How Designers Can Build Experiences That Reduce Anxiety and Stress
A VR designer at Oculus explains how virtual experiences can ease the stress of the data deluge during the pandemic and beyond
From my Brooklyn apartment in New York City, I watch Gov. Andrew Cuomo share the daily Covid-19 death toll with the nation. I watch his broadcast every day, around 11 a.m.
I’ve spent the last three weeks wondering why I can’t stop watching these broadcasts: Is it the data dumps? The descent into dadaist strings of disturbing fatherly adages that reliably occur at the 25-minute mark? Do I just find his Italian-American mean-guy combination of stern chides and emotional outbursts reassuring because of my own upbringing? Is it just the ritual of it all?
The answer was closest to the latter: the ritual. If I watched the program every day, I was less likely to spend subsequent hours of my day falling into a news vortex. It worked by providing me with the information I needed, in a digestible format, at a set time; somehow permitting me to limit my news time. When I wondered why this felt so novel, the UX designer in me awoke to explain: News, in recent years, had become a deluge. Long dead are the days of the morning newspaper and the nightly news. Information updates have…
