Five days spent on the sofa 🛋️

Image: Marcela Rogante, Unsplash

In the last week of June I became a couch potato when I attended SofaConf 2020, an entirely online design conference created by Brighton-based design consultancy Clearleft. At first I was a bit skeptical as to how engaging it would actually be without the usual live theatre, especially over five days. But I have to say, I really enjoyed it, and learned a huge amount from all 18 speakers, not to mention the accompanying Q&As and Clearleft ‘tiny lessons’ peppered between talks.

Each day was dedicated to a different aspect of design; Product, Research, Service, Content and Interaction Design. As a product designer with a creative agency background (who still doesn’t know how to categorise himself) I’m always keen to hear about other designers’ processes, frustrations and ambitions. And of course, impart any advice I may have to help them. So in the spirit of continued learning, here’s five takeaways from five days spent on the sofa.

1. Invite yourself to the mysterious meetings

John Cutler – Product Evangelist, Amplitude
I used to regularly attended a local developer meet-up (pre-Covid) – not because I wanted to learn to code, but because I wanted to learn how devs viewed designers. What were their frustrations, and in some cases, their misconceptions of ‘me’. It was also a great place to learn about emerging tech because they were a bunch of geeks… and they always had free pizza.

In his talk, John Cutler focused on how product teams can work better together when they better understand one another. Seems pretty obvious, but how many teams actively do this? He advocated gaining awareness for better ways of working, changing behaviour to achieve better results, and trying different strategies to create more impactful changes. One thing that stuck in my mind was to actively show up to meetings that you’re not required to attend – which might go against the grain of those who attend too many already.

But John’s example, of a designer attending a meeting with their product manager, suggested this may actually be a relief for the product manager, as we learned this is often a lonely role. Stuck between stakeholders and design teams, business requirements and user needs, product managers rarely see themselves as pleasing everyone all of the time. Inviting yourself to that mysterious meeting they ‘have’ to go to could be the support they crave, but rarely ask for, enabling a deeper empathy of their daily pressures, as well as an appreciation of their skills in balancing multiple requirements. In turn, this forges a deeper working relationship, which can only lead to better outcomes for everyone.

2. Loneliness affects everything

Image: Leisa Reichelt

Leisa Reichelt – Head of Research and Insights, Atlassian
I tweeted at the time that this talk was ‘highly relatable’ regarding the stresses and challenges of working from home. Leisa Reichelt spoke about the research on her colleagues at Atlassian, where they began measuring the effects of sending 5,000 staff members to work from home (indefinitely) with only one hours notice, as the Covid-19 lockdown got real. Many people have evangelised the advantages of working from home, and how we should never return to the daily commute. I’ve spent most of my time freelancing from home since the end of 2018, and while there are many great advantages, it also has its downsides.

Leisa spoke about two types of team cohesion – task cohesion and emotional bonds. It was the latter I realised was missing for me. The feeling of belonging, being supported and having physical interactions with team mates. This was probably compounded by the fact I’d gone freelance though necessity, following a redundancy. A shitty experience to go through for anyone. So I’d over compensated the task cohesion side, and buried myself in my new freelance work. What I hadn’t realised was how much I wasn’t looking after myself, and how this had crept up on me. We’re all having conversations now on the importance of mental health, and staying active. But in 2019 I felt I was going through this alone. Despite meeting loads of new people, and working with some great clients, the deep emotional bonds with colleagues were missing. I now interacted mainly through instant messengers and emails, phone calls or video chat. I worked with one new client for 10 months before we actually met in person. Trips out for meetings, workshops or user test field visits became real treats.

For some people reading this, not having to deal with actual people every day probably sounds idyllic. Due to lockdown, it’s been experienced on a mass scale now. For me it’s something I do still miss. It’ll be interesting to see how many people want to return to the office in some form, with all its social interactions, once it’s safe to do so, despite the many advantages to working from home.

3. Adapt for your users and community

Akil Benjamin – Head of Strategy and Research, COMUZI
Akil Benjamin gave a whistle-stop tour of his recent ‘AK Experiments’ – a series of projects designed to help and empower his local community. He’s a keen advocate of accessible technology solutions, constant feedback loops and the power of c0-design. Here’s three quick examples of these principles from his talk.

1) When Covid-19 hit in the middle of a community-participation research study, Akil needed a quick and simple alternative to their current sticky note approach – “I didn’t want to use a complex collaboration tool”. Instead he repurposed the humble Google Slide, creating as he put it, “…a square with some drop shadow on it”. Participants were able to access their existing Google Meet set-up, and collaborate with each other through the shared slides. I loved how simple Akil’s accessible solution was, and have already tried it with a new client to illustrate initial research findings within their existing G Suite set-up.

