The most generally accepted formula for a meaningful and happy life is to understand the secrets of the universe, to create an authentic philosophy based on these secrets, and to illuminate both ourselves and our surroundings with its light, just like the sun.
Otherwise, it is inevitable that we will fall into the situation of mythological character Sisyphus. Because of the punishment he received from Zeus, he carried a rock to the summit of Mount Olympus every day, and brought it back every time the rock rolled back from the hill, and his whole life passed in this vicious circle. Albert Camus associates Sisyphus’s situation with the lack of meaning in life and existential crises. As Mark Twain said, the two most important days in our lives are the day we were born and the day we understand why we were born.
Victor Frankl, one of the pioneers of existentialist psychotherapy says that finding a meaning in life is only possible if we constantly transcend and transform ourselves. Todd May's book Gilles Deleuze also has an inspiring paragraph on this: “There is always more; more than we can know, more than we can perceive; it's a matter of life, whether we're willing to explore further, or be content to lean on its surface." Artists Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, who always learned, unlearned, relearned, deconstructed, reconstructed but always existed freely in every period of their lives might be the best role models in this context. In his last years Henri Matisse couldn’t paint but tried new techniques with paper and scissors on his sickbed. When Pablo Picasso was asked whether his best era was blue, classical or cubism, he replied "None, it is the next one."
The stories of this kind of people who are always on a continuous journey reminds the famous paradox of Theseus: "Is the ship whose parts were replaced one by one during the voyage still the same ship?
According to ancient wisdom, the sine qua none of transforming and transcending self is also to pursue the secrets of the universe during this journey. Schelling says that “We try to understand the secrets of the universe by modeling it as a system, but the universe is not a system in essence, it is the life itself.” Therefore, science which draws its strength from the rational sharpness of mathematics and experimentation is not enough for us to understand these secrets. We also need the perceptual richness of art and the conceptual thinking ways of philosophy.
Nowadays the best reflection of this intersection is showcased by blockchain based Web3 technologies which perfectly breaks our perception of a static universe and helps us to perceive it and its singular forms as a dynamic spatial experience thanks to its interactive and immersive nature. Web3 truly launched the age of creative economy by removing the borders between art, design, architecture, gaming and technology, enabling users to own the content they produce and share it without intermediaries via smart contracts.
By connecting not only people but also digital assets and places through NFTs and Metaverses, Web3 is perhaps the dream of Bauhaus school’s founder Walter Gropius coming true today. He founded Bauhaus school and met designers, architects, artists, engineers and craftsmen under the same roof for his dream of “building the structure of the future.” Mies Van Der Rohe, owner of the famous motto “less is more”, Ernst Neufert, author of “Architects’ Data” which is the handbook of every architect, Marcel Breuer, who steered the history of furniture with his products such as the Wassily Chair, Wassily Kandinsky, master of abstract art and Paul Klee, strongest proponent of using geometry in art, were some of these great people who started an epic era in design and engineering by their collaborative work in Bauhaus.
Decentralized, open and independent structure of Web3 also reminds us Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s definition of machine: “the organism is a finite whole with identity and purpose; the mechanism is a closed machine with a specific function; the machine, on the other hand, is nothing but its own connections, produced by nothing, for nothing, and has no closed whole.” This machine transforms the duality of the mechanical universe of atoms and the digital universe of pixels into a single, unified electromagnetic reality by turning computers from objects to spaces and digitalizing world’s all assets via NFTs. We have already started to experience this new reality in our daily and business lives as follows:
- Two-dimensional websites are being replaced by three-dimensional Metaverses, where people can enter via their computers, mobile phones or virtual reality glasses. They can shop with their avatars (direct-to-avatar), interact, get trainings, hold meetings, participate in events, socialize and have fun. This brings sociologist Ray Oldenburg's concept of Third Places into phygital space.
- Our separate physical and digital identities are replaced by a single synthetic reality, like in the movie Ready Player One.
- Web2 applications that we use free of charge in exchange for our data and exposure to ads are replaced by dApps where we can earn money as we use them within innovative models like play-and-earn and move-and-earn.
- Companies are being replaced by DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations). The concepts like customer, employee, boss and manager are being replaced by community membership. Community members handle key governance and operational functions such as funding, marketing, communication, design, development and testing with fair incentive mechanisms through active collaboration on Discord.
- Community tokens replace traditional currencies (fiat money).
