Evolving Design in Web3 through Open Source Principles

Transcript

same things is kind of what I wanted to mention which in the center we have a lot in common we care about permissions collaboration we're really open about collaboration you know ethics and principles and kind of how we want to give agency to the user or the end user choice Linux you know same concept and so I thought about this and I thought why is it that in the space it's really interesting for a designer to be in here and you have to kind of learn some new resources and so these are kind of the driving forces I'll start with new solo designers so when I joined the space in like 2017 first there was not a lot of designers so this was like a hundred percent new

solo designers now like two years later luckily I did some research and kind of got around a hundred and sixty designers in the space there's actually more just in this research I did and about 25 percent are kind of solo designers and it's really interesting because in this space like it's not that designers are not wanting to come into the space I'll talk about that a little bit later but the idea that there are these new solo designers means you're coming into a new space you're usually the only designer in a company unless you're like coinbase or a larger project and you're trying to learn everything at once pretty intimidating right so we thought about

this and I go okay so how can we actually like then learn from each other as designers and then how can we actually increase the interaction that we have between developers and key stakeholders and designers and then like sprinkle little design value and say how can we teach or spread that design processes in like a kind of a tricky kind of quiet way and at Def Con in 2018 was the first year we had a design track which was like amazing right and being part of it we one of the ideas that people had was like what if you had we had a UX audit and so two years later and we did 74 audits in a combination of eight days we learned a lot and the best

thing was like loved it I love this quote because it was like wow well received a one-on-one lesson on mixers I could share my experience in setting up UX research win-win there were designers who are really loving the interaction that they get to work on different projects the UX audits were format format in a way where you get one-on-one time like an hour with a designer as a project and the designer doesn't have to be a designer in your project at all or even have to do anything with the project you're working on in this case she didn't even know what a mixer was but then they could collaborate and talk about design processes or like work on a piece of that deserve whatever the product or DAP

or whatever they want to work on how to increase that my best story here that I loved from last year was met amass designers the user researchers and product designer worked with gnosis and they were both talking about onboarding to wallets so you can kind of see how in this space we're working through similar things but there wasn't really much of an opportunity before then to kind of talk about what we've been working on together turns out developers and founders loved it too so they're really loving the fact that they can get this kind of free resource and I'm happy to talk about that a little bit more and if you want to participate this year please ping me like we love how we love to set it up in

advance and you just kind of show up and you can see it was just like a crazy crazy room and so really interesting we're talking about these solo designers we kind of created a place which is these UX audits where people could interact with each other and then an interesting thing came up there was this idea of the fluidity across cross collaborations so this meaning considering the way we reorganize and what I mean by that is we actually started to create these like temporary collective working groups where projects would come up to me and say I actually need UX help too I want to look for a designer I have this project I have this need etc and so

in the case of the burner wallet factor a burner wallet we to redesign the experience of the app and so I pulled together a couple designers that Carl and Alex would work together but they had come up with a new kind of design for the app and the the wireframe and the UX and things like that and then in the different context a theorem gorg their Lily put together a bunch of artists and actually like came up with these like new designs that were adding to this website so you can see how it you'll see people who have never worked together or what never worked on a project together and then designers are all of a sudden collaborating and like re rearranging themselves to kind

of come work together and so my favorite thing is actually web 3 and web 3 open-source is a default so if you're working web 3 you probably must have open-source otherwise you're kind of like looked down upon right and so that kind of pushes designed to actually have open design processes design actually I should mention is already pretty open we talked to users all the time we encourage it but I love this quote from Javier who works on Eragon that said designers opening up about their work sharing it in a way that others will have the freedom to inspect remix and learn will propel a new way of collaborative opportunities so now we're

talking about we rearranging to work together but now what happens is we actually have open processes of tools like figma so figma is if you don't know a web-based design tool that developers are loving I learned that tool like in a hackathon in five minutes it was so easy it's super intuitive and the difference between that and like Adobe is that it is just like a digital like it's free anyone could use it try it it's fun and funny story is you'll see on this left here is Dylan we had Dylan as one of our UX Awards judges for Def Con and he is also a big fan of crypto but um but also he he's the creator and the co-founder

