This is the Nielsen Norman Group UX Podcast.
I'm Therese Fessenden.
I have to tell you, while this was totally unintentional, I think this might be our single
most timely podcast episode.
Last Tuesday, I got a chance to interview Jeff Robertson, founder and human factor specialist
at Chockablock, a blockchain-oriented UX consultancy.
He's also a lecturer at the University of Maryland, specifically on the topic of UX
and emerging technology.
We got into the weeds of why people are going crazy about blockchain and how it will play
a major role in the development of a metaverse.
We'll get into that in a little bit.
But then, two days later, Facebook announces that they would be rebranding to meta to better
reflect their product offerings in the virtual and augmented reality space in the metaverse.
Now, to be clear, the metaverse is a concept that's been around long before two days ago
and long before the Facebook rebrand.
But it's moved from the shadows of tech professional jargon into the spotlight, becoming part of
our mainstream lexicon virtually overnight, pun partially intended.
So of course, I was compelled by journalistic obligation to follow up with Jeff the day
after I heard the news.
So this episode is split into two parts.
The first part will be our conversation prior to the bombshell Facebook rebrand announcement
around blockchain and the infrastructure of a decentralized metaverse.
The second part will be my follow up conversation with Jeff in which we informally react to
Facebook's announcement and discuss what key questions remain unanswered as we look forward
to the future of the metaverse.
There's a lot to unpack with this episode.
So without further delay, here's Jeff Robertson.
Hi, Jeff.
Welcome to the podcast.
How are you doing today?
Doing well.
Doing well.
Thank you so much for having me.
I really appreciate it.
So you've just started work with University of Maryland, right?
Yeah.
So long story short, I mean, I remember contacting you back in, what was it, 2018, maybe being
like, look, I'm thinking about looking into blockchain, seeing what's going on in that
and from a UX perspective.
But over the years, I've compiled everything that I've learned and turned it into a curriculum.
Part of that was what I presented to you a couple of years ago during the seminars.
But every year I add to it and that's what I teach UMD's Human Computer Interaction Master's
program.
So we look at two flavors, UX analysis techniques, qualitative data coding, task analysis, things
like that.
But we focus on the emerging technology of what's going with blockchain.
And so I have them do these various kind of UX research methods and applying it to looking
at that particular field.
Yeah.
So on that topic, if we wanted to dive into what blockchain even is, I know you mentioned
world computer.
So what is blockchain and how does it relate to the world computer?
Sure.
So blockchain in itself is really just a data storage mechanism and I'm oversimplifying it
a bit, but imagine like as new information gets kind of added to a system, that new information
gets kind of encapsulated in a block, which then gets added to the previous block of information
and each block is kind of tied together cryptographically.
And it just keeps on growing and growing and growing and growing and the mental image that
I have in my head is like, you've probably been in a photo booth before where like you
and your friends are doing things and like it keeps spitting out images of every little
kind of movement that you make or new kind of stance that you make.
But imagine that this is continually growing and growing and growing and that way you're
able to look back through all the photos and watch the whole trajectory, all the changing
of information, all the changing of things up to the current point in time.
So when you take that mechanism and you put it into a system that is also comprised of
things like peer-to-peer networks, like computers all over the world coming together, decentralized
ledger technology, basically the information that all these nodes are kind of keeping track
of and cryptocurrency, you create this new system that incentivizes computers to join
and to support it like a world computer is made up of lots of computers that come together
and they form this new kind of entity.
And they're incentivized to do this, to partake through cryptocurrency because as they come
to consensus on the information that has kind of changed in this system, they formulate
a new block, that block goes on top of the other blocks, every node has a copy of all
these blocks and the computer that helped kind of facilitate this consensus gets rewarded
in more cryptocurrency.
Okay, so it's kind of like first person wins, it's like a race to calculate the sum or whatever
it might be.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
And there's different kind of flavors of that, I don't want to go into too much of the weeds
because I know we have limited time here, but two of the main flavors of that are proof
of work versus proof of stake.
And proof of work in order to kind of be the first one to go first, you have to solve a
very complex cryptographic puzzle, requires a lot of computational power.
Whereas proof of stake is more you, it's kind of like a raffle in a way where everyone that's
kind of taking part in this, if they have some coins or cryptocurrency of that system,
they act like raffle tickets and you get kind of chosen to go first if like your coin gets
picked.
Yeah.
If that kind of makes sense.
It's an oversimplification.
Yeah.
It's kind of funny too when you mentioned the photo strip.
I almost picture that game snake where it used to like have to eat the little nuggets
or whatever.
And then every time you eat the nugget, the snake grows and then-
Grows a little bit.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Grows a little more, grows a little more.
Yeah, that's a good point looking at it.
More information being added to this long chain of blocks.
Yeah.
And so it seems like to participate, like you mentioned, there's this need for great
computing power.
So whenever I think about blockchain and, well, I guess Bitcoin being the most mainstream
implementation of blockchain, but I often think about who gets to participate in these.
It seems like you need a lot of computing power or do you not?
So like what have you seen in terms of who's adopting this and who's participating?
Yeah, that's a really great question.
And I keep talking about world computers because I feel like it's a better way to kind of structure
what's going on and present it, especially for my class that I teach to human computer
interaction students, because let's talk about it as a world computer, human computer interaction,
human world computer interaction.
