Dark mode is now present in nearly every popular product. When Instagram, YouTube and even LinkedIn added the option, we can now say it has become mainstream.

There’s still many misconceptions about how Dark Mode should be created for the best results in terms of look&feel, accessibility, battery life and performance on all kinds of devices.

There’s more to Dark Mode than just inverting the colors. In this part of the series let’s explore colors and depth.

Avoid using 100% saturated accent colors, as they’re not visible on dark backgrounds. If your brand color is “strong” that way, just reduce the saturation for Dark Mode.

As you can see in the above example, the colors in Light mode, when placed on a darker background are harsh and difficult to look at. With that simple desaturation trick, they end up being a lot easier on the eyes.

Another thing is using a color theme for your dark grey shades that’s based on the accent color. You can’t go too far with it, but when done in a subtle manner it will transform the entire design into a consistent, coherent whole.

In our case (example above) I simply added a little touch of blue to the greys, so that it matches the button (accent color) and other UI elements better.

Another important part is the hierarchy of the layers, that’s mostly created by their brightness. The typical angle at which we old our phone is around 45°, and the most natural light source is the one coming from the top — either the sun or a ceiling light.

Even though the interface is completely flat, our mind still prefers to be cheated a little bit for better, easier to grasp hierarchy. This is why fake depth is important!

This is why you should avoid objects that are perceived as “on top”, or closer to the users being darker than the background. As you can see in the example on the left, it looks unnatural and takes it longer for our brain to process the image. The one on the right is more in line with how a real stack of layers would be lit.

One trick in particular that does it well is simply starting with a base brightness of the background (the darkest color) and adding 8 or 10 points of brightness to each of the levels.

Using that trick you’ll have a consistent “color distance” between the layers and it will help our brain process it faster.

I talk more about these concepts in my recent YouTube video, so be sure to watch it and let me know in the comments if you found the knowledge useful.

Good luck exploring Dark Mode! These videos will be connected into a longer, free course right here at hype4.academy! 

Dark Mode UI Essentials Part 1

Hello, Apple October event. I’ll share some thoughts on what was announced from the perspective of a designer. One thing I found instantly cool, was the hint of magsafe in the intro - cool move apple. 

Then they talked about music, but I don’t think many people care about that, so just to sum up, new home pods with colors now, now airpods pro and max with spatial audio. 

They also showed new, smaller regular airpods, i.e. the cheap kind. Fun Fact, Diane had both the regular ones and the pros and she lost one of each. From now one we always go wired. 

So a new, larger MacBook pro with a faster M1 chip was to be expected. It’s not M1X though, but M1 Pro. Oh and a second chip called M1 Max that’s also a double of the M1 Pro. So now I guess we have three processor tiers in the mac. 

Also don’t know if you noticed, but the Pro and Max naming conventions are almost matching the iPhones - the faster CPU should be called Pro Max though. But still some consistency is welcome. 

I tested the M1 MacBook Pro in Sketch a while ago and found out I can move an impressive 1800 design heavy artboards without a problem. You can watch that video here:

Now, they shared a lot of transitor science, but I don’t think most people understand any of that. 

The basics are there’s now a 10core CPU cores and 16 GPU cores. The graphics is now a lot faster too. For video editors building in ProRes support into the chip itself is likely going to be a game changer.For me the additional thunderbolt controllers were a happy addition, as I encountered many problems with connecting external devices to the M1 laptops. 

There are improvements in power efficiency, but I think it’s not as important as most pros use their laptops connected to power. It’s a nice to have though for some on the go work.

All the performance graphs now have numbers along the axis, which is something people made fun of at the M1 introduction where the graphs were a bit arbitrary - you couldn’t really see what they meant. I guess apple listened and added the numbers here - maybe they’re more condifent in the performance now. 

As for the video editing, I’ll have to use one of these chips to see a difference. I’m generally happy with my M1 Mac Mini, but it does stutter a little bit with two 4K videos on top of one another. Only for a second or two, until it plays fine, but I do feel it. 