2) Akil set up Saturday School to teach basic business skills to his community. It was made possible through funding from his colleagues and friends, and is now supported by M&C Saatchi. Two simple factors contributed to the rapid success of Saturday school; the morning start time was moved to the afternoon encouraging more local people to show up, and introducing refundable tickets worked as a way of getting people to commit. Changes like these were identified using constant feedback loops, set-up with the considerations of the user in mind. As a result of this approach, Saturday School went from five people in a cafe, to teaching 3,ooo people so far, and counting.

3) Triggered by the recent Black Lives Matter protests, Akil set up Mentor 300 Black Businesses – a structured programme investing in expertise and training for black businesses. One of the points that resonated with me was how they match mentors and mentees effectively. A previous employer of mine created an internal mentorship scheme where no one had a say in who they were being matched with. It caused widespread distrust in an already fragile environment. For successful mentorship schemes to succeed, both parties need to trust they have each others best interests at heart. At Mentor 300 Black Businesses, mentees are surveyed on the desired characteristics of their mentors, and then actively participate in the matching process. If you’d like to make a donation to support this mentorship programme, you can find their go-fund me page here.

4. Bad services ruin lives

Image: Lou Downe

Lou Downe – Director of Housing and Land transformation, UK Government
One of my favourite talks of the whole event was from Lou Downe, who gave a rich and highly engaging presentation on Service Design. I could honestly listen to her all day. She neatly explained that, “services are the spaces between things”, and proclaimed “most services are terrible”. One example of this was Navient, a company employed by the US Govt to process student loans. Navient enforce a ‘7 minute rule’ within their call centres, meaning staff needed to fully process each customer query within seven minutes.

Lou then described a teacher called Anne, who had a long standing large student loan. Despite qualifying for a debt cancellation deal, on condition she made 120 consecutive payments over 10 years, she’d been unable to take advantage of this because it would take longer than seven minutes to process this deal. All Navient could do in the allotted time was pause Anne’s loan, which meant she then defaulted on her consecutive payments run. The effect of this consigned Anne to paying her loan back over the next 25 years, so requiring her to juggle several jobs as a single mum for the next few years, just to make the loan payments.

This example made me realise just how empowering a well designed service could be, and how devastating a bad one can be. Before this, I’d considered a bad service being a package that didn’t arrive on time, or being kept on hold for an hour, only to have to repeat the story to the next person. But Lou’s example really hit home about the real damage an ill-conceived service can do when it doesn’t consider the full effects on the end user.

5. Content designers are the unsung heroes

Jonathon Colman – Senior Design Manager, Intercom
During my time in design agencies, copywriters and designers would often work together – in fact a ‘creative team’ assumes a writer and designer by default. Now, when working with start-ups and small clients, I often need to craft the content in the absence of any writers. I’ve always aimed to deliver a joined-up experience for the target audience, giving clear instruction and direction, consistency of messaging, and a familiar tone-of-voice. Luckily, years working closely with talented writers have taught me some basics. I’ve only worked once in an environment large enough to have their own content designers. They worked on another floor, completely separately from the UX designers. What often resulted were designs and flows being signed off that didn’t fully work with all the content required. I always thought this remote hand-off approach was strange, when I’d been so used to close collaboration.

Jonathon Coleman’s talk gave insight into why content designers often don’t work closely with designers, in the same way designers and engineers are encouraged to do. They’re simply in such short supply, and often stretched across multiple teams and projects. As a result, they’re not afforded the same time and focus on their work as designers, and not given the same presence. Worse still they’re generally paid less, and the fact many content designers happen to be female widens the gender pay gap further still.

Jonathon described in painful detail an episode when he worked at Facebook, where as a result of not having sufficient focus and time, he dropped the ball on a major release, resulting in the feature being pulled after widespread user distrust and a huge media backlash. The feature was meant to be Facebook’s Shazam, but in the absence of a clear message and strong value proposition, users assumed Facebook was now always listening to all their conversations*. In Jonathon’s own words, it was a “massive, massive failure” because he’d failed to do his job. He was of course being very hard on himself, but he made a powerful point on the key role content designers and strategists have in the successful delivery of a product – one they’re rarely credited for.

* We were assured Facebook doesn’t listen to our conversations – “They don’t need to”. 😱

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I hope you’ve learned something here that you can use for yourself or to inspire others – there was certainly a great deal more I could have mentioned. Thanks to Clearleft and everyone involved for organising, curating and delivering this unique five day online event. I’m looking forward to the next one already.