What does that look like?
And there's lots of these different systems, these world computers.
The first one was Bitcoin, right?
And the only thing that, again, I'm oversimplifying, but the main thing that that world computer
keeps track of is Bitcoin, who has what Bitcoin, adding new Bitcoin to the system.
But since then, people have taken that concept and created new world computers like the Ethereum
world computer.
And there's lots of different ones out there, but Ethereum, I think, is a really interesting
example to look at, especially from a user experience standpoint, because it allows more
than just the underlying cryptocurrency to be kept track, if you can keep track of lots
of different things.
Now the difference between these two systems is that Bitcoin leverages proof of work.
And in a proof of work system, you have to solve a very complex cryptographic puzzle.
To do that, you have to have a very powerful computer.
And so the problem with that is not everybody can really take part, because it would require
you to purchase a system that is outside that of the average person to do.
And so you have these entities that really dominate the hashing of information for Bitcoin.
Ethereum started off as proof of work, but they are transitioning to proof of stake.
And this is actually a transition that has had significant change over this past year.
But with proof of stake, you don't have to have a very powerful computer, you can just
use your own computer.
You just have to have some Ethereum locked up in a wallet.
So that allows the average person to actually partake in it.
And so to me, I don't know, I like that more because I really like the idea of world computers
being of the people and for the people.
And so the ability for anybody to really help support a world computer with the computational
device that they have, I think is a really important thing.
Yeah.
So on that topic, I think Ethereum is really fascinating because there are so many dapps
or decentralized applications that seem to be using the Ethereum network.
So it seems like there's a lot more growth.
So in terms of what's picking up steam next, there's Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, but what's
next in the realm of the world computer?
Yeah.
So I think to answer that question, we have to start a little bit more abstractly.
And if you think of these world computers, this is the mental image that I have.
You've got a bunch of computers sitting around a circular poker table.
And on the poker table are poker chips.
And we can just say that these poker chips are cryptocurrency and the computers are all
watching where these poker chips go, who has what, and when they come to an agreement on
what changes have occurred, a picture gets taken of the poker table.
Everyone gets a copy, which gets added to the previous copies.
That's the blockchain, the photo strip that I was referencing earlier.
Now if we take this concept of the poker chip and let's make it a little bit more abstract,
what if that poker chip could not represent just an underlying cryptocurrency, but could
represent anything like a hollow shell that you could put any kind of file you want into.
And because of it being part of the system, it gets kept track of in the same manner as
cryptocurrency by the nodes that are kind of watching everything.
And so what we're seeing is the leveraging of this technology to do new and different
things.
And I think one of the biggest terms of this year are NFTs, non-fungible tokens.
So the idea of having one of these poker chips that are being kept track of represents something.
In theory, this could be anything.
It could be a car deed, it could be your land deed, it could be a title to something, it
could be your will.
It could be a lot of different things that you would want to have kept track of.
But what it has been first used for is art.
People have been using it to keep track of digital art.
And if you think about, again, you kind of have to dismiss some of the craziness that
we've seen in that space in terms of what's being put in these NFTs and how much they're
going for.
But the idea that you have a system that can track art with such a definition, and I hope
I'm saying this word right, but provenance or provenance of artwork, which is something
that deals with, let's say a new Monet was found in someone's attic, how do you know
it's a Monet?
I mean, how do you distinguish that?
Does it have certificates?
Does it have some sort of authenticity?
Who's guaranteeing this to be that of Monet?
What if you had a system that is able to track that from its origin to whoever has owned
it all the way to its present state?
That's kind of like what this new system has to offer is that anything, whether it be art
or a car title, or man, there's so many other things that you could kind of insert in there
can be kept track of with such definition.
Yeah.
Actually what comes into mind when you say tracking, I think of when I order something
online and it gets shipped to my house, like you have a tracking number and you can find
out where it is and what truck it's on, or you can kind of keep track of things in that
way.
It's like when you have these non fungible tokens, these tokens that can't be exchanged,
whereas cryptocurrency would just be a token.
I could have 25 cents or I could have four quarters and those all equal $1 to use regular
money terms.
But for non fungible tokens, it's not the same.
You've got your unique identifying item or uniquely identified item.
It's really fascinating that art has really embraced this.
The art world.
But yeah, it also kind of confuses me at the same time because it feels like those certificates
that you could sometimes buy where it's like, you can buy a star, you can buy a constellation
and it has your name on it.
So in some cases it almost feels a bit superficial in that I'm kind of like assigning ownership
to something, but I'm curious what you think in terms of how NFTs might be used in other
non ownership types of contexts because really if it is just tracking, it's not just ownership.
Am I getting that correct?
Yeah.
I mean, you can leverage it in, I guess, a lot of different ways.
Let's use one thing I think they want to see, especially when it comes to art, we'll just
kind of use that as our basis here, is the idea that an NFT can be used not just to kind
of hold a digital piece of art, but to represent the certification of, or the authenticity
of a physical piece of art.
So let's say we go back to this new Monet that has been discovered, or maybe an existing
one.
A institution could create an NFT that represents that.
And when that piece of art is in, let's say a given museum, that museum's wallet would
have that NFT in it, right?
So it's kind of this dual means of certificate.
Here's the physical thing, here is its representation in the digital world being kept track of by
the world computer.
When we transfer this Monet to another museum, we also transfer its NFT.
