[MUSIC]. 0:00 Okay, thank you. 0:09 Hey, good morning, everybody. 0:12 Normally I, kind of sit at, or stand out here at the front and wave my 0:15 arms a lot, but, I realize if I do that, you guys can't see the pictures. 0:19 I want you to see the pictures so I'll probably hang out here. 0:23 So, the internet is a big thing. 0:26 We all think about it in different ways. 0:36 You know, what I'm going to talk about this 0:39 morning is gonna be a little bit strange I 0:41 think, its certainly different to a lot of the 0:43 talks you'll hear at other parts of the conference. 0:45 I'm not going to talk about HTML much, or CSS, or front ends, I'll 0:49 talk about Photoshop a little bit, its not particularly a positive part of the talk. 0:53 So it'll be a little bit different, but, hopefully, it'll challenge you. 0:59 You know, my goal for this is just 1:03 that you guys think about things a bit differently. 1:04 I don't know, I'm gonna like talk a little 1:07 about the future and where I think things are going. 1:08 I'm not sure if this is gonna happen, it's just my opinion. 1:10 It's certainly up for debate, and I just want to 1:14 challenge you guys to think about things in a different way. 1:17 So what do you think about when you think about the internet? 1:22 Do you 1:25 think about websites? 1:28 Do 1:29 you think about apps? 1:33 Maybe you think about mobile apps. 1:35 [BLANK_AUDIO]. 1:36 When I think about the internet I don't 1:40 think about websites or apps, I think about networks. 1:41 I think about connectivity. 1:45 This idea that we've, we're building something that 1:47 connects people, connects things, connects people to things. 1:50 This is another picture of the Internet. 1:57 I think this one is pretty remarkable. 1:58 There are no country borders drawn on this. 2:01 This is just a picture, it was created by one of the guys at Facebook. 2:04 It's just a picture of friend connections. 2:08 It's pretty amazing. 2:10 It's literally the world. 2:13 Literally the, the Facebook network of over a billion people has 2:14 effectively created a map of the world, joint connections between people. 2:18 These are, these are, these connections enable things 2:21 that weren't possible even just a few years ago. 2:24 It's a pretty remarkable thing. 2:26 And when I think about networks and think about things that are being built that 2:28 have hundreds of millions of users, things like 2:32 Facebook, and Whats App, and WeChat in China. 2:35 It just goes back to say if networks and trying to understand this, 2:37 you know, couple of years ago I tried to read about other networks. 2:41 What happened when other networks are built, what happening in the kind 2:45 of public conscientious, how do people talk about them and think about them. 2:49 And there's just some examples that I think we can learn a lot from. 2:53 The first one is electricity. 2:57 So, this is pretty remarkable. 2:59 This is a photograph, obviously from space, it's from NASA. 3:01 Siberian Peninsula, you can see the tip of Africa. 3:05 You can see Madrid. 3:07 You can see Valencia. 3:08 You can see Lisbon. 3:09 The thing that's striking to me about this is that you can see where people are. 3:10 Electricity changed how we live. 3:17 It changed what we could do. 3:19 It led to all sorts of different new things. 3:21 You know, I'm sure, this, this photograph is especially for a European audience. 3:25 These things didn't exist, you know, 50, 60, 3:31 70 years ago and that's not a long time. 3:33 You gotta remember, we're literally 3:36 talking about our grandparents' grandparents. 3:37 It changed where we gather. 3:41 It changed how we eat. 3:43 It changed where we eat. 3:44 It changed how we socialize with people. 3:46 It's pretty remarkable. 3:49 A second network that I think really changed society is the network of roads. 3:50 Which of course came about because of the invention of the combustion engine. 3:56 So again this very recent, this is 100 years ago, the 3:59 car was invented, people didn't really know what to make of it. 4:02 And as a result of that we had this huge network of roads build all over the world. 4:07 And if you go back 40 or 50 years, I don't think these guys, who are here 4:11 inventing the four leaf clover, I don't think they 4:17 realized exactly what they were, what they were inventing. 4:18 They, they couldn't see the repercussions or 4:22 the consequences of this massive, massive infrastructure. 4:25 Because this also changed society. 4:30 It led to suburbia. 4:32 It changed how we lived. 4:33 It changed how close we lived to our families. 4:34 It changed where we shop, it changed how often we go into town centers. 4:37 And it changed commerce. 4:42 It fundamentally changed how people buy things and how businesses run. 4:43 The road network meant that businesses could buy very 4:48 cheap land on the edges of towns and cities, build 4:51 massive warehouses, and then use trucks to, and, and 4:54 airplanes, I guess, ultimately to ship goods into those places. 4:57 And people could use their cars and the road network to get to these places. 5:01 That fundamentally changed how much things cost. 5:04 And it meant that people who were you know local 5:07 businesses on, on high streets couldn't really compete with this. 5:09 And you guys all experienced this, I'm sure a whole bunch 5:12 of people live in suburbia, I kind of live in suburbia. 5:15 You all shop at big box retailers on the edges of towns. 5:20 It fundamentally altered things. 5:23 And I think the internet is gonna do the same. 5:26 I think the impact of the internet might even be 5:28 more profound in society than the, than the road network. 