I think Wonder Woman stands for a lot of things.

She's a great role model for women.

She's a great role mo, model for young men, who are just coming up.

And she's also the role model for

a study on body language that Amy Cuddy did at, Harvard Business School.

And this pose that you see her in is actually a pose that allows you to

achieve something that you can't achieve with just willpower.

So I'm gonna ask you guys to all stand up and assume this pose.

Put your feet about, yay apart, like maybe a foot and

a half apart, and put your hands on your hips.

You can even do the little kinda like, hip thing if you want.

Come on, do that.

And what's happening when you do this is,

testosterone is actually getting pumped into your body.

The power drug, testosterone is getting pumped into your body.

And at the same time, cortisol is reducing.

Cortisol causes stress for those of you who know that.

And this pose has actually created a chemical change in your body.

You can sit down now.

But if you stand like this for

about two minutes, you can elevate your testosterone and reduce your cortisol

to a point that you actually start feeling really, really good about yourself.

If Ben hadn't gone so long I would have been standing up here assuming

the pose to get into the frame of mind that I need to be to give a presentation.

But, what's, what's critical here is, if you're a designer and

you're thinking about designing stuff for

human beings, one of the things you need to consider is human beings have bodies.

And attached to those bodies are brains, and as we heard from Joe yesterday about

the psychology of, of your users, a lot goes on.

So we're gonna talk a little bit about how your strategies as designers are gonna be

affected by the biology of human beings.

You're probably thinking at some point during your life

over the next couple of weeks and months, what's gonna be next for design?

What's gonna be next for mobile design, or mo, your web design?

And hopefully you're at the conference to find that stuff out.

But if you're like most of us, it's a little far away.

And recently I was in a group of people and my son was a he was ten at the time,

and somebody asked him what he wants to be when he grows up.

And he did what most tweens do.

He put his hands in his pocket and shrugged his shoulders and

said, I dunno what I wanna be.

And this friend of ours pursued the question and said come on,

you must know what you wanna be.

You can be entrepreneur like your dad, maybe you want to be a doctor or

an astronaut.

And he thought about it for a minute and

then he said, the things that I'm gonna be working on haven't been invented yet.

So how do I possibly know what I wanna be?

And you guys, think about that for a minute.

What do you realize?

First of all, you realize that my son is a smart-ass.

>> [LAUGH] >> And then you realize, shit,

we're in the same boat.

We don't know what the future holds for us either.

When I was just starting out in design,

things like mobile devices didn't even exist.

Responsive design wasn't even something that we considered.

And that was just a couple of years ago.

So, what's happening in the next couple of years is well beyond our imagination.

And so how do we prepare for that?

How do we find out what the future's gonna look like, so that we can plan for it?

And in order to look into the future,

we're gonna look into the past a little bit.

So, I'm from Africa.

I grew up in South Africa.

This is the world according to Americans, so I'm sure you guys can find.

And when I was a young man I had the opportunity to work on a small

archipelago of islands called the Islamic Republic of the Comoros which is right

there in the Mozambique Channel, nestled between Madagascar and the mainland.

I don't know why it says penguins on the Madagascar thing,

there are no penguins in Madagascar.

But, this little archipelago has nothing to, to say for itself, except that it was

once called the only Fourth World country in the world by National Geographic.

And I worked there at this, resort where I taught people how to scuba dive,

and, and use the various other water sport things that we have.

Go up to stat.

And it's a really, really beautiful place.

The only thing I had to really endure while I was there,

was about four coup d'etats.

Which is apparently typical for the fourth,

the country that's voted as the only Fourth World country in the world.

So while I was teaching people how to scuba dive I had a mentor

this guy who actually ran the, the dive shop there, his name was Guy Fatherbee.

And he really made me fall in love with biology, and marine biology specifically.

And you know, apart from you know, me taking people on these trips,

these scuba diving trips so that they could see the wildlife out there

I think most tourist thought they were coming for this kind of experience.

But this is generally more of the kind of experience that we were showing them.