And so they now have the possession of it, and it kind of acts as a double authentication
mechanism that requires a little bit of cultural adoption, where we just come to expect everything
to have some sort of representation as an NFT, and that unless you're getting that NFT,
you can't really be sure that you've received the actual physical object, if that makes
sense.
Did it come with papers?
Did it come with the NFT?
No, I don't trust it.
That's kind of like a cultural thing that has to be adopted.
But I think, again, this kind of goes back to this notion that as a civilization, as
a species, we now have world computers that can keep track of anything that we want.
And so as we slowly kind of start leveraging them more and more to keep track of things,
it'll just become common to have things that are both physical or as well as digital being
kind of kept track of by that world computer.
I think it's interesting that you're saying this cultural shift, kind of a sense of cultural
adoption.
I'm immediately thinking of how, in even certain parts of the country, this is still true.
You can only buy things in cash, and you don't necessarily have receipts.
It's just an exchange.
Maybe it's somebody having a garage sale, and they're selling some of their wares.
But if you were to order something online, it would be a bit alarming if you didn't get
a confirmation message.
For example, you're just like, did it happen?
Am I going to get this thing?
Does it feel legit?
And so it seems like there are certain expectations, like shifts in expectations that need to happen
for this technology to really be, A, embraced, but embracing it is not just for the sake
of embracing it.
It's also about making it the most effective and accurate way of tracking things.
So I'm curious what you've seen.
What do you think some of these hurdles are?
What are some of the barriers that are preventing people from really adopting or embracing these
pieces of technology?
Yeah.
That's a great question.
I want to revert back to a kind of an independent study that I did back in 2019.
I was kind of getting into this.
I recruited a bunch of people and ran usability tests on basic wallets.
And so this is before NFTs really started taking off.
It's not that the technology wasn't there yet.
It's just that we were dealing with just the idea of a wallet that holds cryptocurrency.
Seeing what really jams people up.
Now when it comes to how this stuff operates, you're dealing with a real big paradigm shift
and what you use to identify yourself to the world computer.
We are so much revolving around the idea of logging credentials.
Now you have a user ID and you have a password and the way that it works with like a centralized
system is like, Oh, I need to access my Facebook account on my Instagram or my bank.
So what you do is you go to their web app and you say, Hey, this is who I am.
And on the back end it says, okay, we have that information.
Here is your data.
The paradigm shift that's going on now is like, you no longer have that kind of logging
credential that you use to identify yourself, which can change from system to system.
Instead you have one, you have a private key and that private key is cryptographically
tied to a public key that is kind of stored on the world computer.
And all of your data, all of your cryptocurrency, all your tokens, everything that you kind
of do is tied to that private key.
And so when you go to adapt or any of dapps that could be built on a given world computer,
they all know who you are.
And maybe they don't know that it's you, Jeff Robertson, but they're like, Oh, it's you
that private key, whoever it is behind that, but all of your information follows you around.
This concept I think is what really trips people up.
The idea of the private key because they're just so used to the notion of, of having a
password and, and like a username, like your email, it's not only that, like it's, you
have these things, but the notion that like you have forgiveness, if you forgive them,
right?
If you forget your password, Oh, I forgot my password.
And you know, the centralized system that has an information sends it to your, sends
you the ability to reset it, but the private key, you don't have that.
It's like having a safety deposit box at a bank, you have a private key that's given
to you.
The bank manager has another key.
You want to access content inside that safety deposit box.
You both stick your keys in at the same time unlocks and you can access it.
And that's the only thing that allows you to have access to the point that like, if
you were to drop it on the floor and walk away and someone else were to pick it up,
they can use it to go and access the drop the safety deposit box.
Right?
Yeah.
And I don't think that people quite understand that burden of custody.
That's what I call it.
It's like, there's this burden of custody.
You are in ownership of your private key and one else has it.
You don't want anybody else to have it because if they have it, then they have access to
all of your stuff that's being kept track of by the world computer.
And so getting people to kind of understand that concept, I think is going to be challenging.
I mean, once you kind of get it, it's a little bit easier once you adopt that mental model,
but that was the biggest thing that I saw in my usability studies.
People just could not wrap their brains around that concept.
They kept thinking that a private key was like your password.
Anyways.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true.
And I've heard some stories too, and read some articles about how there's millions of
dollars in cryptocurrency that's literally has been thrown away because the private key
information was on a computer that got destroyed or got erased and now there's literally no
way to recover that private key.
So it's pretty wild, the consequences that something that seems trivial if you had a
different mental model, like a different perspective of or expectations around who's responsible
for what, it can have some really critical consequences for sure.
Yeah.
Massive critical error.
Yeah.
And that's really fascinating because I'm also thinking about the role of biometrics
and I don't know if you have done research in this space, but I think about biometrics
specifically because in terms of memorizing things or having a password or storing something
that is your way of accessing secure information, it's always been fraught with issues and even
more so now.
So yeah, if we had biometrics, for example, that alleviates the burden of that custody
where the custody responsibility is still there with the owner, but perhaps could be
alleviated by something like, that's what comes to mind for me.
Yeah.
It's interesting because when you think of biometrics, I guess that could encompass a
lot of different things from, I guess, fingerprint, eye scanning, facial recognition, heartbeat,
you know what I mean?
Anything could be...
