Designing the Emotional Ergonomics of Cyberspace with Shuya Gong

today is going to be a talk about emotional ergonomics what it means to me to design in cyberspace and this is going to be a little bit of a different one it's not quite so nft Dao web 3 Focus but I do think that it connects and it's something really important for all of us UI ux designers in the room to consider and developers to really start to think about how do you design experiences inside of web3 that are super usable that are super emotional that are really relevant to people and so a little bit about myself I'm an interaction designer at we3.com and a systems designer at Ideo and what that meant is that my work has spanned everything from the original brands for good and gather at Target to some of the work around branding for a lens to Astra Port as well as the refi orb so if you've seen any of these projects today come talk to us happy to chat where these come from and what our process looks like but throughout web3 throughout web 2 throughout even not digital products something that I keep coming back to time and time again every time I'm thinking about design whether it's cyberspace or physical products is great design connects function with feelings something that you're trying to do out in the world something that you're trying to get your users to do whether that's payment whether that's to buy an nft whether that's to save the Penguins there are feelings attached to those things and those aren't just things that you feel inside your body so those things that are super visceral in the way that you're interacting with your screen and the way that you're interacting with objects in the way that you're interacting with the rest of the world and so does anyone remember back when search engines looked like this okay yes this is this is a little bit back in the day there's a reason why this search engine did not take off why because you're trying to find something and I'm looking at this and I'm looking at so much chaos I'm like what am I supposed to input where am I supposed to put something in my hunch for why Google actually became one of the greatest search engines in the world not necessarily because it was first to Market but it was because they took that Insight of this is a whole bunch of chaos and what our user is trying to do is feel like they are looking for something and they are able to find it very very quickly and simply and that is what you get in the very very first version of the Google home page 1999 not so much has changed and so when we look at this this is sort of my understanding of what the heck emotional ergonomics are and what they're doing in cyberspace is how you feel about the screens that you're seeing and before we dive into what emotional ergonomics are perhaps it's a little bit helpful to go through and think about where else ergonomics shows up in our lives so how many people have ever come across this chair or sat in this chair okay you've sat in it does anyone know what this chair is you just shout it out I'll read you those Eames Hermann Miller it is 799 very expensive chair they are usually found in art museum cafes and the reason why is because this chair is incredibly uncomfortable to sit in about 15 minutes in and the reason for that is because it is not meant to be physically ergonomic it's meant to be something that you sit in and you feel super uncomfortable after a little bit of time so you keep it moving they're found in a lot of public spaces that are meant to look nice but they are not designed for comfort and so in the industrial era in the Industrial Age physical ergonomics is something that was super important in productivity in economics and getting people to behave and move in a certain way and that showed up mainly in the format of handles when Factory workers were working with physical interfaces there was this moment where it behooved the company to give you something that was a little bit easier to work with with your body so that you could work more hours so that you could spend more time being productive now when we move into the information age we start to think about mental ergonomics it's not just in your body anymore it's not just moving handles it's not just sitting into something it's about how you're able to understand and have information transferred to you in the quickest and fastest way possible so we're going to do a little bit of an experiment here I want you to get ready to look at the next slide and when you fall for it I'm not even going to say if because I'm pretty sure it's a win situation when you fall for it raise your hands get ready here we go three two one ah okay all right all right yes yes you will read this first and this and then this one and you will read this one last you fell for it because by Design what you are ux designers generally designers are doing is they're very very very good at understanding how do I make something mentally ergonomic for you and that's what we've had in our age of screens and our age of things that are a little bit more static in our age of advertising and so now this question of like what the heck are emotional ergonomics and what does it mean to start designing for them in cyberspace is this when you see something like this what is the feeling that you get shout it out anxiety wow amazing perfect didn't even have to set you up for that one everyone most people say anxiety and when you are interacting with your phone when you are looking at when you're literally bowing to your phone every single day and that feeling that you have of anxiety comes up over and over again or that feeling of dopamine rush comes up because you're doing infinite stroll because you're doing pull down to release those are feelings that have no body they are stuck in your screen and you're feeling those things inside and it eventually makes the internet a very not ergonomic place to be and so one of my favorite things that I've started to see in New Age interaction design perhaps is this phenomenon of going beyond the device it's saying instead of just looking into your device and designing all of your interactions in there you have this ability now to think about your device as an actual object to interact with so if you want to go to humanrecordplayer.com or scan this QR code you can try it out right now but I'm going to try it here we'll see if this actually works but Weezer dropped the latest album in audio's a little bit terrible let's save this link to do later but what you end up having to do is to play This Record you have to physically move your phone as of you the human being are a record player and I call this category of new interaction design dancing with your devices and I think what it does is it takes that experience of something that's just solely inside your screen something that isn't really