How the UX universe helped me deal with anxiety
I remember being that 8-year-old girl which is not able to fall asleep because she has a math class tomorrow. I felt sick and scared not being able to immediately answer teacher’s question the other day. The fear of being wrong got me paralysed.
In school mistakes were not tolerated. Growing up as a highly sensitive daughter of a teacher and an ex-cop, I quickly started internalising all negative thoughts and wrong-doings around me. Not only at school but at home as well I had to deal with high expectations. By doing so, I started turning everything inward and became a compulsive ball of nerves. I really did prefer to remain silent rather than saying something wrong.
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When the years went by, this anxious, silent ball was driving my family, friends, and lovers nuts. Having lost someone special to me partly due to silence, the anxiety kicked in more strongly than ever. I even questioned myself.
It was that outlook time when I came across design thinking and UX. According to Nielsen Norman Group:
“The design thinking ideology asserts that a hands-on, user-centric approach to problem solving can lead to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage. This hands-on, user-centric approach is defined by the design thinking process… empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement.”
Jakob Nielsen says “a wonderful interface solving the wrong problem will fail.”
What I didn’t realised back then was that I didn’t always have to blame myself for every mistake around me or done by me. There was even an entire field to make me not so untalkative but brave to experiment, try, and repeat!
My brain was washed. Why weren’t we applying design thinking techniques for teaching and learning at school? Why weren’t we teaching kids how to resolve problems? Why on earth weren’t we teaching kids that mistakes are a valuable source of truth and growth?
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Since then, care was not completely lost but it was definitely more rare. I’ve been working professionally as a UX/UI designer at an agencies and as a freelancer on projects from all around the world.
I’ve embodied UX into every part of my daily life. I am constantly searching for good & bad experiences, editing my mental models, and asking ‘why?’ or ‘how?’.
“Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman and “User friendly. How the hidden rules of design are changing the way we live, work, and play” by Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant helped me understand the hidden juices of the UX history and apply design thinking not only to digital but also to physical products and experiences.
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“The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That’s why we blame others and even ourselves… But… human error usually is a result of poor design… Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature… Pinning the blame on the person maybe a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity?”
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Practise is teaching me that I should analyse what exactly went wrong and immediately search for actionable improvements that allows me or others to avoid that in the future, instead of beating myself up.
“The only way to reduce the incidence of errors is to admit their existence, to gather together information about them, and thereby to be able to make the appropriate changes to reduce their occurrence… Rather than stigmatize those who admit to error, we should thank [them] and encourage the reporting. We need to make it easier to report errors, for the goal is not to punish but to determine how it occurred and change things so that it will not happen again.”
Of course it’s much easier to avoid cognitive confusion by denying the existence of a broken system. This applies to everything, from government to relationships to small everyday efforts.
After identifying the need of improvement, we still have to actually put efforts into making it work better.
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Alas, I’m still fighting my anxiety battle to improve my cognitive mind, especially during political crises, Earth-health-issues, and covid-19. If you, like me, are a highly sensitive person, fighting your battles, please, remember to inhale, exhale, and repeat. If not the UX, that should definitely help.
