SXSW22 Day 2: A matter of life and death
By Dan Monheit 13.3.22
The official SXSW22 app lists 1,469 sessions, spread out across three distinct festivals (music, film and interactive), 15 different tracks, scores of topics and dozens of venues.
In the five days I’m here I’ll hopefully get to 30, 35 max.
There’s always gold, you just don’t know where you’re going to find it. Sometimes it’s in the big rooms with the big name speakers. Other times it’s waiting for you at an oddly named session that you weren’t even sure you were going to attend.
And such was the case today. I started out in a 3,000 person auditorium, where I saw a lovely young lady named Tinx (🤷) interview an excitable couple who’d just invented pastel coloured ankle weights (🤷) and put them on people in ball gowns (🤷🤷).
Mark Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks was on stage with them too, wearing giant pink wrist bands that kind of made it look like he’d just escaped from a mental asylum. I couldn’t tell if this was serious or if I was watching a meme, but they all joked and laughed with each other the way billionaires do, so I guess it was the real deal (🤷🤷🤷).
After popping into some sessions about building brands with weirdness and an interview with former Nintendo USA big wig Reggie Fils-Aime (aka The Regginator), I happened across a session titled ‘A designer’s guide to life and death decisions’. Hmmm. This sounded interesting.
What came next was an inspiring, insightful masterclass from Katie Swindler, Innovation Design Strategist at Allstate Insurance.
The first thing Katie helped us all realise was that in 2022, stress is pervasive. Even if you’re not designing a product that’s intentionally being created for a stressful environment (eg emergency services, the military, healthcare), there’s a reasonable chance that your users are turning up stressed anyway. By understanding how our bodies and minds react to stress, we can create products that are just as easy to use if we’re at our kick ass best, or our ass kicked worst.
As a species, we’ve evolved to have something called a startle reflex; a quick and automatic protective response that’s elicited by an abrupt, intense stimulation (eg a loud bang). I imagine it as that instant burst of hotness we feel when something is about to go horribly wrong.
The reflex is meant to get us ready to run or fight, and in doing so, instantly draws our blood from our extremities to our core. In our bodies, this results in our legs being ready to run and our arms being ready to punch. Unfortunately, the flip side is that our fingers, and therefore our ability to utilise fine motor skills, are all but turned to zero.
A similar thing happens in our brains, as blood rushes from our analytically-driven prefrontal cortex up the front, to our instinct-driven hippocampus at the core. This lets us move without thinking, which is kind of great — except that it achieves this by stopping us from thinking, which is not so great.
All of this explains why a giant red stop button is the global standard in factories around the world. It also explains why, when designing digital experiences for high stress situations, we need to provide people with large buttons that have lots of room for error around them. Think about trying to turn off your phone’s alarm at 3:30 in the morning. The bigger the ‘off’ button the better!
Big buttons are one way to harness peoples’ heightened state, but Katie also took us through examples of how we can use design to:
Suppress stress (dial down the novelty factor, reduce the intensity, minimise the speed of change, provide training simulations),
Protect people from stress (provide information that’s in a conversational tone, nicely chunked, uses a combination of pictures and words and is somewhat interactive eg clicking ‘next’ or turning pages), and;
Calm people from stress (simple aesthetic choices, provide order and clarity, incorporate natural elements)
Everything was brought to life with examples from far and wide including pediatric oncologists, astronauts and CPR training programs. I’m 100% going out to get Katie’s book (you should too) and I cant wait to get back and put some of these brilliant strategies to work for people changing energy providers, signing up for phone plans and racing to catch their next flight at Melbourne Airport.
