How to survive a design career and avoid burnout (Part 3)
Early in 2021, I found myself in my dream job as a UX Designer and well on the way to burnout. I did something I had never done before: I resigned without knowing what I would do next and took time off. I decided to call up friends in the Product Design community to try to get to grips with this question: why do some Product Designers (and related roles) flourish in harsh working environments, while others (yes, like myself) tend to struggle & burn out?
I had conversations with three people I admire and trust. This piece is based on the third conversation with a friend in Norway — Anouk. The other two conversation posts are available over here and here.
A bit of a detour:
As I’m writing this, it occurs to me that I’ve spoken to many more than the three people I’ve dedicated posts to. A lot of Product Design people have shared wonderful pieces of wisdom and some very personal stories. I have been showered with tales of burnout by designers from all over the world. It made me realise: everyone is having a hard time or has had some pretty hard times at some level, especially in the last two years with the global pandemic. Yes, even those amazing, successful people who one admires and finds inspirational because they seem to always be doing well. We’re all human. And we’re all in this together.
My third conversation
Anouk studied psychology and found her way to UX Design in a pretty meandering way in South Africa. We met at a Google UX Masterclass in Cape Town and we just hit it off. She is empathetic, smart, and incredibly funny, often inappropriately so. A few years after we met we started working together as UX consultants at a big corporate, doing projects for banks, investment managers, and the like.
At some point in time, she moved to Norway. We’ve stayed in touch. She is the kind of person who is fun to keep in touch with because she loves people and there are very few boring moments in her life. She has overcome incredible challenges and continues to do so. She is now a senior UX Specialist at a biggish startup in Oslo.
Advice
I called her up, post-resignation, to talk about how she does it. How does she keep moving upwards and onwards as a UX Designer? And this, despite having very little in terms of social support and having to design in a very recently gained third language. Her first response was not advice. Her first response was to look serious and ask how I was really doing.
Now. We all have friends who are psychologists, therapists, or counselors. They sometimes seem incapable of accepting a positive response to the question: “How are you?” You’ll reply: “I’m fine!” And then they’ll lean in and say, with a slightly concerned expression: “But how are you, really?”
This is not Anouk. She demands a non-flippant answer straight off the bat, so she can have a proper conversation. She doesn’t tolerate superficiality.
She listened as I told her about the things that I struggled with as a UX Designer, as a member of a team that had to make the dramatic shift to remote work, the challenge of working from home with two lively toddlers in a house that doesn’t allow me to work behind a closed door, and my utter failure at staying cool and calm when my partner’s anxiety levels shot through the roof because of all of the same challenges.
Her advice was two-fold.
“You need to move to Norway. Things are so different here! The government really looks after its people. They don’t live to work. They live. And they really value getting out into nature. They even have a word for it: friluftsliv. Oh! And I worked overtime once or twice and got into trouble for it. It’s really not okay here.”
Her second piece of advice felt more like an admonishment:
“And you need to learn some self-compassion. Your children look up to you and they need to see that you value your own mental health.”
Move to Norway!
This piece of advice, which was a little tongue-in-cheek but also quite serious, got me thinking about our environments — specifically our working environments — and the impact it has on our performance and general well-being as Designers. She referred to two environments in one go:
- The countries we live in,
- The companies we work for,
and how they impact us.
Consider the country you live in
Just to clarify — I’m not planning on moving to a Nordic country any time soon or advocating that everyone should. I would love to visit Norway if only to experience what it feels like to be in a place with the 8th happiest population on earth, little crime, a working healthcare system, and almost zero poverty. Anouk and I are both from South Africa. South Africa doesn’t have any of those. I love my country. It is breathtakingly beautiful and diverse, but it is a developing country with the kinds of challenges developing countries face: poverty, corruption, rolling blackouts (our electricity supply is unpredictable), a broken healthcare system, and high unemployment and crime rates.
Looking at the UN’s Human Development Index numbers and comparing Norway to South Africa (a little bit):
Life expectancy (years): 82.4 vs 64.1
Expected years of schooling: 18.1 vs 13.8
Employment ratio (% of population 15 and older): 61.7 vs 40.2
Population earning less than $1.90 per day (%): 0.3 vs 18.7
Homicide rate (per 100,000 people): 0.5 vs 36.4
Internet users (% of population): 96.5 vs 56.2
Skilled labour force (% of labour force): 84.3 vs 52.2
I’ve been lucky enough to travel a bit. When you walk the streets of a developed nation’s capital city (like Helsinki, Barcelona, or London) late at night and realize you feel relatively safe and free to move around, it dawns on you how subliminally stressful life can be in a country like South Africa. We have coping mechanisms in place to deal with things like crime (stay in safe areas and be vigilant), broken healthcare (pay for expensive private medical care, if you can afford it), and rolling blackouts (buy a generator or a battery system, also if you can afford it). But then you add a global pandemic and political instability to the mix. This is a recipe for a pretty stressed population. High unemployment rates make people (including UX Designers) in South Africa more likely to tolerate non-ideal company cultures, even though experienced UX Designers are in high demand, because of a skills shortage and a burgeoning tech industry.