of figma so he understands what open-source InDesign could look like and is driving the tool that's actually allowing us to do so so the other option here this is the grin memba Wimble grin wallet and so you can see that they're they're just like putting their work in the open and anyone it's kind of like you can fork you can make a copy and like utilize it and have fun with it so the possibility of sharing is really endless this is really awesome this will happen like two day three days ago and so ideal collab ventures they actually did this interactive workshop on personal tokens and this is like figma in action people like certain things in there and

like drawing it so it's like crazy and you get to see what people are doing and you talk about it and so you can see why it's so easy for us to collaborate together and then I want to give a shout out to the deep work guys were right there in the background there and have also been doing some open processes in the other room they do an amazing job of this like live work in progress so I mentioned that design could feel like a black box sometimes like developers like yeah okay we're gonna get the designer to do that and the designer feels like they have to do everything by themselves well what happens is when you open you actually livestream they this is a YouTube clip from their YouTube video where they live stream the use research process the user story process they did like one live

stream per one they ran the design hackathon on staking UX and so what happens is then you invite others to work that process with you and it doesn't feel so much it doesn't feel so scary so the other aspect is Greenfield the interesting aspect is in this space like a lot of people come to it because there's this whole idea that we could re event everything we can redo anything reimagine all these things like possibilities are endless and that's awesome but actually design designers actually work really well and constraint and so I don't know maybe were traumatized from like no one ever giving us any freedom but we actually like when there's constraint so when there is no

constraint what we see is actually a desire for shared knowledge and language as well as this kind of standardization of UI and UX flows but backed by user research so this is why I really encourage anyone who hasn't seen any design processes to utilize them because what's awesome is they've already been kind of like secured by research designers tend to do use user research we don't like to kind of like make things up because we're really worried that it's gonna be a not great product and so that's the standardization of user research coming from Greenfield is is an example is like Christopher onna who's working on Manero I think he was maybe the first person I

saw that was really evangelizing this he this is his work on figma and he was sharing it and he was saying hey I worked on all this stuff at Manero like go ahead and like tell me what you think make some edits like work on it and and he started creating this like icon library and so this is like the understanding that anyone who wants to build on Manero or anyone who wants to build on like what kind of icons we have we have some shared knowledge so that you're not starting over and over and over again a good example of this is design systems if you don't know what a design system is it is a basically a library that has both design and code and so that it is a framework so the example here which you can't see because

it's actually larger than this there's so much worked here the rimmel team from consensus they did an awesome job where these are transaction state alerts so what was happening is you know everybody would go on to adapt and like okay I'm ready and then you're like did my transaction go through what happened is it am i ok it's like you go to a restaurant you pay with a credit card you don't just leave right the waiter goes you're good or here's your receipt like you you expect that there's like ok and then you're leaving and sometimes prior we didn't have that at all so sometimes you be like did I get it like where is it going and and so ramble did a bunch of user research and they start to standardize some of these

UX flows and saying like this is an alert you could give and that way also adapts who are building on top of it not only do you have some code and some some design but you actually now start to understand like thematically what you can do and what's happening in the space 2018 was a really big year for Design Systems Aragon also created one it was called lorikeets but actually what they started to do was they moved they decided that doing a kind of generic web 3 design system is pretty difficult and so they decided to to concentrate and like look at the amount of work they did it's like insane and anyone can go ahead like scan that QR code 'you can go in and check it

and like fork it create your own and so you're seeing that this sharing of understanding knowledge of systems is like it's happening it's already happening and a third a I mentioned the UX Awards what we wanted to do with the UX Awards was actually create like a signal that hey this is kind of what the narrative of this year is looking like this is what we kind of expect as good UX and so we had all design panelists we had designers who were like creating this oh and then and so we have like the winners and it was awesome argent is one of the winners who were like amazing and they came back this year as as one of

the judges so the last part is powerful technology so when we have really really big technology we tend to think about like especially now the impact of that technology and and the idea around like ethics and principles designers do this quite a bit but not necessarily written for and this is why I love this person Q who wants to remain anonymous but who created this like manifesto design manifesto around like they want to he she wanted to create a dhow and said this dow we always talk about a designer doubt but this person who actually it's gonna launch later with my new cartel I