That's what you're talking about, right?
Yeah.
Any kind of like...
Now, in a way, like when you pick up your iPhone and it scans your face and it logs
you into your phone or you want to access your banking application and you turn on face
recognition as your means to do so, what it's doing for you is saying, instead of making
you type in your password and your username, we'll enter it for you, but we'll only do
it if we recognize your face.
So I could definitely see that kind of layered mechanism being placed on top of private keys
where you just have something that uses your biometric signature to inject that private
key into the dApp that you're interacting with.
And by the way, that's the term that is being used right now for when you connect to dApp,
is connecting your wallet.
A wallet is a term that's synonymous with private key, but you connect.
And so when you go to dApp, it says, connect your wallet.
And what they really mean is like, log in, but you're connecting your private key, not
logging in with your credentials.
But I could definitely see where you would have some kind of biometric layer that would
kind of do that for you.
Oh, it's the signature of Jeff Robertson, we'll inject the private key and now you can
have access to all of your information.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's really fascinating thinking about that mental model shift because everyone has become
so accustomed to that term log in.
Even with social log ins, I'm thinking about how people connect their Google accounts or
their Facebook accounts to their various other accounts, just as a way to authenticate themselves.
So it's going to be interesting to see that space really evolve with those mental models
evolving.
Whenever I interact with a group of people that work in the space, they all kind of references
that you're dealing with developers who think about things from a developer standpoint and
not from, and that's just par for the course for any place that a UX specialist is working
with is you got to deal with that kind of mentality.
How do we address the interface of what we're building so that it better suits the end user?
Yeah.
I also think too, the developers, it has kind of been developer centric by necessity just
because there's so little that has really been developed.
So I can understand why it has been developer centric.
Has that changed much, do you think?
So there's also the issue of because it's so nascent, in the infrastructure being built,
you have this, and everything is also very much open source.
All this stuff gets put on GitHub.
And so what will happen is the developer wants to create a new, let's say, wallet or some
sort of application or whatever.
So they'll go to GitHub and they'll just kind of copy that stuff that's there.
And they'll just reuse that for whatever it is that they're building.
But because of that, you start to have these kind of inherited traits, almost like genetics.
You know what I mean?
Like we all inherit genes from our parents and therefore look like them.
So you'll see the same kind of repeating patterns throughout a lot of these different applications
for completely different teams, but it's because they've all cloned from the same source.
And hopefully over time, we'll get to a point where like what people are cloning from, what
people are kind of using, has been adjusted to kind of be more user-friendly, right?
And that way it starts to permeate itself throughout this new kind of system of things.
That and you hope that these teams start to recognize the need for UX professionals to
come in and kind of like help them create a better experience for new users, because
that to me is like the biggest thing.
It's like you have these, when you think about the technology adoption life cycle, right?
That bell curve, like you have the innovators and then you have like the early adopters
and then you have that big gap that exists between the early adopters and the early majority.
I worry that you're just going to have this very esoteric situation where only the early
adopters and the innovators are kind of like stuck in their own little bubble and they're
not catering to that next wave of people.
And so that next wave of people, this doesn't come.
It's like, you need to make it accessible to these people, otherwise they're not going
to, like, why would they use your product?
So we got to start thinking about them.
So hopefully developers will start seeing the need for that more and more, or at least
the people who are running these projects and invite more UX professionals to come in
and help refine that.
And yeah, that's also like, I think why I talk about this, I've been talking about this
topic with you guys multiple times now, right?
Why I try to teach a course on UMD is to just inform UX professionals about what's going
on with the spaces that they can come in with a better understanding of how it all works
and therefore try to build a better experience.
Yeah.
It seems like there's kind of two areas where this industry falls a little bit short.
The first is there are lots of companies that are, to your point, taking things from GitHub,
copy paste, and maybe making some adjustments, but all in all, a lot of the technology remains
the same and oriented toward the same people.
And the flip side of that, it seems like UX professionals are also pretty new to this
industry and unsure where they can have the most impact.
And it seems like there's A, a lack of understanding just because it is such a new space and B,
a lack of awareness of where they can have the most impact.
So this is sort of a question that comes up a lot, not just in this particular space,
but in UX in general, right?
Which is, should UX professionals who are designers or researchers, should they learn
how to code?
So that question applied to blockchain technologies and world computing, should UXers learn some
basic blockchain development skills?
What's your take on this?
Yeah.
I mean, I honestly think that it's important for everyone to learn coding of some degree.
There's a balance between understanding what can be done, right?
And then also using that to design a better kind of experience because sometimes that's
a problem.
It's like you go to a developer and they're like, I need it to look like X, Y, and Z.
And they're like, do you know how hard it's going to be to make it look like that?
If you have a better idea of how that works, then as a UX specialist, then you can more
craftily kind of put things together.
So to answer your question in short, yeah, I think it would be important for UXers who
are working in the blockchain space to kind of get a better understanding of how that
works developmentally so that you can kind of work with that and massaging it into a
better experience.
And this is something that actually, I think a couple of years ago, I contacted you or
maybe another colleague of yours at NNG about this concept that I was struggling with, with
what I was seeing when I was doing this usability test on wallets.
And that is if you want to access your funds, right, if you want to access your funds, you
have to have the private key on the device that you're using, right?
If you don't have that private key, you can't access your safety deposit box.