I really fell in love with, with marine biology.

But what's super disappointing is, after about three years of studying biology,

I realized that the way people make breakthroughs in that kind of space,

in that industry, is in the lab.

This is my generic stock image and

you can tell by the fact that everything is a primary color in those beakers.

Okay.

Nothing looks like that in the lab really.

So I had this, this, disappointment.

I was like, oh,

I can't believe that I am gonna spend the rest of my life in a subterranean,

windowless lab, when I really wanted to be off in the field doing stuff.

And then it dawned on me that it I had actually learned probably the most

valuable lesson of my life, and that was, biology is the best designer ever.

It's an exquisite designer.

It has the characteristics that we all wish we had as good designers.

It works well within constraints.

The very, very tight constraints of physics and chemistry allow biology to

create the most amazing array of things, but still within those constraints.

Nature also seeks beauty.

Not beauty in the sense that it's gonna go on the cover of a woman's magazine, but

beauty in the sense that it's attractive to the other organisms that interact with

it, whether they be its, its mates, its surrogates, its all the things around it.

Species seek some kind of beauty, just like we do as designers.

It's very adaptive, it remains flexible.

It's one of the, the best parts of being a good designer is being flexible.

It has great empathy.

Things that work well together tend to thrive in nature.

And finally, it's one of the best user testing environments there are, there is.

I just would hate to be the researcher has to design the user tests for nature.

But, it's amazingly good at coming up with new ways to test its ideas.

And this idea that there are these cycles of near wins

that approximate perfection and then get a little bit closer and a little bit closer,

is what I truly love about biology and how it teaches us about design.

So I'm gonna talk a little bit about of these evolving ideas and the fact that

ideas that evolve in nature aren't very different from how we work as designers.

We go from things that seem complex to things that seem simple

both in graphic design and in product design.

And as a product designer myself, I'm a little bit more partial to this story.

So maybe something that came out that was very, very complex is now super simple, or

maybe that simplicity just belies the complexity.

Either way, we've gone from something that was clanky and

hard to use to something that's way easier to use, and that's appealing.

Now, just a little bit of kind of weird, geeky stuff around evolution.

Most of us imagine that it's kinda this tree shape, right, that things slowly

adapt to their environment and that's how speciation happens.

But it turns out that a bunch of researchers,

a guy who's unfortunately dead right now,

Stephen Jay Gould, came up with this idea called punctuated equilibrium.

And punctuated leak, equilibrium happens when there's great stress.

So change happens when there's a lot of stress going on,

a lot of environmental stress.

So, band, these bands that I've put in here are showing

where that stress may have occurred, and that's when speciation happens.

So in, in nature it could be a meteor falling out of the sky or a disease.

In our world it's probably something like a recession, or

a new piece of technology, or the internet.

And that's when things start to diversify and you see new ideas coming up.

So big innovation tends to happen when there's lots of stress.

So, I'm not suggesting you all go out and get super stressed.

But that's when things happen,

when there's this environmental stress, that's when things get going.

So Rule Number 1, and I've listed them at the end of the presentation as well,

I've got a whole bunch of these rules.

Innovation in products, especially the products that we use every day,

technology dri, driven products, happens suddenly.

There's no gradual iterative process.

Suddenly you get a big breakthrough and boom,

you're into the next generation of that product.

If we think a little bit less about the macro and

more about the micro, and focus in just on our physiology, think about,

what does the human form say about our future?

Not particularly good news apparently.

But,.

Our bodies tend to show us what product design should look like.

So, first question is why do we have brains?

Most of us would assume that we have brains that we can do higher cognitive

things like, think and feel.

But it turns out that we have brains so that we can move.

Moving is how we control the world around us.

A neuroscientist guy by the name of Daniel Wolpert, has done work to show that

all the evolution that's happened across all speciation happens

when they want to move, and when they wanna move, they have to grow a brain.

So if you're a tree or a plant, you don't need to move, you don't need a brain.

Movement is the way that we affect the world around us.

