Stoic Designer

"Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their minds." - Marcus Aurelius

If stoicism is a practice of embracing what is in your control and reminding yourself what's not, then what odd advice. What, after all, is more outside of your control than what's going on in my head?

Empathy is a tool for correcting for your own biases. When your boss is short with you, it's natural for anxiety about your job to bubble-up and just ruin your day. That anxiety is soothed, though, when you know your boss is having a really hard time at home.

You may, as a practiced stoic designer, react to your anxiety here in either circumstance the same way. But greater context definitely makes it easier.

We see and vouch for the benefit of "practicing empathy" in design work all the time, right? It sounds a little foreign to phrase it like that, but what we're doing with usability testing is generating enough understanding to make the next strategic decision.

Getting inside of our users' heads provides context and evidence for the choices we make about what's actually in our control: the service we provide.

Craft virtuously.

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Remember that design is not art, but a practice.

I am resting at the country-house which once belonged to Scipio Africanus himself; and I write to you after doing reverence to his spirit and to an altar which I am inclined to think is the tomb of that great warrior. — Seneca, “On Scipio’s Villa”

Scipio Africanus was a consul and general of ancient Rome — a famous one. He defeated Hannibal, an enemy of Rome widely considered one of the greatest military commanders in history. Some 200 years after his death, our boy Seneca vacationed in one of Scipio’s homes.

There, he wrote a lot about Scipio’s bath. Bear with the excerpts:

I have inspected the house, which is c onstructed of hewn stone; the wall which encloses a forest; the towers also, buttressed out on both sides for the purpose of defending the house; the well, concealed among buildings and shrubbery, large enough to keep a whole army supplied; and the small bath, buried in darkness according to the old style, for our ancestors did not think that one could have a hot bath except in darkness. It was therefore a great pleasure to me to contrast Scipio’s ways with our own.

This bath was apparently to a certain Roman class unfit.

But who in these days could bear to bathe in such a fashion? We think ourselves poor and mean if our walls are not resplendent with large and costly mirrors; … if our swimming-pools are not lined with Thasian marble; … and finally, if the water has not poured from silver spigots. … We have become so luxurious that we will have nothing but precious stones to walk upon. In this bath of Scipio’s there are tiny chinks—you cannot call them windows—cut out of the stone wall in such a way as to admit light without weakening the fortifications; nowadays, however, people regard baths as fit only for moths if they have not been so arranged that they receive the sun all day long through the widest of windows ….In the early days, however, there were few baths, and they were not fitted out with any display. For why should men elaborately fit out that which, costs a penny only, and was invented for use, not merely for delight?

“Poor fool,” they say, “he did not know how to live!”

As much as it looks like this letter’s taking this trajectory, Seneca isn’t really bemoaning the then-current Roman’s extreme opulence. Rather, he’s making a point — not the only point, but a big one — about the minimum viable product.

Scipio’s bath was a solution designed for a functional job-to-be-done: he got dirty when working outside, so he bathed. Seneca actually makes the point that Scipio’s generation washed-off sweat and dirt, but the job-to-be-done of Roman baths contemporary to Seneca had changed from wash off dirt to wash off ointments and perfumes. The windows of Scipio’s bath were narrow and defensible. Those 200 years later in Rome did not require defense.

We can look at this like the roadmap of a service over time. Even a core job to be done — to safely wash dirt and sweat — given enough time wobbles on its axis, and what was demonstrable user need for safety diminishes enough in favor of other priorities: comfort, duration of bath, society. The new job to be done resembles the original, but requirements for the service provided have changed.

Different features — broader windows, hotter temperatures — with demonstrable need were added to Roman baths over time. With that time, what were surely attractive, newfangled features at some point became basic expectations: for Seneca’s contemporaries, it was no longer a nice feature to have a hot bath, but a prerequisite for basic service.

One of the Stoic Designer themes here is that the product is ephemeral: it is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. What we haven’t explored as much is that the service isn’t static, either, its life-cycle is just longer than the product. Jobs to be done are like meandering rivers. External pressures — good and bad — make the river wind this way, then that way, and over time they become all different rivers - or they dry-up entirely.

In Seneca’s letter about Scipio’s Villa, he tries to make the point that contemporary Romans should try to understand as much about the time of Scipio as much as Scipio-the-person to fully put into perspective his style of living. It is a lesson about putting yourself in another person’s shoes. To Stoic Designers, though, this is also a lesson that the user experience is a metric defined in part by its point in time. For us to measure the quality of a service, it’s not sufficient to understand what and how, but also when.

Craft virtuously.

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Remember that design is not art, but a practice.

Michael Schofield

Back in April I introduced Venerating the Grave UX (medium), which is about regularly “ritualizing” negative feedback. The idea is that periodically you make an event out of digging-up negative user feedback and determining whether it has been or how it might be addressed.

