December 20th, 2019: I found an abandoned 4 day old kitten. I was told he had been crying for two straight days and his mother was nowhere to be found. He was about the size of my palm, if that. If you’re unfamiliar with neonatal kittens, as I was, they are born completely dependent on their mothers. They cannot eat by themselves, they cannot see, they cannot hear, and most importantly, they cannot regulate their own body temperature.
So, I brought him back home with me, helped him warm up with a heating pad wrapped in a towel and tried to feed him. I watched as he fell asleep in the warmth, and hoped against all odds that he would make it through the night. As I watched him, I knew I was going to learn a lot about kittens if I got the chance to take care of him. I guess the process surprised me more so when I found myself discovering hidden UX Design lessons on the way.
Spoiler alert: he made it through the night, and at the time of writing this article is a healthy 5 week old kitten named Fry.
The first three weeks of a kitten’s life are the most critical. Mortality rates amongst kittens are highest during this time and kittens can die due a whole host of reasons, many of which are out of our control. I had to give this kitten his best shot at life, and I quickly realized that each decision I made could mean the difference between life and death for him. Naturally, the pressure was on and I had to make sure every action I took helped him achieve one of this core needs: food and warmth.
Intentional decision making helped me remain consistent through the entire process and allowed to gauge what worked and what didn’t. Every time he cried, I had to check two metrics: how long has it been since he last ate and how warm is the heating pad he sleeps on? The answers to these questions guided my course of action to calm him down.
While intentional decision making may take on a much more complex form in the context of UX Design, I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between my current circumstances and working on a UX project. As a designer, my goal is always to enable users to meet their needs, while balancing business requirements.
We often get caught up in the details of the design process and find ourselves making decisions that don’t always facilitate our users needs. These decisions may show up in the form of large splashy visuals to have more impact, or prioritizing form significantly over function.
Intentional decision making is also a vital problem solving tool if something doesn’t quite work as we thought it would. Knowing the intended outcome of every design decision made makes the process of finding and correcting errors quicker and much easier.
I think this lesson seems a bit arbitrary at first glance, given that Fry is a cat and I am a human. But when I first started researching how to care for a neonatal kitten, the process didn’t seem that different to me from caring for a newborn baby. I was tempted to approach the situation the way I would have if Fry were a newborn in many instances.
This way of thinking felt familiar, more instinctive, and was the approach that made most sense to me given my experiences. Feeding him with a baby bottle while he lies on his back or warming up his milk just because it tastes better that way. But as it turns out, kitten choke on their food if fed on their backs. While they do need their milk to be warm, it’s so they can digest it, not because they prefer it.
At each step of learning about and understanding my user, I asked myself: do I believe this to be true from my experiences that are my own, or my user’s? I learnt the importance of not defaulting to my own beliefs and expectations and allowing my user’s experiences to help frame my actions.
Thinking through design problems this way can help develop more inclusive and accessible solutions. Studies have found that within the context of accessibility, users with similar disabilities often find themselves surrounded by a culture that’s determined by their own unique experiences. Thinking of user needs within this framework can be the first stepping stone for us, as designers, in improving the accessibility of our products and services.
After a lot trial and error, I came up with an efficient system to feed Fry when he was hungry. The most important aspect of this system is that it’s simple and flexible to his needs. I did not have to come up with an entirely new method to feed him each time his dietary needs changed, or he had a growth spurt. Instead, I made small changes to my existing system such as trading his feeding syringe for a baby bottle once he had outgrown it.
With his quick growth, I also found my own roles evolving rapidly; certain abilities that were essential at one point were now obsolete and I was constantly picking up new skills to keep up with him.In some ways, this idea mirrors the rapid evolution of technology and ever-changing role of the designer within this dynamic ecosystem.
We’ve gone from the iPhone revolutionizing the way we interact with screens to now designing our own infinitely large environments and ecosystems through the lens of AR. And with such change, comes the need to develop more transferrable skills and to never stop learning.
In such an ever-evolving industry, being and building systems that are adaptable to change is crucial. Taking care of Fry taught me to fail fast, learn quickly, and move forward.In more ways than one, I found myself relying on my design thinking skills when faced with a problem I had never encountered before.
And with Fry being such a handful, that was almost everyday. But this experience also gave me a new way to look at this process, and ultimately, I walked away with more than I had bargained for: a kitten and re-learned UX design skills.
