Mark and I just returned from a week-long trip to Switzerland and Germany to explore some of my family’s origins. We had a great—and exhausting—time.
I learned a ton, not just about my family’s past, but about designing for the entire experience, and how my perseverance interacts with my learning.
Design for the Entire Experience
The two images I attached to this post are of parking garages. Parking garages require an entire experience: Find a parking space and park, and walk to the exit. When you return and after you pay, walk safely to your car, and leave. These parking garages did a great job on the entire experience.
First, there is a specific, designated lane (in green) for pedestrians. If people walk in the designated green line, everyone, especially the drivers looking to park, knows where to expect people.
That decreases the possibility of accidents.
But the second image has lights over the possible garage spaces. It’s a little hard to see, but there is a small red LED light over the empty parking spaces and a large white LED over the filled parking spaces.
With just a glance, everyone can see if there is a space available for the car. No one has to peer past the cars and then get disappointed when they can’t find an empty space. If we did this in the US, we could look for those small red lights and know if there is a place to park. The red lights are even more visible in darker parts of the garage.
This is a small example where a few user interface choices lead to a much better experience for everyone. From a product perspective, the garage designers focused on the entire experience of parking, leaving, and re-entering the garage.
When designers consider the entire user journey, they avoid creating a premature optimization that creates a worse user experience. While I knew that, this was a concrete example I can use in my product workshops.
I also learned a lot about myself.
Integrate Personal Learning
Aside from learning that the cheese sandwiches available in many places for lunch were terrific, I learned how much a mindset of perseverance makes a difference. And to know when to take a break.
We walked a lot during our time, walking through many World War II sites. I found Nuremberg and Dachau particularly difficult, physically and emotionally.
The physical part challenged me in two ways. First, the heat. The temperature was in the high 80’sF/30C the entire time. It was a dry heat, which made it more comfortable than Boston in the same temperature. Still, it was hot. While I practice my walking every day, I focus on walking fast, not shuffling along, as when there are many people around. While I was able to stand for longer than I expected, my vertigo challenged my physical perseverance.
Then, there’s the emotional piece of the touring.
Our family pictures from the 1930s show many people who did not survive deportation. I don’t know if they went to Dachau. Most likely, they were deported to Poland and ended up in Auschwitz. But seeing a concentration camp in person, left me no doubt as to what they endured.
There’s a difference between seeing the conditions in-person and in books or online. A huge difference.
I did not visit the crematorium in Dachau, although Mark did. That emotional kind of perseverance was not necessary for my trip.
That’s because each of us learns in different ways.
New Places Challenge Us to Integrate Our Learning with Perseverance
My perseverance often means the difference between learning something and missing that knowledge. Often, that requires emotional resilience to persevere.
Intellectual resilience is fairly easy for me. I’d like to say it’s because I’m stubborn. As an example, for many of my crazy-hard math or CS courses, I often learned the essentials in the final exam. If I hadn’t taken that final exam, I would not have learned.
But intellectual resilience is often different than emotional resilience. I could think of my classes as “just” needing intellectual resilience. But persevering through the concentration camp required a lot more emotional resilience.
Mark had the emotional capacity to continue in Dachau and I did not. My physical exhaustion didn’t help, but I did not have the emotional resilience to continue. (Yes, our resilience requires physical and emotional parts. See the series that starts with Building My Emotional Resilience, Part 1.)
Over the past 15 years, I’ve learned a lot about when to persevere and when to stop. I need to persevere long enough to learn, but not so long that I collapse in a pile of self-pity. Sometimes, there’s a very fine line between the two. That’s why it might be worth practicing on a smaller scale.
New Places Don’t Have to Be Far Away
Sometimes, “all” we need to do is to see familiar places through new eyes. I learned that as a consultant, long ago. That’s because while every client is different, many clients have similarities. The more I see only the similarities, the less I can see the differences. Yet, those differences matter to the client’s eventual success.
If you, as I, like to practice learning, you can integrate what you learn by traveling in your mind, not just in your body.
How does this place design for the circumstances? Do they think of the entire user journey for a parking garage, as the garages we parked in? Or, do they focus on the drivers and ignore the pedestrians, as too many US parking garages do?
How does the climate affect us emotionally? Climate extremes can change our emotional resilience.
And when does perseverance help or hurt?
As a curious person, I want to integrate learnings every time I travel, regardless of the newness of that place. I hope you do, too.
That’s the question this week: How can you integrate what you learned from traveling to a new place?