- Marketing and loyalty programs are being replaced by NFT-based community memberships and airdrop mechanisms.
- Traditional finance applications are being replaced by decentralized finance (DeFi) applications with staking, yield farming, lending, borrowing functionalities. DeFi allows NFTs to be used as collateral instead of physical assets such as real estate.
Famous fashion designer Coco Chanel once said, “Fashion fades away, what remains is the style”. Time will show us whether all these developments are just temporary trends or not. But recently there are some indicators of permanence:
- On Christmas, US’s most downloaded app was a virtual reality app.
- Average time spent on video games exceeded average time spent on social media for the first time.
- The new generation, who grew up in digital more than physical environments, has become a crucial actor of world economic model.
- Public’s digital adaptation reached to very high levels even in developing countries due to pandemic.
Existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, “Man can be wrong in two ways: he can either believe in something that is not true or refuse to believe in something that is true.” Believing in something that later does not come true is really disappointing, but not believing in something that is real might result in missing great opportunities in our lives. Just as mentioned in Manuel De Landa's book Non-Linear History: “Human history is not a story of necessity, it is a story of contingencies. It is not the story of successive developments in a straight line towards transforming energy, matter, and information into cultural products, but of missed opportunities while embarking on completely different development paths.” Companies are trying hard not to miss the opportunities offered by Web3. The character Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams says “If you build it they will come.” Just as new ones are rapidly being added next to the buildings built in the desert, all companies, under the leadership of the fashion and retail industries, are in a rush to get space in Metaverses and launching NFT series to tell their customers "I'm also in". Start-ups, on the other hand, are also in a hurry not to miss this period, where they can find founding capital more easily than ever by selling governance and utility tokens. Deleuze once said “Take yourself to a level, experience the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place there, create flow combinations from time to time, always have a small amount of new land; connect, unite, move on; a whole diagram that is not deterministic and non-subjective unlike the ongoing programs." This seems to be a super sharp philosophical foresight of what is happening now in Web3.
The successful companies that stand out in all this noise are those that can hear the deepest voices of their customers before others and transform this voice into innovative business models and customer experiences. In this new world where companies can track what customers do in the Metaverse beyond where they click on the web site, two dimensional customer interactions are turning into three dimensional customer journeys. In order for organizations to adapt to this new way of communication with customers, their designers need to gain three-dimensional thinking competencies. And this is a cultural issue that requires artistic perception, philosophical conceptualization and scientific approach beyond applying classical design techniques.
In philosophy, Plato's efforts to direct people from the two-dimensional shadows on the wall of the cave to the real world of three-dimensional ideas outside the cave, and in science, the KED quantum field theory, which proposed that light is not a particle or a wave, but a field with a multidimensional set of probabilistic values in time and space, have left their marks on human history regarding three-dimensional thinking.
In art, the cubist artists led by Picasso, who created three-dimensional effects by deconstructing the objects on the two-dimensional canvas and bringing them together again, Da Vinci and other Renaissance artists who wanted to convey the three dimensions to the canvas with techniques such as linear perspective, atmospheric perspective, chiaroscuro, sfumato and perspectograph, the founder of modern art Paul Cezanne, who left his father's great fortune saying he will conquer Paris with an apple and dedicated himself to create a new style with three dimensional immersiveness effect, Marcel Duchamp, who pushed the boundaries of different tones of the same colors to add a sense of movement on static canvas and Andy Warhol, who applied new techniques such as serigraph and silkscreens to reproduce his paintings and maybe inspired today's NFT series are some of those avant-garde people who never accepted to being stuck in the limited zone of two dimensions.
Psychiatrist and painter Rollo May defines the journey of this kind of people in his book The Courage to Create as: “We are called upon to do something new, to confront a no man's land, to push into a forest where there are no well-worn paths and from which no one has returned to guide us. This is what the existentialists call the anxiety of nothingness. To live into the future means to leap into the unknown, and this requires a degree of courage for which there is noimmediate precedent and which few people realize.”
One of those extraordinary people is Frida Kahlo, who might be considered as the muse of Web3 space by saying, “There is nothing in the world as powerful as labyrinths without walls.”
Web3 is now a huge decentralized labyrinth that liberates us by breaking down the walls of the classical centralized Web2 business models, also called walled gardens. But in this Web3 labyrinth majority of people get lost except for a certain group with strong technical competencies. The complexity of the labyrinth is causing anxiety on them, but as Kierkegaard puts it, "Anxiety is the vertigo of freedom."
