My Dear Friends of Figma in Hi everyone how’s it going my name is tony chan thank you for tuning in and i’m here to talk about web3 and how it can empower the open source design community i want to preface by saying that everything that i say is my own opinion and it doesn’t reflect the views of microsoft.
Alright let’s get started when i was a kid i was extremely inspired by all the homemade and creative content on youtube i’d create these random skits with my friends and sometimes even these videos of myself lip syncing and it was kind of cringy right but it was a creative outlet i i really enjoyed making my.
Friends and family laugh but in the back of my mind i was ready to be the next youtube sensation i was even practicing my autograph for all of the t-shirts i was gonna sign unfortunately i realized that only my mom thought i.
Was entertaining so my dreams of being filthy rich and famous went down the drain some people though they keep grinding on like mark for example he had a similar start to me right he was inspired by others to create videos as a creative outlet and he’d upload several videos a week recording editing recording.
Uploading uploading he he really poured his passion his heart his soul into his craft meanwhile i was kind of just stuffing my face with all kinds of pizza and junk food mark he eventually got his first 10 subscribers 100.
Thousand hundreds of thousands of subscribers and the money it started to reign in and he realized that he could make a career out of this so it became his full-time gig he’d eventually rack up hundreds of millions of views and be an inspiration to kids just like me when i was young one day mark gets a notification.
And the first thing he thinks is oh it’s payday gonna treat myself tonight he pulls out his phone and he realizes that more than half of his videos were removed an external company submitted a copyright claim and a bot just took down half of his videos even though some of those videos were appropriate under the terms and services.
For youtube so kind of just take a moment to try and imagine how much it hurts to have something you poured so much passion into just evaporate and thin air overnight especially if your financial well-being was tied to it so the crazy thing is mark he’s a real.
Person and this is a real story and i really did make cringy lip syncing videos as a kid mark’s situation happens more often than you think lots of creators have issues with copyright laws their videos get demonetized removed improperly all the time and there are even tutorials online on how to claim other people’s work how.
To abuse the system how to make money off of other people’s hard work and i do want to clarify that i’m not trying to bash on youtube i i love youtube i i might be severely addicted to youtube but copyright it’s a very difficult problem to solve i understand that you can’t expect a single company to make everyone.
Happy right that’s how the saying goes but what if a singular entity wasn’t entirely in charge of the platform what if the users and creators had some control over the moderation or even other features what if it was a mix of corporates and user control.
How would that change the product development process how would design look like in this context how would decisions be made what systems would you need in place to make all of this successful currently there are thousands of community driven platforms operating just like how i described they make up a.
Network called web web3 it’s special because the rules data distribution security it’s all governed by a community instead of a singular entity or business these web 3 websites are kept online by a network of computers hosted by users all around the world and they form something called a blockchain.
This community hosting the platform has huge influence over the direction of the product they could actually vote on which features get implemented into the product and this technology it’s it’s a completely new way of interacting with the web so let’s see an example audio is a music streaming platform on.
Web3 and i know i know you’re probably like oh geez another music streaming platform come on tony but hear me out for a second so the music industry generates 43 billion dollars of revenue every single year and only 12 12 goes to artists.
Even worse artists have minimal control over how their music is distributed how it gets recommended to their listeners they have little visibility into the data of who’s streaming their music audience is trying to disrupt the industry by giving more power back to the artists back to the users and it.
Uses blockchain to let the community make decisions on how data is used on how features work on how money is distributed on the platform so let’s let’s see an example of what community governance actually looks like each of these nodes represents a user keeping the platform online with their computer.
And let’s say an artist proposes a change they want the top songs to refresh weekly as opposed to monthly they juggle this idea with the rest of the community and they try and get buy-in from different community members and they catch the attention of a third-party developer who’s typically a community member that’s not directly on.
The audience team they produce the code necessary to have this feature and they’re incentivized they’re incentivized to do this because they get paid out in audio currency which is essentially like the currency that the app uses and you can also trade this currency for actual us dollars or euros or yuan’s.
So users who hold the audio currency or use their computer to host the server they could vote for or against the submission the features implemented into the product when more than 50 percent of the community is in favor so although not exactly identical you can.
Kind of start to imagine how a similar process can be used to tackle more complex problems like copyright for example these web 3 websites really integrate the values of open source into the foundation of the technology everything is completely transparent all the data all the interactions it’s just public.
And this collaborative process you might have noticed it’s pretty similar to design right like you’re proposing ideas you’re getting feedback you’re iterating you’re aligning different stakeholders and that’s what you all do best it gets even more interesting if you dive just a little bit deeper into the rabbit hole so user behavior and data.
Like i said earlier is fully public but the identities are private it’s obscured by a random string of text numbers and symbols and from a product lens this is a gold mine for user behavior right there’s a huge opportunity to leverage this data to make more informed decisions every single contribution whether it be.
Code pixels or even intellectual property like this proposal from this artist from earlier it can all be tracked and compensated for this process is very similar to how the open source developer community works so this concept of community driven collaboration to ship software it’s not.
New at all back in the 1950s before the internet almost all software was built by academia hobbyists enthusiasts early adopters and the values of shared knowledge and cooperation they were long established within this group it was necessary to work together to push the technology forward because programming coding it.
Was still so early in its infancy by the late 60s though operating systems and languages started to evolve and the cost of software skyrocketed right like it cost money to iron out bugs to update features to roll out new features and companies started to charge for the software that came with their hardware and due to competition the industry.