5:30 Possibly even the electric network. 5:34 So I think, you know, in my mind, its pretty safe to assume, that 5:38 this is going to lead to the 5:41 greatest challenge to society for hundreds of years. 5:42 You can, the inside is, is very young. 5:46 It's 20 years old. 5:49 So you can already think about the things that it's changed. 5:49 So it's fundamentally changed how news is discovered. 5:53 Fundamentally changed how news is published. 5:57 How journalists think, and how news organizations think. 5:59 It's already fundamentally changed, in parts 6:03 of the world, how governments are elected. 6:05 It's changed how we play games. 6:09 It's changed how we buy things. 6:13 I'm sure all of you guys shop online all the time. 6:16 There's new products coming out, you know, Amazon, 6:20 Google are doing a whole bunch of things 6:22 where you don't even have to go to 6:24 shops anymore, everything just gets delivered to you. 6:25 The internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate with people. 6:30 You know, I have a year and a half old twins now. 6:34 They were born in San Francisco, where I lived I'm back in Dublin now. 6:37 And the internet fundamentally changed my parent's experience 6:41 of that of, of their grandparents being born. 6:44 Fundamentally changed my friend's experience of that. 6:47 It's changed how we navigate our world. 6:52 And 6:54 the striking thing to me about all these 6:56 things is that the internet is still so young. 6:57 It's only 20 years old for all practical purposes, 20 years. 7:00 And if you look back to, again to 7:06 understand this, you gotta look back over you know, 7:08 the last few hundreds of years and understand what 7:10 happened and other media and communication technology were invented. 7:13 And when you look back, you realize that 7:16 the internet, not only is the internet so young, 7:18 a lot of the other technologies that we have: 7:21 TV, radio, print are actually relatively young as well. 7:24 The first example of media externalized by humans is 30,000 years ago. 7:28 So there's just a rapid increase, in the pace of change. 7:34 Things that are fundamentally altering large parts of 7:38 society, and this is happening in our lifetimes. 7:41 So, to understand, you know, to kinda like zoom in into these technologies a 7:46 bit more and understand what's happening when 7:50 they were introduced into soc, into society. 7:52 How did people react? 7:55 This is like huge implications and huge lessons for us 7:56 to understand how the internet is being thought about today. 7:59 I'm gonna give you just, guys, just two examples. 8:03 There are examples, by the way, for all of these media technologies. 8:05 The same patterns happen over and over and over again. 8:07 The first is is print. 8:11 So, you know, the printing press here, you can see, was invented 8:13 roughly around 1440, but it took over 100 years before we saw newspapers. 8:17 When the printing process is first 8:23 invented, they're printing pamphlets sorry, they were 8:24 printing huge, huge tomes, the same kind of things that monks, were hand scribing. 8:27 The printing press was pretty transformational, it 8:37 led, you know, it formed a large 8:40 part of reformation, created this idea, of a public, that there was a public, right? 8:42 Before the printing press, for the most part, news and information 8:48 traveled within the small town or village that you lived in. 8:51 The 8:54 second example is electric technology. 8:56 Things like cinema, radio, TV. 8:59 Again, these took decades to develop, took decades to stabilize. 9:02 And if you look back at this history of things like cinema, things like TV you 9:07 realize that people were doing things that were 9:13 different, then how we think of these things today. 9:16 For example, they were filming plays, or the 9:19 fact that the first movies had no sound, right? 9:22 There's a whole silent era for movies that were, 30, that was 30 years long. 9:25 And if you think about, if you actually look and see the 9:29 first movies that people made, they weren't the movies that we know. 9:32 There was narrative, there was no story art. 9:35 It was literally just pieces of pretty 9:38 random video footage, all just pieced together. 9:41 So electric technology, things like TV in 9:49 particular created this idea of a mass audience. 9:51 This idea that everybody could look at this one thing and experience it together. 9:55 Again, fundamentally changed how we think about things, how 9:59 we think about life, how we think about information. 10:01 The one thing though, aside from all these changes 10:08 to society, the one thing that struck me most when 10:10 I was, looking at the history of all these things, 10:12 was that people at the time made the same mistake. 10:15 Every single time, without exception, any of these technologies 10:19 were introduced into society, people made the same mistake. 10:21 And I feel that we're making the same mistake now, all of us. 10:25 I've made it, I'm making it a whole bunch of times. 10:28 I'm sure a lot of, lot of you guys are, are making the same mistake. 10:32 And, it's not a new thing, older people who 10:35 dealt with all these technologies also made the same mistake. 10:38 An that is, that they look at the new technology 10:42 and they think about it in terms of existing technology. 10:43 They look at a new medium and apply the ways they work with older media to it. 10:46 Film plays is obviously a, a great example. 10:53 So they apply the ways they work with existing media, new medium. 