They announced two new laptops, as expected 16 and 14” displays. 

They have magsafe again, hdmi, sd-card and headphone jack is still there too. Happy days! 

Three thunderbolt ports are still better than two, but I actually liked the four-port MacBook pros on Intel. But I guess that wouldn’t really fit into the chassis. 

Touchbar is also gone, good riddance! The new keyboard also looks a little different overall. 

There’s also a notch now for the camera, which I guess makes sense as it blends in with the action bar at the top. Unless you’re not using dark mode, then I guess you’ll have to adjust a bit because in light mode that camera notch is quite visible … 

ProMotion refresh rates on the display is also welcome - but mostly for content consumption. 

The display is now also Mini LED, so brighter and more like the largest iPad pro, which looks awesome. 

Better microphones and speakers were too be expected, but on that front Apple laptops were always pretty good. This is more of a feature for musicians. 

I was expecting the 16” to get the Max CPU, and the 14” to get the Pro, but apparently you can configure each CPU for each of the screen sizes. Good to know if you like the performance but want to go portable. 

The memory now tops at 64 gigs, which is a good welcome from the 16 gigs on the M1. And seeing how well the M1 performed with just 16, I’m happy to see what 64 will do on the Max. 

Batteries were also improved, but what’s more interesting is that there’s now a fast charge feature, allowing you to top up the battery by 50% in just 30 minutes. That’s going to save a lot of on the go projects!

It means the highest spec ones will be a lot more expensive than that, if this is just for the base versions. 

I was hoping for a 32” iMac Pro with the new chip, or the mini with the pro Cpus but I guess we’ll have to wait for those a while longer. I will definitely check these out though, as they do sound like an exciting step forward.

Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max Laptops are game-changers for creatives

Apple M1Pro and M1Max Laptops are a game changer for designers

As a person who has been doing so called “UX” for about 22 years now I’m going to pop that bubble for you today. Again.

Value is the most important part of the product.

It’s simply the friction that appears where you want to get to the value. The better the UX, the lower the friction. But it doesn’t depreciate the value, only the road to it.

When the value is mindblowing good, people will jump through flaming hoops of bad UX to get there.

Focus on the value first. Then polish the experience.

Don’t do UX just because the UX people used some jargon to tell you about empathy maps and customer journeys. Every customer has a journey to reach value.

Also — Product Market Fit research is not the job of an UX designer. Market researchers existed well before someone put the X in eXperience.

UX Is Overrated

The design world is getting faster and faster every year. Why? There are a couple of reasons. One is that the recent design tool revolution made our workflows much easier and faster. The last few years were also the

adventof design systems, or even design libraries and components. We also have a lot of existing knowledge of what works well, so in many cases, we can use these safe patterns to come up with design solutions much faster.

In general, design is about finding solutions to problems.

poetic reason too — with the global economy declining, companies simply cannot afford as much “design-time” as they were before. They still expect similar results though.

I’m going to share two basic techniques that can help you design faster. Of course, there’s a lot more to speed design in problem-spotting, problem-clearing, and fixing the obvious to reveal hidden issues. But let's start with something easy.

During a typical, 8-hour day, the actual “design” and problem solving usually takes only a small portion of the time. Most of it is repetitive tasks that we can optimize.

Now here’s the thing. The above reasons for speed design are all good, but they’re all business-based. And I’d like to think from the designer=human perspective too.

Counting hours as a way to calculate income is becoming an antiquated way, and when working from home, we should definitely push a “per outcome” approach. Estimate a cost for your work. Then do the work. Don’t worry about the “hours”.

You can accomplish the same amount of work done in less time. Which one would you choose?

And if you estimate it well and use the speed design techniques you, as a designer, will have a lot more time for other things. You’ll finish your UI design a lot faster. You can use that time to either learn new skills or simply relax.

The fact that the world is fast, doesn’t mean you need to keep running the hamster wheel all day. Just be fast and hyper-focused for short bursts. Finish your work and then it’s your time, on your terms.

