Self-Growth After Entering the Design Industry

Whether you’re a one-person design team or a designer at a large company, you’re bound to experience burnout or feel like you’ve plateaued.

You might start to feel like you’re just going through the motions, like a machine executing a series of design processes.

The Burnout

“AI, please replace me!” I cried out.

For me, I wasn’t feeling the joy that I initially felt when I switched to this field. I was just using these tools a lot, and I was good at using them. Looking in the mirror, I saw that I looked a little gloomy.

I started to execute designs that required empathy without actually being empathetic myself. In interviews, I patiently guided users to “stop talking about their functional requirements first and think about what was happening the last time they had this need.” I told myself, “Empathy, Fake It Until You Make It,” but all I could think about was how I wished the person who made the wrong request should go to the heil.

This is a time when, even though your output becomes very fast and very large, you gradually start to feel no joy in the act of designing. At this time, you start to get used to the fact that good UX is often not something you can control. Weird timelines and workarounds mean that features don’t get finished, and if features don’t get finished, users don’t feel the value, and they’ll even think it’s hard to use, so you’ll have to spend more time fixing it next time. You start to realize that sometimes your product is like a bizarre building, with the toilet in the middle of the living room. Work is sometimes like being given a piece of land and told to plan the toilet first, and then suddenly told to add a living room, but this time it’s not just about building a toilet. Finally, a couple of people who claim to care about design jump out and say, “Why is the toilet in the middle of the living room?”, “Redesign the living room experience,” and “Designer, are you designing a product or designing me?”

Work is not the whole of life, you tell yourself.

If your salary is good, you might feel like a giant money-printing machine, but if your salary is not good, you start to resent the world and feel like a tiny cog in the capitalist machine.

You might start to feel like an impostor, seeing other people’s portfolios and saying, “They say I’m the most communicative designer!” and “Sharing Iteration with Developers and making sure the features are implemented seamlessly” starts to give you PTSD, and you feel social anxiety when you participate in the design community. It seems like all the designers out there are “super communicative,” well-rounded, and have good relationships with stakeholders. They love to attend events, and everyone is an ENFP social butterfly who loves to host workshops and get everyone involved in the design process.

The Search for Passion

While I’m not a senior designer yet, I’ve been through this time. I believe that I’m the kind of person who needs to find my passion before I can do anything well, so I took some time to think.

The things I can’t control really don’t matter to me.

I’m learning to do my best in the areas I can control. For example, my own passion is something I need to pick back up, because even if I retire on the spot, I’ll be bored. Challenge is a core element that makes me feel alive every day. I think what helped me during this time was watching Youtuber DoDoMan and the cartoon “Blue Period,” which describes the growth process of a person learning to draw.

The central idea in DoDoMan is “stepping out of your comfort zone.” Watching an episode or two a day, I started challenging myself to do things I didn’t know how to do and trying to find resources.

20% Project

Recently, I chatted with a junior who works at Google and learned that they have a mechanism called the 20% Project. When you feel burned out in your current position, you can apply for the 20% Project. The purpose of the 20% Project is that you can spend 20% of your time switching your job to a different functional job. This means that if you are an engineer, you can choose to participate in the 20% Project’s designer work, and if you are a designer, you can also apply to participate in the 20% PM Project to try to move the other side of your brain.

My junior said that in addition to allowing employees to change jobs, it also makes employees feel that their work is attractive again, so they don’t want to change jobs.

Inspired by this concept, I brought up this concept in my 1:1 meeting with my boss, and my boss was also willing to give me a chance to try service design and field implementation. These two things are not my forte, nor do they belong to the scope of UX Desgner’s responsibilities.

In order to learn about this, I wrote to Professor Wang Zhengya, a professor in the Department of Service Science at National Tsing Hua University, to inquire about the latest research trends and frameworks in service science. I found some keywords and indicators, and used an abstract perspective to look at the site. I am very grateful to the kind professor for taking the time to help me.

I also found service design resources on ADPlist for my Design Review. I got a lot of very effective help on this platform. It is touching that there is a group of such powerful people in the design community who are willing to teach their methods for free, so that monkeys who are just starting to learn how to pick fruits can jump higher and higher, and jump more and more accurately, instead of scolding people who have just become monkeys for not knowing how to pick fruits.

As for why I don’t do Design Review in my own company, it’s because everyone is in the same thick warm layer. To make progress and find fun, it is important to find different perspectives and need a new perspective. There are too many troublesome interpersonal relationships in the same company. For example, everyone has similar eyes, always has the same problems, or is embarrassed to tell the truth because of face.

Volunteering in non-software fields to experience non-user-facing work

Recently, I started volunteering as a care volunteer at the Taiwan Innocent Project to care for victims of judicial injustice. I’ve found a lot of things that designers can see here. I don’t need to produce interface design drafts, but I can spend more time building real-life relationships with real people.