10:59 So the first printing press, printed pamphlets, 11:03 these huge things that monks were transcribing. 11:07 My favorite example is Alexander Graham Bell. 11:14 When the telephone is invented, his pit, his 11:17 pitch was that the telephone was for broadcasting. 11:19 That you would literally put a telephone on a stage, 11:22 like this one, at a religious event, a music sermon. 11:24 And people would dial in from all over the world. 11:26 That would huddle around their own telephone, and dial in. 11:29 That's a, a pretty interesting way of thinking about 11:33 a telephone, that's clearly not what ended up happening. 11:35 So the person who was inventing this 11:37 technology, and trying to get funding for it. 11:39 His pitch was radically different, and the reason was because 11:41 you know Alexander Graham Bell was thinking about existing media. 11:44 And the dominant idea at the time was this idea 11:48 of a mass audience things like newspapers and distribution of newspapers, 11:50 and so it was natural for him to think of 11:54 the telephone as another way to distribute things to mass audiences. 11:56 As I mentioned, cinema was film plays. 12:01 And the internet was pages. 12:04 All right, all the first websites and many websites still today are built on 12:06 this idea of a page, a web page, many, many web pages all linked together. 12:10 And if you think about pages, the, the word itself is from print, right? 12:14 Books are made of pages. 12:20 We're already thinking about existing media, and applying it to this new medium. 12:22 I think Marshall McLuhan described this best. 12:28 He talked about it as walking backwards into the future. 12:31 So when I look at a lot of webpages that 12:36 exist today, on the surface they look incredibly well designed. 12:38 You know the BBC homepage looks very clear. 12:41 But to me it looks suspiciously like a newspaper. 12:46 We've invented this incredible technology that's connecting the world. 12:49 It's connecting billions of people. 12:53 It just doesn't seem right that the, this massive news 12:55 organization, and by the way, I respect the BBC enormously. 12:59 I think they've done incredible things. 13:02 It just doesn't feel right. 13:04 It looks so much like a newspaper. 13:05 So we, we live in this time, you know, Paul mentioned it in the introduction. 13:10 We live in this time of great change, every generation, feels this way. 13:13 Everyone feels like they live in, in times of change. 13:18 You know human beings are typically not very good with dealing with change. 13:21 We're pretty change averse. 13:23 But I genuinely feel, maybe everyone says this, I genuinely 13:25 feel we do live in a time of great change. 13:28 And, and our profession in particular are lucky. 13:30 We're lucky to have this opportunity to shape this change. 13:34 And the reason that I feel we live in a time of great change 13:37 is because if you look back even for the last thirty, forty or fifty years. 13:40 You see that each, each new computing paradigm took about a decade, right? 13:43 So we had mainframe computing in the 60s. 13:48 And it took about a decade before we got to minicomputering. 13:49 Another decade before we got personal computing. 13:53 And another decade before we got the 13:54 desktop internet, AOL here [LAUGH] and their CDs. 13:57 It took about another decade before we saw a mobile internet emerge, right? 14:03 We, we, we got mobile phones and mobile technology 14:07 started to take off, but all these things took decades. 14:10 And if you look at what's happening today, if you look at what's 14:13 happening in this decade, if you take the decade from 2010 to 2020. 14:17 You start to see that they're actually 14:21 multiple computing paradigms all happening at once. 14:23 We always have, have mobile as a, as a huge 14:27 paradigm shift, and how we think of technology and communication. 14:29 We also have wearable computing. 14:34 And, you know, there are lots of early experiments in wearable computing. 14:36 And you can debate whether they're good or not, 14:39 or whether they have a mass market or not. 14:40 But in my mind wearable computing is a real thing, it's a real 14:43 thing and I'm going to show you some examples of why I think that. 14:47 And the third one is that we have connected objects. 14:50 Right, we are literally putting censors in objects and those objects can 14:53 start to talk to one another and start to talk to people. 14:56 So, to kinda illustrate, how these things start to come together. 15:00 I have this, fun video, it's about a minute long. 15:05 It's from Simone Rebaudango, it's a master's project. 15:10 It's, it's, kind of, it's kind of fun. 15:13 It's tongue in cheek, but it paints a picture 15:16 of the future that I think is pretty interesting. 15:18 >> And this is Brad. 15:20 Brad is part of a new breed of products. 15:23 These toasters are connected to the web but 15:27 also to each other, creating a peer product network. 15:29 Like all of the other toasters, brad is programmed to love being used. 15:35 He is also sensitive to the use of other 15:42 toasters, so sometimes he feels a bit of pressure. 15:44 If he's used more than other toasters he will remark upon how satisfied he is. 15:50 When Brad is left alone for a very long 15:59 time, he will try to draw attention to himself. 16:01 [NOISE] When 16:04 his host forgets about him, and other toasters in the network are used 16:11 more than he is, he'll start to feel a bit of craving come on. 16:15 [MUSIC] 16:19 Brad may start asking for more, showing signs of anxiety. 