And that's a really critical thing when you're a designer, because assuming that

we're not move, moving leads us to design things that require people to be static,

and that's out of our natural state.

So this thing, this disgusting looking thing, is called a sea squirt.

And it has two forms, it swims through the ocean and

it has its little brain that allows it to do that, and when it find its home,

which is normally a coral reef, it puts its feet down.

And the very first thing that it does is digest its brain.

Now, we can not do the same thing as well [LAUGH].

But, the critical thing here,

from a designer's point of view is, if we've evolved so much and we've taken so

much trouble in growing brains, we should respect that as well.

So think about the world around us.

Everything that we do is designed around movement.

The city, if you walk out into New York City, here you can just see it.

Everything is designed for movement.

Everything allows us to be mobile.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

So, the big idea here is, mobile is not technology.

When you describe, when you use the word mobile,

don't use the word in a technological sense.

Think about it specifically as our state, our human state.

We own mobile.

Technology is catching up to us and not the other way around.

We've spent millions of years getting to this point,

technology's only been here for a short amount of time.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

So it's not the technology, it's the biology.

[BLANK_AUDIO].

And I tell this to my designers all the time.

Be careful of technologies that requires to be in a state that's unnatural.

And by unnatural, I mean not moving around, not being mobile.

Desktops are a good example of this.

They are what was [UNKNOWN], what was possible and capable for

us to build at the time.

We had a lot of computing power in these machines that were heavy.

We couldn't carry them around.

But as soon as we got to the point that we could make that mobile, we did.

As soon as we could make a computer in your pocket, where's my phone?

But wherever you're.

As soon as you can figure out how to do that, we did it.

We pursued the mobility as soon as we could,

as soon as technology got small enough to allow us to do that.

So, instead of us building a, a home office and an office,

now we are super mobile, super mobile.

So, the second rule then is, this is our mobile state, me moving around,

you being here, us going from place to place, traveling around the world.

That's who we are.

Built for that state.

Oops.

One of the other great things about being a designer who's thinking about

the future is that, if you're designing for

humans, which we all are, humans haven't changed that much.

Our tools change.

And the technology improves and gets more complex.

But, the form by which we are interacting with them, hasn't changed much.

Just look at this picture.

The hand hasn't evolved much in hundreds of thousands of years.

It still does the same thing.

It still behaves in the same way.

Your eyes, your ears, all your senses, they are not gonna change for

the next couple of hundred of thousand years.

Unless, we've become super cyb-orgy.

But at the rate of the evolution, this is what you're designing for.

So, even when design looks terrible

[BLANK_AUDIO],

it still conforms to our human body.

But we're trying to make technology look more like us,

rather than us trying to conform to how technology works

[BLANK_AUDIO],

whether it's a wearable or

in this extreme case something that you insert in your body.

This guy has inserted these RFID tags into his hands and

he uses them to open up his house and access technology and turn on things.

And he believes that if we continued on this track, we won't even want wearables.

We wouldn't want to carry the watches and the phones and things with us.

We want all of that stuff embedded.

And, that may be true.

It might just be an extreme view now that becomes a conservative view later.

But right now,

we're at that age where we're still trying to figure out wearables.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

This is a really cool picture in my mind because

it shows how technology has transformed this woman.

But notice that her body hasn't changed, the shape of a woman.

Her arm still looks like an arm.

Her face still looks like a face.

All right we're not trying,

making technology look, make us look completely different.

It just conforms to what we are.

And, in fact I was at, at TEDMED Conference when they were releasing all

these really cool new cyborg arms and, and leg prosthetic.

Those look exactly like the things you would see in nature, exactly.

So, we are conforming that technology to look like us not the other way around.

I also like that in artist impressions of the future,

we still wear regular clothes and have you know a belt,

which is like millennial art technology to hold up our pants.

Apparently, we couldn't figure out how to do that.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

So the future of design, specifically in mobile design, looks more like you.

Look in the mirror.

This is what design is going to look like.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

We dig a little deeper and we think about Maslow's hierarchy, hierarchy of needs.

