Is laziness valuable?

In May 2022 I went with my Content Strategy classmates to London for one week. Every day, we took part in workshops and lectures from several experts working in the content strategy field. Today, I’m writing about the day we spent at Class35 with UX Director Arvid Brobeck.

A picture I took on the way to my Airbnb in Canary Wharf, London

I always felt like I was a rather lazy person. So when Arvid’s talk “The Lazy Designer” was announced as part of the schedule for The London Week, I was very interested and curious. Before going further — if you are curious to learn more about what London week was about, check out this post by classmate Rebecca.

Arvid talked us through his experience as a designer and how his process evolved over the years. Design is about challenges, problems, solutions, future: changing things — hopefully for the better and for the people, usually for making a client’s wallet better.

Personally, I have a feeling that laziness is common among people working in the creative industry, but I never actually thought about it. In the creative process, it’s common to spend countless hours researching, documenting, and in useless meetings. Arvid said “52% of the things I did, I did nothing. I was working really hard, for no point”. Working so many hours for things that had no effect on the end product makes no sense.

One of Arvid’s slides. On a side note, his slides were masterfully animated 🪄 — I did not think such animations were possible inside of Keynote!

Laziness is valuable.

Arvid’s talk was meant to be a provocation to communicate a different perspective: “I don’t want to work my arse off… for nothing”. Being lazy means not necessarily doing worse, but rather avoiding anything that is not necessary. In the creative field, the concept of being efficient is different from many other jobs: “we are a problem-solving factory” — the inputs and solutions are always different, and the work is never the same.

Five things Arvid started doing

To improve the process, Arvid changed his approach and started doing five things. First, prototype since the first day, starting from just drawing on post-its: why spend an hour on documentation when you can just see that it works? Second, using symbols to dramatically reduce the number of cmd+c and cmd+v needed in a project and keep them synced with any change in the design. Third, use real data and content as much as possible instead of dummy content — you can’t understand if a design works with lorem ipsums. Fourth, continuous delivery: get the client involved in the design process so that they can trust you, even if you don’t provide a polished presentation that would be necessary to reassure them. Last, if you are doing something repetitive, look for a way to automate that task: someone has already done it, and there are lots of tools that help you automate literally anything repetitive and save hours. My problem with this last point is that I am so lazy that sometimes I spend one hour automating a task that I could have completed in 30 minutes of boring, repetitive work… but well, this is not the point: most of the time, I saved hours.

My take as a fellow lazy designer and content strategy student

I found the whole lecture very interesting and relatable to my experience. I would add that when you realize you have worked for nothing also your motivation level plummets, and therefore everything else falls apart — starting from the communication with the team or the client. I often find myself lacking motivation on long-term projects, but that’s usually because I tend to isolate myself in order to focus on the project and waste hours polishing everything… for nothing, since that presentation is not the final product.

It’s interesting also how similar concepts and ideas are approached by lectures teaching different courses in the broad field of content strategy. The idea of continuous delivery and its connection to trust is tightly related to the concept of breaking down silos, mentioned countless times in different lectures on topics pretty far from UX design. During a workshop, we experimented prototyping since day 1 with the Five Sketches process: my classmate Victor wrote a blog post about this unique approach to UX design. Last week, our content modelling course came to an end with the following task: using a tool to connect our content model to a layout, to make sure the design fits the content.

About working your 🍑 off for nothing: how many hours have you trashed searching for links?

Still not convinced that laziness is valuable?
Even science says lazy people are likely to be smarter and more successful!
Want to learn about a different approach to UX Design?
I highly recommend this post by Gabjia about the Thinking Aloud method.

This post was stuck in my drafts since the beginning of summer, and I finally took the time to finish writing it.
Hope you liked it, thanks for reading.
‘Till next time, Filiberto 🚀