16:19 >> All right, so maybe we'll have toasters that work that way. 16:28 But I think it's really interesting because, 16:32 what's happening is that, the objects are connected. 16:35 That's gonna increasingly be the case. 16:39 And they're talking to one another. 16:40 And they're starting to, talk to people. 16:42 And people are starting to talk to them in different ways. 16:44 ANd it just changes our relationship with those things. 16:46 So it's a bunch of things that are eh, bunch of themes, I think are higher 16:51 level, that I think all of us should be thinking about again, how this plays out. 16:55 No one really knows, but we have this 17:00 amazing opportunity in front of us to shape it. 17:02 So the first is that the internet is permeating everything. 17:06 It's in our homes, I'm sure you guys are familiar with Nest. 17:10 Who make a whole bunch of connected objects for the home. 17:15 It's in our clothes. 17:17 Nike are an incredible company to watch right now. 17:20 Because they're a company that are only 30 years old, but they've 17:23 moved from being an apparel and sportswear company, to being a technology company. 17:26 They're literally putting chips in all their products, 17:31 in their shoes in the apparel that they sell. 17:33 That's all connected to this Nike Plus 17:37 platform that they're building, which has apps, 17:40 and it's things like this wearable device, this field band which tracks my movement. 17:42 Right, they're building up to this pretty interesting thing, but they're 17:47 literally putting the internet into all the clothes that they make. 17:50 I'm sure almost everyone has taken a Hail-O Taxi. 17:55 The internet is literally permeating taxis changing how 17:57 we think about getting transport, changing our transportation habits. 18:02 Maybe that's bad. 18:06 Maybe, I know I've taken a taxi when I should have cycled or walked. 18:07 The point being that we will literally start 18:11 putting censors in everything, that's already starting to happen. 18:13 And so everything will be connected, everything will be able to talk 18:18 to everything else and it just changes the possibilities that we have. 18:22 It changes the things we can make, the 18:25 types of experiences we can build for people. 18:27 And what's fascinating about this is that it's 18:31 gonna be possible to do this everywhere, right? 18:33 So, here's a a photo. 18:36 This is a remote part of Southeast Asia. 18:38 It's a jungle in Southeast Asia. 18:40 And this lady here, with her phone, if she has a network 18:42 connection, has access to exactly the same types of information that we have. 18:45 And increasingly in the future, we'll have access to 18:50 the same types of connected experiences that we have. 18:52 And this, to me, is actually the key to mobile. 18:55 If you think about mobile as a thing. 18:59 Then, to me, the most important idea behind mobile is not devices. 19:01 It's this idea that everything will be available everywhere. 19:06 To me mobile is about access to information and publishing 19:09 information, it's not about iOS or Android, or tablets or phones. 19:14 So this changes what we do all these things, all these huge, huge trends, these 19:20 huge shifts in technology, this idea of 3 computing paradigm shifts at once. 19:25 Just changes what we do, it changes our job. 19:30 You know I've deliberately not used the term web design. 19:33 I'm talking about the Internet, because I 19:37 think this actually fundamentally alters what we do. 19:38 And I think our tools are just not suited for that. 19:40 Photoshop is a tool that's for print, it was designed to manipulate static imagery. 19:46 It's not designed to deal with time, or 19:53 how things change, or how you build a network. 19:55 How you design an ecosystem. 19:59 It's not built for that. 20:00 [BLANK_AUDIO]. 20:01 So I'll come back to the Photoshop thing. 20:04 but, you know, I often give a talk 20:07 that's is somewhat similar to what I've just said. 20:09 But, and then I leave it there. 20:13 And everyone is very confused. 20:14 [LAUGH] And, like, oh my God, what? 20:16 But today, I wanted to like, give you guys something more concrete. 20:19 Maybe you can go back to your job, and 20:22 directly change some of the things that you work on. 20:24 Maybe change what higher company thinks about their business. 20:27 And again, this is a huge huge opportunity for this community. 20:30 So I kinda ask myself, you know, what is the future of web design? 20:34 And the answer is that obviously nobody knows, 20:37 it's gonna evolve, it is evolving very fast. 20:40 It's gonna continue to evolve very fast. 20:42 But I think there's definitely three themes that I see. 20:44 In my work over the last few years in the, in the you know, my work, I worked 20:47 at Facebook and at Google before Intercom, but at 20:52 Facebook I worked with a lot of externals companies. 20:54 My job was as a designer working with, you know, 20:57 companies like Nike and Starbucks and Coca-Cola and so on. 21:00 So, you know, I saw the insides of these other organizations. 21:04 And I think these, these three things apply to all of us. 21:09 I don't think there's any exceptions and how they play out we're not sure yet. 21:12 So the three things are that first of all, all of us will be designing systems. 21:17 Not even products, but systems. 21:23 Things that are connected. 21:25 All of us are gonna be designing personalized experiences, and 21:29 all of us are gonna have to deal with designing change. 21:32 Designing how things change over time, 21:36 which obviously involves transitions and animation. 21:38 [BLANK_AUDIO]. 21:40 So the best way, I've found to explain this idea 21:43 of designing systems is just to give two practical examples. 