The things start with the basics, what we need to do in order to stay alive.

So whether it's keeping warm and sheltered.

Keeping our, keeping ourselves fed,

staying within a group of people that love and protect us.

These things are very basic.

Now, clearly Maslow wasn't around before the internet, cuz that's what we all need.

But, if you think about the products that are being designed and

created today, they all conform to this as well.

So, that kind of hierarchy of basics to complex needs, is not gonna go away.

We're just gonna build for each of those levels.

So, rule number three is, the best of our products,

the best ideas we have, don't come at the expense of what we already are.

They just extend who we are and what we are.

So, our powers as biological beings are extended by these ideas,

not replaced by them.

So, what about content?

This is the biggest pain of most designers' lives because content precedes,

in many cases, good design.

So, if we know that tech conforms to us and we know that content needs to follow

that as well, what kind of world are we gonna create and what kind of products do

we need to create for that world in for, in order for content to be relevant?

Now, unfortunately, 70% of

adults claim that they take their smartphones to the bathroom with them.

Which means right now as designers, somebody is using your websites or

your product or your app, on the toilet right now.

And that's, a little scary because that means that we have to design for

all eventualities,

all situations whether they are well within the testing realm or not, right?

I can just imagine designing this user test.

So, we know that we're always on, we want our, our devices with us,

we wanna carry them with us, we wanna take them wherever we go.

But it's not always the same device either, right?

It's not just a smartphone, it's not just a tablet.

So, when we had the smartphones designed for that was pretty easy,

then we added the tablets, and then we started adding more and more, and

it got really, really confusing really quickly.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

And The Guardian did a great study where they showed how we interact

with our products over a week, and then eventually over a day.

And as you can see, there's something going on here that's more than just oh,

I'm using more devices.

It's, I'm using more devices, but I'm not throwing the other devices away.

So, you might take your smartphone and

then get an, a tablet, and you go to the office and use your desktop,

and then you've got a tablet, and then you've got a wearable.

You're not replacing them.

You're aggregating them.

So, there's this effect that's going on where you are not substituting things, but

rather aggregating them.

And that's really, really important.

It's gonna get more complex.

It's gonna get more complicated for us as designers.

We've got not just the things that we're currently designing for, but,

the things that we haven't even imagined yet that we have to design for.

So, all these different experiences require us to not

only do what Ben was telling us earlier, go out and prototype so

we can find out how these are being used in the real world, in the wild.

But then also try and fill in the gaps with new products, new ideas,

new content delivery systems, so that we can design a better experience for

those gaps that we haven't quite created yet.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

Rule number four then, is mobile experiences are not created equal.

So we might, we may think we're creating a great mobile experience, but

our users are trying to fill the gaps of even more products and more experiences.

And we're gonna have to be in advance of that by seeing how they do it,

watching them work in their environments, watching them play in their environments,

and seeing where the gaps are.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

Okay.

So, one of the things that we absolutely need in order to

stay healthy and happy, is a constant flow of.

Dopamine, right?

We need dopamine, we need serotonin, we need norepinephrine,

we need these drugs in our brains to make us happy,

to keep us satisfied, to feel that we're bonded with the people around us.

And how as designers do we need to create environments in which that happens?

We're not going to go too deep in this but

I just want to touch on a couple of things.

The first thing to realize is that we are emotional first.

Not logical first.

For many years, researchers assumed that we were just these rational computers,

biological computers, that could make decisions quickly and easily.

And then these other things called emotions

just kinda got in the way from time to time.

Well, it turns out that women were right all along, right?

They, it's all about the emotions.

Emotions come first.

And that's because all your sensory input comes through the amygdala.

So much so,

that if you have some kind of damage to your amygdala, you cannot make decisions.

Not good or bad decisions.

You just, period, cannot make decisions.

And that's really, really important, from a design point of view.

In studies of flow, which is what's, often designers describe

as being in the zone, they figured out that when you're in flow,

you're actually turning off a lot of your cognitive ability.

