We have a few holiday traditions in the Schneider house. We put up lights in the windows, decorate a tree, and wrap presents to go underneath it. On Christmas Eve, despite being a vegetarian, I’ll make an extremely rich seafood soup. We have an advent calendar that my daughter opens to get a small gift each day leading up to Christmas. One of the calendar gifts this year was a small artificial Christmas tree for her room. She’d been asking for one, and the local thrift shop had one cheap. So a few mornings ago she woke up to a note in the advent calendar telling her to look behind the couch for her present.

The night before, when my wife put it out, I didn’t think it looked exciting enough. So I gave it a face-lift.

It’s a bit of intentional whimsy. I often think about how I can make the world a more whimsical place for my daughter. I also want her to have the tools she needs to be happy and successful in life. That balance between delight and utility is at the heart of how I think about design.

At its core, there are a few things designers do. Whether for games, the web, apps, or industrial design, the goal is to provide an intuitive interface to a complicated system so users can successfully accomplish their tasks. Designers do this through a mix of understanding their users, aesthetics, and delightful interactions. The aim is an efficient, intuitive bridge between the system and the user. These goals are hard to satisfy individually. Good design comes down to making smart tradeoffs between them.

As parents, we’re shepherds, not chauffeurs. We can guide, but we can’t take our kids to their final destination. Schools, friends, books, and television also play a role, which means we don’t have complete control. What we can do is help craft the interface between our children and the world. We give them tools to interact with the universe and foster a sense of wonder and curiosity so they’re eager to engage on their own.

Here are a few things I think about as a parent designing that interface. Lest you think these only apply to people with children, they also work well with family, friends, and coworkers.

I related to the dad in Everything Everywhere All at Once that put googly eyes on everything. He loved his family and wanted them to be happy. The googly eyes were his attempt at surprising and delighting them.

In design, whimsy and delight can be powerful tools for keeping users engaged in tasks that might otherwise feel repetitive, but only when used well. Spreadsheets are purposefully boring. They don’t need whimsy (I’m looking at you, Clippy). Bells, whistles, and animations on a spreadsheet would get in the way of efficiently processing data.

Life is closer to a video game than a spreadsheet. Art, animations and sounds are additive to the experience. Delightful moments make mundane experiences more enjoyable. Drawing a face with syrup on a waffle. Putting a marshmallow in hot chocolate. Using a silly voice while reading a book. Putting eyes on things. Adding ribbons. Drawing bad cartoons. Making treasure maps to find presents. Going outside and count animals (don’t use a spreadsheet). Small bits of whimsy help keep kids engaged and heighten their experience of the world.

You don’t have to stop with kids. Spontaneous presents, thank-you notes, cartoons, and safe-for-work jokes can all add levity and delight to your own day, and to the days of your family, friends, and colleagues.

Good design allows users to undo mistakes and adds friction in the right places to prevent them. Users make mistakes. They misclick. They fail to aniticpate consequences. Designers learn where the landmines are and add warnings, confirmations, and explanations to prevent unrecoverable errors. We want users to feel safe trying unfamiliar features, not worried they’ll irreversibly break something.

We want the same thing for our kids. The urge to protect them from the slings and arrows of the world is natural. But eventually, they’ll be out there on their own. We won’t always be there to sweep obstacles out of the way. Failure is a necessary part of building resilience. The trick is letting them fail gracefully.

That doesn’t mean setting them loose and hoping for the best. It means giving them tasks that matter and letting them do those tasks on their own. Unloading the dishwasher matters. It’s real work, and you can tell whether it’s done well. If it’s done poorly, it’s also easy to fix. The same is true for other chores like cleaning, gardening, and homework.

We can apply graceful failure and guardrails at work. The same design principle are useful in how we interact with our colleagues. I often see more senior folks (myself included) jump in and just give solutions to new colleagues. It’s faster in the short term. But letting someone explore is how they learn. It’s in no one’s interest to work with someone who can’t find answers independently. Searching, fumbling, and discovering things along the way is a big part of learning how to answer questions ones self. Those small discoveries stick around and become useful later.

The greatest skill in the world is the ability to practice. Practice is hard. Repetition turns into boredom. Progress slows and rewards show up less often. Being able to practice despite this means you can build skill even when you can’t see it yet. This is the foundation of resilience. Confidence comes from knowing that even if you don’t know how to do something now, you can learn it through practice.

My daughter practices piano and choir. We try to build her practicing skills through math, too, though she’s more interested when practice connects to art. “All children are artists,” said Picasso. He may not be the best role model for kids, but the statement holds up. Children would almost always rather make art than practice math fundamentals.

Still, I can see her improve in math and music. I help her connect practice to progress. In fourth grade, she chose the flute in orchestra. At first, she couldn’t even make a sound. By the end of the year, she was playing well enough in an ensemble. Practice won.

The design parallel is that repetition should build expertise and a desire for efficiency. Basic tasks should be easy and fast. If a task will be repeated, designers should make it efficient. Bulk edits, hotkeys, macros, templates, and customization all help. But these are shortcuts. The basic functionality should always be there. Over time, users discover advanced tools naturally, building both skill and efficiency.

I’m fine with holidays themselves. I can take or leave the reasons behind them. What I really enjoy is the pause. The time set aside to step out of our normal routines and reconnect. This holiday season I’m planning to build a gingerbread house, play some games, get out into the woods, and practice a few instruments. The rest of my family will do similar things, together and separately. Somewhere in there, we’ll find a few small ways to improve the design of our interface to the world.

For more information on some of the references above check out these links.

Beneath the oldest fault lines burrows the Ichneumole, a grotesque fusion of an ichneumon wasp’s parasitic instinct and a mole’s earth-shaping bulk. Its body is squat and muscular, covered in velvety fur that parts to reveal chitinous plates A quivering lump of a nose tastes the air for the psychic traces of living creatures. When it finds a settlement it strikes, unleashing a psychic screech that assaults the mind. Those unfortunate enough to survive the blast find themselves reeling, unable to flee as the beast closes in.

You can find full stats and description for the Ichnemole for free over on Patreon.

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