Now listen up gang! We’re going to be saving seconds here. Yes — seconds.

When this approach becomes second nature, these seconds will compound into hours, days, and weeks. Because if you save a second or two on every little part of the job, the sum of the time saved is going to be a lot greater.

And if one technique saves you 8 seconds every hour, then this one technique will save you four full hours in a year of work. If you combine many of the techniques and a proper mindset you’ll be saving an hour a day in no-time.

And yes, at this scale 4 hours wouldn’t even fit on the canvas :-)

Let’s start with the basics. If you’re still moving all the UI rectangles to their final position with your mouse cursor, then you should stop right now! There are two more efficient ways to move an object to the right position.

One of them, if you’re grid-obsessed is to simply enter the right number for the X and Y values in the inspector. But let’s be honest — most of us don’t do that. We move things with our mouse to an approximate position, and then we

You do it by selecting and object and pressing an arrow key on the keyboard. In the example above the blue square is nudged by one point by a single press of the right arrow key. Of course the more you press your arrow key, the more you will move the object. But what if you want to nudge something by 10 points? Pressing the right arrow key 10 times would be a huge waste of time, right?

, that allows you to move objects even further — 10 points by default.

Now, I know this is super basic but hang in there. Just one more and I’ll show you something really cool.

Some plugins allow you to go oven further. A 

 plugin called Nudge, Push, Shove adds one more option called shove. It also allows you to modify the value for all three moves.

, you’re going to shove the element by 15 points by default.

These three keyboard-based moving techniques are essential for a speedy workflow. But it’s likely you already know that, so here’s the fun part.

You can combine nudge, push, and shove to decrease the number of keystrokes necessary to accomplish the same thing.

Let’s look at this particular scenario — we have two rectangles, currently

points apart. We want to nudge them to be

What would you do? There are two main ways to accomplish this.

The “obvious”, longer way that most of my students (during the first class) still use is to simply nudge the object 8 times. It’s simple and straightforward, but it also requires you to press the arrow key 8 times. That in itself takes a couple of seconds.

There is another, much better way to do this. It does require you to be fast with math, but once you try it you’ll feel like the Flash, speeding through your designs and saving the world one nudge at a time.

As you can see above, you can achieve the exact same result by pushing (10p) the object first, and then nudging it twice in the other direction. This is three keystrokes instead of 8 (assuming you count shift + arrow as one).

Of course you can merge all three techniques, including the

(15p), but it requires a little bit more effort and fast math skills.

Even if you save 3–4 seconds each time you perform this action, it’s one of the most common actions that you perform in the design tool. Looking at it from a perspective of a year…

If you’re working on an 8-point grid, you can use plugins to modify the default nudge, push and shove values to respect that. For example you can change the default 1/10/15 to 1/8/16 and that will speed up your workflow in a great way too.

Unless you’re working with an already pre-defined set (or a design-system), this trick can save you a lot of time. In a typical scenario, to add an icon to your project, you need to open an icon-pack, find the icon, copy it and paste it into the right file. Or find an individual SVG icon on your disk, and drag it onto the artboard.

Did you know that the most popular icons, like arrows, chevrons and magnifying glass, can be done very quickly inside your design tools? You can also create them way faster than it’ll take you to fetch them from an external library.

I made a short video on these techniques, that should help you especially with the exact “how-to” on the icons. It’s just some simple shapes, so definitely worth practicing.

Efficiency is definitely an area that needs improvement among UI designers. Obviously, a lot of that efficiency comes from practice, but you can implement some of these practices right now — even if you’re a beginner.

Saving those precious seconds will result in more time to learn actually useful things. Let me know if you’re using these, or any other speed designing techniques in your workflows.

Speed techniques to help you design faster

My design career started with videogames. In 1998 I was playing a lot of Quake with some friends over a 33.6 modem. My phone bill at that time was insane, and resulted in my being grounded nearly every weekend. But it was worth it! As our online team grew, we decided to go official and create a website for it. I 

I learned design and some development because of 🎮 videogames. The rest is now history.

