Working for other people can be a horrible way to spend your life.

ven if you’re doing something that you love, doing it 40+ hours per week for other people has a tendency to ruin the appeal. One way to ease this problem is to create and maintain personal side projects. Below we’ll discuss why this proves true.

What is a Personal Project?

A personal project is something that you can consider 100% your own (or at least 50% if you bring in a partner). It’s something that you create and take on for no one but you. As the common thread that binds the readers of this site together is a love for design, we’ll assume that the project would be design related.

A design related personal project can take any number of forms, big or small. It can be something small like designing an online portfolio, starting a blog or building a personal brand, or something larger like starting your own company or creating the next big thing in web 2.0.

The key is not so much what you do, but that you do something, or even many things.

The Appeal of Personal Projects

As you decide what sort of personal project you should undertake, remember that it should be something that you can get excited about. Something to keep you awake a little at night, to get your brain pumping with fresh ideas and new possibilities. The point here is to find something that will help you rediscover your love of design, not as a profession, but as a hobby or even a passion.

Burnout is something that hits every designer at some point. Being forcefully creative as a way to pay the bills can be mentally exhausting and eventually results in you feeling like you’ve got no creativity left. This is the result of teaching your brain to literally loathe creativity. You begin to associate it with mandatory work and the daily grind.

Creativity should add awe to your world, make life more bearable, and provide you with a fundamentally more enjoyable way to view your existence. That may seem a little abstract or high-minded, but it’s a much more pleasant view than the utilitarian method of being creative simply to earn a paycheck.

The key here is to stop ruining your talent by using it exclusively at work. Instead, channel it through activities that can actually make you happy.

I Have No Time for a Personal Project!

To put it bluntly: bull. One of the best things about doing something personal is that you can go at your own pace, even if that only means spending tiny bits of time on it here and there.

The absolute hardest thing to do is not to find time to keep your personal project going, but to take that first step to actually begin doing anything real at all. Once you have that first victory, however small, the momentum feels good and keeps you going.

Avoid thinking about a personal project as another thing on your professional todo list. This is tantamount to simply taking on more work and will get you no where. Instead, categorize this project under “free time.” Put it up there with starting that novel you’ve been wanting to read and catching a ball game on a weekend. Remember that the way you approach this psychologically will completely decide the overall effectiveness of the exercise. Keep it positive and keep it fun!

As living examples, take the two guys that run this site: David Appleyard and myself. We work together on a number of websites and professional endeavors. We’re both up to our ears in work and share the kind of twisted personality that responds to such a crisis by piling on even more.

Despite the fact that our professional commonalities would provide us no end to current work-related topics, whenever we have any communication beyond a brief email, we discuss crazy new ideas and personal projects. When I really stop to think about it, I realize that I have no time to take on anything extra. However, I also realize that if I don’t have anything new to tackle I’ll quickly become mentally stagnant.

I therefore choose to ignore time constraints and find a way to devote time to enough new endeavors to keep my brain from realizing that what I do every day is actually work instead of a mixture of original and regular activities that I simply enjoy.

Profitability

Whether or not a personal project should be profitable depends on what you’re really looking for from it. My background in business forces profitability to be a key component in everything that I think up (your driver could be something else entirely).

I find that the potential for profitability is a huge factor in the enjoyment I get out of my personal projects. Call me a crazy capitalist, but really I like to constantly consider new means of making an income.

I had a more than full-time design job when I starting writing for blogs such as this one. Despite the fact that I had zero extra time, I began giving up a little sleep to do something new that allowed me to hone my skill as a writer while actually getting paid to engage in what I considered to be a fun hobby.

Before long I had so many new opportunities that client-based design work has had to take a back seat and writing has become my new full-time career.

My advice to you is to find a side project that helps build a marketable talent or product. Find things that you enjoy learning about and doing that can actually make you money someday (why not have your cake and eat it too?). There are far too many incredibly talented people in the world that can’t pay the rent because they lack this key insight.

The world doesn’t need more starving artists. It needs more pioneers like Collis Ta’eed and Vitaly Friedman who took the time to work on side projects that had a high potential for profitability. These endeavors not only led to personal fulfillment for their founders, they rocked the design world by presenting us all with new ideas and possibilities for furthering our own careers.

Closing Thoughts

I’ll conclude by encouraging you one last time to stop creating lists of reasons you can’t start a personal project. Instead, channel all of that thought into actively seeking out something beneficial that you can spend your free time on.