affecting your body at all into something that you have to physically move you have to physically interact you have to physically feel the results of your interactions and so something very interesting I think started happening in the 80s up until today is that our physical objects very rapidly started to disappear into the screen everything that we had that we could interact with started to go into the desktop our memories our Calendars our books our I don't know how sunglasses made it in there but we'll we'll give that one a go everything starts to be compressed and compiled into the screen and so you might ask yourself this question now what else is there left to put into the screen and with the dawn of the metaverse perhaps what we realize is that it's really not a matter of putting more things into the screen we're at this moment in time where we're actually looking through the screen and augmenting reality through it and what does that mean it starts to see a moment where we're not necessarily designing just for our realities that are built around us we're now also designing for realities that are augmented realities that are altered and the feelings that people have when there's a break in reality is often very very uncomfortable so I love the Gartner hype curve whenever this drops it's like basically my equivalent of the Super Bowl I think it is the Super Bowl for designers um back in 2016 augmented reality was here in the trough of disillusionment what happens when something is in the trough of disillusionment it usually means that a lot of startups in that space start to close down because they can't figure out how to make it into the plateau of productivity who remembers what Snapchat was doing in 2016. lenses most of you have forgotten and you would not be blamed for that because snaps tacticals were a thing in 2016 and most people looked at this and rolled their eyes again back in the trial of disillusionment right but when we look at what happened to augmented reality when we thought about it as maybe an eye rolls maybe kind of a joke when we look at the hype curve for 2022 augmented reality isn't even on this graph over the course of seven years can I jump out seven years augmented reality went from trout to disapprovement disillusionment into not even plateau of productivity because I would say if you were to figure out what is the best camera company out there right now I would make the argument that it's Snapchat the reason why snapcam maybe we could put us pause it is the best camera out there right now is because it's moved into cameras being a capture of reality to cameras now augmenting reality and that moment of going from capture to augmentation means that the feelings that we have about reality are perhaps a little funky is what you're seeing real or not and how do we design for Grounded truth and grounded reality so I want you to take a moment right now close your eyes I'm not gonna do anything weird to you I promise close your eyes and really take a moment to think about what you value what is it that you value let an image come up let a feeling come up let a memory come up all right open your eyes Did anyone say money it's fine if you did literally literally a store of value Did anyone say nfts that's okay too that's totally fine no judgment here who said your family who said your job your career your sense of purpose in life who said a physical object is there a family heirloom or something that's there the things that you value are things that you have feelings for and they're typically things that you want to protect and so if you're introducing something new if you're introducing a new function a new premise of a new technology into a space you need to design feelings into what you're doing there so that people want to actually protect that people want to have feelings for it and so now let's take a look at this hyperbiga in 2022 web 3 is right at the peak of inflated expectations and nfts are right about going into the trial of disillusionment folks this is what we call a bear Market that is exactly what that trough means how long it'll take to move into slope of Enlightenment Plateau product City I don't really know but I have a feeling that better design experience that people have feelings about that people actually want is going to get us there a whole lot quicker so who remembers this app okay the eye beer the eye beer was this funny little app that you would download it on your phone and all you could do was pretend to drink a beer and that was it does anyone know at the peak of this app how much money it was making per day because of downloads this app was 299. all right at the peak of downloads the I beer app was breaking in twenty thousand dollars a day nfts don't look so weird now do they when you look at this comparison so I would pause it and say where we are right now in terms of nfts and web 3 where design is where we're understanding the capabilities of how to get people to interact with what we're building here is actually where we are back in the day with the eye beer there is a lot of time and runway for us as designers to get into the game and understand how to translate these abstract experiences into things that you can actually interact with so web3 this is web 3 is not just about the next internet my understanding of web 3 is very much that it is the dawn of a cyber physical era where physical assets are coming on chain this matters in terms of refi whether you're thinking about card and credits or natural assets this is also perhaps a little bit around the internet of things but I really really think about this moment as us looking at the internet not as something that's just inside your screen inside your pocket but all around us the Cyber physical era that we're about to enter into means that we are trying to understand how to design for a different physics it's no longer necessarily that this chair is just a chair is just a chair it may have sensors in it and be able to understand a lot more about you and the availability of a space Also I heard this term cyber physical from this developer named Supreme in Oakland I fell in love with it and I really would like us to move towards cyber physical instead of saying fidgetal so as designers in the room can we do that like as an agreement yeah like no more no more digital it sounds like a bit of a disease we're doing cyber physical it's happening okay here we go so one of my moments when I was watching the social dilemma which you've seen as a documentary is it's it's a good documentary it's also one of those things you're like oh okay all right here we go that's the internet we live in the thing that stuck out to me the most was when Aza roskin was introduced and many people were introduced they had this title underneath the inventor of the infinite scroll and some