A great game needs an addicting gameplay loop, fascinating story, or both. But what it also needs is likely some UI so you can use the game, fiddle in the settings and, in some games use in-game UI’s like some computer screens for hacking (Cyberpunk 2077) or mobile phones (GTA V).

Working as a designer for so long, I naturally notice all the interfaces and try to evaluate them — mostly for fun. Game UI’s don’t need to follow a lot of the rules of their phone/web counterparts, but they do need to be readable, clear and easy to use.

Deathloop is a brand new game from Arkane — developers behind some of my favorite games like Dishonored and Prey. It’s a shooter, but with some truly innovative mechanics around time-loops, dying (a lot) and respawning with new knowledge to do things differently the next time.

The UI of Deathloop was something I noticed even before buying the game — many screenshots showed very odd choices in terms of whitespace, general margins, paddings and positions of buttons, text or images.

Diving deep into the game I started noticing more and more of these little issues and as video games are not as often mentioned when it comes to UI, I decided to share a couple of my findings.

The above image is a good example of a problem that haunts the entire game. There’s barely any padding inside boxes of text, with words starting almost at the edge of the box and everything being codensed.

I made a quick (raster based) modification (seen on the right) adding more spacing and also creating better hierarchy of the content. The entire interface would’ve been a lot more readable with just the inner margin tweak alone.

The example above shows a very narrow tooltip (an overlay that follows your mouse cursor around) that could’ve been wider and definitely could use bigger padding.

Another example is the a mix of odd line-height (a little bit too big) and having left-aligned content with center-aligned titles. It makes it harder to follow the text along our trusty F-pattern and just looks odd. This happens in some parts of the game UI, but not in all of them. In some cases the title IS left-aligned as it should be (for example in Notes).

The whitespace issues sometimes go the other way too — like in this example (left) where everything (including a quick video showing the power in action) is super small and to the top, leaving a lot of empty space next to a left-aligned button (it was right-aligned on other screens).

I outlined the text in blue, and the button in yellow, to better illustrate where they should be and enlarged the cinematic to full width of the window.

Another example shows that there’s no common left-edge for object placement and aligning text to circles always works better when it’s in the vertical center of the oval.

This problem persists with the left edge being pretty random — in the example above the circular photo of our protagonist sticks out more to the left than the title: DAYBREAK. The spacing from the icon is almost non-existent for the description text, and it’s tightly condensed between two divider lines, with different distances from top and bottom.

It’s a shame, because the menus themselves and the fonts look good in most places. The raster-type overlays, pixel-noise and textures do a great job of sharing the atmosphare of the world.

What is the reason for these issues? I believe it’s a mix of working with raster graphics (that don’t stretch too well) and multi-language versions of the game. In some languages (German, I’m looking at you!) the average word length is a lot higher than in others. That means the developer need to plan for more lines of content, more text overall, and that happens at the cost of whitespace and/or hierarchy.

I also made a video where I go more in depth, with precise examples of how some of the issues can be fixed and show some gameplay. 

Going vector won’t really work for most games, as they do require menus that are a little more artistic than a typical set of vector shapes can provide. However, maybe a mix of vector base-shape (including simulated torn edges) can be merged with raster overlays that shift position depending on the box size.

And that size depends on the amount of content we need to place inside.

The issue with this solution is that localizing games would require a lot more time, effort and money to make it “feel right” for every customer.

Let’s just hope for larger padding for now.

Deathloop - UI in videogames

If you’ve read some of my articles, you know that I’m all for discipline and ambition. I believe that working hard is the best path to success. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to “make it” in the industry and start working for large, international clients. I want to share some of my thoughts with you — junior designers, as I believe there are some traps that I hope you’ll be able to avoid.

There is the popular saying of “working hard vs working smart” which I think is only partially true.