So you might have your private keys on a computer at home that you open up and you can see your
cryptocurrency in there, whatever cryptocurrency it is.
But unless you have that with you as you go about in your daily activities, how do you
use it?
It's like me going to a restaurant with my wife and I see that they accept cryptocurrency
and oh, I'd love to pay with it.
Well, I can't pay with it because my private keys are on my computer at home.
How do you allow multiple devices to be able to use the same private keys, allowing you
to leverage that in these different situations?
And you guys talked about the concept of omni-channel design, the ability to pick up where you left
off on a different device.
Now I know that this isn't an exact kind of interpretation of that or application of it,
but what I kind of derived from this concept was the idea of omni-wallet design.
How do you have your private keys on all of your devices, right?
I don't know, that's a problem that needs to be solved from a technological standpoint.
And so once you do that, have the ability to kind of pick up where you are on any device
because they all have the same private keys, you can now interact with things no matter
where you are, right?
Like if I were out of the country on a trip and I lose my phone, I lose my wallet, right?
If I could at least convince somebody to lend me their phone or their computer, I could
log in to my bank account, cancel my cards, right?
Well, unless I have the private keys in this kind of system, I can't do that.
I can't make any changes because I don't have this identifying mechanism that tells the
backend system that it is me.
And so that I see as a very problematic hurdle.
How that gets solved is going to be through technological advancements and combination
better design, right?
So that people know how to set these kinds of systems up.
Maybe they're just there by default.
I mean, one way that this could be done is if like Apple says, you know what, we're going
to create a special chip that sits inside all of our new devices.
And Samsung has already done this to a degree, I think it was Samsung 10 maybe, started having
this special chip inside the phone that was dedicated to holding private keys.
But imagine all of these devices had special kind of chips inside them that were dedicated
to holding private keys.
And when you log into a new device after buying it, your Apple ID injects that private key
onto that chip inside the device, right?
So now I can access the same dapps on my computer as I can on my phone, as I can on another
device, as long as I can sign in with like my Apple ID.
That's like one possible way of doing that, but it's just hypothetical, I guess right
now.
Yeah.
Well, I guess further to your point is a great reason why some UXers should try to get involved
in the development space.
Even if it's just a dabble, come up with some new perspectives and address things like authentication.
And it's been fascinating too, just in some of the client work I've been seeing, there
are lots of folks who are asking these questions, like, how can we make authentication easier?
And this is without the world computer in question, so it's definitely not going to
get any easier.
But I wanted to ask you another question too, about world computing.
And you mentioned how NFTs can act as like a reference for things that exist in the real
world.
And I remember when we were first talking about recording this episode that you mentioned
that there's this metaverse.
So I would love for you to like talk about this metaverse.
But when I think of metaverse, you mentioned something like Ready Player One, which I think
is just so cool.
Do you want to like talk through that because I feel like that's going to be really important
for this next frontier of design and of development?
Absolutely.
So yeah, the Ready Player One is a great, I think, example of that because if you've
seen the movie or read the book, you kind of understand the concept of this immersive
environment that you go into via virtual reality, right?
And so that in itself is its own form of merging technology and has its own kind of user experience
that could be talked about in a different kind of way.
It's an area all to itself.
But what I think where the world computing kind of aspect of this comes into play is
like when you go into the metaverse and you go from one world to another and you're collecting
coins and you're buying avatar stuff and your clothes for your avatar and all these things
that kind of follow you around, like you've probably seen this in the movie if you've
watched it, like they open up some kind of like digital purse, right?
And they bring out all these different things, but what the hell is keeping track of all
that, right?
Like where is that being stored?
Well, the way that that would work is that you have a private key associated with your
person, right?
Wherever you go in the metaverse, that private key kind of tells the backend, this is who
you are and this is all the tokens that you have.
These are all the clothes that you have for your avatar.
All that information follows you around seamlessly.
And so that's where I think that there's this kind of the meeting point between like the
metaverse in terms of this virtual experience and how all that information about you gets
tracked so that you have a seamless experience, right?
It's just all being tracked by the underlying world computer.
And there are already metaverse examples out there that are being developed, Decentraland
is a big one that is being built, I think it's on top of the Ethereum world computer.
So it makes me think of this, like in these kind of metaverses, like you have to design
for two things.
You have to design for the two dimensional screen that someone might be interacting with
on like a computer desktop, but you also have to design it so that it is virtual.
Like you can interact with it in a virtual way as well with like VR glasses, right?
So I know there's kind of a stretch in terms of what I'm saying here, but the idea that
when you design an experience, you have to think about the different ways a human being
will be interacting with it.
Is it going to be on a two dimensional screen as where you've all become familiar with now,
or will it be also through VR headsets so that you can be really immersed into the thing.
But yeah, so Decentraland, like people are buying up space in there and all these other
places like it, and they're building up stuff, they're building up storefronts, you can go
in and you can shop for clothing for your avatars, you can buy artwork, right?
And Decentraland is the one that I'm most familiar with, so that's why I keep talking
about it.
You have different areas, right?
You have like the fashion district, you have the museum district, and like you can walk
around in these areas and go into buildings and see things.
And so if you go into the fashion district, you can see these buildings that are being
built, you can go in and check out Louis Vuitton, right?
Like they could have their own shop there and you can look at all these things like
the bags and things that they might be selling.