Your goal should be finding something that is exciting and personally fulfilling. Start a project that you’ll actually enjoy spending time on and can help you regain your love for creativity.

Finally, don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that there is a trade off between fulfilling personal projects and profitability. Marketability and enjoyability are not opposites, they are a recipe for success!

5 Guiding Principles for Experience Designers

1. Understand the underlying problem before attempting to solve it

Your work should have purpose—addressing actual, urgent problems that people are facing. Make sure that you can clearly articulate the core of the issue before spending an ounce of time on developing the design. The true mark of an effective designer is the ability to answer “why?”. Don’t waste your time solving the wrong problems.

2. Don’t hurt anyone

It is your job to protect people and create positive experiences. At the very minimum you must ensure that you do not cause any pain. The world is filled with plenty of anguish—make your life goal not to add to it.

3. Make things simple and intuitive

Leave complexity to family dynamics, relationships, and puzzles. The things you create should be easy to use, easy to learn, easy to find, and easy to adapt. Intuition happens outside of conscious reasoning, so by utilizing it you are actually reducing the tax on people’s minds. That will make them feel lighter and likely a lot happier.

4. Acknowledge that the user is not like you

What’s obvious to you isn’t necessarily obvious to someone else. Our thought processes and understanding of the world around us are deeply affected by our genetics, upbringing, religious and geographical culture, and past experiences. There is a very small likelihood that the people you are designing for have all the distinctive qualities that make you you. Don’t assume you innately understand the needs of your customers. How many people do you think truly understand what it feels like to be you?

5. Have empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand and share another person’s perspective and feelings. Step outside your box and try really hard to understand the world from another person’s point of view. Go out of your way to identify with their needs. If certain things just don’t make sense to you, ask more questions. Ask as many questions as you need to until you finally understand. When you really get what makes people tick and why they do what they do, you’ll have a much easier time going to bat to make their lives better. If you aren’t trying to make people’s lives better, what are you even doing here?

20 Guiding Principles for Experience Design

1. Stay out of people’s way

When someone is trying to get something done, they’re on a mission. Don’t interrupt them unnecessarily, don’t set up obstacles for them to overcome, just pave the road for an easy ride. Your designs should have intentional and obvious paths, and should allow people to complete tasks quickly and freely.

2. Present few choices

The more choices a person is presented with, the harder it is for them to choose. This is what Barry Schwartz calls The Paradox of Choice. Remove the “nice to haves” and focus instead of the necessary alternatives a person needs to make in order to greatly impact the outcome.

3. Limit distractions

It’s a myth that people can multitask. Short of chewing gum while walking, people can’t actually do two things simultaneously; they end up giving less attention to both tasks and the quality of the interaction suffers. An effective design allows people to focus on the task at hand without having their attention diverted to less critical tasks. Design for tasks to be carried out consecutively instead of concurrently in order to keep people in the moment.

4. Group related objects near each other

Layout is a key ingredient to creating meaningful and useful experiences. As a person scans a page for information, they form an understanding about what you can do for them and what they can do for themselves using your services. To aid in that learning process, and to motivate interaction, don’t force people to jump back and forth around disparate areas in order to carry out a single task. The design should be thoughtfully organized with related features and content areas appropriately chunked, and…

5. Create a visual hierarchy that matches the user’s needs

…by giving the most crucial elements the greatest prominence. “Visual hierarchy” is a combination of several dimensions to aid in the processing of information, such as color, size, position, contrast, shape, proximity to like items, etc. Not only must a page be well organized so that it’s easy to scan, but the prioritization of information and functionality ought to mimic real world usage scenarios. Don’t make the most commonly used items the furthest out of reach.

6. Provide strong information scent

People don’t like to guess. When they click around your site or product, they aren’t doing so haphazardly; they’re trying to follow their nose. If what they find when they get there isn’t close to what they predicted, chances are they’re going to give up and go elsewhere. Make sure that you use clear language and properly set expectations so that you don’t lead people down the wrong path.

7. Provide signposts and cues

Never let people get lost. Signposts are one of the most important elements of any experience, especially one on the web where there are an infinite number of paths leading in all directions. The design should keep people aware of where they are within the overall experience at all times in a consistent and clear fashion. If you show them where they came from and where they’re going, they’ll have the confidence to sit back and relax and enjoy the ride.

8. Provide context

Context sets the stage for a successful delivery. By communicating how everything interrelates, people are much more likely to understand the importance of what they’re looking at. Ensure that the design is self-contained and doesn’t break people out of the experience except for when it’s entirely necessary to communicate purpose.