That’s a little over a year of practicing NON-stop, so in reality, it means you can master a skill in 4–5 years if you commit to 8 hours of practice every day. And we both know that’s nearly impossible.

Now of course it’s not that simple. For one thing — you can’t really “master” design as it’s changing and transforming all the time. Also: some people are faster than others. But we get hung up on that time or “years of experience” quite a lot as a factor to define how good we are.

Most people estimate that a junior designer has between 0 and 3 years of commercial experience. Assuming, that most of that experience is real work, not meetings, it’s still not enough to truly be a master, but it’s getting there. Besides nobody expects mastery from a junior anyway.

Senior designers are usually people who either worked over 3 years in the industry, or — which I find extremely funny — had a senior role previously. So you can hack the system by being a senior designer in your own company, and then apply for a senior role right away. Some recruiters may even fall for that.

But let’s get back to our practice exercise.

The old saying of practice makes perfect has been a mantra of many design students. Then UX / Design bootcamps came with their promises of instant-career (just add water). Sure, we live in a fast (and increasingly faster) world, and people expect to have what they desire right now.

Same day delivery of your design career. Just sign up!

Assuming that practice (in any form and style) does indeed make perfect, let’s look at the job market right now.

Which candidate would you pick if this was the only project of 6 different people?

Both UX and front-end development has been hot trends for young people when choosing a future career. After all, they pay well and are seemingly accessible with all the courses and university classes around.

But among the bootcamp promises, many stopped mentioning the “practice makes perfect” mantra. It doesn’t fit the new model of teaching based on instant gratification.

Practice implies hard, repetitive work. Showing up on time. Showing up daily. A grind.

And without external motivation towards practice, many junior designers start to think that their bootcamp is enough. In some of our own recruiting efforts, and some friendly companies, we noticed a pretty scary trend. We called it:

Most bootcamps and online courses leave you with “a project” at the end. This is a good thing if you consider it a starting point to further self-development. But many young designers, lulled by the promise of instant-career, start applying for jobs with just that one “course-project” under their belt.

If your only reason for a career in design or development is money, then you’re probably not loving the field. It shows. Most employers and recruiters see that disconnection between what you aspire do and who you are. It’s not inspiring anyone to hire a person like that, sorry.

I believe a mix of discipline and curiosity is essential to thrive and I hope more young designers will take it to heart.

And that curiosity should inspire you to try things on your own. Do “passion projects” and build out your portfolio yourself. Nobody is going to do it for you. You can use that bootcamp or course project as a base, but show a lot more. Show that you care and that you put in the effort.

If you show up with just one project, it means you didn’t put in any work outside of your learning experience.

If you pick the path on the left, it doesn’t matter how many hours you spend practicing.

And here we run into a problematic loop. That’s because not all practice makes perfect. If you’re randomly hitting the keys on your keyboard, chances are you’ll write Hamlet eventually, but it will take a very long time.

You need proper “form”, as they say in the fitness industry. Doing a pull-up is a great overall exercise, but if you have a bad form, you may end up hurting yourself instead of improving your physique.

Now apply that principle to the designs you do. Below I outline some problems you may encounter along the way.

The condescending outlook on doing Dribbble design challenges is mostly coming from those UX “designers” who don’t do much design themselves. Of course there is merit to it — Dribbble

eye-candy. But it’s also where really cool visual trends and patterns emerge that with some tweaks can inspire great, real-life products.

So should you try to replicate Dribbble shots when you’re beginning your UI journey?

Just think of it as practice of just one part of the field — the visual design. If you master the “unrealistic” designs, you’ll be able to dial it back a bit under some guidance and still create outstanding work.

At some point, you’ll learn to use proper contrast and realistic flows, but you’ll learn good hierarchy, explore new font choices and likely find out some techniques you were not aware of.

There are countless different styles of the UX process, and you will likely forge your own at some point, but one thing is common to all of them: at some point you need external input.

