Over the past 9 months there has been constant chatter about the technologies emerging from our quarantine period. It’s clear that the way we do everything could change pretty soon. From how we work, and how we bank, to how we play and interact with each other and express ourselves digitally… we’re on the precipice of a massive shift. But it still feels like something is missing.

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TLDR :-) Psychology, edtech, learning experience design, and game design can help us find new ways to design new experiences in a way that allows us to build more equitable relationships with our devices.

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Looking around at some of the most popular sites and applications we use, they’re all the same. Minimalist clean lines, white backgrounds, sans serif fonts, flat illustrations, gradients, and “tech blue”. Molly Mielke neatly summarizes this phenomenon as she details the history of software design that brought us to where we are today. In Why We Crave Software With Style Over Branding she talkes about the development of software aesthetics and how the dot com boom came with a flood of stylistic opinions but “Fast forward to today and tools are incentivized to expand their market by attempting to solve everything at once. But this means that the market for any given piece of software is often anyone and everyone.” I couldn’t stop thinking about this. To some degree this sounded like something that I’ve long heard to be at the core of experience design. Guided by studied, tested, and established best practices and patterns— software should be intuitive, familiar and usable for anyone. But maybe that’s part of the problem? Maybe not the problem but at least the dangers of an over simplification.

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A few months ago Facebook announced the launch of a VR remote work application where users can host interactive meetings with avatars of themselves. This was just one of many announcements over the past several months that at least in part, were a result of the abrupt and seemingly permanent shift to remote work. Of all the announcements and think pieces I saw on the future of work, What stood out to me most was a twitter thread by Drew Harry (@drewwww). Using Second Life, the online game, as his example he compares screen grabs of a scene from the app today to the same scene from over a decade ago. The concept, layout, and design of the virtual interactions are identical with only updates to resolution and decorative details. “It’s all about making technology disappear and recreate the experience of physical co-presence. It’s a failure of imagination that something better is possible.” While there is massive opportunity to use technology to really impact how we work, we haven’t quite figured out how to design so that these technologies fit in our lives in a way that makes a difference.

From the Wild West that was software design 20-30 years ago, things have greatly changed. So much of the practice has been standardized and is increasingly governed by established best practices and set precedence— see Nielsen Norman Group and every medium post ever. The emergence of skeuomorphism and relating functionality to real-world counterparts greatly assisted in the early widespread adoption of technology. By simplifying and abstracting away what was making these devices work, they became approachable for the average person. ‘Users’ didn’t need to necessarily know what was happening to the information they were exchanging with the system, just the steps to take to get to the outcome they wanted. At a surface level this has been a major feat for efficiency and “intuitive” design, but lately I’ve been starting to wonder if our reliance on over-simplification, familiar patterns, styles, and concepts might be an inhibitor to the long term evolution and sustainability of digital product design.

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Web3 may be one of the most cut and dry examples of how these newer technologies and experiences demand a new approach to design. One of my favorite newsletters is Packy McCormick’s Not Boring. In his piece from a few weeks ago, The Interface Phase  Packy makes a wonderful introduction to how interfaces have evolved in response to infrastructure and what we can hope to expect in the future. “While web3 apps like NFTs, DAOs, and DeFi are gaining popularity, we’re still interacting with web3 through web2 interfaces. If history is a guide, we’re going to need new web3-native interfaces and spaces to bring hundreds of millions of people into the ecosystem.” Ignoring for a moment the handful of terms that may not be familiar if you are not familiar with web3 (This is a great Web 3.0 primer by David Hoang) and crypto, Packy makes it clear that with web3 comes the introduction of a ton of new technologies, concepts, and experiences that can’t be effectively communicated using the fixed viewport flat screens that have become the hallmark of the web2 interface. We’re going to need an approach that not only reimagines digital (or blended or wherever we end up) experiences but also helps us to understand what we are actually doing when engaging in these new experiences.

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This very long-winded thought came about because of the constant posts I’ve seen on how web3 and crypto need better design to truly become mainstream. What excites me most about this is the massive opportunity space it could create. I’ve long been thinking about how design should be approaching the need to create entirely new experiences for new technologies, but also how we can educate new users on what these technologies are and what is happening when they interact with them. I’ve been wondering if our focus on abstracting away the complexity and making things as “easy” to use as possible is what developed our one-sided, sometimes addicting and harmful relationship with technology. I feel there’s an opportunity to focus of designing in a way that will help to provide people with a deeper understanding of what they are interacting with so that we may build more mutual relationships with the devices and platforms that define our lives. In doing so we could also find a way to bring back the opinionated styles and delightful experiences of the early internet.

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To start shifting my own design practice to embrace new ideas and experiences, I am starting with learning more about how we perceive, understand, form opinions, and learn. Leveraging theories from education and cognitive psychology, I’d like to find ways to more effectively represent and communicate complex information, rather than hiding it or hastily likening it to something distantly comparable. Looking to edtech, learning experience design, and game design as role models, I want to stop defaulting to the path of least resistance by making the alternative paths more engaging, rewarding, pleasing, intriguing, and so much more.

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everyone wants to hide the blockchain, but i 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 the blockchain (@nnnnicholas)

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I don’t yet have a concrete approach, and I don’t think there should ever be a one-size-fits-all framework, but I do believe these could be the first few steps for how we break away from sterile tech design and bring back stylistic opinion in software. It’s possible to maintain standard for usability while creating a more sustainable future for the digital products we design as we reimagine the future of how we do everything.

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Even though web3 is one of the more exciting examples, I want to emphasize that this mindset applies across the board, at varying degrees, to all experiences we design (acknowledging that nothing is black and white, nuances and complexity are what makes all of this so fun and interesting— some use cases clearly make more sense than others). As Packy notes, interface design follows phases. We will always come back with new best practices that fit the use cases we’re creating for, but that doesn’t have to be the end all be all. By designing for learnability we can continually test out new styles and patterns to revive the excitement of novel digital experiences.

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