For those of you who like to feel extra spooky, I called a collection of purely negative feedback — which, real talk, could be just a filter a on spreadsheet that weeds out the positive and neutral feedback — a “Charnel House.”

Venerating the Grave UX isn’t really about emerging with solutions, but about normalizing your perspective. In January, I wrote

Consistent user research unearths plenty of truisms about the quality of your service. Like youtube comments for the soul, we willfully perform this grave diggery to identify pain points in a customer journey that give meaning and direction to our design work.

Catalog these well, and make it easy to revisit the worst of the comments, your negative feedback. This is your charnel house. Visit often.

Veneration is humbling, but the goal is optimistic: it’s hard to do consistently thorough user research without being conditioned against taking negative feedback personally. Such a practice thickens the skin. It inoculates you.

So, today, when the veil is thinnest, make some time to look upon the bones of your design work.

Craft spookily,

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Remember that design is not art, but a practice.

Michael Schofield@schoeyfield

We idolize a project that is complete in design work. We don’t organize portfolios around failed experiments, incomplete products, the good ol’ college try. Instead, our bragging rights are constrained to a spectrum of doneness, notches in a belt, that — like a belt — represent arbitrary milestones on a line that loops back on itself.

Saying this stuff out loud is a little woo, but I’m trying to temper our endemic reverence for getting things done. A complete collaborative project represents, if anything, compromise. It is the way in which a team worked together to weigh user needs against organizational objectives. As your craft matures, you’ll have one or more pieces of work — maybe even a majority, if you stick with a single company long enough — you’re not proud of. We have to pay bills. We lose battles. I have an entire list of complete projects that make me groan. You probably do, too. These are projects not only where our skills were less refined but, maybe, our design principles took a back seat to the stakeholder’s demands. Sunk cost, right?

Service design is the work of people. Cooler heads don’t always prevail, the best ideas don’t always survive rank, the time required is too much for the time given. Shipping is compromising. Sometimes, that’s to the detriment of our pride.

But — is this just a problem with perspective?

The practice of Stoicism is the practice of asking, “is this in my control?” What about shipping design work is? What control did we share, and thus forfeit? Shipping work requires you to recognize your place in the process. Your control of that process is limited, as is how a completed project turns out.

What’s in your control? You are in control of whether or not you try.

Do your best to convince them. But act on your own, if justice requires it. If met with force, then fall back on acceptance and peaceability. Use the setback to practice other virtues.

Remember that our efforts are subject to circumstances; you weren’t aiming to do the impossible.

Aiming to do what, then? To try. And you succeeded.

What you set out to do is accomplished.

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6 #50

Design work is a verb. Do what’s in your control virtuously.

What do you think? Let’s chat about it on twitter.

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Remember that design is not art, but a practice.

Michael Schofield

When I meet with teams I’m sometimes asked to catch folks up on the progress of various feature requests in the system. I work pretty hard to make sure these statuses are transparent, so more often than not I’m confirming what they know: I haven’t made and probably won’t address these in the near future. That sucks to hear.

Often many of these requests are small design tweaks that take no time at all, but stay in the backlog by principle.

Here’s a real conversation between me (MS) and a stakeholder (SH):

SH: We know some of the customers complain [about this design] and [want it changed in this way].

MS: I feel ya. But any design changes like this ought to be prototyped and tested, and that just takes bandwidth we’re using for [this OKR]. I don’t think there’s enough evidence to bump this to the front of the line.

SH: Literally no one would care [if you just make the changes right now].

How often as user experience professionals do you feel you talk into the void? It’s easy to capitulate. You tell the stakeholder, “okay, sure, I’ll try to make this happen,” because on some level the stakeholder is right. When the stakeholder outranks you, it may even be wise not to die on that hill.

But I profess here and for many years in Metric that it’s not just that good UX is good business but that a good user experience design process is good business, and in cases above without really compelling evidence it holds-up that adhering to a design principle is better for the business. And if, after all, principles were so easily subverted, they shouldn’t be principles.

I’m frustrated when I have to have these kinds of conversations, to champion principle. What’s more, it’s easy to second-guess yourself. Often the business of championing systems of work and design process is lonely. You’re in a state of evangelism until there is enough organizational buy-in. Even as I write this I’m not supremely confident that being a stick-in-the-mud is worth it.

However, the reason we put so much effort into developing systems of work and establishing strong best practices and design principles is that they make both organizational decision making easier as well as a quality product more likely. They should be defended.

Let me emphasize the s**t out of this pull-quote from Epictetus:

When the standards have been set, things are tested and weighed. And the work of philosophy is just this, to examine and uphold the standards. But the work of a truly good person is in using those standards when they know them.”

— Epictetus

He isn’t talking about design work, and we should keep that in mind. For most of us, design isn’t life or death. It doesn’t matter as much. But I think we can maintain this perspective and apply the dogmatism of doing what you said you were going to do simultaneously.