Now what's interesting is like, how do you leverage that as a company?
Do you just sell accessories for people's avatars, right?
Or do you buy an avatar handbag and you also get one in the mail, right?
Like there's different ways that could be leveraged, right?
So it's just another kind of world that people can kind of go into and do things.
I think that they were holding concerts in there recently, they had the Metaverse Festival
going on in Decentraland, so you kind of go in and watch the avatars of musicians or other
artists do things.
So yeah, it's interesting, but I worry about the certain generations, I don't want to say
generations, I don't like tying things to people's age, but it might be something that
is just so familiar to younger generations coming up that they're able to kind of go
into it, whereas somebody like older generations might go, that seems ridiculous.
Yeah, it is interesting to think of that.
And I would say, it's also interesting to think about how e-commerce, when that first
came about, actually, it's funny you mentioned Louis Vuitton because a lot of luxury brands
were actually very resistant to e-commerce because they were concerned it would erode
their brand.
They were concerned that they wouldn't be able to help authenticate the authenticity
of each bag, for example, or any like Rolex too, I don't think they even do e-commerce,
they just show you watches and you have to go to an in-store experience to actually purchase
one.
So in some cases, it's almost like with e-commerce, we had the same response.
And looking forward, looking at this metaverse as a way of tracking things and our acclimation
to two-dimensional interfaces, we've gotten very used to that.
We've gotten used to going on Amazon or Google shopping or whatever online store and it all
happens on a two-dimensional screen.
But there's also like massive improvements in things like VR, but not just VR and not
just augmented reality, but mixed reality where you've got a little bit of both.
And that's where I think this metaverse is probably going to have a really huge impact
because you've got these essentially mirrored experiences.
You've got your real life experience, you're tracking things in a digital space.
And in a lot of ways, it's not that different from how the internet has changed things.
It's really that now we're able to track things in more than two dimensions, it seems like,
and more than just transactions.
Yeah.
Huh.
That's an interesting point.
Yeah, absolutely.
So Jeff, if people wanted to learn more about your work or how to reach you, where could
you point people to?
It could be social media channels, websites.
Yeah.
I think the best hub to go to would be my personal site, jeffrobertson.me, and from
there you can access just kind of blog posts on different research things that I've been
involved with, find social media links, stuff like that.
All right.
Well, Jeff, this has been wonderful.
Thank you for your time.
Of course.
Thank you for the opportunity.
Thanks.
So we recorded our episode Tuesday, and this was before we knew anything.
There weren't even rumblings about this, so I feel like it's worth adding some additional
context since now it's like, wow, this is like a whole new angle with which we can look
at this.
So we talked about this metaverse and how there are all these things we can essentially
track, things we can have information about, and that can be great, especially if it's
decentralized and if people have interest in basically establishing a way of authentication
and being able to really interact in new ways.
But now it's like a whole new question, and actually when Facebook rebranded, it kind
of reminds me of all of the times that Comcast or Time Warner had a lot of really negative
press and they were just saying, okay, we're going to change our name.
We're now Xfinity or we're now Spectrum and whatever the other brands are.
And that's first what came to mind, but yeah, looking even more deeply, it is a bit interesting
to see the response so far in the past 24 hours.
So yeah, what are your initial thoughts about what has just happened?
I go back to the whole ethos of the decentralized movement, right?
This is something that is all about a means to break free of systems that are currently
under some sort of centralized control.
And this is generally servers that companies have that store all of our data and even banks
with central currency or government currency.
I don't like to talk about the financial aspects of blockchain because I think it really defeats
the point of the larger picture things, which is like the idea, like you're talking about
these larger world computers that transcend government-
In my mind, it's almost like the equivalent of saying, like summarizing the internet to
being only email.
It's like, that's how it feels to me when we talk about cryptocurrency.
Like yes, email is important, yes, cryptocurrency is important, but it's not the only implication
of this type of technology.
The only thing, yeah.
And if you remember in my seminar back in 2019, I talked about these kind of different
situations of these blockchain systems, specifically the difference between a permissioned versus
permissionless system.
And a permissionless system is one where anybody can become a node, right?
You can have your computer or your very large rig if you're doing proof of work, connect
to the network and help support it and in return, you're earning cryptocurrency as an
incentive to help support this decentralized system.
Now the other one is permissioned where you have to be invited and that's where Facebook
or Meta, whatever we want to call it now, it kind of comes into play here because they
were working on a cryptocurrency, they were calling it Libra or DM, I don't know where
they are right now, but the system that they had that they're working on was a permissioned
system where you would invite people, corporations, other corporations to be a node to help support
this system.
And so my question is if they're building out this metaverse, where is all this data
going to live?
Is it going to be on their permission system that they were working on for Libra or DM?
And if that's the case, you start to get away from, again, the ethos of the whole decentralized
movement.
All of a sudden, this concept of building these systems that transcend corporate or
government control are just being reinvented by a corporation in order for them to build
their own platforms on top of.
Along with the idea of these decentralized systems where you have NFTs and you have cryptocurrencies
and you have these assets that you as an individual have custody of because you have your own
private key.
No one else has it.
You have that private key.
How does that work with what Facebook is trying to pull off here?
Are they going to be in custody of this stuff?
Like is it attached to your Facebook ID?
