Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Pipe Salazar

Hello Dear Reader

I’m a designer and as you already noticed thanks to my headline, I’m a User Experience Designer, and although the job market forces me to categorize and label myself, I don’t feel that my creative life is limited to writing, researching and creating prototypes to test. As an intellectually restless person, from time to time I feel the need to explore other expressions of design that feed my creative processes and give me a break between so many readings and paperwork.

“The X is for Anxiety”

I would like to start this trip with something that has been chasing me for several years now and is perfectly summarized in the following question:

Have you ever felt that you are petrified by the amount of work you still have to do?

According to the World Health Organization, anxiety “is a natural emotion that includes the reactions that human beings have to threat of a negative or uncertain result”.

For me, anxiety is what paralyzes me and fills me with panic, LITERALLY PANIC! That happens every time I’m going to start a new project and, especially, it intensifies when the client of the project is ME.

How to design then with half-paralyzed brain and with the other moderately functional half invaded with fears?

The answer to this question is very simple, to put it into practice not so much. The following is what works for me and prevents wasting my time thinking, thinking and not acting or producing solutions.

If your head, as well as mine, begins to work from the precise moment that hear the word project and you don’t manage to silence it even when you’re brushing your teeth, maybe you can find something useful in this post.

1. Organize yourself: Analyzing alternatives — good, bad, ugly, chaotic, catastrophic etc. — without achieving any specific result won’t be useful for you and will only increase the stress that you’re going through, take a deep breath and start putting them on paper!

– The best way to start is to do a “Brainstorming”. This will allow you to discard the worst solutions or at least those that don’t have much sense or relation to your task.

– To Do List. Easy, right? Well, making a “list of things to do” will help your brain to identify the chronologically organized steps you should follow to start shaping your project. The important thing at this point is that you can keep the activities simple, easy to follow, BUT with DEADLINES it’s useless to know what you have to do without prioritizing your activities. That only increases the anxiety, be careful…

2. Find out and search for references: How are you going to get rid of the idea that your solutions aren’t good enough when you haven’t even seen how good the solutions of others are?

Having a diagnosed anxiety disorder, from my personal perspective, generates a series of imaginary negative affirmations in you, which is a product of the stress that this problem creates in your mind. Recurring negative thoughts are also quite common, and if you add an insecure personality or lack of self-esteem, it’s the perfect formula for failure.

But, don’t torture yourself! Even the “best designer” admires someone, whom he considers the best.

Please understand that you’re in a learning process and NOTHING is perfect, the “perfection” is just another of the imaginary things that the monster of anxiety wants to reach. Personally, during my learning process working abroad, I have come to realize that “perfection” lies in the flexibility of those imperfect products that we design to be tested, evaluated and re-designed constantly. The idea isn’t to reach what works for you or is “perfect” the idea is to find the right solution for the users of our products; they’re those ones for which we are designing.

Remember: If our designs were perfect, our profession wouldn’t exist.

Here some creative platforms in which I find inspiration, know-how, study cases, trends etc.: Behance, Dribbble, and Product Hunt. And more importantly, where I find life stories that motivate me to continue pursuing my dreams: TED Talks, Medium, Vox, among others.

Pro tip: Consume and read content of your interest on the web, but take all the transforming energy from that content to improve YOUR DESIGN PROCESS. When we learn from others, we can identify and improve our failures and maybe, just maybe, we will stop comparing ourselves odiously and begin evaluating ourselves productively.

3. Be clear about your work methodology: When we design user experiences, we have to take into account too many variables that in many cases DON’T depend on us in their entirety and that, dear reader, is overwhelming.

When we work, investigating our users and “assuming” (in some cases) information about their tastes and behaviors, we require a clear, precise and organized work methodology that helps our anxious head to find order within the chaos. Knowing the number of steps we must take to fulfill our task is chamomile tea for your work as a designer; it allows us to know exactly and in due time something that could be missing or something that will fail. Finally, it allows us to omit the anxious thought that tells us:

All of this is a chaotic mass that works by grace and work of the Holy Spirit. Help!

Something that has helped me a lot to identify a framework is to research and read texts by experienced designers who were dedicated to the academy and who have generated knowledge about our profession.

Remember, we can’t create our own work methodology if we don’t even know the meaning of the word.

4. Share your process: Start sharing your process with your colleagues at work or with your classmates. Knowing the point of view of other designers will help us to find those flaws that skip to our eyes. Don’t share the final result of your work, because the criticisms and failures will be much more noticeable in a finished product, and return to the starting point will be much more complicated to reach. If you share and ask for opinions with others, not only does it feed back into the project, it also helps you to know how others work and visualize those practices that maybe you could start implementing in your own creative process.

Every time we share and learn from each other, we expand our knowledge and we’ve the opportunity to argue our choices. Perhaps, that monster of anxiety will stop you from time to time with these negative thoughts, but remember, you’re neither the first nor the last one, who is doubtful when solving a design problem. That IS WHY IT’S A PROBLEM! Find the way to solve it, using all your tools at hand. One of those powerful tools is the opinion of third parties (except your mother’s that does not count, because you’re always the star for her).

Finally my last point I would say, GO TO A THERAPY. Think about this: you go to the dentist to check your teeth or to the GYM to strengthen your body, right? Well, you also need to take care of your most important vital organ, your Brain! It’s important to understand how yours works and why you think what you think. It will give you a much broader vision of your approach to your professional life and be aware of those harmful behaviors that exist in you mind and limit your professional growth.

Thanks for reading! I will continue writing as a therapeutic tool for my personal and professional life and if you liked this post clap that hands and share this post with your friends. Maybe someone can find this information positive and useful. If you have comments on how I could improve my future publications, you’re welcome! Leave your comments.

Remember we are not the only ones who are going through this problem; there is no reason to cope alone.

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Designing User Xperiences — The “X” stands for anxiety was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Designing User Xperiences — The “X” stands for anxiety

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