When working in user experience, it is our goal to create happy users. Many factors can impact our ability to reach our goal, such as the quality of our UI (user interface) design, the quality of strategy behind our UX (user experience) goals and roadmaps, the quality of communication with teams that are watching business goals and other KPIs. But sometimes, even the mental state and the emotional culture of the teams working on the user interfaces can impact our ability to give our users a joyful experience.
Picture a downtrodden, demotivated team working on a project. What outcome will they produce? Often people working from a dark, discouraged place create work that is just baseline decent and meets the minimum requirements and pleases the status quo. They don’t have the energy, inspiration or motivation to push for innovation – in many cases with environments like this, people who push for improvement get punished.
Hopefully most teams are not in that worst case scenario. I’m sure some are, but I’m hoping most aren’t. But the health of our teams really lies on a spectrum, and even for the best teams, in certain circumstances demotivation and general office blahs can negatively affect anyone. Contrastingly, teams that struggle with positive energy and joy have their days when the team is bristling with excitement.
So, what can we do to increase joy and motivation on our teams? Is that even our job? As ux professionals, part of our job is impacting UX and Design Thinking culture in our company. That involves getting people excited about what we are building. How do we do that?
Free Food
Everyone loves free food. Everyone. Make user experience kick off meetings a big party with free pizza or some other enjoyable treat. Our teams are diverse, not everyone likes pizza – maybe a gluten-free or raw vegan pizza might be a more joyful fit for your team. It’s about what makes them happy! When people are fed and being treated well, it puts them in a happier position to have discussions, receive information and escape the office blahs and get excited!
Be Excited
Excitement is contagious. Our UX meetings should be brimming with inspiration and excitement. To do this, we must have interesting information, ambitious goals, well-planned exercises and creative solutions. Our UX team must be prepared, well-informed and healthy so that the positivity we foster can radiate when we meet with other teams. And as individual UX employees, our personal preparation, inspiration and knowledge can ignite joy and enthusiasm within us, which can radiate throughout the UX team.
How do we prepare? Practice your exercises a few times before you bring them to a team. How do we ignite our inspiration? Read UX books and take UX classes and stay informed. We also need to be up to date on our products and knowledgeable and emotionally connected to our users.
Have Fun
Make your meetings and exercises fun. Use exercises that captivate participants’ attention and make them laugh! Have screenings for your user interview videos and edit the film like a Hollywood movie trailer. Pass out popcorn and movie tickets, and have a red carpet. Give out ribbons and trophies to teams whose products have amazing user experience. Pass out scoops of ice cream named after a persona. These tips won’t work for every team, you will have to UX the solution. What is fun to your team? What would make them laugh and get them excited? Brainstorm some ideas!
Use Storytelling to Inspire
Another way we can spark joy in our teams and enthusiasm for creating great user experiences is by co-opting the power of storytelling. Storytelling is one of the strongest interpersonal motivators. When we talk to our users and collect experiences through interviews, don’t underestimate the power of being able to tell a story from the user’s standpoint. Capture a time the user was really impacted emotionally from a product and try to spark a design in your listeners to empathize and feel the need to take action based upon this account. For example, if you work for a travel site and a user was able to use your product to take a journey home to help a sick relative, here is an impactful way their hard work is helping people. It could inspire more innovation, and more desire to help. Storytelling like this can also ignite excitement towards supporting diverse user needs, needs that may not be immediately apparent to those who don’t look deeper than their own experience.
By taking these steps to create a vibrant, excited, high-spirited team, it’s safe to assume the excitement, joy and inspiration would flow freely into your creations. The workplace would attract great talent due to the joyful atmosphere and the products would be so creative, joyful and user-connected because the people building them have huge hearts connected in what they are producing.
