How UX Leaders Are Failing to Shape the Future of the Web

UX leaders, let’s ignore the foundational ideas behind Web3 and whether they conflict with the principles of good user experience.

Let’s jump straight into making decentralised apps easier to use. Simplify the onboarding. Improve the wallet interface. Make the buttons clearer.

Then, a few years from now, we can complain again that UX was an afterthought and that we had no seat at the table.

Or we could start asking the difficult questions now.

Web3 is being presented as a solution to the shortcomings of Web2. Before we help make that solution more usable, shouldn’t we examine whether it solves the right problems—and for whom?

That is a conversation UX leaders should be leading.

What exactly are we being asked to design?

Earlier visions of the next web centred on ideas such as the semantic web and greater personalisation. The version now gaining attention through cryptocurrency centres on decentralisation, permissionless participation, trustlessness, immutability and resistance to censorship.

These are substantial propositions about how digital systems should work. Each carries consequences for the people using them.

Take the familiar shorthand:

• Web1: Read.
• Web2: Read and write.
• Web3: Read, write and own.

It is a compelling slogan. But what does “own” mean to a user?

Does it mean control over their data? The ability to leave a platform without losing their identity or relationships? A financial stake in a service? Ownership of a token? Something they can transfer, recover or pass on?

Those are different promises. We should be precise about which one a product makes and whether the experience fulfils it.

Ownership also brings responsibilities. Who helps when someone makes a mistake? What happens when access is lost? Can a fraudulent transaction be reversed? What does meaningful control look like for someone who does not want to become an expert in the underlying technology?

These are foundational UX questions.

Our role is to examine the promise

Should UX leaders become advocates and evangelists for Web3?

Our responsibility is to investigate the relationship between the technology, the business model and the people expected to use it. That requires curiosity, but also scepticism.

Consider the claim that a decentralised internet will put power back into people’s hands.

Which people? Power over what? Through which decisions? And how would we establish whether they actually have more control?

A system can distribute its infrastructure while leaving its users with little practical influence. It can offer more freedom while demanding more expertise. It can remove an intermediary while transferring that intermediary’s responsibilities to someone poorly equipped to carry them.

We should investigate those possibilities before treating the promise as an outcome.

There is an opportunity here for UX research to shape what gets built, how it works and whether it deserves to exist.

What kind of change is Web3?

Before debating how to design for Web3, we should be clearer about what we believe it is.

Is it:

• A new business model built around ownership and participation?
• A technological shift that enables meaningfully different experiences?
• A political philosophy about control, institutions and trust?
• An attempt to address specific failures of Web2?
• A return to some of the open web’s earlier ambitions?

It may contain elements of all five. But the answer matters because each calls for different questions and different evidence.

A business model needs scrutiny of its incentives. A technological advance needs a useful application. A political philosophy needs examination of who gains power and who bears the consequences.

Calling all of these things “Web3” should not exempt them from scrutiny.

We should also ask what is driving a particular product: an ideology, a technical capability, a commercial opportunity or an unmet customer need?

And when those motivations conflict, whose interests determine the experience?

Does Web3 need a new user experience?

There are calls to reinvent UX for Web3. There are also arguments that users should experience Web3 applications much as they experience any other application.

Both positions need examination.

If a new interaction is necessary, what makes it necessary? Does it help someone exercise a valuable new capability, or does it ask them to accommodate the technology’s limitations?

If the technology becomes invisible, what still needs to be understood? Which consequences must users recognise before they can make an informed decision?

A familiar interface can make a product easier to use while concealing unfamiliar risks. An unfamiliar interface can expose the mechanics of a system without helping anyone understand them.

The design challenge is to establish what people need to understand, control and accomplish—and build the experience around that.

This is where leadership matters

As we approach 2022, I am tired of seeing the same conversations circulate among UX and product design leaders: UX is not UI. We need a seat at the table. Design must be involved earlier.

Those concerns are valid. But leadership also means bringing consequential questions to that table.

Web3 presents an opportunity to examine the assumptions behind a proposed future while that future is still taking shape. To test its claims. To challenge its incentives. To influence its foundations.

If we limit our contribution to improving interfaces after those decisions have been made, we help create the conditions we later complain about.

Can we make more room for these conversations in 2022?

Before we make Web3 easier to use, let’s establish what it should make better for the people using it.