Are all those mundane, admin tasks sucking your time and getting you down? User-centred design might be that elusive but effective answer.

Have you ever drifted into a kind of zen-like state when you were mowing the lawns? All of a sudden the lawns are freshly mown; what were you thinking about? Or when your Nonna is making that penne arrabbiata for the umpteenth time, it’s like she’s doing it without thinking.

I’m not talking about what Csíkszentmihályi calls flow, which involves complete engagement in the task at hand – there is passion and insight and creation (actually maybe Nonna does have that when she’s a-cookin’). It’s the mundane stuff that you don’t really like doing, but you don’t mind doing as long as it doesn’t get difficult. I’m talking about all those dull but still important tasks – whether you call them admin, operations or evil distractors – that keep the wheels turning.

These tasks don’t have to be painful, they just have to be done, yet they are so often a drag. Applying user-centred design principles to these tasks can actually reduce stress. Here’s how I made the connection.

I was listening to a talk on improving stress resilience, which included this diagram on resilience and flow by Csíkszentmihályi. Basically, states of engagement are grouped by the level of challenge and skill required to complete particular tasks. This got me thinking – perhaps we can redesign low challenge, low skill engagements and interactions with the goal to replace boredom and frustration with relaxation. We could transform them into ‘time-outs’ from the high challenge, high skill, high concentration tasks.

For example, one of my daily tasks is to keep contacts, opportunities and information up-to-date in our online CRM tool in a way that gives everyone else in my team a full picture of the state of play. While some things are smooth sailing, I’m constantly fighting with the file upload tool – the process is convoluted, involves numerous extra steps, doesn’t fit in with my workflow and is prone to errors. What happens? One of 3 things:

1. I diligently waste time uploading, waiting, uploading, and waiting. Oh boy does this frustrate me.
2. I get interrupted or otherwise distracted and forget to click ‘confirm’ when a file has uploaded, the process times out which means I have to do it all again. Grrrr.
3. I avoid it like the dentist. My colleagues don’t have access to the files. Information is lost. The organisation suffers. Bad things happen.

If you’re thinking ‘there’s a fine line between frustrated and lazy here, Phil’ you’d have a fair point. My view is that this seemingly simple, mundane interaction needs to be redesigned with user goals and context in mind – it needs to help me. If this was the case, our business would have a better CRM system for capturing and leveraging valuable customer insight. We’d be better off.

I don’t expect to ever like uploading documents to our CRM, it’s just not something I’m ever going to skip to work for. But, if it wasn’t so painful I’d do it quickly and happily. I’d then be using my time more efficiently, less frustrated by this mundane task, and my stress levels would be out of the red.

There are plenty of good examples of companies that got this right. I’ve heard people say they actually enjoy doing their accounting as a result of the time and effort Xero put into their interface design.

However, the hundreds of annoyances that we put up with day to day could really benefit from a bit of love in the form of user-centred design. When the outcomes include greater efficiency and productivity, organisations working with the most up to date information available and reduced workplace stress, to me it’s a no-brainer.

So, what’s the mundane task frustrating you today? Leave us a comment and we’ll start a laundry list of all the tasks and interactions that need some UCD love. Maybe then we’ll be ready to unite in action against those who get our stress levels into the red by making us jump through unnecessary hoops.