Book Review: Designing Your Life

Challenging Beliefs

From what I’ve read, I’m certain that one source of unhappiness for many people is dysfunctional beliefs that make them feel inadequate. People internalize an idea that ultimately does not fit with their values and goals.

Dysfunctional beliefs are unfounded constraints that we put on ourselves, limiting our options. These beliefs focus on one aspect of a situation that people have interpreted as being negative and accepted as immutable law. However, these are not gravity problems. Because we’ve created them, we can also change them. Through the exercises that the book provides, you can learn to reframe such beliefs. Here’s an example from the book:

Prototyping Your New Life

Prototyping is a great way of testing new ideas, features, or experiences. The benefit of prototyping is that you can learn a lot about an experience over the course of a short period of time, with minimal investment. In the context of a university education, we do this through internships and co-ops.

I am very fortunate to have had the opportunity of participating in a mentorship program when I was in high school. Over the course of a few one-day visits, I worked with a materials engineer at a large manufacturer in my hometown. Prior to this experience, I had imagined that would be a great profession for someone with my grades, living in my region. But afterward, I realized that this profession was neither creative nor exciting enough for my preferences. This experience saved me from making a big mistake. Unfortunately, at the time, this mentorship program was not available to all students in my school. But imagine how this approach could help students to evaluate their options.

Burnett and Evans propose the use of prototyping to solve a variety of problems—for example, starting a business. If you wanted to launch a unique business model that would disrupt the retail shoe market, it might be beneficial to try working at a shoe store for a few weekends, where you could learn a lot about shoes. You might even learn that you don’t like the retail shoe industry—thus, saving you the expense of launching a failed business.

The Dysfunctional Job Market

Everyone should expect that they’ll get turned down for many more jobs than they’ll receive job offers. But it’s also important to understand how inefficient the job market is. Don’t assume that, just because you’ve been rejected for many jobs, you aren’t qualified for a particular role. It’s more likely that you’re in an inefficient job market.

There are many problems with the employment market, including the following:

• the dynamics of gender inequality—both on the hiring side and because of self-selection by talent
• job postings for organizations seeking unicorns
• job postings by managers who are going through the motions of hiring to satisfy human resources when they’ve already selected a preferred candidate

The authors tell us that only 20 percent of all jobs available ever get posted on the Internet. Many smaller companies—the dynamic companies that are fulfilling real needs for staffing and growing rapidly—typically don’t even post jobs. The best jobs get filled through relationships.

Conclusion

Designing Your Life offers a variety of self-help concepts that may sound familiar, but presents them in a UX design–friendly context. Although people often think about choosing the right school to attend or job to seek, you should really think about the kind of life experience you’re seeking. If there is a group of people who know anything about researching and designing experiences, it’s the UX community.

The primary value of this book is that it demonstrates the flexibility of design processes and the benefits of applying them in new contexts. While UX professionals often get pigeon-holed in Web or app design—or sometimes product or service design—in reality, User Experience is about designing experiences.