21:46 These are obviously examples that I'm personally familiar with. 21:50 I'm sure there're a bunch of other examples that you guys have. 21:53 So the first one is Facebook. 21:55 So a lot of people ask, you know, what is Facebook? 21:58 It's not a website, and it's not an app. 22:01 It's a system, it's an ecosystem of 22:05 lots of different components all connected together. 22:08 And if you think about Facebook and think about the things that are on Facebook and 22:11 in Facebook, if someone said to you, what 22:15 is Facebook, you'd probably start thinking about the Newsfeed. 22:16 That's a part of Facebook. 22:20 The timeline, your profile page, is another part of Facebook. 22:21 A page that a business or brand has is another part of Facebook. 22:25 But all of these things are just aggregations of something else. 22:29 The Newsfeed is just an aggregation of content your connected to. 22:33 Your timeline is just an aggregation of content about you, alright. 22:36 It's things that you posted about your life, or it's 22:40 things you are tagged in that your friends and family posted. 22:43 So the common theme here, is that there's something 22:46 smaller that's in a, an atomic piece of content. 22:49 And the, the Newsfeed, the timeline, our actual experience of Facebook is 22:52 considered, is is is consisted of an aggregation of these smaller things. 22:56 And you guys, I'm sure know this, right? 23:01 If you think about Facebook, you have a Newsfeed, and 23:03 these, on the left here, you have these individual posts. 23:05 But this isn't unique to Facebook. 23:08 Twitter works exactly the same way. 23:10 Smaller pieces of content, your experience is the aggregation of that content. 23:12 You don't experience these things in isolation. 23:16 Instagram is exactly the same. 23:18 Pinterest is exactly the same. 23:20 [BLANK_AUDIO]. 23:21 Twitter, is the same, but Twitter is also doing something interesting. 23:24 This is Twitter Cards, which is actually a product 23:29 that they sell to businesses, talk to businesses about. 23:32 What's interesting to me about this, is that here 23:36 you can see there's a New York Times story right? 23:38 So someone's sharing a New York Times story. 23:40 So the New York TImes obviously you know, historically was a 23:43 newspaper business it's obviously not news that the news sort of business 23:46 is in rapid decline and it's quite possible that the New 23:50 York Times won't sell newspapers in the next, in the forseeable future. 23:52 That's very very plausible. 23:56 What people don't think about, and I think this is equally 23:58 plausible, is that the New York Times won't have a website, because 24:00 the people who are reading New York Times content, or actually 24:06 reading them on these distributed networks, 24:08 they're reading them on social media. 24:11 They're experiencing New York Times content, like 24:13 here on Twitter, much more than the website. 24:15 To the point that the website becomes an overhead and a cost. 24:17 And the New York Times decide, strategically, 24:21 that doesn't make sense to us anymore. 24:24 It doesn't make sense for us to have a website, so 24:26 we're gonna get rid of it, or we're ju, we're gonna focus 24:28 on building our business around publishing the best types of content 24:31 possible, to show up on these other networks that people are using. 24:34 So here are Twitter cards, the New York Times can decide right now 24:38 how to show content, whether to emphasize the photograph or to emphasize the text. 24:42 Right? 24:46 And this is obviously the very very beginnings of something that 24:47 Twitter I'm sure will develop well beyond what you see today. 24:50 But it's an interesting idea that the New York 24:53 Times won't have a website in a few years. 24:55 [BLANK_AUDIO]. 24:57 So the common pattern with these things is 25:00 that there's this atomic unit and it's aggregated. 25:01 It can be a stream. 25:05 Pinterest has a grid you know, horizontal and vertical grid. 25:06 There're different ways to show these things, 25:09 but if you actually take a little bit 25:11 of a broader picture, you start to see that other companies are also doing this. 25:13 Like Google has Google Now. 25:17 If you look at Google Now, which I think points to the direction possibly 25:18 of search at Google, you see that 25:22 there's these independent things, these individual components. 25:23 And depending on who you are, they can decide to show you different things. 25:27 I mentioned Nike already. 25:32 You know, Nike is an ecosystem of connected components. 25:34 So, the question then becomes, what does this mean for us? 25:38 What does our job look like in this world? 25:41 Where there's possibly no website. 25:43 You know, what are we designing? 25:45 And you know, this is a a screenshot of Intercom, I think 25:48 this is the best example I have cuz it's the closest to home. 25:50 But when I joined Intercom, you know this is the, 25:54 this is what you get when you use the app. 25:56 This is the Home page. 25:58 And just like all of you, you're looking at 25:59 this and thinking, there's a lot I'd change about that. 26:01 [LAUGH] alright, looks pretty complicated. 26:03 So, of course there are. 26:07 Of course there're things you would change about it. 26:08 But that's not what I, what I did. 26:12 You know when I joined the company, what was 26:15 important to me was to understand the system behind it. 26:17 Right, so you, so for Intercom specifically, you have this list. 26:20 You know these are all the users of your app, Intercom 26:23 by the way, I should, I should say is a communication platform. 