Burlesque performances, like most everything else in life, don’t always go as planned. What do you do when the audience just isn’t feeling it, when you trip up and make a mistake, or when things just don’t go as rehearsed? Learning how to pivot mid-performance is a skill that can only come from practice and experience. Here are a few of the key things I’ve learned and how I use them in UX design and development.

Now I know what you are thinking, how on earth does burlesque relate to UX design and development? In my time as a performer, and my experience doing design and development, I've started to notice a lot of cross-over with the skills I have learned as a burlesque dancer.

Reading the audience and how I use it as a designer and developer

Learning how to read the audience is vital with performing. By reading their body language, you can see how they feel about your performance. Are they looking at you and paying attention to what you do? If not, how do you get them to pay attention? I have found that there are a few fail-proof steps I can take to get anyone's attention and to keep it for the rest of my performance, but how can I apply this to my work as a designer/developer?

Reading the audience is also key to a great user experience. Once I find out who my audience is, I am going to use the skills I curated while performing to keep their attention. Is the design interesting and easy to use? Is it creating the experience I want the end user to have? If not, what am I going to do to change it?

How do I read my audience? Reading an audience as a performer is just making a bunch of educated guesses on the fly, based off their body language. If the audience member a young male, turned away from the stage, that keeps his eyes down when I approach them. I am going to make a guess that he is at his first burlesque show and is feeling a little uncomfortable, this happens a lot given I live in Utah. I will gently start an interaction. That might consist of running my boa down his arm, exposing my shoulder and giving them Bambi eyes, but it always includes making and holding eye contact with them as I move away. I don’t want to scare them off, so I will keep the interaction brief. I do not speak while performing, so I communicate with movement and facial expressions only.

Luckily as a UX designer or developer, we have a few more tools than just a quick read of someone’s body language and having to immediately act. While I have gotten fairly accurate at doing quick readings on audience members, I absolutely love all the research that goes into figuring out a user. Being able to quickly read an audience does come in handy though. If you are working with a client to find their audience, you should be able to get some answers before you even start the intensive research. Make sure you ask who the product is for, what they are hoping to achieve and what audience they are targeting.

In burlesque, my audience is pre-determined for me by the producer and the show theme. The venue in which I'm performing also clues me into other vital details. Am I performing in a 1920’s prohibition style show (my most common type of show considering I perform at Prohibition Utah)? What is the stage set up like? Can I move through the audience easily? Do they have music and costume requirements? I will develop my act around the specifics given to me by the producer, just like I would develop an app or website around the specifics given to me by the client, and what I find in my user research. I use the same steps in creating a burlesque routine that I use for creating a good UX when I design or develop something.

What are the steps I can take to create a good user experience?

1. Determine the audience, find their needs and list them out, refer back to this list.

2. Design/develop with those needs in mind

3. User testing.

4. Re-evaluate, does anything need to be changed?

Taking these steps and repeating 2-4 until you get an end product that everyone is happy with is the goal. As a dancer my user testing consists of performing the planned routine for other dancers acting as an audience so they can help me find technical mistakes and help me improve my ability to interact with the audience. I am always willing to scrap a whole routine or project if it doesn’t work.

What happens if I’ve made a mistake, or I trip, or do something that ruins the experience for a user?

Is the experience ruined or did it not go as you planned? What I teach in my intro burlesque classes is to just keep moving. I will teach them 30-45 seconds of choreography and then I have them just keep moving to the rest of the song after the planned choreography is done. This is laying the foundation to develop the ability and confidence to just keep going when you have things go wrong. I have used this skill in dance competitions, work and at home with my child.

If you forget your routine, trip over your own feet, or audience just isn’t feeling it, you just keep moving. You don’t get to walk off stage if something minor goes wrong. Just like you don’t get to exit a project if it fails. This photo of me mid-performance is right when I lost my prop. I can’t just stop in the middle and go find my lost prop. I had to roll with it, and for me that means making a goofy face while adjusting my outfit, looking for my lost business card props, making it look intentional, and not pausing to overthink what I am doing. I have trained countless hours to make my mistakes look unnoticeable to the audience, but sometimes I just play them up as part of the act like I did here in this instance.

Now we can’t make every mistake we make as a UX designer or developer look intentional (it's not a bug it's a feature), but we can take it as a learning experience. We just keep moving forward. Did your design/program totally flop? Why? What do you need to do differently in your process to succeed next time? How can you re-engage with your audience? Does that re-engaging look like a new direction? For example, a physical pamphlet vs a website. Re-engaging might look like scrapping the whole project and just starting over, and that's ok. We need to learn when to scrap a project instead of spending all our time trying to make a broken idea work. We might want to go back to evaluating our audience's needs and try again.

Play with existing information

Something that every good performer considers is using what is already in the space they are performing in. Stairs, curtains, chairs, and the audience are all things you can use to enhance the experience you are creating for the audience. Draping yourself across chairs, slowly descending the stairs, are things you can do to make the experience feel more intimate.

How do I apply this outside of performing? While designing or developing anything, I will consider what they already have. Do they have an existing website? What do they love about it? Can you work it into the new product? Using elements that they already have and love and just updating them is a fantastic way to integrate something the user is already familiar with.

Using the above items has helped me grow as a designer and developer

Understanding how to implement the skills I have learned as a burlesque dancer has helped me grow tremendously as a developer and designer. Adaptability has become my middle name. I went from someone who genuinely struggled with change, to someone who is extremely comfortable with it all thanks to burlesque.