically separated from the bank. This is a common approach large corporates take when they crave imaginative solutions and finally realise that it might be easier to build a creative environment outside of their usual hierarchical and cubicle-filled office spaces, rather than importing creatives into the cubicle ocean and distilling a sense of corporate bureaucracy into them, so that they either lose all sense of creativity and experimental spark, or simply leave.
The bank established such a space, which I visited a few times. It was so joyful and fun! As a consultant, one gets to choose how much time one will spend at headquarters and how much you’ll spend at the client. When we did consulting work for this particular department at the bank, I spent the maximum allowable time over there.
The department didn’t make it, though. It made a noise and produced some epic, mindful and just plain good work for a year or two, and passionately criticised a lot of the work coming from the mothership. Then it was shut down, for no discernible reason other than a global partnership that went awry. And the creative souls either left or were absorbed. I asked Stanley what on earth had happened there. I might have imagined a flicker of pain on his face, but his answer was that you have to make peace that you will leave a trail of destruction as you make change happen in a large organisation.
He left it at that and I didn’t probe any further.
I thought about it, though. I’m not a trail-of-destruction kinda person, so this part of his advice didn’t sit well with me. Surely, I thought, it’s possible to persuade people to change their ways of working without conflict? To do that magical thing where you tell people what the theory is and what the research says and then they realise for themselves that they need to adopt a different process? Surely.
Maybe.
I’m not too sure about this anymore. I think Stanley is right. Let’s say you step into a business where:
- UX Design happens in a department somewhere, with other designers, or
- You are the only UX Designer in a sea of developers, or
- UX Design is equated to Visual Design and people speak about it being sprinkled on top somewhere towards the end of the process, or
- Nobody cares deeply about the well-being of end-users and therefore usability tests simply don’t happen.
To change such an organisation to be Human-Centered requires the destruction of something. It might be the current way of working, including how projects are prioritised and scoped. It might be the way teams are structured and what the leadership looks like. It might mean a cultural shift. It will almost certainly entail the destruction of the way that people in the business speak about design and how they speak about their customers and end-users. Organisational change will leave a few bruised and broken egos in its wake. The existing leadership and some team members would have built a particular way of working and be invested in it and proud of it. And it’s hard to let go of something you’re proud of.
So seek and cherish these three things: your crew, your rocket and your trail of destruction. They are lifelines, and your crew is the most important one. Without a sense of social safety the vision of your organisation, however grand and meaningful it is, will not help you. Digital work is not a solo mission. And grand and meaningful missions demand change, which demands a trail of destruction.
As a friend reminded me the other day, good design has to be revolutionary:
Design, if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive, must be revolutionary and radical.
—Victor Papanek