Building relationships based on interviews is like a speed date with a stranger for me. No matter how good the interview skills are, there is a bottleneck. In the few researcher interviews I have had in Taiwan, the most common challenge I have been asked by interviewers is: “In fact, a good study will only choose 1–2 methods. It is not that interviews are the only option, but that interviews are just the most practical.” Although it is very useful, using only interviews cannot solve my occupational burnout. The purpose of work is for people to solve problems, and it is not necessary to solve my occupational burnout.

My first attempt here was to use the LEGO, a tool often used in design thinking, to design small activities that everyone can enjoy. “Children may eat the materials,” “Elderly people have poor eyesight,” etc. I implemented Inclusive Design, which is often discussed in the latest HCI research, and used empathy to create design challenges. This is not part of my work scope. Becoming a care volunteer, participating in people-centered thinking outside of my circle of life, and participating in people’s real lives rather than just being an observer, makes me very happy and it will deepen my vision of design.

Traveling to a new country to experience their innovative services

At the beginning of this year, I tried a “twin-side hot pot” travel in the United States, a software superpower, 6 days in the Bay Area and 5 days in New York, like half of it is clear soup and half of it is spicy soup, very rich. The software styles of the Bay Area and New York are very different, which stems from the density of the cities and the pace of people’s lives. The way people live shapes the shape of software design.

In New York, good restaurants are easily crowded and there is not much space to queue. The space between tables is much smaller than in the Bay Area. Here, I can’t imagine there is any room for delivery robots to walk around, and it is still much faster to use manpower for delivery. People with a fast pace of life often use Resy for “reservation” functions. It has become a fashion to book new and good restaurants on Resy, so there is also a new restaurant ranking on Resy. In addition, New York is a place that values design, and even enterprise products are made very beautifully. Resy is probably the most beautiful POS I have ever seen.

On the West Coast, waiters hold a light-weight mobile phone to order and checkout in the outdoor area where the sun shines. The screen is a white background with blue buttons. Guests do not need to queue up at the counter to queue, they can have a more elegant meal, and the waiters do not have to work so hard to carry heavy tablets back and forth (tablets are still mainstream in Taiwan’s POS).

I also like Square’s style, very simple white background blue buttons, although it is not as fashionable as Resy, you can see that the design system is easier to maintain at a glance. Square and Yelp Guest Manager have a very good cross-device, hardware-integrated design. It is hard to imagine how much more advanced the software technology in the Bay Area is than in Taiwan. In the past, when I attended a seminar with a professor, the professor said that 10 years ago, when he was an intern, he saw farmers at Farmer Market use a small earphone hole to plug into Square’s device to check out. Although Yelp’s food reviews are now considered outdated by Americans, more and more stores in the Bay Area are using Yelp Guest Manager for queuing. Yelp Guest Manager has a very smooth on-site queuing tablet. Engineers in the Bay Area use self-service ordering kiosks for breakfast, and because their heads are full of algorithms similar to best path planning, they can pick up rice balls on their way to work to eat in the company to relieve their homesickness. Uber’s former founder founded Ghost Kitchen, which allows the same kitchen to produce products of different brands at different times, maximizing kitchen utilization and rental rate. Uber in LA even uses delivery robots to shuttle around the streets, even smart enough to cross the street.

All kinds of innovative services have stimulated the vision of a designer who grew up in Taiwan.

Sure, here is the translation of the text into English:

Language Exchange

In order to learn English speaking, I found a language exchange partner on a Facebook group. He is an American who wants to settle in Taiwan for a while. Language exchange has really helped me a lot, especially seeing how someone from another country can find things that they have in their country or piece together new ways to live their old life in Taiwan. These are discoveries that I have never made before.

I remember that when my master’s degree professor was doing research on boredom detection, he mentioned that boredom can be divided into several levels. One level is “the thing itself is boring”, such as playing with your phone when you are bored at a party. Another level of boredom is “lack of challenge”, such as games with high repetition. The third level is “mental density” that is not enough, such as entering an automatic mode or a very familiar job. Interestingly, when people encounter slightly difficult situations, their brain nerves are active. It’s like when a catfish, their natural enemy, is put into a group of sardines, the sardines will swim constantly to survive, thus maintaining their vitality. The catfish effect is often used as a threat in management, such as the performance system. However, I believe that this is a misuse of challenges based on the art of the emperor. I believe that challenges do not necessarily have to be threats, but rather to let people try new things and use brain areas that have not been used for a long time.

After taking these actions, I started to become more energetic and started to relieve my gloomy face. I have realized that breakthroughs in growth and perspective are the source of my passion as a designer. Personal growth after entering the industry is really important to me!