therapist

Reason #5 Why UX Designers Are Like Therapists

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You may have seen that Johnny Holland has a great new series of posts out entitled “What I bring to UX from…”. I love these posts because they help us to think across talents and professions to gleam lessons from other fields. One article in this series, What I bring to UX from… working with delinquents & young offenders, caught my eye. I started to recall a blog series that I started last year and never took the time to finish, Reasons why UX Designers Are Like Therapists. This article inspired the #5 reason that we are like therapists. That is, to be successful, we both need to practice diplomacy. (Here are links to Reason #1, Reason #2, Reason #3, Reason #4.)

King and Queen cartoon "I told you to try diplomacy first."

In the Johnny Holland article, the author points out the skill of diplomacy. In short, ti is the ability to lead someone to see the errors of their own ways without pointing out their errors directly to them. If you have ever been in therapy, you probably know that this is the goal of your therapist. Not so much to “tell you” what is bothering you, but to use his/her skills to get you to see it for yourself. By doing this the therapist is empowering you to be self sufficient as well as to change your point of view in order to make you more successful at seeing better results in your therapy.

One could argue that as a UX Designer, you need the same skill. First, you need diplomacy within your project teams and client relationships in order to advocate for your designs and help people to better understand, for themselves, why your role exists and the value that you bring. Further, you need to use diplomacy to help persistent, opinionated team members and clients to see where and why their genius design solution ideas may or may not work as well. For example, you have a client that insists that his/her site needs to utilize breadcrumbs to help people navigate through the site more easily. You know the type of clients that I’m talking about, right? The opinionated ones (put nicely). After doing some analysis and informal research you realize that the client’s idea of using breadcrumbs is not the correct solution. How do you decide to solve the problem? You can push your ideas on them, OR you can utilize the skill of diplomacy to help paint a picture of why one idea is better than the other.

Painter painting a house cartoon
Help paint a clear picture.

Second, you need the skill of diplomacy to help guide your users through the different products and services you are designing. You cannot just shove a site or a design at a user without first thinking of how that site or design helps to paint a clear point of view of how to complete the task or get the content the user needs. Thus design 101 is really a type of visual diplomacy (in a very high level sense).

By utilizing diaplomacy, the outcomes are similar to those of a therpist. You are allowing your project teams, clients and users to be more self sufficient as well as helping them to shape their own point of view. This is one of the artistic parts of UX design, getting people from both sides of the product (back end facing and front end facing) to see the narrative that you are creating for mutual product success. Teams and clients become better at understanding your role and your expertise, and users become better at being successful while using your products and services. It’s a win-win.

Win Win Dice

Another way that UX Designers are like Therapists

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As most of you know, I’m constantly learning elements of therapy & counseling and can’t help but relate them to our work as UX Designers. My most recent lesson came from a discussion around Freud’s countertransference. My friend brought the term up to me and since I had never heard it before, I asked him to describe to me what it means, and how he uses it in his work. Transference is, in my short, less informed point of view, when a patient redirects the feelings they have for someone or something to their therapist. Thus countertransference would be when a therapist redirects feelings that they have for someone or something on to the patient. My friend explained that this is one way that he uses to understand his patients better, by relating them to other patients or people that he’s met or worked with before. For example, if the therapist had feelings of unease or distrust for a past patient and then finds himself redirecting those same feelings to a current patient, he can get a better understanding of who the current patient is just by recalling details of the past patient’s character. This is not to say that he basis all of his diagnosis on past patients, but simply uses countertransference as a way to know patients better, especially when they first start seeing him.

Whew… So what does this very short lesson in psychoanalytics have to do with UX Design? Well the first term that came to my mind was empathy. We always say that we should have empathy for our users; as in the capability to share their emotions and feelings. This is different than transferring our feelings, but I believe they are related.

When I started to reflect on this topic further I realized that what most drew me in was the idea of taking feelings and thoughts that I’ve attached to one experience and transferring them to another. This is something that we, as UXDs, try to facilitate. That is, getting our users to transfer feelings that they have for tangible products, for people they love, for things or experiences that bring them joy, to the experiences or products that we are trying to create. This, my friends, has truly helped me to clarify my role as an UXD.

Now, the next question I asked myself is, is there a way for me to use countertransference to better understand my user just like the therapist does with his patients? More specifically, is there a way for me to transfer the empathy I’ve had for a past user (maybe one I’ve seen in testing or have interviewed?) on to the users that I’m currently designing for? For example, let’s say, in the past, I interviewed some users in order to better understand their usage of the iPhone. During these sessions, I developed a certain amount of empathy for these users. Can I say that when I design future iPhone applications or designs that I can redirect this empathy in order to better inform my designs? Well it doesn’t really work like that. I don’t know that you can purposefully transfer empathy for one user to another. It’s more of an observation thing. Meaning really being aware of when you’re transferring empathy, and then analyzing why and if it makes sense to do so. Making these types of connections in the brain will enable you to really understand how you understand the user. This is an introspective process, however, it is one that can help us to better understand from an emotional point of view who we are designing for and what their needs are.

The moral: the closer you are to filling your user’s shoes, the better you’ll be able to design for them. Practicing noticing when you are transferring emotions and empathy from past users or experiences on to current ones will help you to know yourself as well as your user better, and eventually close the gap between you and your user; thereby making your designs more user centric, and therefore just plain old better.