The work of living is to set standards and then not compromise them. … Not, I want to do good—that’s an excuse. But, I will do good in this particular instance, right now.

— Ryan Holiday

Craft virtuously.

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Remember that design is not art, but a practice.

Michael Schofield

Design is a performance of smart people among smart people where it’s easy to conflate merit with your in/ability to solve the kind of algorithm you’ll probably never actually encounter in your day-to-day. While reminding yourself you’re not the smartest person in the room is probably key to doing quality work, it’s easy to start believing you’re the dumbest.

This sense of being head and shoulders below a colleague fuels this survival impulse to try to further clamber-up the tree because not only do we convince ourselves we’re deservedly lower in status, we assume that because they know React they are living a better life.

The fear of missing out is part of a vicious cycle that motivates us to subscribe to a s**t ton of newsletters, grind through tutorials, join and try to be fully present in a dozen slack communities, write for UX Collective or Hackernoon, chat-up John Cutler on Twitter to try to soak-up that residual experience, while doing our job, gigging on the side, having a relationship, walking 10,000 steps, until your will just nopes out and you succumb to the neuroticism endemic to the industry.

Our symptoms are exacerbated by the times but this is an ancient poison. You just know the mad emperors of Rome were insecure. What — had Nero asked this of Seneca — would a Stoic advise?

I think Seneca might suggest that the fear of missing out is a prioritization problem.

We either feel we’re missing out because our brief time here is spent on the joyless hustle, or we feel FOMO despite being otherwise content because there is a signal-to-noise ratio disparity.

In one case, FOMO is a ticking clock, a reminder not only that there are experiences you want but that your time left to experience them is short. Stoicism at its core is a prioritization framework. We use the deliberate practice of reminding ourselves that there’s no guarantee there’s a tomorrow to make easier decisions about how we spend time. If you think you are really missing out to your detriment, what are you waiting for?

This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow. — Marcus Aurelius.

What’s more likely is the other case, where we might see how the fear of missing out can be the result of a practical signal management problem.

The Stoics were concerned with jealously reserving their attention because information overload can dilute perspective. You can be awe-struck when you stare at the horizon — and sometimes you should — but you really don’t want to be awe-struck in the middle of a road.

Your monkey brain, engaged in watching all the other monkeys in the industry, wants to monkey-do. In the interest of staying current we subscribe to newsletters, join communities, and watch social because we perceive there to be value in staying current. Maybe you’re working with Sketch but see that screen-names you admire use Figma, or perhaps you are tap-tapping away at some jQuery but see in this morning’s newsletter that you can program a robot with Vue. This is interesting, sure. Have you ever asked yourself why you care? Does it really matter to you?

This is just as much a prioritization problem as the other, because it is either in your control and your best interest to learn all this stuff - or it isn’t.

Some of this is perpetuated by the fallacy that the more bullet-points on our resume make us more marketable, but that for the most part isn’t true. What’s left, then, is whether you have the control of your situation to learn a thing, and whether - memento mori - following a tutorial is really how you want to spend your brief time.

If it sparks joy, go for it. Life is short. Whittling your to-do list to things that are worth your time is the Stoic template for resolving FOMO. If it doesn’t, be honest.

It’s hard to admit that you don’t care about WordPress’s Gutenberg, because caring about Gutenberg is wrapped-up in what it means to be a WordPress professional. So, because we choose to care what other WordPress professionals would think of us, we continue to subscribe and read these newsletters only to delete them without further action, burning the time we could use for something else, devoting attention to information we can’t and won’t use. We open ourselves to signals motivated by the myth of staying current - when, really, we should stop listening for the signals entirely. If it doesn’t spark joy and it doesn’t make you measurably better as a human, unsubscribe.

Such are the lessons of the Stoics:

* Know what really matters

* Jealously guard your gift of attention so you stay focused on what really matters.

Craft virtuously.

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Remember that design is not art, but a practice.

Michael Schofield

One of the first a-ha moments many of us have who are interested in user experience design is that whole maxim that “you are not your user.” At the time it’s a profound wagging of the finger that after years rings a tad cliche if only because it’s on the tip of every UX designer’s tongue.

It’s not wrong, though. In fact, we reinforce this truth adopting principles like being data driven, internalizing infinity-loop design models with quadrants dedicated to testing. Good design, we learn, is about accepting that you’re wrong, your stakeholders are wrong, your product manager is wrong, and - s**t, when it comes to survey responses - your users are wrong, then evangelizing that wrongness until everyone adopts a design process that makes ya’ll a little less wrong.

What does that say about personality traits we, culturally, accept to be good? We applaud an iron will, but are frustrated by a stubborn one.

What’s the difference?