As UX experts, our role is more important than ever. We have to design Web3 user experiences that will reduce everyday users' anxiety without compromising their freedom. We have to eliminate usability problems which are at the moment the biggest obstacle to Web3 adoption.
There are two critical success factors in development of Web3 UX standards that will make Web3 applications frictionless. The first one is to borrow Web2 UX design standards which are also suitable for Web3. When we remember the initial user interfaces of companies such as Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, and then think about the point they have reached today, we realize the effectiveness of those standards, which are results of years of intensive user research. In addition, the fact that users expect to see the experience patterns they are used to also in new applications is another important supporting factor regarding this decision.
The second success factor is to use the community power, which is perhaps the best thing that comes with Web3, to create the next generation experience design principles and standards. The first steps of this have been taken on April 2022 at Metaverse extension of UXistanbul Conference which was held in a festival-like atmosphere with contests, games, parties and keynote speeches of experts from Silicon Valley companies including Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Zoom, Netflix and Web3 companies like Roll, Parcel, Ready Player Me and UXservices.
UX experts from five continents and more than hundred different cities of the world participated in the conference, made UXistanbul a schelling point and organically created the world's first Web3 UX community. A core team from the community refined the take aways and conversations from the conference as Web3 UX design principles and guidelines.
Web3 UX Design Guidelines:
1. Control
1.1. Allow users to view their past transactions.
1.2. Display the gas price and estimated execution time of the transaction.
1.3. Prevent possible transaction errors and money loss by clearly showing the network used for the transaction.
1.4. Allow the user to easily change the network on which the transaction will proceed.
1.5. Allow selection of gas price / transaction speed in cheap – fast scale format.
1.6. In case of complex transaction options, give the user the right to choose between expert and normal modes which restricts or enriches the options accordingly.
2. Feedback
2.1. Inform the user about whether the transaction will be on the mainnet or testnet.
2.2. Inform the user when the transaction is completed successfully.
2.3. Inform the user about transactions that failed due to network congestion or slowdown.
2.4. Inform the user if the balance in the wallet is not sufficient for the transaction fee and gas price.
3. Navigation
3.1. Since majority of Web3 users are crypto investors, they have instant and fast trading habits. For this reason, enable users to reach the action they want to do in a maximum of three steps.
3.2. Use accelerators, auto-complete, and default values for fast completion of transactions with minimal text input and selection.
3.3. Make staking option visible on the homepage and main menu so that the user keeps her assets in the app instead of exchanges.
3.4. Display the next step during each transaction.
3.5. View each successfully completed transaction step. In this way, let the user feel the transaction completion rate.
3.6. Activate the product, category and action-based search feature contextually according to the content of the page.
3.7. People analyze information sets they see by breaking them into pieces. Group content such as menu items instead of listing them one after the other. When grouping content, remember that the ideal number of items in a group is four.
3.8. Make high priority tasks and content highly visible. Users often stop interacting if they don't find what they're looking for after four clicks.
3.9. If you direct users to another page via a link, do this by opening a separate tab.
3.10. Sort the menu items by certain criteria: consistency, importance, traditional order (example: days of the week), frequency of use, and alphabetical order.
3.11. Do not include more than seven items in the main navigation menu.
3.12. Use the left navigation when the priority of the menu items is neutral. Sort the items alphabetically in the left menu. If the priority of the items is different, use the top menu and place the items in the top menu starting with the highest priority on the far left.
3.13. If the options in a menu are hierarchical, group them under main items.
4. Error Prevention
4.1. Show the fiat money equivalent of tokens for the payment amount and transaction fees.
4.2. Specify irreversible actions.
4.3. Allow easy copying and pasting of addresses (public keys).
4.4. Ask the user for final transaction confirmation with a short transaction summary before the transaction is recorded on the network.
4.5. Give the user the right to cancel a transaction before it is recorded on the network and notify him/her about immutability of transactions on blockchain.
4.6. Ensure the use of similar design elements for similar functionalities. Consistency lets users apply the knowledge they have gained while using one part of the application during their experience with the other parts and help you prevent errors.
4.7. Don’t change the user interfaces too often unless it’s really necessary. When you make design changes, inherit the main design patterns of the old design that users are accustomed to.
4.8. Apply gestalt principles of proximity, symmetry, and similarity for appropriate grouping and placement of design objects on user interfaces. Otherwise people group the wrong interface components, and this error condition mislead them during their interaction with the application.