And this is also going with the assumption that they will be building all this on top
of a system that's similar in its mechanics to what we've been talking about with blockchain
that they would have nodes that support all this stuff.
So are we moving away from the true philosophy of the decentralized movement while we allow
a corporation such as Facebook to build their own variation of it?
Because currently, we have versions of the metaverse.
We have different worlds.
We have crypto voxels.
We have Decentraland.
These are things that are built on top of it, both built on top of Ethereum and there's
others ones out there as well.
And you as an individual are able to purchase land inside these worlds.
Can you purchase land inside of this Facebook's metaverse?
I'm just kind of curious what they're going to do.
And the reason I bring all this up is because as we've seen with all technology, there's
kind of always a trade off with things.
If you allow a company to kind of govern something or a central thing to govern it, then you
can get maybe better usability out of it, right, like if we want to talk about VEX because
they're in control, they can cater the experience to you.
But that comes at a cost where you're kind of letting go of control of things for that
convenience.
I mean, we can look at this in a lot of different examples, whether it be, you know, Mac versus
PC, where PCs you have the ability to do more custom adjustments and Mac were like, we really
put together a package where it's harder for people to kind of really make adjustments
on their own.
But yeah, I'm just kind of curious where we'll go because if people kind of flock to a corporate
run metaverse like that, then there might be a loss of some of the great things that
the whole decentralized movement is about.
Yeah, yeah, because I remember during that seminar that you taught, and it's wild how
much it's changed in just two years, which really makes the class that I've been teaching,
you know, along with my colleague, Aaliyah Joyce, but yeah, emerging patterns and interface
design is one of those things that we're constantly updating and like, even more so now, like
a matter of one day, and all of a sudden, it has really opened up this whole new world.
But yeah, back in 2019, we were discussing like, it was DAOs, right?
So can you talk a bit more about those?
Because those were kind of the supposedly who would be the, the organizations to create
these, right?
Yeah, the DAOs, the decentralized autonomous organizations.
And so what they are, is, again, it's groups of people that come together from all over
the world, for common purpose, and they write their own kind of, I guess, bylaws, if you
will, for how it will be structured and how it's run.
A lot of times, it's very democratic in a way where, you know, you vote on things that
you want to have done for the project you're working on, oh, for example, let's say that
I was trying to do some contract work for a DAO, what I could do is write a proposal
for what it is that I wanted to help them out with.
That gets reviewed by members and they vote on whether or not that contract gets taken
up and I get, you know, paid the fees and I'm charging and I do the work.
This is a very democratic kind of way, way to how they operate.
And currently, you know, they're the ones that are creating things like Decentraland
and I guess Cryptovoxels, I don't know as much about that, but also the Rarible platform,
which is where a lot of NFTs are sold, are created and sold, but it's all, you know,
kind of run by these DAOs, but it's a new way of kind of creating a business-like structure,
but without the classic, you know, corporate or business hierarchy.
Right, so yeah, moving away from that very hierarchical, centralized type of organization
and moving more toward a kind of, I like that you use the word permissionless too, which
kind of really harkens to the point that this is open and this new system would not be as
open and yeah, it seems like there are going to be lots of like potential implications.
I was reviewing their statement just so I could be caught up to speed and I think they've
released some information about the metaverse previously.
I think it was like September, so I saw one of their statements from September, which
was along the lines of, oh, we're not building this alone, we'll be working with lots of
other individuals, like supposedly, you know, legislators as well as other organizations.
Now who that is, you know, we still have yet to see, but it does kind of make me wonder,
you know, what is this going to mean for the participants in this metaverse and what exactly
is going to be incentivized as part of the metaverse?
So just thinking about the fact that lots of social media makes money on advertisements,
for example, so it's probably going to be a big motivation to somehow make advertisements
a part of this metaverse and I can see, you know, potential issues with that.
And actually what comes to mind is actually I used to live in Hawaii several years ago
and in Hawaii there's a law against, at least on Oahu, there's laws against billboards.
Like there are no billboards in Hawaii because the idea is you want to be able to expose
all of the natural beauty that Hawaii has to offer and I'm glad for it, right?
You get to see all this wonderful stuff, there's no advertisements blocking the way, but I
can envision that same feeling that I felt when I came back from Hawaii, which is, oh
my gosh, billboards are everywhere, there's ads on the highway.
And I can imagine something similar happening where maybe we've become accustomed to not
having ads everywhere we look, but now if my dog food is running out, will Amazon be
able to be part of this metaverse?
Like who is going to be part of this metaverse?
Who is going to be telling me ads of like, hey, maybe you should buy this dog food for
your dog instead of that dog food.
So it's kind of interesting to see like what are the motivations behind interested parties
and is that going to match up with what ultimately user goals are?
And I don't think users even have a goal at this moment to be part of a system like this.
Maybe as an enthusiast or maybe as like entertainment, but this is definitely one of those unknown
frontiers or new frontiers where there is a lot that, and kind of going back to our
conversation yet there, not yesterday, but last week that people are not going to have
an appropriate mental model for this because the world has been two dimensional for like,
or I should say the digital world has been two dimensional for the last several decades
and now it's going to be three dimensional.
So yeah, it's definitely one, you know, makes me wonder what that's going to mean for how
we interact with this metaverse.