So this prefrontal cortex area that does most of your higher thinking.

That actually get shut down so that you can do some really awesome work.

So the, the, the really amazing action-adventure sports guys,

they are completely switched off at that level.

They are relying on this kind of much deeper

emotional way of managing their world.

And in order for us to understand that and then use it in a way that's useful.

We have to understand that, that creates engagement.

And if you are trying to create engagement with product or services or brand,

you need to understand how that connects.

Now again we don't have a lot of time so we can't go deep in to this but

I highly recommend a book by Steven Kotler called The Rise of Superman.

And it talks a lot about how this flow and

how the mantle state needs to happen in order for

us to create engagement with each other and with products and brands, et cetera.

So, one of the things he talks about is that there are these

big buckets of triggers.

There are multiple triggers within each one of these categories.

The environmental one is super important for

us from the point of view of this talk is that from a physical point of view,

our bodies actually give indications of what we need to feel.

So just as you guys stood up earlier and you put your hands on your hips and

you kind of had that feeling that you're now in a state of power because the,

the, testosterone thing generated by your brain into your body.

The same thing happens in almost every situation.

So if we know that there's this kinesthetic relationship between our

bodies and the word, we need to also design for that.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

Our physical experience obviously then,

is resulting in some kind of chemical experience.

So if we're designing things at our desktops.

But then our users are using them out in the wild, in their cars on their,

on their trains and in their beds, on the toilet.

Then we're not quite designing the right experience.

We need to get out there and feel what they feel.

Because that's when we have the opportunity to prototype or

build something.

That gives them the sense that they are bonding with it.

That brain chemistry, mostly serotonin, drives that engagement.

And that can only happen when there's some kind of physical participation between

you and the product, or you and the experience.

So this is not brand loyalty, this is just plain stupidity.

Nobody is gonna go to this length for your brand or your product.

Nobody loves you this much.

These people are serious outliers.

Yeah, maybe I understand the, one or two of these, but Windows, really?

Acting like crazy.

>> [LAUGH].

>> The idea is that you need to create some kind of bond with the people that

are using your product.

And that's a chemical thing and

a physical thing that they're not gonna take a bullet for you.

They're not gonna go to the end of the earth for your brand.

You need to be able to connect with them in a way that makes them feel good.

They need to be thinking, hey, what am I going to get out of this,

what's in this experience that helps me?

So if you can create an experience that makes them feel good,

you are going to do really well.

And if you make them feel like they have won, they have got,

they've got some kind of achievement, you are going to make it even better.

The ultimate product design or

experience design is when you make them feel fantastic in front of their peers.

So just as we all gathered here as designers and

developers, nobody's thinking to themselves, gee, you know, I need to be

an expert at InVision or Photoshop or any one of the other products featured here.

They're thinking, I want to be recognized as an expert.

I want to be recognized by my peers as a master of my game of my craft.

They're not specifically thinking about your product.

They're thinking about what your product can do for them.

And I think a lot of us as product designers forget that.

We forget that we not just designing a product, so that they can use the product.

But that we need to do something that they can feel good in front of their friends,

in front of their peers, in front of their colleagues,

in front of their entire community.

That's one of those Maslow hierarchy of needs, you have got to make them look good

in order for them to be bonded with their environment.

So I'm gonna tell you a quick couple of stories.

A friend of mine has the runs the BMW dealership in Boston.

And a lot of people coming in especially these what he describes as soccer moms,

talk about buying a car that would help them do the things that they needed to do,

and they were seriously concerned about car safety.

And so he would show them things like this.

He would take them to the website and say, look this is what the Kelly Blue Book

rating is, or, you know, whatever some kind of third party ranking would be.

And these are great scores.

In his mind, he was doing what he thought was the best possible thing.

He was saying, this is what these people need to see in order to buy my car.

You would show the engineering features, you would show the specs, you would say,

look, it's got 20 air-bags and 5 reinforced steel things over here and

there, and then those people would walk out and then go and buy a different car.

And he couldn't figure it out.