It’s worth spending a bit of time thinking about the country you find yourself in and how it is having an impact on your well-being. Designers are often introverted. We tend to focus on internal factors to find solutions to the challenges we face. The thinking goes: “What am I doing wrong and how can I fix this?” On the one hand, this is great, because our emotions and responses are arguably things that we have a measure of control over. But sometimes our bigger environment is playing a far greater role than we care to admit. And maybe it’s a healthy thing to pause and think about this for a moment.
I worked at a wild digital ad agency in Jo’burg (the business capital of South Africa) for a few roller-coaster years. Our teams were diverse, and timelines were typically quite tight, so collaborating was key. On the same project team, we would have fashionistas driving to work in shiny Audi TTs from the leafy suburbs around the corner, as well as interns and single moms juggling taxis, trains, and buses from the townships, 50 kilometers away. People would sometimes arrive at work a bit shaken — either from experiences in traffic or because they had witnessed or been the victims of crime. We made a conscious effort as an organization to be sensitive to these experiences, but living in a stressful environment will have an impact on you and your team’s ability to perform at your best.
Consider your working environment
This brings us to the second kind of environment to become more aware of: the company you work for, including the company’s culture and the way it shapes processes. I cannot recommend “Accelerate” (by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim) enough.
Their words:
“As in other fast-paced, high-consequence work, software and technology is plagued by employee burnout. Technology managers, like so many other well-meaning managers, often try to fix the person while ignoring the work environment, even though changing the environment is far more vital for long-term success. Managers who want to avert employee burnout should concentrate their attention and efforts on:
- Fostering a respectful, supportive work environment that emphasises learning from failures rather than blaming
- Communicating a strong sense of purpose
- Investing in employee development
- Asking employees what is preventing them from achieving their objectives and then fixing those things
- Giving employees time, space, and resources to experiment and learn.”
Forsgren et al then go on to describe the organizational factors that are most strongly correlated with reduced burnout risk. I’m not going to go into all of these — I really, really recommend you read the book. The very first factor they mention is Organisation Culture.
For me, a company’s culture is its values made visible and how those values are experienced by the people inside the company. The strongest company cultures I’ve experienced are the ones that result from visionary leadership. The leaders in these companies are optimists in the way Daniel Kahneman describes them:
“Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders — not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge. They are probably optimistic by temperament; […]. Their experiences of success have confirmed their faith in their judgment and in their ability to control events. Their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.”
These kinds of leaders have a vision that they want to make real. Usually, it’s something utterly impossible but irresistibly inspiring. It’s something that resonates with the people who work at the organization. One of my all-time favorite passages that speak to this comes from a book written by one of the original Mac developers, Andy Hertzfeld, in his memoirs about the early Apple days, Revolution in the Valley.
Hertzfeld writes how Bud Tribble, his manager, described Steve Jobs:
“Well, it’s Steve…The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field.”
“A what?”
“A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”
Just to clarify — Andy Hertzfeld’s stories about Steve Jobs are quite frank. He tells the stories as they are, and Jobs was not an easy person to work with! But the man made a dent.
Visionary leaders have reality distortion fields. When they do it right, their teams buy into that distorted reality and work towards it in whatever it is that they do. Team members are encouraged to do work and to work in ways that complement the crazy vision. And people are discouraged when they don’t. This, to me, is what shapes the true spirit and culture of an organization.
I’ve had the opportunity to do UX Design at businesses led by engineers, creatives, and UX designers. The engineers mostly built solutions that were functional and powerful and scalable, but on the less usable and beautiful side of the spectrum. The creatives built heart-stoppingly beautiful, fun things with little value other than generating the right kind of noise (which is a completely valid and worthy goal if you’re into marketing!). The UX designers built simple solutions to real humans’ problems: not perfectly crafted creative portfolio pieces, but things that just made sense to people.
The other two kinds of culture that I’ve experienced are what I can only describe as a weak culture, and a culture based primarily on the pursuit of profit. Weak cultures happen when there is a disconnect between leadership and their teams. The leaders might have a vision, but teams don’t know what the vision is, don’t understand it, or don’t connect with it. Cultures based primarily on the pursuit of profit are everywhere. These kinds of businesses are often very hierarchical and encourage competitiveness, meeting ambitious targets, pre-defined project outputs, and on-time delivery.