Started to privatize source code so at this point open source collaboration lost a lot of momentum it was barely kept alive in the shadows by early adopters and other hobbyists one day a hobbyist named richard stallman noticed that his office printer kept jamming and it created a huge.
Backlog because the entire office was using this little printer and he wanted to write a script to notify everyone in the queue that the office printer was jammed and that someone had to physically physically go there and unjam the printer sounds pretty easy right unfortunately when he reached out to the.
Company they refused to give him the source code richard eventually started an open source operating system which serves as the foundation for linux one of the most popular open source operating systems today he also eventually published the gnu general public license which serves as.
The foundational pillar for many open source developer projects today so coming back to present day every single one of these companies have benefited from open source most have even contributed back to the open source community some are leaders in the open source developer community.
So it kind of goes to show that despite all the time that’s passed you can still see the impact that early adopters have had on the internet right like the values of collaboration peer review communication shared knowledge they’re integral to developers and how they work the open source developer community today is thriving more than ever.
As of 2020 there are 50 million open source projects on github alone that’s that’s just one website hosting website open source empowers developers to rapidly collaborate and to learn from one another there’s there’s a strong sense of community of mentorship people go out of their way to explain old concepts to new programmers and even.
Brainstorm new ways of solving new problems with total strangers what about design though design has made significant progress towards open source these past few years many companies publish their design systems their plugins their iconography even their internal processes to the public.
These assets are open but it’s hard to categorize them as truly open source because the open collaboration part is mostly absent right like people are just consuming these assets they’re just like take tick tick tick tick they’re never contributing back to the source and it kind of makes sense because the.
Companies that control the source they’re making their decisions based off of their own design use cases and not really the community’s use cases open source design right now feels fairly surface level sure you could propose a new iteration of an illustration but it’s it’s really challenging to asynchronously.
Collaborate with like a random person around the world on a public project for maybe like a more complex customer problem or like an interaction problem or even like a research problem who knows what user experience design could look like if we did have a mature open source design community it’s also not really a surprise right.
Like the tools required for open source contributions like creating a pull request or version control or merging branches or like jumping through different branches they’re technical by nature they’re processes built by developers for developers and there aren’t many processes in place for designers to contribute in a meaningful.
Way to open source because design just it just wasn’t much of a consideration back then when this community first started the collaborative and the iterative nature of being in an open source environment helped raise the bar for software development for the discipline as a whole and it’s a huge accelerator.
For knowledge i learned most of my coding experience from cloning random projects online tinkering with them pushing the changes getting roasted by like a random stranger and then making the fixes learning right like this feedback loop of failing learning failing learning it helped me retain my learnings and it’s a benefit that design.
Just hasn’t really reaped yet at this point web3 is the perfect opportunity because the technology is open by design and the building blocks are there to create open source processes for user experience designers can really step in and help the community collaborate in this open environment and help refine open ux.
Frameworks for future designers to come so how do you get involved i recommend learning how the blockchain how web3 generally works on youtube there are a bunch of great resources on tedx most of these web3 communities operate from within discord or telegram is another good one.
Dbradar is also another great resource so it’s a website but it has a really robust search where you can filter through all kinds of web3 applications like web3 social media apps webview chats web3 decentralized storage even like literally anything you’re interested in but in web3 form the number of blockchain developers.
Increases exponentially year over year and there are so many parallels to how the web was first built the paradigms were set by the developers and designers kind of had to like shimmy in and adapt to the mold early adopters are again setting the standards the processes the patterns that a lot of these web3 apps currently.
Use even today you can see the systematic influence that engineers have had on i don’t know like organizational processes like agile or scrum these these product teams they center their strategy their sprints around development and with web3 designers can really influence the system to place a.
Higher priority on the user experience all right let’s do a thought exercise to close us off let’s try and imagine what web3 could be like in i don’t know 10 15 years so currently designers or developers are currently trying to connect all of these different web 3 applications.
And let’s say they’re successful in this context what if all of your data i mean all of it like your photos your videos your comments your likes your tweets your money your financial records even your health records what if it was all stored on your own device on your own cloud and when you jump from one app to the.
Other you can choose what information each app has access to you have ownership over your own data that in itself is kind of a crazy concept in today’s age where you don’t really own any of your data but let’s dream a little bit more what if you could also control what your interface looked like as you’re jumping.
Through all these different applications all you’re really doing is consuming that platform’s data on the network right you’re just plugging into different blockchains so theoretically you could use your own custom ui for whenever you jump into any video streaming application for example youtube or vimeo you’d have a consistent.
Experience but just have different content that could be kind of interesting right like that would really benefit those with accessibility and pyramids because they can pick and choose their experience and they have they would have a more consistent experience across different applications.
So in this context ux is starting to look like it’s less about deriving use cases for specific products and more about designing for the ecosystem of apps of information of data that surrounds a user and that seems pretty human-centric and pretty damn cool.
Many people have been saying that design finally has a seat at the table which is awesome i don’t want to downplay it you you really feel it when design has representation upper management there is a new iteration of the table being built and you have a chance to not only sit at it but you could also modify it.
You could even add rounded corners to it because we all know designers love rounded corners alrighty thank you all for listening and one last plug so my team at microsoft is hiring for design system designers product designers and ux engineers if you’re interested hit me up on linkedin if you don’t want to hit me up on.
Linkedin i completely understand i wouldn’t hit myself up on linkedin either so just go ahead and go to the microsoft careers page and search for hashtag mds one last thank you to figma for having me this was super nerve-wracking but really fun.
In this session, Tony will introduce the potential impact of Web 3.0 without diving into the granular, technical jargon. He’ll illustrate …
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