9. Avoid jargon

Remember that the experience is about them (the customer), not you (the business). Like going to a foreign country and expecting the lady behind the counter to understand English, it’s just as rude to talk to your visitors using lingo that’s internal to your company or worse, expressions you made up to seem witty. Be clear, kind and use widely understood terminology.

10. Make things efficient

A primary goal of experience design is to make things efficient for the human before making things efficient for the computer. Efficiency allows for productivity and reduced effort, and a streamlined design allows more to get done in the same amount of time. Creating efficiency demonstrates a great deal of respect for your customers, and they’ll be sure to notice.

11. Use appropriate defaults

Providing preselected or predetermined options is one of the ways to minimize decisions and increase efficiency. But choose wisely: if you assign the defaults to the wrong options (meaning that the majority of people are forced to change the selection), you’ll end up creating more stress and processing time.

12. Use constraints appropriately

Preventing error is a lot better than just recovering from it. If you know ahead of time that there are certain restrictions on data inputs or potential dead ends, stop people from going down the wrong road. By proactively indicating what is not possible, you help to establish what is possible, and guide people to successful interactions. But make sure the constraints are worthwhile—don’t be overly cautious or limiting when it’s just to make things easier for the machine.

13. Make actions reversible

There is no such thing as a perfect design. No one and nothing can prevent all errors, so you’re going to need a contingency plan. Ensure that if people make mistakes (either because they misunderstood the directions or mistyped or were misled by you), they are able to easily fix them. Undo is probably the most powerful control you can give a person—if only we had an undo button in life.

14. Reduce latency

No one likes to wait. Lines suck. So do delays in an interface. Do whatever you can to respond to people’s requests quickly or else they’ll feel like you aren’t really listening. And if they really have to wait…

15. Provide feedback

…tell them why they’re waiting. Tell them that you’re working. Tell them you heard them and offer the next step along their path. Design is not a monologue, it’s a conversation.

16. Use emotion

Ease of use isn’t the only measure of a positive user experience; pleasurably is just as important. Something can be dead simple, but if it’s outrageously boring or cold it can feel harder to get through. Designs should have flourishes of warmth, kindness, whimsy, richness, seduction, wit—anything that incites passion and makes the person feel engaged and energized.

17. Less is more

This isn’t necessarily about minimalism, but it is important to make sure that everything in the design has a purpose. Some things are purely functional; other things are purely aesthetic. But if they aren’t adding to the overall positivity of the experience, then take it out. Reduce the design to the necessary fundamentals and people will find it much easier to draw themselves in the white space.

18. Be consistent

Navigational mechanisms, organizational structure and metaphors used throughout the design must be predictable and reliable. When things don’t match up between multiple areas, the experience can feel disjointed, confusing and uncomfortable. People will start to question whether they’re misunderstanding the intended meaning or if they missed a key cue. Consistency implies stability, and people always want to feel like they’re in good hands.

19. Make a good first impression

You don’t get a second chance! Designing a digital experience is really no different than establishing a set of rules for how to conduct yourself in a relationship. You want to make people feel comfortable when you first meet them, you want to set clear expectations about what you can and can’t offer, you want to ease them into the process, you want to be attractive and appealing and strong and sensible. Ultimately you want to ensure that they can see themselves with you for a long time.

20. Be credible and trustworthy

It’s hard to tell who you can trust these days, so the only way to gain the confidence of your customers is to earn it—do what you say you’re going to do, don’t over promise and under deliver, don’t sell someone out to fulfill a business objective. If you set people’s expectations appropriately and follow through in a timely matter, people will give you considerably more leeway than if they’re just waiting for you to screw them over.

The above principles are general and can be applied across many types of experiences. However some products require a more focused set of directives due to their specific audiences or brand goals. Below are examples of Guiding Principles that have been made public by some of the best known organizations. Use these as inspiration, but don’t think that just following the same instructions will yield the same results.

UX Design Principles at Major Organizations

• IBM Design Principles
• Googley User Experience
• Windows User Experience Design Principles
• Facebook Design Principles
• Nokia’s Mobile Design Guidelines
• U.S. Government’s guidelines for user-centered design on Usability.gov

Additional Resources

• Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles for Good Design
• Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics for User Interface Design
• AskTog’s First Principles of Interaction Design
• Carsonified’s 10 User Interface Fundamentals
• Fred Beecher’s Nine Essential Characteristics of Good UX Designers
• Keith Lang’s Top 10 UX Myths