26:26 The idea is that it simply co, connects businesses and their customers. 26:29 All right and it's a simple way for 26:34 businesses and their customers to talk to one another. 26:35 So here, a business, an app who is using Intercom can see all their users. 26:37 And they can talk to them. 26:40 They can message them. 26:41 Right. 26:43 [UNKNOWN] activity feed to see what's going on in your business. 26:43 And there are conversation threads and profiles and so on. 26:46 However, the details of the of the UI don't actually matter. 26:49 What matters is that the most important way to 26:52 think about this, is not to think about the UI. 26:55 It's to think about the objects that are in this system. 26:57 Okay, so there's a user profile, there's a 27:01 company profile, there's a message, there's a reply. 27:03 There are tools if, if, if we want, if 27:06 we're dealing in messages, we need a message composer. 27:08 We need a reply composer if we want people to reply. 27:11 We need to figure out where this reply composer goes. 27:13 Where does. 27:17 Where. 27:17 How can a user of an app who doesn't use intercom reply? 27:18 Right. 27:20 This is suddenly a pretty complicated system, and there are different views. 27:21 And so, this was what, this was you know, one of the earliest 27:24 things that I created when I joined, and obviously the details here don't matter. 27:27 What matters is that I didn't jump in and start redesigning 27:32 parts that, of the UI or even parts of the experience. 27:35 The most important thing to understand was, what's in this? 27:39 Like, what is it? 27:41 What are the objects that are in here? 27:43 Where do they show up? 27:44 What are the cascading changes? 27:46 If I do make a change to one part of the system, what happens to the rest of it? 27:47 Are there other things that are gonna change because of that? 27:52 And I actually made a bunch of mistakes when I joined. 27:55 I didn't understand things well enough, I changed 27:57 parts of the product and broke other parts. 28:00 And this is gonna become a common experience for all of us, 28:02 because we're all gonna be dealing in this wor, in this connected world. 28:05 And it's gonna be harder for us to 28:09 comprehend all other permutations of all other things. 28:11 And so we're gonna need to start designing systems. 28:14 We're gonna need to start drawing it out and really internalizing what it 28:16 means to change one part and know that it will impact other parts. 28:19 [BLANK_AUDIO]. 28:22 So I believe all of us are gonna be designing systems, 28:24 and it's gonna become a critical component of what we do. 28:28 Second thing is designing for personalization. 28:32 Again, I think all of us are gonna be dealing with this. 28:36 I spend a lot of my time when I was at Facebook explaining what social meant. 28:39 So, you know I would have these really large businesses 28:44 in the world asking me if social was a thing. 28:46 This is like a fad you know, this social media thing, 28:49 we've hired a bunch of interns to manage our social media. 28:51 You know, they're pretty cheap, so that's goin' okay. 28:54 And it's a kinda crazy, like we don't, we don't, we don't walk around life, 28:58 you know, saying hey John, like the party on Friday like, can you make it social? 29:02 That's not a thing, right? 29:08 We don't think about social in the abstract. 29:10 It's part of who we are. 29:13 Human beings are one of the most social species, 29:14 if not the most social spec, species on earth. 29:16 This is just the internet catching up. 29:19 Of course, social interaction, human connectiveness, is gonna be 29:21 a core part of every experience that we build. 29:25 It's how real life works. 29:28 And there's really only two parts to it. 29:31 You can intellectualize this all day long, but for me, 29:32 it, you can simplify them to two things, two simple things. 29:36 One, people want to feel unique. 29:38 All right, all of us today got up 29:40 this morning, chose what to wear, chose where we 29:42 sat down, chose the people that we, we 29:45 spoke to and said things that projected some sense. 29:47 I'm making everyone paranoid, I'm sure. 29:50 [LAUGH] Projected things, right? 29:52 Said things, and decided not to say other things, because 29:54 they want people to see themselves in a certain way. 29:56 And the paradox of this, is that people also want to feel connected. 29:59 Right. 30:03 We have a innate desire to feel part of a group, part 30:03 of a movement, all right, that's why we have family and close friends. 30:06 And these two things are, are almost in tension with each other. 30:10 We wanna be connected, we wanna feel part of the 30:13 group and be the same, yet we wanna feel unique. 30:15 And this is gonna be a part of the experience, I 30:18 think, for all of us, all the things that we design. 30:19 And the reason this is really really important, 30:23 is the reason that I believe personalization is gonna 30:25 come to everyone's doorstep that's here, is that 30:27 the internet as we know it is fast disappearing. 30:29 The internet as we know it, is this, is this idea of pages. 30:31 Things that were linked together. 30:35 This idea of a destination, of driving traffic to a certain place. 30:36 But that's fast disappearing. 30:40 [BLANK_AUDIO]. 30:41 We're moving very very quickly to a world where every time data is served 30:43 to you, whether it's in an app or a website, you bring with you information. 30:47 You bring with you, with you information about your interests, 30:51 your friends, your friend's interests, behavior, things you've done before. 