other folks had the inventor of pull down to release some other people had the inventor of the like button and there was this moment in watching this documentary that was like you know what I actually just really want to be the inventor of a new interaction like I actually I actually just want someone to interact with a screen or to interact with something digital in a completely new way and so this is my invitation for all of us today we're about to go a little bit more into like Workshop interacting mode and we are going to invent something that perhaps perhaps becomes the equivalent of something as important as the infinite scroll in web3 but hopefully here's my other caveat I don't really have any screens or stats on this because I just find it depressing a lot of the interactions that we designed into the web 2 world have had a lot of negative effect on people's emotions and I would hope that we enter into this phase of Designing for cyber physical and as we think about emotional ergonomics to really be careful about the ways that we're designing new user experiences and new user interface because particularly in web3 this is a space where not only are you looking at Social Capital you're also looking at a large amount of financial Capital right that moment you get a notification because some price went up or down is not just oh someone liked my photo it's also oh my God my life savings maybe just went down the toilet so there's a lot of care and a lot of intentionality I think in how we design our new interactions on the internet so here's our here's our interactivity piece if you're really not feeling like socializing that is A-Okay you can do this by yourself as well but highly recommend you get into groups of two or three if you're sitting by yourself and you don't want to interact with other people I 100 get it that is okay but I'll give you a second turn around say hello to the person next to you give them a name turn your chair get friendly whatever you might want to do it's totally fine if you want to do the solo I'm all right with it but for the next 12 minutes we're going to do this as a little bit of a group activity so here we go okay two minutes two minutes in your groups I want to know who who are the people that will be using your web 3 products is it busy mothers future phone users Bankers grandmas a family that shares a phone so the whole wallet thing being the only thing that's on your phone each person has one might not be a thing who is your person that you imagine using a web 3 product in your mind two minutes go for it it can be yourself but I highly recommend you push out into somebody else two minutes and we'll do a little bit of a shareback all right you got about a minute left I'm gonna do a little bit of crowd work so don't be scared if I'm coming if I'm coming towards you but I want to hear who you're designing for you got about 20 seconds left who is the person that will be using your web 3 products are we ready here we go I'm sorry for the cold it's called who is the person we're going with um like um folk musicians like age like 25 to like 40.

folk musicians h2540 amazing I can't wait to I can't wait to see like the service that you're thinking of for them all right how about here people involved in small clubs people involved in small clubs amazing local communities I love that all right how about here in the front what do we got independent film directors independent field we got a lot of artists in this room I like this so much you have one uh no code designers and developers no co-designers and developers we love that we love to sign it for ourselves oh so sorry okay over here was that a hand wave over here here we go all right low income population to include people struggling with mental health and substance abuse amazing low-income populations fantastic okay we've got a spread here so the who is super important I think it's really crucial that we start with who because just saying that it's anybody doesn't really work right the emotional capacity of different users looks very different the way that they live the way that they work the way that they interact with the internet and with their devices is going to look very different so keep your person in mind we're gonna do four minutes on why why are they using it what are they trying to do this might look like sending money back home might look like sending out a contract taking on a loan we're talking about use cases and it's okay if these use cases aren't quite possible yet let's say in design mode for a little bit if your developer brain is going like but but with the aegon layer part of it isn't quite it's fine give me a use case think about the use case first and what is your person actually going to be using web 3 for four minutes to think about that and we'll do a little bit of crowd work or we might just have you shout it out from the audience but four minutes back in your groups take a minute all right it's like maybe about two more minutes all right I'm gonna I'm gonna Wander over to see what's uh what the crowd says are you guys ready to share why they're using it all right here we go here we go why are they using this first of all the Persona we chose as Grandma's okay um we were thinking of applications to help grandmas communicate with their grandchildren we're also thinking of Health Care applications um Grandma Dao also came up um I love it Grandma Adele watch for the the alpha you heard here at Grandma Adele but really health insurance I think is one of those things that um it would be really interesting to design for because you've got privacy you've got different amounts of digital literacy you've got different amounts of comfort with screens and devices anyone else who's like dying to share their their use case their why if not I'm gonna move us on we're running short on time okay what what are they feeling when they do this two minutes on this how does your person feel while they do this it's okay if it's a negative feeling sometimes you have to design in a little bit of friction sometimes what you're doing is intentionally trying to counteract that feeling of something negative is it that they're feeling fear is it that they're feeling Delight is it relief are they feeling really productive is it a little bit of frustration take two minutes just to pick the core feeling there might be a lot of different feelings that your user is going to feel during this moment of interaction but what is the One Core one that feels like the loudest of all of your feelings that you're feeling towards us two minutes take a little bit of time now think about it here we go I'm gonna move us along for time here take about one more minute all right I'm gonna come on over here do we have a feeling for your core user it gives usually one word the one word feeling that that you're