In most organizations, Product Designers are not the most empowered group of people. We have a voice, and if the organization has a listening kind of culture, that voice might be heard, but it also might not have any significant impact on the organization’s culture. So I think it’s important for us, as UX Designers, to consider the culture of the companies we find ourselves in. If your role description at the company does not have a prefix like “Chief”, “Head” or “VP”, chances are that you will have very limited influence on organizational culture. You’ll have a better time and deliver better work if you feel that your goals and values are aligned with the goals and values of the place you work for.
I tend to believe that most good UX Designers are an empathetic bunch of people. After all, empathy is where Design Thinking begins. We want to understand people’s pain points and solve for them. We want to solve these kinds of problems in surprising, creative, and beautiful ways. We want to build usable (forgiving, efficient, memorable, easily learnable) products. We want to play a part in making the world an easier and better place to live in. We want our designs to be ethical, accessible, and sustainable.
I don’t think that there are many organizations that want all of these things. Building usable, beautiful, creative, surprising products that solve real people’s pain points is hard. It takes time. It demands a particular kind of mindset that includes words like customer-centric and experimental. I realize that it might seem as if I’ve jumped from culture to process, but I believe that one determines the other.
Good designers want to build humane technology. If your company isn’t all that interested in a more humane world and even asks you to design products that are harmful and unethical, you are going to have a hard time. If your company is interested in a more humane world, but clueless about the processes that need to be in place to design things in a human-centered kind of way, you are also in for some interesting times.
If you are not in a position to change your company’s culture or its processes, and they clash with your goals or your value system, you have some tough choices to make. Whatever you decide to do, be honest with yourself about:
(1) what you want to achieve in your career over the long term,
(2) whether you believe you will achieve some part of your goal in the organization you find yourself in, and
(3) how much influence you have on your company’s culture.
If the answer to (3) is “Not much” and you find that you are spending most of your time doing work that doesn’t set your soul on fire in some way, it might be time to move on. If you’re not ready to move on, remind yourself on a daily basis that a lot of your unhappiness as a designer stems from a culture that clashes with your value system, rather than some kind of personal deficiency.
One of my biggest frustrations at a company I worked for was that I felt as if I was often the bottleneck in the process. The developers wanted me to deliver detailed specs for them to build. I insisted that we needed to prototype things — together, as a team — usability test these with real people, and then build them iteratively. This takes a lot longer than simply specifying a solution and building it, but one removes the risk of building something expensive that nobody wants.
I had a conversation with a friend who is now the Head of Product Design at a payment solution company and I told him about my intense frustration at feeling like the bottleneck. His response, with a big smile on his face, was: “I love being the bottleneck! That’s what we do, isn’t it? We stop people building stupid sh*t that doesn’t make sense.” Maybe he’s right. In a world where more than 99% of consumer apps fail, we clearly need more people saying: “Wait but why?” Or at least: “How about we prototype and test that first?”
Depending on your company’s culture, your questions will be welcomed and responded to or you will be shut down. You are the only person who can judge whether this is something you can live with or not.
UX Design is not easy. The world is constantly changing, people’s behavior is changing, the way businesses operate is changing, and tech changes all the time. As a UX Designer, you are slap-bang in the middle of all of those and your job is to design solutions while the carpet is moving underneath your feet. It’s very exciting and incredibly interesting, but it is hard. No UX Design project is the same, even if the same tools and frameworks are used. You need people who understand this around you.
This brings us to the next piece of advice my friend, Anouk, shared: learn a bit of self-compassion.
Develop self-compassion
Designing and building well-made digital products is hard.
Stakeholders provide vague briefs and expect high-quality solutions to be delivered at speed, without necessarily providing a definition of how “high-quality” is defined. Designers often work in isolation, delivering designs that are impossible to build within any realistic timeframe. Developers are put under pressure to build designs that have been signed off by stakeholders with little understanding of the complexity of the design. Product Managers and Scrum Masters all seem to adopt their very own flavor of Agile or Scrum, which makes the process a bit confusing for new members joining the team. Existing architecture sometimes means that front-end and back-end are too tightly coupled, making what should be simple front-end changes ridiculously complex. Building good software is expensive, which often puts pressure on everyone to deliver too ambitious results in too little time. The challenges are endless. The point is: building good tech is hard. Many books have been written about it. We are still figuring it out.
