Why Web3 Developers Should Care About Design Josh Mauldin mod; Emma Hsieh Artium; Lindsey Thrift Git

later this year so hi glad you're all here uh so let's talk about why web 3 developers should care about design and the first question i have for the panel is so let's talk a little bit more about design and product principles as web 3 begins to mature and yeah go for it i can i can take the first one um so i think universal design why should we designed for inclusivity and like who are we designing for and again why should engineers care about design um so universal design it is a practice that defined by a group of not just designers from different across different fields but also um researchers and engineers in 1997 and the principle was defined as that we should define we should design for products or interactions environments for all humans to the greatest extent with no with no additional adaptability so how does that tie to web3 we've actually come a long way since the the web 3d term was first coined by gavin wood probably about like over eight years ago um and he in his medium article that he says why we need what three and he considered that as being the foundation of freedoms of individuals and so why well who are these individuals and these people can be all kinds of different doesn't matter all their age old or young different backgrounds for culture and different language that they use and also whether they have disabilities or not and here i kind of want to bring out like call out that disabilities it shouldn't just be a physical personal health problem especially in redesigning for a product what that means is actually it's a mismatched before between interactions between the users and their environments that they were in it and this is actually defined by how world health organization also says this disability is not just a health problem it is a complex phenomena reflecting the interaction between features of a personal body and features of the society in which they live so that's a little bit of like disability that i wanted to call out um but going back to that's a long way going back to the principles if you google universal design you will find seven principles out there but um today i wanted to talk about like just two and the first one would be equitable use being fair and impartial avoid stigmatizing and segregating users and i wonder if you guys want to talk about anything about this or well i'll diverge a bit and say like the design principles and bringing forward being human-centered and what we're working on i think the evolution of web3 is we've been deep in the infrastructure space what can we accomplish in the innovation of the actual tech and the infrastructure what undergirds what we take to users and today we're reaching a space where we're leveling up from mainnet to layer twos we're interacting at that space you know dapps have been common are becoming common space there's so much more available to us we're able to move faster and it's introducing this new problem like what should we work on when it's not obvious that we're just trying to figure out whether or not that we can make the tech work it's whether or not it's worth working on will someone use this is this a problem anyone actually has um we're moving from uh asking whether or not we can build a solution to whether or not the solution has a problem and i think we'll begin to see an opportunity to actually find problems and build solutions for it when you're you know coming from web 2 space to web 3 we've got frameworks and things that abstract all the complexity of the infrastructure away to a point where today you get a group of web devs together and they can just build a solution to a problem like that because the tools are there and i think we're quickly approaching that that point in web3 and this is when we begin to see the need for skill sets like product design user experience design and product management i'll keep this short because i think that was actually pretty well covered there i would just i would only add to that plus one that 100 i would only add to that that um let's see in 2018 to i mean basically if you've looked at sort of the evolution of the space right like as the space has grown um we've started designing for kind of a broader and broader set of people whenever we first started we were developers building for developers right i am my own user therefore i don't have to do as much research i don't have to do as much design i don't have to like prove out these concepts in order for web3 to deliver on the i guess the promise right like we're all dreamers we're all aspirationally building these things that we think are going to impact society in a positive way that's what we thought web 2 was going to be and it kind of didn't deliver that's what our hope is that web 3 is going to deliver in order for us to do that we're going to have to be designing for everybody not just ourselves not just the people that we know or are in our you know the one room over that we can do that we have to design for everybody so that's all i'll add to that i thought that was really well put um it makes me want to ask another question around like what are some practical ways that developers can start to think more about the regular humans that they want to to pull in the cool people as it were the what the ones that haven't installed metamask yet um so i would say to start i mean i think one of the it's one of those things where if you are how do you like how do you start achieving results at the gym you start going every day um it's incremental i'm a big believer in incrementalism it's like really uh i think it's tempting to look at like the product spaces or the products that like have it all together like git coin like already you guys are amazing um and think like well how do we do that how do we get from like zero to a thousand um and i would say that like first just start thinking about involving designers earlier in the process if you don't if you have higher designers higher designers if you haven't i would start making time for a technical review like actually like building design and research into your process and understand that it's a i don't know it's it's it's consistent effort applied um towards a certain direction this is kind of how i think about involving design and sort of those the way in which to involve everybody i actually want to engage in some user research right now because i feel like i'm talking to a black box but there are humans in front of me i would love like a quick like poll of the room how many folks in here are developers builders cool cool how many of you are designers product people rad i'd like to introduce a concept that i think of as balanced team um this comes from a group of folks i used to work with but i think it applies largely as we move into this dao space the idea being that we all bring a set of disciplines and this room has a really nice well-balanced team um as we bring product thinking design um and engineers into the same room amongst other disciplines that i think we'll start to discover what is a web 3 balance team look like i think it will involve community managers folks who are deeply embedded in what's happening in the community as we build