30:54 And that means that all these businesses, depending on 30:58 what you share with them, can personalize experiences for you. 31:00 And all the, all the data that I've seen so far, points in the direction 31:03 that people will openly share information, if the value they get back, is is enough. 31:07 You know, we have this with loyalty, with loyalty 31:13 programs like Tesco Club card, people who have Tesco 31:15 Club card are telling Tesco everything they buy, in 31:18 return for like, just a little bit of money off. 31:20 [BLANK_AUDIO]. 31:22 So I think it's, this is gonna radically change how we think about things. 31:25 We're gonna have experiences where we have all of this information about 31:27 people that they will share with businesses, and then you've got all 31:31 of this third party services and data like social networks, and Google, 31:34 and loyalty cards, and these big companies that aggregate all this data. 31:37 And it's gonna change our experiences. 31:41 It's gonna change our experiences of news. 31:43 Where we won't get the same news experience. 31:45 We won't all see the same news. 31:47 We will get news based on our interests. 31:49 Local news based on where we are. 31:51 News your friends have read. 31:53 News people like you have read. 31:54 I think TV will be exactly the same. 31:55 Currently, TV is a pretty terrible experience. 31:59 We turn on our TV and it's like 999 channels. 32:01 Unlike, I don't know why there isn't 1,000 and its just, I've no idea 32:04 what to watch, so I'll just watch the same things over and over again. 32:07 And I think we'll go, move quickly to a world where we'll see 20 things. 32:11 And they're all interesting cause they're movies that our friends watch. 32:15 They're shows our friends watch, they're movies based 32:18 on our interests and shows based on our interests. 32:20 [BLANK_AUDIO] 32:21 I think the same is true for commerce, 32:23 when we go to e-commerce websites, we'll see 32:25 products your friends liked, products your friends bought, 32:28 products we save for you based on your interests. 32:31 This, we already experienced this, any of you guys use Amazon in any 32:34 way shape or form, Amazon are recommending 32:37 things based on things you've bought before. 32:38 It's a personalized experience. 32:41 I think, I think it's even gonna happen to offline stores. 32:43 It's already happening, where people get individually 32:46 priced items based on what they bought before. 32:48 [BLANK_AUDIO]. 32:50 This is already happening. 32:53 Personalization is already happening. 32:55 I don't know if most people realize it, but when you 32:56 search on Google, you're getting different results based on who you are. 32:59 And you don't even have to be signed in. 33:03 It's based on cookies and a bunch of other things. 33:05 All right. 33:07 So all of us look for the same 33:07 information on Google, we will actually get different results. 33:08 [BLANK_AUDIO]. 33:10 So I think personalization is a big deal. 33:13 And I think all of us are gonna have to deal with it and try and figure it out. 33:15 And more and more and more of our experiences become personalized. 33:18 And the reason I think that this is gonna, 33:21 this is almost inevitable, is because it's just better. 33:22 All right. 33:25 People will engage more. 33:25 They will watch more shows. 33:27 They will read more news. 33:29 If things are tailored to people, you're just gonna see higher 33:31 engagement and p, that will obviously drive businesses to push this forward. 33:33 [BLANK_AUDIO]. 33:36 So the last thing. 33:40 That I'm gonna talk about is hard to describe. 33:42 It's designing change, designing things that change. 33:46 And I love, I, I used to sit in the Ace Hotel 33:50 a lot in New York and this is an amazing sign they have. 33:52 They had an ugly exit sign, and they 33:56 just wrote, every exit is an entrance somewhere else. 33:58 I think that's a really powerful idea. 34:01 The idea that all of the things that 34:04 we design, people are coming from somewhere else. 34:05 And after they, like, deal with what we've given them, they go somewhere else. 34:08 And they bring with them biases and how they move changes how they think. 34:12 And we, I think we have a lot to learn 34:18 as a community from architecture and urban planning, because these, these 34:19 people have been thinking about how things change over time and 34:23 how people move through space, for, for many, many, many decades. 34:27 And there's many great lessons learned. 34:30 So I wanna share with you guys a quick 34:33 video, this is from William White, who is studying 34:35 why some some town squares and city squares are 34:38 full, while other town squares and city squares are empty. 34:41 [BLANK_AUDIO] 34:44 [MUSIC]. 34:44 >> This is the plaza of the Sigmund Building in New York. 34:46 Late morning, with a time lapse camera, we were testing a hypothesis. 34:50 The sun, we were pretty sure, would be the chief 34:55 factor in determining where people would sit or not sit. 34:57 Now, just after 12, they begin to sit. 35:01 Right where the sun is. 35:05 I was enormously pleased. 35:07 What a perfectly splendid correlation. 35:09 It was quite misleading as we would see later, 35:11 but it was a very encouraging way to start. 35:15 [NOISE] We were studying the Seagram's Plaza 35:17 because it was one of the most popular. 35:20 Many people didn't think that it would be, but it was and we wanted to find out why. 35:23 [BLANK_AUDIO] 35:28 I love his voice [LAUGH] people don't speak like that anymore. 