Having a baby changes your life, and creates new problems to solve. Fortunately, as designers, we have lots of tools to help.
Taking a year's maternity leave after the birth of my son was no walk in the park – although I did end up taking literally hundreds of actual walks in the actual park.
Having a child profoundly changed who I am as a person. Then, returning to work also came with a heap of new emotions which were difficult to navigate. My mental health was suffering.
Inspired partly by my colleague Paul Bailey’s positive experience in taking his work home with him, I decided to carry out an experiment where I applied design thinking to my life.
The first stage of design thinking is shaking off your preconceptions of the problem and collecting real data from real users.
I knew I wasn’t feeling great, but why?
I thought about all the things that felt hard and started recording them in a journal.
Not only did this help me realise I was actually juggling a lot, but it also gave me a newfound empathy for myself.
Give yourself a break, Polly!
The next phase was to collate all the data found in research and start to form some problem statements and user needs.
I started to think about the shape of a ‘regular day’ in my life, similar to creating an experience map of a user’s end-to-end journey through a service.
Getting up after always very minimal sleep, making breakfast, taking my son to nursery, starting work, finishing work, nursery pick up, making dinner and then collapsing in a heap…
It was no wonder I wasn’t feeling great at the end of the day.
These were all things I was obliged to do without one single thing I wanted to do for myself.
So, the problem statement was something like: “I prioritise the needs of others over my own needs, and I need to fix this imbalance to improve my mental health.”
During ideation workshops in a previous healthcare project I worked on, the message was always clear: no idea is a bad idea. I carried this with me into my next phase of design thinking.
I spent some time trying to remember the things I liked doing before I became a mum, covering the dinner table with sticky notes.
In a product- or service-focused workshop, there’d usually be three or four ideas that a design team could run with and start prototyping.
For my little mental health experiment, I found one glaringly obvious theme – self-care.
I went back to the map of my regular working day, picking it apart to see where I could sprinkle in some moments of self-care without a huge upheaval of our routine.
That meant things like a walk, cooking from a new recipe, or catching up on reality TV.
This is where I really started to see the benefits of approaching this from a design thinking perspective.
If something wasn’t working, it felt totally fine to go back to the drawing board and rethink my approach.
After all, every failure teaches us something.
Putting something in front of your users is the best way to get real-time feedback on your service.
On the healthcare project I’d worked on, I sometimes found that content I was certain was right for our users actually confused them in practice.
Iterations based on user feedback is key to creating a product or service that truly meets your users’ needs.
With my own experiment, I saw that certain parts of my routine were unachievable if the whole house went down with the latest nursery bug, for example.
So, I had to keep making changes here and there, reminding myself of what I was trying to achieve, and that it was okay for that to adapt and change as time went on.
As of now, I’m still experimenting with ways I can give myself a little boost during the day.
Using design thinking means I’m able to continue to make educated changes rather than guessing.
And there’s an added bonus, too: the design process itself makes me feel more in control, which is one important way of reducing stress.