think and a couple people but what they really care about is actually defining like why we want to work together and like what make what brings people here right community is starts because you have a shared value and you go hey I'm interested in that value or I'm interested in that mission and so you join that community and then you all of you guys work towards this thing it's the same as a co-op or things like that and so Taoism in some form like that and so attracting people to work with you through ethics and kind of these principles is really useful if you have not seen this talk please go see Kate he spoke at Def Con last year and the idea around ethics and the the the

responsibility that we have weapon like how design could be weaponized I know it's contentious but flash loans is it ethical or not all these things these kind of questions maybe when we start to think about it early on we can actually start to think about how we can build it into product or into protocol like really at a really early stage any theorem doubt or kind of did the same thing they created kind of these design principles to kind of expand how others can build upon the website already and so we've got this amazing amazing kind of group here but wait who's excited yeah yeah there you go okay but there's but design experience

still needs help so I talked about this research right like 160 designers awesome I tracked where they started or and and kind of where they ended up this year and only 58 percent and they're staying in web 3 14% kind of went back to up to it was like no more and then a couple are dabbling but and a couple of unknown they're kind of silently disappeared and I'm not talking about just like quiet people there people who legitimately used to be heads of designs and things like that are just like what happened and so we want to really improve designer experience is kind of why I'm here and if you're a developer stakeholders a majority of you guys are like encouraged and introduced design interactions super early on because then not only are you helping yourself your

product but you're actually encouraging others to like have better standards of the quality of work you want to do and please consider funding and resourcing open source design if we could pool the open source work and open source design we'll have better products as well and if your designer like continue to share there are some amazing talks on that create your own ethics and principles start to like think about these like really interesting groups you can create and so high level design is kind of like is it's shiny but like if you dig deeper there's really a lot of gold so thank you for your talk for my dog for listening to my talk and open source design something I'm super passionate

about if you have any questions designed come talk to me I'm also working on some stuff like validator experience and then like contributing onboarding you can get my Twitter so thanks and there's some wine that we will have not in this room but we will have so thanks sorry I don't think we have time for questions well I mean you are the last talk oh okay does anyone have questions statements sometimes they're stronger than questions there we go I'm Cruz about that number we're like 40% of designers that we're know every

last year like disappeared is that like you could have like a mailing list that you send emails to them I did that research old school and so I cross-referenced Twitter LinkedIn and then some of the work that we have also a telegram group that we've been working on so that's kind of where I've been doing it I've been thinking about reaching out some people want to stay private which is why I didn't like open source that but that's yeah but I mean if but the problem that you have a sample when you would like to have an idea would also need to know how many new designers are in the space right know if it's expand like the important question is are we losing more people than we are

acquiring people right yeah exactly yeah exactly and that's what I wanted to track originally the idea was that I wanted to track I thought my assumption was oh these these people are still here they're just working on different projects and I want to track the links of projects and designers but what I saw was I was like oh where does this person work now it's like oh not here where to Susa and I just went down that list but I agree that sample size is really small right that's why I think with the the 25% of like solo designers is like probably honestly higher but my sample size quite small right now that's what I would love is why I kind of like wanted to talk was just to bring back everybody who was interested like

reach out to me or reach out like tell someone so that we can have better data around that oh sorry for my message desktop thanks for the talk and I'm working in an open source open source software and I have a user interface and it's very hard to catch the what users need and I learned that figma exists I will use it great but I'm afraid it will make them into like you have this framework and like change stuff but it might limit them in some ways do you have any not to limit them like to express their needs for weight sir can

you rephrase that my not problem but goal now is to catch what my users need the most in my interface do you so this classic example of build a UI and then see what users doesn't like about it I think we can do I didn't talk about a lot of the design processes because I wanted to just talk a little bit more historically about design in the space but there are quite a few designers like boom right there who are really really great at talking about those processes and have talked about this process in this in this chat so that's a great question like we can we can kind of follow up with there cuz

there's a lot of ways basically is what I'm trying to say okay thank you user research [Applause]