Frustration vs Creativity
The two faces of a problem
Once I watched a TED talk about how frustration can make us more creative, and I loved it! The speaker told the story of how a pianist gave one of his best performances while playing an old and worn piano. He had to change his way of playing and that created a different impact.
As a designer, I work with creativity every day (frustration comes with the package), it’s all part of the job. Following the process does not always guarantee you will achieve your goals. One day things may look fine and on the other, you may not know how to proceed, it feels like everything will fall apart. Sometimes, it actually does! And I’d like to share how I learned that that is not a complete disaster.
The challenge.
It happened earlier this year, while I was at a college program called Apple Developer Academy - UFPE. During the whole year, we had to form a group and work together in order to come up with a digital product from scratch, launch it and maybe, make it profitable.
From the beginning, my team tried to explore as much themes and options as we could in each step of the process (a little bit more than necessary, I must say) not just because we wanted to have a deep understanding, but also because we were a little afraid to make the wrong decisions and lose our precious time. Unfortunately, you only know if a decision is good or bad after you make it…
The process went on and we’re reaching the point of starting the development phase. I’ll cut through the details, but after months of research, testing and validation, the concept we had was a service to show activities to do in the b-side of the cities, starting with our hometown, Recife (Brazil — PE), and it would be a collaborative platform. You may be thinking is not that fresh or innovating, but it seemed interesting enough back then.
The flaw.
So we had the research, the concept, the prototypes, we knew the market(so we thought). It was time to get our hands dirty. And that is when things started to go bad…
We found out that an app in our competitors research was updated and boosted, and now it did practically everything e wanted, and globally!
You can imagine how was for a group of students to find out that the project they were working on every day, for months, has led to this point. This is when frustration grabs you by the neck. That was our old and worn piano.
Each one in the team took the hit differently. Some of us got upset, some got stunning, and some (including me) tried to make fun of it. Although we handled it differently, we all knew that we needed a break, take the day off and clear our heads.
As the only designer on the team, I was somewhat guiding the process and I kept thinking: “How the hell did I let that happen?”
In the next day, with our heads back on track, we had a meeting to discuss what we were going to do. Should we keep moving like nothing happend? Should we go back to zero and start it all over? Should we keep trying to come up with something that really defferenciate us from the other tourism apps?
We started to brainstorm some options, revisiting our research and remembering the interviews and the points that stood out the most. Then, it struck us! The decision-making prosecess is as hard when you are designing as when you have to choose an activity to do in a city you are visiting. It’s like when you are looking for something to watch on Netflix but get overwhelmed by so many options…
People want options, but not many options, more than that, we want options that fit our needs. Context-aware suggestions, This is what sparkled what Palpitadus would be!
Getting back in the game.
Remember that b-side thing I said before? Now imagine if these suggestions of activities were shown to you considering the best time to do it. Considering the weather, day, time and distance, you would never see a suggestion of a park on a rainy day, for example. And that was exactly what we did, we built Palpitadus!
Palpitadus shows the best b-side activities in Recife in real time. Whether is day or night, cold or warm, sunny or rainy, it shows not options, but only the best suggestions!
It may seem unlikely, but this whole Thing was actually an opportunity to dig deeper into our goals and solution. It wasn’t bad luck or karma, it was a flaw, our flaw! But we manage the frustration and approach the situation looking for what we could do, not what we shouldn’t have done.
That’s how we turned the table, how we became the pianist!
In case you want to check it out, Palpitadus is already available on AppStore. People are already using it and giving great feedback, and I really hope you do too! For now, we only cover Recife.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my team for putting up with me this whole year, it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t meant to be, anyway. As the Wizard said:
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us
And I believe we chose wisely! Thank you!
