Multitasking, UX and why you shouldn't combine them!

Have you ever tried eating anything with the product shown above? Let me explain. It is a combination of three utensils, a spoon, fork and a knife, made out of plastic. The purpose was to create a single ultimate tool for eating that can eliminate the need to carry all three separately. But in the process of making it, they screwed up the experience of using each element. The device in the photo can’t be used to have soups, as the gaps are very near to the mouth. You can’t lick the spoon clean since it has a built-in knife in it. You can’t easily eat fruits with it because hey, ever seen a fork with that small prongs? For all practical purposes, the device is usable, but when it comes to the EXPERIENCE part of it, it seriously fails on all three fronts.

In Indian mythology, guru Dronacharya was delivering an archery lesson to his students. The task was to hit the bird’s eye, which was sitting on the topmost branch of a tree. When he asked the elder most Yudhishthir what all he could see, he responded by saying he could see the bird, the tree, other birds on other trees, people busy in their day to day task and everything he could describe. On the other hand, when he asked Arjun, who became the greatest archer in the world at that time he responded that he could see only the eye of the bird and nothing else. He got the permission to shoot the arrow and of course, he succeeded!

Multitasking was once considered to be a good quality to have. Employers were looking at people who could do multiple tasks at the same time and handle different projects simultaneously. That was the need of that hour. The development was a critical job and people who were good at applying logic were needed to be present for all the projects. The rest of the things were done by the junior people, and everyone was happy!

Then emerged to the competitive era and a user experience started gaining importance. There was a team of new people who would define the flow of information and interactions in the most logical way. The process of designing and developing the product became complex to make using it simpler for the end-user. Gone were the days when everything was form-based and only calculations happened in the back end. Everyone wanted a clean interface and task to be done in minimum possible clicks. [yes, clicks. The term tap was yet to be born!] Development was now divided into segments called front-end and back-end. But the old practices still prevailed. Employers kept seeking people who can manage multiple projects at a time, or worse, started assigning multiple projects to existing and already overburdened employees.

Then came the current era of touch screens and this changed the design and development industry inside out. The interaction inside a tiny 4.5-inch screen was a completely different ball game. You needed to be utterly focused on the job as one tiny mistake could add another couple of screens in the entire flow. Sadly, even at this point, the Multitasking mentality prevailed. UX designers were asked to work on multiple projects simultaneously and so were tech leads. The job of tech leads also got complex since they had to deal with new platforms with new patterns, but they had a reference to follow. Whenever they went from one job to another, they had a template in front of them, which they could see and follow. There was always a reset point for them from where they could resume. Also, these people were, in fact, working module by module and not on the entire product at a time. So the crucial tasks for tech leads were numerous and distributed. Hence switching between two projects was relatively easy for them as compared to the UX folks.

The person, the User EXPERIENCE designer is the one who has to give his best every single time to bring the best possible experience out of challenging data. For generating concepts, s/he has to behave like the Arjun in the mythological story. When focused, a designer can create multiple concepts of equal calibre and detail them out to an extent when the idea gets clear within a glance. Unfortunately, the multitasking mentality has made its way into the UX space as well and it is wrong on every level.

The process of UX design, to start with is like a funnel. Every designer creates multiple concepts to tackle the said problem and it is all, blue sky thinking i.e without considering what is possible and what not! Then the feasible and practical concepts are shortlisted and then the client and user feedback together with results in the selection of the final concept which would be used for the entire design. To create those multiple concepts, the designer needs time and has to remain focused. But to create a concept, the designer at all times has to keep in mind the entire set of requirements. A concept that is best for a certain set of requirements can be very difficult to employ for the remaining sets. Possibilities are that it might complicate the problem than solving it. So while designing the concept, a designer must think of the entire system all the time and all his ideas need to be validated for the entire requirement matrix and not just the module s/he is working upon. This will ensure a holistic and seamless experience throughout the system. Of course, the quality of design cannot be measured in numbers, but still, a designer working on a single project can consider all angles and that can reflect in the final output.

The point is, the User experience designer working on a large scale project must NOT multi-task. If this particular designer is forced to focus on multiple projects at the same time one of which is a large scale product, chances are the designer would fail to provide one holistic seamless experience across the product. Some people might argue that multitasking will create a cross-pollination of concepts and the designer will end up with multiple solutions for the same problem, but at the same time, it is really important to focus on the bird's eye. Otherwise just like other not-so-good-archery students of Dronacharya the multitasking UX designers will end up providing inferior quality products. Or even worse, all the products designed by him or her would start looking similar.

When forced to focus on multiple projects at the same time or if asked to concentrate on segments of product over large intervals, the designer usually struggles with the first stage, i.e. the concept generation. Time crunch, which is the reason why multitasking becomes necessary; makes things even worse. The designers stuck in this situation tend to go with the best possible scenario, using patterns. They will start assembling different segments of UI designed throughout his or her experience and bundle them together in a single theme as the deliverable. This looks great, feels holistic, but it seriously lacks innovation. Today, each company is coming up with something new and to tackle that something new, you cannot risk relying on patterns. Usage of patterns in the UI will end up making your UI only as interesting as the UI posted on the internet and would NOT be a step ahead, which is the basic expectation.

To sum up, employers need to stop expecting a designer to work on multiple large scale projects and expect out of world output. I agree, that with experience this kind of superpower can be achieved! So, while hiring designers with less than 10 years of experience, to achieve the best quality output from them, employers should keep in mind that 'Ability to multitask' has to be kept restricted to smaller projects. This will ensure good quality output and true customer delight; the level of satisfaction achieved by a spoon, a fork or a knife!