4.9. Minimize the cognitive load of users by using automatic computations, and other effort-minimizers on user interfaces.
4.10. Don’t force users to remember the information from previous steps of the interaction. Rather minimize the memory load of users by displaying relevant information when they need it.
5. Trust
5.1. Specify data received from oracles or other sources outside the network.
5.2. Specify data to be stored off chain.
5.3. Specify that private key and wallet (recovery phrase) information should not be shared with anybody.
5.4. Be careful when using default values. Do not use them unless you are sure users do not run the risk of choosing the wrong options.
5.5. Use default values to increase usability, not to gain additional sales and commercial gain.
5.6. Do not ask for personal information that you do not need when users sign up.
6. Language
6.1. Show short hover descriptions of Web3-specific concepts to make them clear for users.
6.2. On the website and app, do not use the very friendly Web3-specific jargon (frens, ser…) and abbreviations (imo, gm..) that you use on Discord and Twitter. Prefer a professional language. There may be exceptions to this in line with your communication strategy.
6.3. Keep the tone of the content consistent throughout the whole experience.
6.4. Do not use a Web3-specific abbreviation unless you are sure that your users know it.
6.5. Use language with a positive tone. A good user experience cannot be created with content that has negative statements. Your error messages should not make users feel guilty. Instead, you should direct them to the right action with a positive tone.
6.6. Express the content with short and concise sentences and paragraphs.
6.7. Use clear statements, leaving no room for misinterpretations.
6.8. Don't use fancy language with unnecessary adjectives like "state of the art", "robust", "ideal", "unique" and "optimized."
6.9. Present core content in a way that users can easily share with other users via social media and other communication channels.
7. Color
7.1. Use colors to attract attention of users to specific parts of user interfaces, group items, and show status of transactions. Consider the effects of colors according to the context of use:
- Red is attractive but aggressive, alarming and stimulating
- Blue is professional, but it has a cold and faded effect
- Green is comforting but might be boring after a while
- Yellow is energetic but after a point it might be too strong
- Orange represents clarity in communication, but is not noble
- Purple is noble but not energetic
- Black, gray and white are risk free but not exciting.
7.2. Limit the number of colors used in the same user interface to maximum five for a minimalist and aesthetic design.
7.3. Do not use red and blue together.
7.4. Do not use blue text as it fades.
7.5. As a background color, off-whites and light grays are the best alternatives. Then pale yellow and pale blue are other best alternatives.
7.6. Consider that approximately 10% of men and 0.5% of women are colorblind.
8. Images
8.1. Use self-explanatory metaphors to communicate the intended message and improve recognition. Select metaphors that users are familiar with so that users don’t interpret extra meanings other than the intent of use.
8.2. Users focus on faces when they first look at an interface. Don't use face images on low priority parts of the interface.
8.3. People avoid looking at banner areas. Avoid the risk of banner-blindness by avoiding banner-like user interface components.
8.4. Choose the highest priority content and design objects instead of displaying them all in user interfaces at the same time. Because people have difficulty in focusing on more than one object at the same time. For instance, when an informative carousel image is displayed on the upper middle part of the interface, most users at least shoot a glance at it. However, when another image is located next to it, most users ignore both images and don’t look at either.
9. Widget
9.1. Do not use radio buttons for more than five options. Use list box instead.
9.2. Use vertical forms instead of horizontal forms. Add tags above fields, not below them.
9.3. Use radio button when user needs to select only one option.
9.4. Use check box when user needs to select more than one option. If there are more than five options use list box or combo box.
9.5. List combo box and list box items in alphabetical order.
9.6. If you don't want to limit user's selection options or if there are more than fifteen options, use text box.
9.7. Do not use spin box when there are more than ten items in the box.
9.8. Use scroll bar when drop downs have content outside the visible region.
9.9. Reduce the complexity of user interfaces by using white spaces. White spaces are also helpful in separating user interface components and content.
9.10. Remove all unnecessary parts of the user interface as long as these parts clear away any functionality of the product. As famous novelist Antoine de Saint Exupery said: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
10. Text
10.1. Do not use more than three font sizes in the same user interface.
10.2. Use left alignment to optimize the readability of the text.
10.3. Numeric data should be right justified.
10.4. Do not use underscores unless you specify a link.
Your contribution is appreciated on the first draft of this work which will be the universal guide for UX designers all around the world in creating the interface of Web3 applications.