up dows and you've got tens of thousands of community members who are influencing your roadmap in the direction of where you're going how do we distill that what does that look like so i think bringing these teams together where we begin to deeply understand one another's practice i like to talk about t-shaped people i as a product manager think about think deeply about where does what we're building fit into the goals we're trying to achieve what are the outcomes that are aiming for and what's what's standing in our way what risks should i be buying down as designers you think deeply about who are the users what are their problems am i solving for them and as developers and builders you often think deeply about whether or not this is feasible is it achievable should i be doing that and then being t-shaped is that i understand well enough what the what the disciplines on the other side of me do really well so as i'm moving about in my efforts i know when to pull in a designer it's less about having a process and being rigid and more about understanding what we bring to the team collectively so that you can lean into one another as a dev can be like okay so i'm building the solution and this is what i understood but then i bumped into a user i was in a user interview i was helping someone install our product i was dog footing what we used and i realized this doesn't solve the use case and then you reach out to your design team or your designer on your team say like i think we need to dig into this some more i mean you begin to lean into one another it's less of this like rigid handoff between disciplines and more about understanding one another and coming together to build collectively i i want to poke at something here for a moment it sounds a bit like you were talking about like cross-discipline pairing and i've experienced that and i just wanted to say that it's really truly magical when you're hanging out with an engineer or a pm and i'm a designer and they're like oh hey did you did you think about this thing and it saves me several hours of work saves them several swears at me um yeah just plus one it's a it's a solid solid movie i actually know emma's been doing this so maybe you could talk a bit about um like across the swim pairing and web 3. yeah honestly i think like uh josh kind of bring out like sometimes when i'm you we are very easily just kind of design or like work in our own silos and you're pounding like kind of guessing what the engineers doing how are they doing this thing or like what is the objective that the pms are doing while you're designing things um for my case so and i found that just pairing with them it literally saves hours and also like it's fun we have fun together and then kind of in the process and we get to know each other better so absolutely we're cool on that yeah so we we've got about five minutes left um yeah this stuff really goes fast um so i i guess the last question i'll have for each of you is just in in a sentence or two talk about why it matters to care about user experience i'll start um so i think user experience because the one thing that we kind of been talking about uh i think right now like a lot of space like people are kind of talking about like we're gonna be completely different um from black too but i think what we actually need to do is like consider because people are people we don't human psychology doesn't really just change because we are in the era of web 3. um so what we really should do is learn from what is not working what's harming in the web to and avoid that but also learn from what's actually working what's try and true a lot of people put hours years of um practice into making this thing best for humans in general so there's definitely things that we can learn and build upon and improves upon can you repeat the question again i got very into what emma was talking about sorry i have to look back at my notes because i was doing the same thing yes uh i believe i was asking in a sentence or two talk about why people should care about a good job why why i was like i was like humans that's why and i forgot the question um yeah i mean i think i i just huge plus one to what emma shared um and i and i think the other piece is um we're reaching a stage where if adoption becomes real we have to abstract the complexity away from the user um i don't know how many of you got to attend andrew yang's talk earlier today um but just like the inspiration of realizing like the real impact um of what we're building like we're past again like keep coming back because we're past the point of just building infrastructure to the point of like delivering impact to the people and the communities and and our like human infrastructure that we desire and to do that we've got to abstract away the complexity of the technology and user experience design does that it begins to understand what's the user behavior and how do we make this a graceful introduction for anyone where installing a meta mask wallet isn't painful you don't have to read developer docs to use um the product right like it's it's making that motion towards mass adoption and making it inclusive for anyone who wants to come in and use the tools and products i'm going to swing sweet i think i started the talk on the aspirational i'm going to swing it all the way back over to pragmatic why do you care about design it's an existential it's existential to your projects um we like what we've seen like at least four funds raise a billion dollars plus massive amount of capital is going to be deployed web 2 is waking up they're entering the space um they just they employ massive design teams they are already thinking in this direction and it's going to be important for us in order to stay competitive in this space in order to continue to shape the future we're going to have to continue to to design for those people right so design in my opinion provides two different things right it provides aid it de-risks current design decisions so it's going to save your your dev team time you're not going to spend six months building something that is may not fit the right use case or be quite right it also provides asymmetric insights right so if you and five other products are building the same thing and only one of you talks to your users you're going to have ideas and you're going to have kind of like strategic understanding of those problems in a way that the other competitors don't so those are kind of like my let's just say it totally saves you money hiring a designer saves you money [Laughter] yeah so any other closing comments uh yeah actually um i think right now one thing that i want to call is that i think right now in where where we are in web street right now is we are the things are made by the people but it's not really for the people yet um especially for people who doesn't really understand why threes yes so that's how do we make things that's for people and that is by working with engineers in prom and have a balanced team really i also just wanted to say in regards to andrew yang's talk i got to tell him a dad joke right beforehand and that's how you get him to stop smiling i didn't know if anyone knew but now you do we have a couple minutes left are there any questions from the audience