feeling secure secure oh we don't hear that a lot when we're talking about financial applications but yes I absolutely want to feel secure when I'm transferring money or doing something else okay we got a hand on the back here let me walk all the way over there's low income households how are we feeling here yeah yeah so that it feels easy and it's actually a solution that's better than the previous solution so for our situation that um they're getting access to Mental Health Services and to have like their intake process be more graceful and useful so to feel easy Easy Feeling easy I love that feeling a lot smoother feeling a lot more convenience feeling like this is something I can do I can crush this task that I'm trying to do all right amazing so here comes the hardest part and maybe the weirdest but we're gonna give it a go you do not have eight minutes because I've only got five minutes left on the time I'm Gonna Save a little bit of time for myself but take four minutes how does that feeling get embodied what does easiness feel like what does security feel like what does Fear maybe even feel like take a moment to think about that maybe grab your phones maybe take out your laptops think about what that is like with your group do a little bit of interaction stand up move around think beyond the screen don't forget about the ivr and really get into what your physical interaction to express that emotion for your person to do the thing they might do yet I've really I really wanted to see someone do like a transfer of money by like drawing a Sigil with your phone or like doing something with a magic wand but how do you go beyond the inside of your phone screen as the only platform for interaction and actually think about your phone as a device that you can use it to control other things so four minutes on the clock give it a go I want to see your phones out I want to see you facing each other I want to see you trying stuff out and we'll see what happens here we go a little bit a little bit more activity for you over here and get into a little body storming here what does it look like to use your phone as a wand what does high-fiving your phone screens look like what if your seed phrase was 12 movements that corresponded to words love love that group over there with their phones out they're trying to figure out like how does how does how do we how do you create the feeling of security what does this look like incredible okay I've got two minutes left on the clock so I'm gonna speed us along a little bit so that we save time for one thing that I want to do at the end here but don't forget your interactions I actually would love to see what you come up with because one of the questions that I have here is like we're very much still thinking about our devices and what is possible right now but I kind of love this tweet it was from yesterday from bcgx and it's about an AI nose and I really was thinking about this like all right so smell is one of the deepest senses that we have that's attached to memory and we keep talking about you know how do we help users remember their seed word how do we help people understand and be able to like activate those 12 magical words to recover their wallet and it just it just is one of those crazy ideas of like well what if your seed phrase was a 12 layered candle that released 12 different fragrances and those fragrances were things that helped you remember what it might be what it might unlock these kinds of interactions maybe are several years off into the future but these are the ones that are so interesting to me because as we're designing the next wave of the internet as we're designing the Dawn and this era of the Cyber physical I really don't want to live in a future that is shiny screens slick interactions without any kind of embodied feeling without being able to smell things without being able to taste things without being able to you know all of the pleasures of being alive and a human and having all of these sensors on our body I don't want to lose those and so for all of you here today thank you so much for spending the time and the energy to Think Through like what would interactions with our phone be but it also push you a little bit to think about this concept of a multi-sensorial intranet of how you start to engage all of your different senses and the ways that your body can interact with the Real Worlds now in a little bit of cyber physicality so to sum this all up and to give a little bit of a takeaway here is that toolkits are public goods right the moment that material UI came out it really allowed a lot of developers and designers to scale up and speed up their process and they're really really important to scaling new design patterns which I think all of web 3 is all of web 3 is an incredibly new design language and design pattern to start to get into and to be honest we don't know either what those new design patterns are and also we don't quite know what those things are embodied as and so there's more to add to the typical UI kit that we have today at our um at our availability in figma files because it's like using only a web 2 skin when we've got an entire web3 body so I push you to think through what are actually these new toolkits what are the public goods that as designers you start to create and you put out into the world so that we're able to scale a delightful design language around web3 something that really understands and pushes us to think about cyber physicality and so here's my invitation to you if you would like to make an emotionally ergonomic interaction design toolkit with me and uh we'll figure out the words for that later because it's quite a mouthful we'll ship it as a public good because public goods are good and here's what we're gonna do um scan this QR code it will take you to a telegram group and then we'll have everybody in one group together um I may throw some design prompts in we maybe will do some ask for what was the interaction that you came up with maybe we'll do a couple of Zoom meetings maybe we'll do a couple of just teasers and prompts in there every from time to time you can leave and unsubscribe at any time but I'd really like to know throughout the course of 2023 what we actually end up creating together and what is the toolkit what is the new thing I'll come back to this slide in a minute but how do we go from something that looks like this which is maybe how a lot of our web3 applications look like today truly they look just like web 2 applications but what do we end up creating together that starts to embody the internet and starts to give us a feeling of emotional ergonomics I'm Shia gong you can find me at we3.com or on the internet at oh mygong thank you so much for making stuff with me today I hope you had a really great time and I'll see you again in cyberspace [Applause]