Last month, members of my team travelled across the globe to conduct research around people’s idea of quality craft and design. The team stopped in Seoul, Berlin and, lastly, Copenhagen. I joined the Copenhagen leg and discovered a new-to-me concept: hygge.
This concept of coziness and contentment crept into our conversations over and over again. And it got me thinking about how this sense of warmth can apply to team culture, and how that can affect processes and positively influence people’s experience on digital products.
Applying Hygge at Work
Being comfortable and relaxed allows for creative expression and honest feedback. You can work together smoothly, always bringing it back to our users. People come first. And it can start with our teammates, ending with the people who use our products. If the workplace can facilitate hygge internally, the digital product will only benefit.
But it’s important to not confuse internal facilitation with our UI. Interfaces should be unobtrusive and free of distraction. We can encourage community–that is where hygge comes in–but you can’t make hygge. You can only create an experience that encourages it. This starts by leading with empathy for the people we work with and the people who use our product.
Reevaluating Success
One-to-one and group research sessions showed, time and time again, that people didn’t want to be bothered by endless badging of updates, constant notifications and a feed of related up-sells. They didn’t want to be overwhelmed (life is already overwhelming as-is). User-experience discussion about good craft and quality design always centered around a human element and a feeling of connectedness. That sense of connection didn’t always result in more time on an app, however. And that doesn’t need to be a bad thing.
Let’s chat about product goals for a moment...
Time spent on a digital surface, for example, isn’t a metric that works for long-term vision. It creates burn out. It creates frustration. And it comes across as “messy” and “chaotic,” as several people we interviewed mentioned (people can tell when they’re being sold something, and they see it as noisy).
Meaningful time spent can work, but we need to make sure that we’re measuring it appropriately. We need to balance it with people’s feelings and how it relates to their own path to mindfulness. This applies to any metric your team might be goaling against.
Let’s get back to UX best practices: giving people power to make decisions and connecting people to the things they want or need. Let your UI fall to the background. Let people (or march, if you’re sales-focused) and their stories shine brighter than excessive notifications or endless “commercials,” as interviewees called it.
Driving adoption of a particular page, click-through-rates on buttons or time spent on surfaces alone won’t make products better. Instead, it can take away from the experience and create user frustration or annoyance.
Bringing it Back to Hygge
We can’t make digital surfaces hygge, but we can let it influence our design processes and let it reinvigorate our focus on people who use our surfaces.
Quality is paramount. We (the tech, design community) need to get this right if: we want to retain trust, we want people to continue finding value in our products, and we want to be a platform people continue to use. We must amplify people’s voices over our own, furthering what’s best for people and the global community as a whole.
We can start by opening up, sharing moments with our team, checking in on each other and recalibrating our meetings to focus on people – not solely metrics (we should be solving people problems, not just product problems). Lean into your feelings, talk about what doesn’t feel right and be open about your thoughts.
In your next meeting, flag the concerns you have. Talk about how people will be impacted. Validate it with data and push for quality over quantity. Relax, be yourself and consider people’s feelings.
I think we can do it, together.