UX is a complex beast. Whether you want to be a designer, or a researcher, there are a lot of external factors you need to consider. You can’t really

Whether you want to follow the old, lengthy processes with personas, scribbles and lots of meetings, or the new, agile design+test+repeat way, you need to be able to actually see the impact of what you do. It’s very hard to achieve with personal projects when you’re just starting to build a portfolio.

One idea is to try and apply to some non-profits, or do some user studies for free. That way you’ll be able to “touch” some real work before the real work truly begins.

Enough with the negative outlook though. Things aren’t peachy for juniors right now, but they can always get better. You can get help and guidance in many places online, but not everyone knows where to look. There’s just too much information out there — often conflicting.

Ask me anything about design (both overall good UX design, and also specific UI related things). I’m from the agile-UX school, so I like my processes fast, iterative and filler-free.

I believe at some point it is our responsibility to start giving back to the community. And this is exactly what I’m going to do.

Perfect practice makes perfect

I want to talk about money in the industry, both past and present, but from a slightly different perspective.

Everyone wants to earn more money, and while obviously it’s possible to improve your financials, it’s not what you should be focusing on (at least not as much).

The fact that we desperately NEED more money is sadly driven by social media accounts (Instagram is the prime suspect here) showing (often rented) excess; we want to have the same things.

he private jets, or at least that gold, brand new iPhone 12 Pro Max. It doesn’t matter you just bought an 11 Pro last year.

We scroll through things like that DAILY. And we want more money to maybe afford some of these some day. (Photos from Unsplash)

And while these things don’t bring us true happiness, we lie to ourselves pretending that they do. We mostly tell ourselves that lie before we get the things, and then, eventually, we do get some of them. That leads to the need for MORE money and a lot less time to really enjoy life.

Once we get that dream car, it usually takes a few days before we start using it only for the intended purpose of getting from point A to point B. And sure it’s more luxurious, but you get used to it quickly — trust me.

Chasing money, many designers go to larger companies, even knowing that the work there can be unfulfilling or uninspiring. The risk of going to a smaller startup, earning less, but having a blast designing away during a hackathon over a cold pizza slice seems to lose all its appeal.

Me during a hackathon in Stockholm in 2013 — at 5AM I decided to write a short story over a cold pizza slice, as my team was asleep — some others, energy-drink fueled people still continued. But it was FUN!

I’m not going to pretend I have the key to a life of success and “fun”, because it’s different for everyone. I can only speak from my own experiences, and I’m currently exactly at that place. But the trick here is, that YOU define where that place is. Whether it’s a Ferrari, a Porsche, a used Toyota or your own two feet as your primary means of transportation. Or it can be anything in between.

You pick your spot on this graph — and don’t let society (or Instagram feeds) tell you what you SHOULD pick.

I started my first real web-design job, back in 2002. It was an internet startup — something very rare back then, right after the dotcom bubble had burst. I was designing and doing the HTML for a rather large and growing internet portal.

I earned the equivalent of 500 coca cola cans a month. Yeah, the cheap ones. It may be easier to visualize it without currency conversion and coca cola is like the definition of capitalism. A Cola can is slightly more expensive in Poland, than it is in the US.

If I spent my entire salary on soda cans, that’s how many I would get each month.

Now the thing was that I was working for that really low wage and also spending a lot of time at work. I felt a bit trapped and unable to pursue my other hobbies.

I was in a band, had a nationwide poetry community, we were releasing books, doing shows and so on. It was creative and it was super fun.

So right there, after my very first year of working in the IT industry, I went to my boss and told him I want Fridays off work.

Now keep in mind that while now it’s a common practice, and some companies do 4-day work weeks. It even

My argument was this, I will try to do more than 4 days of work in those 4 days. Not necessarily make up for the missing day, but nearly.

Of course, this was connected to a pay cut. Now I was making 400 coca-cola cans a month, but I had 12 days each month to do creative things.

Those connections made there, those poems, short stories, concerts and everything I did back then contributed a lot more to who I am, than moving those large pixels around a CRT display.