35:29 It's just, it's, it's fascinating. 35:36 You know, why do people sit in one parts of the square and not in others? 35:37 Why do people, why are some squares full and others are empty? 35:41 And it's a lot for us to learn about that. 35:43 Why are some of the experiences we design not used by 35:46 anybody, and why are other experiences used by lots of people? 35:49 And I think a lot of it comes down to how we think about time. 35:52 [BLANK_AUDIO]. 35:53 If you think about the best buildings in the world, you know, many 35:56 of the buildings that win architectural 35:59 prizes are actually horrible to use, right. 36:00 But they're amazing externally. 36:02 But some of the best buildings that stand the test of time, like 36:04 Grand Central Station in New York, ha, ha, deal with, deal with change. 36:07 They deal with how people move through that space really well. 36:10 [BLANK_AUDIO]. 36:12 I think a wonderful example of this is 36:15 these town squares that exist in many European cities. 36:16 So the experience of the square, you know, to look 36:20 at this photograph this does, this doesn't look that dramatic. 36:22 It doesn't look like a square that 36:25 you would particularly, you know, write home about. 36:27 It just looks like lots of other town squares in Europe. 36:29 But the reason when you walk into the square, the 36:32 experience is incredible, is because of where you came from. 36:35 You came from somewhere like this. 36:39 You were walking down this dark narrow alley, and 36:41 suddenly this square just opened up in front of you. 36:44 And it's that change over time that makes that experience amazing. 36:46 And I just, in my, it just isn't something that we think about a lot. 36:51 We don't think about time. 36:54 We don't think about things like change. 36:55 And the reason that this, to me, is really, really critical for us as a, as 36:58 a community to think about and adapt our 37:02 work is, is really enca, ca, encapsulated by this. 37:04 Another Marshall McLuhan quote, who's, clearly influential in my thinking, 37:09 [LAUGH] we shape the tools and the tools shape us. 37:14 So if we build these tools, like Photoshop, they shape what we do. 37:18 If you're in Photoshop for a large part of 37:22 your life, you're just not gonna design change well. 37:24 It's not designed for that, it was never built for that. 37:27 Right, equally if you're in After Effect for most of 37:30 your life, which is a tool for designing time and change. 37:32 But After Effects is like pretty hard core. 37:36 You're also probably not gonna think about systems. 37:38 And the fact of the matter is, these tools that we need don't exist yet. 37:40 We're using tools that were built for other media. 37:45 Tools that are built for print. 37:48 Tools that are built for filmmaking. 37:48 And there's a whole load of conversation on the internet about building new tools. 37:52 But I think, I just wanted to put it 37:56 in your heads, I think it's really really important that 37:57 you critically analyze the tools that you're using and how 38:00 that changes your work, because it will change your work. 38:02 And maybe the best work that you'll do is the work 38:06 that you'll do on sketch pads and on white boards where you 38:08 can actually sketch change and look at how things play out over 38:11 time and design these systems and figure out how they all interact. 38:13 [BLANK_AUDIO] 38:17 And to me, you know, the BBC website just looks like it was designed in Photoshop. 38:20 It just looks like that. 38:25 So it changes our horizon. 38:27 It changes what we think is possible and you know, when I wake up every morning and 38:30 go to work,you know, I'm, I'm working in 38:34 a in a small startup that's trynna change something. 38:36 It's trynna change how businesses and and their customers interact. 38:39 They're trynna change the fact that the 38:43 experience that we have today is just poor. 38:44 If you wanna talk to an internet business, you have to click 38:47 on a form, fill in a big thing, it goes into the ether. 38:49 No one really knows where it went. 38:52 Then you get an email back that's automated that says, hey, thanks for 38:53 your, thanks for your question about our business, we'd like to sell to you. 38:56 Your ticket number, blah, blah, blah. 39:00 By the way, do not reply to this email. 39:02 Like that is not a good experience and I just think we can do better. 39:04 We can do better than that. 39:09 When I look at all the things and when I 39:11 wake up every morning, I feel like I can do better. 39:13 I feel like I'm stuck looking at print and things like that. 39:16 Things like graphic design, and just that I can do better. 39:19 So, I guess this is a, I, I don't know what this is. 39:23 A request [LAUGH] to you guys to think about your work differently. 39:27 And you can debate this. 39:30 This isn't necessarily the ultimate outcome. 39:31 I don't really know. 39:35 But I just wanted to place these things in your head. 39:36 Because I think we need to, we're at, we're 39:38 at this amazing point in the history of humankind. 39:40 We have an amazing job, because we get to shape this. 39:43 We get to build this. 39:46 We get to design these things. 39:47 We get to decide what the internet of tomorrow looks like. 39:49 That's our job. 39:52 And so, I just wanna leave you with this, with this this quote from 39:52 Charles Eames, and a really wonderful post read thing, from Tim Ballmer, at Facebook. 39:56 Which says, eventually everything connects. 40:00 So thanks a lot. 40:04 [SOUND] >> Thank you very much. 40:05 >> Right on. 40:11