Achieving Life and Design Goals By Mapping Out “Moments”
I recently read The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath and there were some good insights on how designers can intentionally create meaningful moments. One of these methods is setting up goals with Kamb’s Level Up strategy, a forward looking strategy he explains in his book Level Up Your Life. It’s a forward looking strategy that views achieving goals as setting up milestones and once you achieve those milestones, celebrating each one as a way to further motivating you to achieving your goal. In their book, Chip and Dan state that milestones define moments that are conquerable and worth conquering. What milestones do is compel us to make that push because:
- They’re within our grasp
- We’ve chosen them precisely because they are worth reaching for
The reason why setting milestones is important because by celebrating milestones and goals, this allows you to keep pushing through big tasks you want to achieve, while celebrating them. From personal perspective, when we celebrate our achievements, it makes us feel good, that we are on the right track and gives us the motivation to continue meeting our goals.
The same can be said in design, where we have grand goals to help our users achieve their goals but they can backfire because we fail to thoughtfully map out how to get there or what users can do to ultimately change the way they think/do something. Here are a few steps in which you can apply this way of thinking into your daily practice or when coming up with a well thought out design:
Identify and be specific with your goals
Often times, when we make goals, we don’t bother to map out the smaller goals of getting there. It’s super easy to map goals (I have a whole list of them), but it’s super easy to fall out of them because we don’t commit. We don’t map out the steps of getting there. Similar to when we map out problem statements as designers (this can be the goal you are trying to address with your potential design), we need to be as specific as possible to ensure that we leave room for a clear direction in mapping out concepts and features that aim to alleviate a core problem for our users. If we don’t do that, we don’t end up designing for anyone or designing anything intrinsically useful.
Here is an example of a (bad) problem statement: Amy wants to be informed of healthy eating practices at Google.
We don’t really know what to design for because it isn’t clear what the problem is let know who Amy is. We can come up with solutions and map out general milestones that can help Amy achieve her goal using them, but this makes it hard to map out useful steps that are specific to the context of her and what she ultimately wants to achieve.
With that in mind, a better way to frame this is: Amy is a manager at Google who wants to integrate better eating habits into her daily life because she doesn’t want to feel like she is on a diet.
In this example, the ultimate destination for Amy shouldn’t be that she wants to be know more about healthy eating practices, it should be something more intrinsically motivating such as Amy wants to stop subconsciously impulse eating so she can feel better throughout her work day. When you reframe the problem, it makes it easier to map out specific solutions and less of a daunting task to come up with solutions that are general and not exciting because the problem isn’t exciting. It’s about leveraging your insights and identifying them to come up with one compelling problem that has the user’s best motivations/intentions in mind.
Establish meaningful milestones to accomplish
To identify milestones, and what’s inherently motivating. Ask yourself, what’s a hidden accomplishment that is worth surfacing and celebrating?
Some examples from the book include:
- Turn around a product/service line that is struggling
- Have a direct report promoted to a managerial role
- Solve a business challenge by collaborating with another function or group
- Recieve a compliment that you run meetings that are actually worthwhile
To experience more defining moments, we need to rethink the way we set goals and take an ambiguous goal and define an appealing destination. This also applies to design too where we need to rethink the way we frame problems and how we approach designing for our users. This way of mapping out defining moments within our work and our design problems can drastically change the way we work and how we approach our day to day work with intention.
Map out those milestones along with the goal
Like in a video game you are given a certain amount of levels. Depending on your goal, you can add or remove levels based on how big you think your goal is. Here is an example that takes the first two steps in mind: establishing a meaningful goal and milestones.
Goal: Fit into my size 2 pants
Level 1: Identify my eating habits
Level 2: Replace not so healthy food with healthier alternatives (i.e. fruit for chocolate)
Level 3: Exercise for 20 minutes 2 times a week.
Level 4: Eat half of any sugar and processed food in my diet
Level 5: Increase exercise to 3 times a week instead of 2 weeks.
Boss level: Limit sweets to once a month, exercise 3–5 times a week for 30 minutes to a hour
A common goal is to “get in shape” but the goal itself is ambiguous and un motivating. If you were to pursue it, there isn’t a clear destination, let alone any motivation because the goal is too big. It’s nice get in shape but for what reason? When you set up goals, you need to be specific, have a motivating factor, and highlight small goals to ensure that you reach it. This is where the concept of defining moments comes in. It makes achieving your goal so much less intimidating but also something to look forward to.
Here is a work example:
Goal: Get UX for my product finished by October
Level 1: Look at existing resources and talk to people on my product
Level 2: Start coming up with initial concepts and present them to team
Level 3: Map out final solution and get buy in on from pm, eng and design
Level 4: Start building out fleshed out designs
Level 5: Get buy in and final approval from PM
Boss level: Get buy in and final approval from UX director and prepare for launch
Here is a design example:
Goal: Get users successfully onboarded into product
Level 1: Create homepage with visible button to get started
Level 2: Map out an area for the user to be aware of all the steps they need to take
Level 3: Make sure the steps are easy to follow
Level 4: Provide clear instructions to what each step does
Level 5: Connect external workflows within the product if any (i.e. potential integrations)
Boss level: Provide additional value once users have on-boarded for the first time
Don’t be too aggressive when meeting levels. Be realistic in your timelines
Mapping out timelines in relation to meeting those levels can help, but in certain situations, such as losing weight, that can take more time than maybe launching a product feature in a quarter.
You want to be sure that you are realistic with when you meet your goals because another factor that leads to demotivation is the mindset of wanting it now but not getting it right away. Like the popular saying goes, success isn’t made overnight. Here is the same example but with times include:
Goal: Fit into my size 2 pants (2 years: I want to consider this as a lifestyle change, not as a lose weight fast plan because I know I’ll gain all the weight back)
Level 1: Identify my eating habits (start this week)
Level 2: Replace not so healthy food with healthier alternatives (i.e. fruit for chocolate) (in a month)
Level 3: Exercise for 20 minutes 2 times a week. (in a month)
Level 4: Eat half of any sugar and processed food in my diet (in a few months)
Level 5: Increase exercise to 3 times a week instead of 2 weeks. (in a few months)
Boss level: Limit sweets to once a month, exercise 3–5 times a week for 30 minutes to a hour (in a year)
In this example, I spaced out times because I anticipate a slow ramp up, especially if it will take more than a few months to achieve this goal. When you come up with deadlines, you want to leave some room for change and fallback, just in case you don’t meet your milestone on the exact deadline you set it for. Just consider mapping out times as a benchmark to keeping yourself on track.
Ending notes
Hopefully this method of defining moments, whether within your life or product, can help hold yourself accountable to meeting any goal you encounter.
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