Now my real reason for not doing currency conversion here was to show you one thing. If all you cared about was drinking soda, that wage would be enough to drink yourself into a sugar coma every day. (16 cans per day?)

Of course, we have other — hopefully bigger — dreams for our lives. But most of them are influenced by that greener grass on the other side of the fence. If we stop looking across, we may just realise how beautiful it is right here, on our side.

You don’t need those luxury cars, yachts, and golden watches to be happy. Achieving them is rarely connected with true happiness. More often it’s all about being overworked, stressed, anxious and depressed. Not even being able to enjoy what you’ve earned.

To get that shiny object you usually need to let go of a part of your soul.

You can either chase the shiny or enjoy the life you have knowing that happiness is not in things. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be ambitious. By all means, strive to achieve greatness!

You can easily make thousands of soda cans per month or tens of thousands in some countries. But the job must be fun to be fulfiling, and it must be about something more than money when you start getting enough of it to live a good life.

That moment of fulfillment and joy will happen way sooner if you realise what’s important in this life for you.

Unless it’s a golden yacht with silk sails. Then it may take you a while.

One way to make a big change in your life is to get a lot faster at what you do, and then just charging per project. That way you reclaim the “hours” of your life and you can use them however you wish.

But there are many other ways too. Just explore and find yours.

How much did I earn as a junior designer in 2002?

With lockdowns being lifted in more and more countries, many businesses are considering bringing their employees back to the office.

Sure, some like Google or Facebook are opening up to full Work From Home indefinitely but even they’re trying to match the wages to your home location.

However, some companies are pushing for full office work or a hybrid model like in the case of Apple, where they expect their employees to work in a 3/2 hybrid model as soon as September.

ple employees has filed a petition for the company to allow full Work from Home, but it has been denied. For many, it can be a tipping point with whether they still want to work at Apple or not.

Work from Home has so many benefits, that people are willing to accept lower pay just to continue working the way they had been for the last year. The benefits are obvious — no commute, which for many is saving hours each day — and those hours add up to days and weeks of transit.

Directly tied to that is improved sleep, as without commute your entire morning is usually just taking the few steps towards your desk after waking up. One added benefit can be also the possibility of spending more time with their family, which has a huge emotional impact on their wellbeing.

Why are so many companies trying to bring people back?

There may be a couple of reasons for it, ranging from having a shiny spaceship office laying dormant all the way to reduced productivity and subpar collaboration.

The main goal for any company is to make money. So if the productivity of remote employees were to stay the same or higher (because they can be better rested), most of those vanity reasons like having a big empty office wouldn’t be that important.

So maybe productivity did drop and judging by the panicked reactions from some businesses, it may have dropped quite significantly. At least enough for it to matter for the bottom line.

Then there’s the problem with creativity. Some companies, including ours, measure the collective and individual creativity, as it’s the base of continued growth and innovation.

While the modern collaboration tools like Miro, Figma and others, have definitely improved the remote creative process, they’re often not enough for a true brainstorm.

Zoom calls, that have taken the professional world by storm this year, also fall short, with many people dozing off on mute while browsing Instagram on their phone just to “check off” that meeting.

That, combined with the natural tendency of getting distracted by a million things at home can lead to a huge productivity drop. Let’s do the laundry during that zoom call — I’m on mute anyway, right?

I personally heard countless stories of people complaining about those distractions and generally getting less done. Of course they didn’t really want to come back to the office, and some have since then been laid off.

Some people are simply not yet ready both mentally and emotionally to stay productive in an environment associated with leisure and relaxation. That motivation won’t often appear with a looming termination just over their shoulders. That will only add to the stress and job quality decrease.

I see two main potential solutions to the reduced productivity problem. Let’s start with the non-doomsday scenario:

Lower productivity while working from home is a problem with the experience. It can and should be researched and solutions found through education and modifying some of the practices to match our new realities.

That would require cross-company collaboration, sharing the results and joining in on an effort to truly solve the problem.

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