Your comment about the advertisements, I mean, we've been talking about Ready Player One
a couple of times, but I don't ever remember that scene in the movie where there is not
a, you know, one to one comparison to what's kind of going on now, but they're the company
of the evil corporation was talking about how they can leverage up to like 90% of visual
real estate for advertisements and the player, you know what I mean?
Like that's like kind of what I'm worried about is if you have a centralized entity
that's kind of controlling things, you know, you're at the mercy of how they want to allow
you to interact with stuff.
I do think there's like, I have mixed feelings because on the one hand I see lots of potential
for it being a good thing and then on the flip side, I could see it as having potential
for being abused in the same way our current, you know, mobile devices and applications
have kind of exploited our attention spans as well.
So it is interesting to think about and also terrifying to think about at the same time.
But yeah, it's, and I wish I had like a happy note to end on and I kind of want to end on
like a happy note if I were to put a cap off on the episode.
But yeah, I guess if I were to think about anything positive, it would be that conversations
like this have become much more critical than they have in just in a matter of 24 hours.
And I think that's a good thing, even if it does make us feel bad a little bit, but yeah,
I guess, you know, if you had to offer advice to people who are starting to wonder like,
how can I best get involved in this space or advice to maybe folks who are involved
in this space?
But now we've got, you know, corporate entities that have capital that want to contribute
to this space.
Like if what advice could you offer to people who are trying to get in on this?
Yeah, I don't know.
Big question.
I know.
Knowing that you have, you have a company like meta out there that is like has the capital,
that has the infrastructure to take everything that has been done kind of so far and to do
it in a very kind of, you know, controlled way is both scary, but it's also cool because
you're like, you know, you have someone who's going to legitimize at least conceptually
the things that are being built.
I mean, I guess my advice for anybody out there is like, you know, think about your
core beliefs as a person, what you believe in, you know, the things that you think are
problematic with the status of today, with how companies out there have used our data,
you know, and often problematic ways and kind of think about that going forward with what
you want to support.
If you want to get into, you know, the development of things out there outside of getting a job
with meta, right, there are lots of these dowels that you can approach and try to work
with to offer your services to them and to get involved in a, in the, in their, I guess
in their roadmap, you know, like being a part of their, the whole organization, you can
be a vote, you can be someone who tries to shape and mold the service or product that
the Dow is building and evolving.
So there is opportunity there to kind of get involved again, outside of just like trying
to get a job.
Yeah.
I think what you mentioned as like really reflecting on what it is you're a signing
up for, but be, you know, thinking about who it is you're serving.
And I often use that term, you know, who you're serving or that phrase who you're serving,
because I feel like as long as we know that our business will have goals and that's fair
because we do need to pay our bills, but as long as we know who it is, we're, we're trying
to help and have that as our North star for what it is we ultimately create, then, then
I do think there's opportunity to make something better and keep ourselves in check.
Now, I guess if I were to think of anything to add, it would be that a lot of times our
incentive structures cause us to make decisions that are otherwise, you know, maybe ethically
fraught, right?
When I think of certain organizations, I'm not going to name any specific ones, but this
is everywhere like conversion rate, right?
If your conversion rate is double what it was in the previous year, then you're probably
going to get a bonus for it, right?
You'll probably get rewarded with greater title, greater pay.
You know, there, there are lots of positive things that come from helping your business
to succeed.
But the flip side of that is, is that we often will get tunnel vision on, Oh, well, if we
just increase revenue in this area, we'll be great.
And we kind of lose sight of the need that ultimately we're serving and that, and that
need actually can bring a tremendous amount of value when we kind of forget the value
that that can bring.
So yeah, it'll be interesting to see if like incentive structures will change as these
designs become much more embedded in our lives.
And it's a, you know, Facebook's point, I don't want to kind of give this sense of doom
and gloom.
It will take a while for, for meta to reach its maturity.
So I do think we have time and that's something that's very rare.
I feel like usually when these technologies happen, it's just like, surprise, here's a
new life changing technology and now you have to learn how to live with it.
But in a way we're, we're kind of getting a heads up and I do think that bodes well
for us so that we can, we can better prepare as designers and also kind of prepare a bit
as a society and hopefully, you know, have some key decision makers involved in the beginning.
But yeah, that's my little rant.
Absolutely.
Excellent point.
Yeah, no, that's an excellent point.
We do have kind of a heads up and it looks like we know this time, so we can all be better
prepared as a society and how we want to be involved or hopefully have some sort of voice
in how things go.
Well, Jeff, thanks for joining again on a very short notice and thanks for sharing your
thoughts with us.
And I'm excited to see, you know, what lies ahead and you know, what, what will basically
soon lie all around us with augmented and virtual reality.
But yeah.
Yes.
Um, that's, I guess that's the show.
So thanks everyone for listening.
That was Jeff Robertson.
His website is jeffrobertson.me.
Check out the show notes for links to things that we chatted about, but also our website
has loads of free UX content like articles and videos.
And this month we have two more upcoming conferences and training opportunities, a two day internet
employee experience symposium starting November nine and a five day qualitative research series
starting November 15.
You can find details on all of these, our virtual conferences and more at www.nngroup.com.
And of course, if you like this show and want to support our work, please leave a rating
on Apple podcasts and no matter what platform you use, please hit subscribe.
This show is produced by me to Reese Fessenden and all editing and post-production is by
Jonas Zellner.
That's it for today's show until next time, remember, keep it simple.