Remember that to change your mind and to follow someone’s correction are consistent with a free will. For the action is yours alone — to fulfill its purpose in keeping with your impulse and judgement, and yes, with your intelligence.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.16

Conditions change. New facts come in. Circumstances arise. If you can’t adapt to them — if you simply proceed onward, unable to adjust according to this additional information — you are no better than a robot. The point is not to have an iron will, but an adaptable will — a will that makes full use of reason to clarify perception, impulse, and judgement to act effectively for the right purpose.

Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, The Daily Stoic

Craft virtuously.

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Remember that design is not art, but a practice.

Michael Schofield

By recommendation on twitter I’m reading But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking About The Present As If It Were The Past by Chuck Klosterman who talks about our inability to predict.

I think he meant it as a joke but early in the book he describes how Occam’s Razor — the principle that the simplest solution is probably the right one — doesn’t work with predicting the future, and instead suggests Klosterman’s Razor:

The best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with.

Stoic design teaches us to allow for this. When we are motivated by an insight from user feedback to do a thing, we not only agree that our insight or our solution could be wrong, we prepare a contingency.

This is the premeditatio malorum principle - prepare for the worst, hope for the best. That contingency might just be a follow-up iteration — if our tweaks and experiments are sufficiently small then iteration is the default contingency — but large feature launches should be coupled with plans to roll those features back if something goes wrong.

Craft virtuously.

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Remember that design is not art, but a practice.

Michael Schofield

We might instead call a “design virtue” a design principle, the difference being that what we’re calling virtuous are principles that we have so much faith in we treat them with more reverence than rationality.

Personally, or organizationally, we have them. Lately a principle like “design accessibly” — which describes the requirement that the service or product we put out into the world ought to be usable through any medium — has sort of ascended to community reverence, so that when you and I talk it up we’re not just using the language of good strategy (think mobile-first design) but the language of moral imperative.

Such “design virtues” hold-up to strategic scrutiny, too. To make products or services accessible is to make them available to a larger marketshare; to bake this kind of design practice into the way your organization works is to design accessibly at scale. We might call these kinds of principles that are both demonstrably practical and virtuous “righteous best practices.”

Look, I’m a sucker for fun-with-vocabulary but the idea is that this kind of criteria can help form a personal or organizational code that can infuse the work ya’ll do as a common set of axioms against which you judge the quality of your craft.

A design virtue is part of a virtuous design cycle

A further constraint to differentiate principle from virtue is that a design virtue can describe any part of a virtuous cycle. A good design process is one that loops-back on itself at the end, where the steps you take to explore and test ideas, then make the product or perform the service, then test that deliverable against some criteria will organically lead-in to the exploration of new ideas. Design is an infinity loop. Place a dot anywhere on that loop, you should be able to describe that mark with a design virtue regardless of where it is in the process.

Mobile-first design is not a virtue as you can only really describe a certain chunk of the loop as such, but user-centric design is: whether you’re highlighting part of your discovery process or delivery, you could describe it as “user centered.”

A good design process outlives specific design strategies. Design virtues tend to persist, and are sound bedrock around which to build a culture of work.

Mobile-first design is about a decade old and I would argue is no longer the best strategy - but still a good one. Before 2007 it wasn’t even a phrase. Rather, “accessible user-centric design” will still be top of craft ten years from now, just as it was ten years before the iPhone.

Craft virtuously.

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Remember that design is not art, but a practice.

Michael Schofield

Real talk, “practicing Stoicism” involves a lot of reading of the same core concepts boiled down to “get good at prioritizing what really matters” and “don’t lose your s**t.” Tim Ferris calls Stoicism his operating system; I think of it - because I’m a dork - like an honor code. What’s appealing about Stoicism, I think, is its practical application devoid of woo.

It’s less common to run across letters about interconnectedness, but that’s precisely what I did this morning.

Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another and in sympathy with each other. This event is the consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, p. 77 (Hayes)

Because it’s not reminding you how dead you’re going to be, it feels a little out of place - but when you do design work you learn to appreciate the systems of design, how the process of research dovetails with the realities of accounting, which lead to the creation of artifacts like wireframes or reports, that guide service provision.

Systems of work connect even the most siloed developer to the reference librarian, who in a higher-ed organization might not only be separated by departments but entire bureaucracies.

Unlike the interconnectedness between me and you across states and time, which is no less true, the connective tissue is much more tangible in an organization, where an individual has real leverage to improve those connections, and even engineer new systems entirely.

Stoicism is dogmatic about understanding what is and isn’t within your realm of control; in advice like the above from Marcus Aurelius, it also reinforces that your reach is extended through the systems that underlie the craft.

Craft virtuously.

Clicking that ❤ in this issue of Stoic Designer is an easy, no-sign-in-required way to signal to the great algorithms in the sky that this writeup is worth a minute of your time.

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Remember that design is not art, but a practice.

Michael Schofield