I have the pleasure of working with an incredibly communicative and people-oriented front-end developer. We recently spoke about chemistry checks with people applying for development positions. I mentioned that it must be difficult for him because he likes everyone. His response surprised me. He said: “I like people, but you have to look at this person, figure out if they have the right skills, and then ask yourself if you want them in the trenches with you.”
In the trenches. Those were his words, and my first reaction was to agree. A war-making analogy! Because things get stressful in Product, right? And when things get hard, you need people you can rely on and who you feel comfortable with.
But it’s also a little crazy. We feel as if the work we’re doing is like going to war. This means that we need to be like soldiers. We have to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good. We have to fight.
Wait a minute.
Maybe it’s time to sit back and realize that product development is not a war. No one’s going to die**. Maybe it’s time to appreciate that everyone in the team: designers, managers, scrum masters, developers, architects, owners, and whoever else, has a piece of complexity to deal with. Perhaps it’s time to learn to appreciate and respect everyone’s skills and efforts — including our own. As Designers, we often underestimate the value we bring. This doesn’t help when you are the Designer working late nights to get the job done.
To some degree, this is where self-compassion comes in. Here’s a formal definition:
“Self-compassion has been recently defined by Kristin Neff (2003) as having three interrelated components that are exhibited during times of pain and failure. Each component has two parts, the presence of one construct and the negation of another. These three concepts are: (a) being kind and understanding toward oneself rather than being self-critical, (b) seeing one’s fallibility as part of the larger human condition and experience rather than as isolating, and (c) holding one’s painful thoughts and feelings in mindful awareness rather than avoiding them or over-identifying with them.” (Barnard & Curry, 2011).
Barnard, L., & Curry, J. (2011). Self-Compassion: Conceptualizations, correlates & interventions. Review of General Psychology, 15 (4), 289–303.”
When my friend told me to learn self-compassion, my first reaction was a bit of a scoff. It felt like she was expressing pity — only, Anouk is not one to pity others. Neither am I. Pity is not helpful.
But self-compassion is not about self-pity. It’s also not about self-indulgence or a sense of entitlement. Self-compassion does not imply that your work should be painless and easy, or that you should never give more than you expected to. Having self-compassion means that you:
(1) Are kind to yourself,
(2) Realise that you are human, just like all the other humans around you, who all make mistakes and struggle at times
(3) Are open to all of the emotions and thoughts you may be experiencing, especially the “war-zone” emotions, but you also don’t over-identify with them.
The best thing is: self-compassion is something we can all cultivate within ourselves. It’s a skill. Thinking about the three points here, self-compassion is cultivated when you:
(1) Recognise that you have a pretty unkind & critical inner voice that makes a noise when you make mistakes. Consciously listen to that voice whenever you make mistakes and think what you would say to a good friend who told you about a similar mistake that they made.
(2) Reach out to people when you’re suffering. Realize that everyone is suffering on some level. Don’t allow your struggles to isolate you. We’re all human.
(3) Do solid mindfulness meditation. Allow your thoughts and emotions to surface, observe them, and move on. Don’t suppress them. Don’t over-identify with them. Watch them, both the good and the bad, come and go.
A lot of UX Designers suffer from perfectionism. We want the details to be right. We want the design system to be adhered to. We like alignment and beautiful proportions and perfect grammar and experiences that flow. We want our designs to be usable and desirable. But the problem with perfectionism is that it’s often pathological. From Brené Brown’s book “The Gifts of Imperfection”:
“Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life-paralysis. Life-paralysis refers to all of the opportunities we miss because we’re too afraid to put anything out in the world that could be imperfect.”
She goes on to describe how self-compassion helps us to overcome perfectionism, and how self-compassion leads to compassion, which in turn extends to the people around us and creates a space where they can be their authentic selves.
This brings us to the best thing about compassion in organizations, and why businesses should be paying attention to the work coming out of the likes of CCARE (The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education) at Stanford University: organizations with more compassionate cultures, are more productive and profitable. Let me just repeat that, for good measure: more compassionate organizations tend to be more successful.
Last words
There is so much more to say on these pieces of advice, but here they are in a nutshell:
(1) Consider your greater living environment and its effect on you and your team.
(2) Consider your work environment and if it’s making you unhappy, change it if you are in a position to change it. Or move on.
(3) Develop self-compassion. Try mindfulness meditation. It’s super trendy right now. I recommend giving Sam Harris’ app, Waking Up, a go.
All the best. Here’s to making the world an easier place to live in in 2022.
** I realize that many designers work in settings where people might actually die. I’m referring to the design of consumer apps, where the greatest loss might be a bit of time, money, or frustration. If you’re designing for healthcare workers and pilots, the conversation changes.
