What if ...
A narration of an unfortunate series of events and the deeper thoughts that emanated from it
Disclaimer: The essence of this post is derived from the premise of Marvel’s “What if?” I have taken this route because it gave me a brainwave into how I can best articulate the problem of not having things your way.
Here’s a sequence of unfortunate events that happened to me over the last few months, some of which might be relatable to you. I am referencing them in the fourth wall, to hopefully help you put yourself in my shoes.
What if… you broke your phone?
That expensive smartphone with the OMGSOMANYMEGAPIXELS camera front and back just crashed to the floor with a deadly sound reminiscent of Thanos’ snap; the mobile’s display screen simply shatters into smithereens, along with your heart.
You don’t have a spare mobile, and the mobile repair guy says you need to wait till the next day to get it back in good condition. In the 18 hours without a phone and without your SIM card, you get a peek into a dystopian world without your mobile phone:
Want to order food? Enter the OTP for payments
Need to send money to parents? Enter the OTP to complete transfer
Need to sign into office mail id? Enter OTP for two factor authentication.
Alas, you don’t have an active SIM card to receive these messages. You end up not doing work, cooking dinner instead, and calling your folks from your neighbor’s mobile to inform them of your temporary unavailability.
When you get your phone back finally, albeit with a lighter bank account, it feels like everything’s ok again.
What if… you burnt your finger and thumb?
When you accidentally touch a hot utensil while cooking, you end up with angry burns on your right hand. As you apply antiseptic and ice-packs to soothe the dull angry pain emanating from your right hand, you foolishly believe that it’s just a simple burn wound and you can carry on with your duties as usual.
In the next seven days, you are unable to:
Hold a pen properly to write down things
Text people with the ease you are used to
Type stuff quickly with the swollen finger and thumb
Hold the goddamn spoon to eat your food
Workout effectively without the right finger flinching from contact with the rough steel handles of the dumbbell
One fine day, you wake up, and the weird sensations from your right hand have finally stopped. Everything is back to normal as it were.
What if… Figma stopped working for you?
You are up to your nose in Figma frames at work, when suddenly a big ugly popup appears on your screen.
Figma is no longer available for your organization. Please reach out to the following admins to sort this out.
As it turns out, your company has been struggling with the Figma financial team to sort out the invoicing payments for the last few days. Even worse, you are one of the admins named on the Figma organization plan — as a result, your emails, Whatsapp and Slack are inundated with queries from all stakeholders to unblock Figma for them. In the chaotic 8 hours we were locked out of Figma, many teams’ work were affected or delayed, which only emphasized how Figma was the lifeline of a product company like ours.
However, it was all hunky dory the next day as the payment was sorted the night before. Everyone was able to open Figma and go about their business as usual.
The second situation underlined above would fall under “temporary or situational disabilities” for the users, as per the Microsoft Inclusive design handbook. The first and third one would be classified as “lack of access”.
However, I would like to point out that the situations I found myself in included a solution or a workaround which were known to me at the time of the incident:
I was fortunate enough to be in a position to pay for repairing my smartphone, so I knew it would come back the next day.
As an injury prone person, I knew it was a matter of a few days before I would be able to use my right hand properly again.
As I was aware that we were sorting out the financial stuff with Figma for a few days, it was only a matter of hours before Figma was restored, and used the time to rest and recover.
It is for these reasons that I really feel that the temporary/situational disability or lack of access needs to be more nuanced in context of the person it affects. Essentially, it all boils down to the affected person’s financial, physical, mental and emotional stability — these determine the severity of the situation for them.
For a daily wage worker or a college student, a broken phone meant a major loss of earning or livelihood without any monetary support or savings — a literal life or death situation for them.
For a person doing construction, maid work or other rough menial work to make ends meets, such injuries could mean loss of salary for them if they took days off to recover.
For students or white collar workers with windows laptops, getting design work done without Figma or Sketch being available for windows means a lost opportunity for them.
Now let’s take a step back, and consider the more severe problems that can likely happen to us or someone we know.
What if … you couldn’t see/hear properly anymore?
Can you use apps the same way again? Can you navigate around your home or in new places on your own? Can you interact with friends and family members the same way ever? Would you need to sacrifice your dignity and independence to continue living with impaired sight or reduced ability to hear?
What if … you are in a new place and there’s no internet?
Can you find your way around without technology? Can you get help from the locals even if you don’t speak their language? Can you find a roof over your head and some food to eat, without anyone’s guidance? Can you even get back home without the right transport and money?
What if … you need help for a medical emergency?
Which hospitals are taking in patients now? Which hospitals/clinics have the necessary equipment for the patient? Who can guide you on the available resources in your current city? Are there any medical insurances that can cover the expenses? Where do you get a second opinion?
These are things we imagine won’t happen to us, and which we tend not to acknowledge simply because they are scary to think about. There’s only so much life can prepare you for such things, but we can never be free of uncertainty;
This uncertainty during difficult times puts us in a very vulnerable position, and it can be very difficult and overwhelming for us to deal with it when it happens. Users look for answers in any way and through anyone who can help them.
This is where I would like to chip in with my perspective, both as a designer and as a human being:
Whether you are a product manager or a designer, you have the power to make a difference to people’s lives if you put your head and heart into the right problems to solve — the bigger picture of how humanity works, and making life a little less uncertain for your users.
As a designer or product person, your contribution is not confined to the UI / UX of apps or websites. There are quite a number of interesting problems to choose from — accessibility, inclusion, diversity, equity, climate change, regulating markets and supply, creating platforms to help businesses recover from the ramifications of CoVid and so on. They are huge in scale and cannot be solved by you alone, but creating a community of product folks and designers who share the same passion will bring about dividends.
Rather than being The Watcher from “What if?”, who is a mute spectator to the problems plaguing the universe, it would be great if we could use our collective expertise and responsibility to design products and solutions for the betterment of our users’ lives — by removing uncertainty at different stages of their day to day life experiences, one day at a time. Even small incremental changes in the things we make for our users, will build up over time and put the users in a better position to deal with uncertainty in their lives.