And it turns out that his idea of what safety looks like and

their idea of what safety looks like are completely different.

So this is critical, what people see in their minds and

what they experience is going to be different from how we design and

therefore we have to get out there and see what they see.

You have to ask that question.

What does safety look like for you?

What does good experience look like for you?

They will then tell you.

And then you'll say, oh, that's why you didn't buy my BMW.

Because that looks safer to them than the BMW did.

Another quick story.

We were engaged by a company called FitOrbit to redesign this

platform that they had which allowed people who wanted to get fit.

The people who make you fit in other words, physical train or yeah,

physical trainers and people who do nutrition and things like that.

It's kinda like a Match.com for people who need to get fit.

And they were doing okay, but they were struggling a little bit, and

we looked at this, and we un, we, we, we kind of asked,

a lot of questions about what does getting fit look like to you?

What does making, yourself healthy look like to you?

And what we discovered from these people is that, most of these,

the users of this service,

felt that they weren't necessarily worried about losing weight, or eating well.

Those thing would follow.

What they were super worried about was companionship.

Not only did they feel a lack of companionship in their life

because they were feeling unhappy or unwell, or fat, or something like that.

But rather, they were then projecting that out into the world saying nobody loves me.

And so once we were able to understand that, we came up with this thing

saying it's take one person to gain weight, two people to lose it.

And that was our internal way of understanding what experience

we needed to create.

We redesigned the website.

There's an example, there's the work there.

We focused it on companionship and we saw a 300% increase in subscriptions.

This is a good example of how understanding what people's physical

story is, what their emotional story is, relates to how you design a product.

So, rule number five.

The best products makes us feel more human.

So here are the, here are the things we just discussed.

Innovation trumps iteration.

Right?

Lots of small changes doesn't get you to that big breakthrough.

The mobile state is our default state.

We have to think mobile all the time even when we're not designing a mobile product,

that's who we're designing for, a mobile thing, a mobile human being.

We've got to extend our biological powers.

Know what those powers are, and then extend them.

These mobile like experiences that we're creating,

they're not equal because they get used in different environments.

They get used in bed and on the toilet,

in all the places that we least expect to see them.

And making them feel good is what they want.

They don't want you to build another future, another cool thing.

They want you to make them feel good.

That is a very very fundamental part of being human.

So, some practical things.

Agile and Lean are cool.

And they're obviously better than Waterfall.

And they're better than what I heard recently, which is AgileFall.

But, these, these things, these small iterations,

these cycles are not gonna make big break use.

You need to do things that allow you to push forward.

So, for those of you who use processes like design sprints,

deep dives, experience mapping, these are incredibly powerful tools.

Like within a week or two.

Can push you really far ahead.

Here's a good example.

So when the Palm Pilot was first created, which is the first real computer in

a pocket kind of thing, the the guys that were designing it got a lot of resistance.

People said there's no way these

people are gonna carry around a computer in their pocket.

So they took a piece of wood and they carried it around in their pockets for

several weeks.

And they realized that there's this comfort in having your computer with you.

That, that sense, that physical sense of having that thing

in your pocket far outweighed the anxiety of having a computer in your pocket.

And that's how they overcame that.

This idea that mobile first should lead the design, I think is kind of cool but

it's also kind of quirky when you think about the fact that we are mobile already.

So mobile first should have been something we should have been thinking about a long,

right from the beginning.

It's a human state, it's not just a state of the technology.

So even when you create something, and this is a good example of where you have

a great technology that moves you forward, quite literally.

If you makes you feel like an idiot, you're not gonna ride it.

>> [LAUGH].

>> Right?

It doesn't matter how brilliant the technology is.

If it makes you feel weird and uncomfortable and

self conscience, you're not gonna use it.

Extending our biological power.

There's a really, really lovely clip of Marilyn Monroe being interviewed.

And, she's wearing some new outfit.

And the interviewer says to her, Marilyn, I see you're wearing this new outfit.

And it's, you know, it's a lot, a lot more conservative than what she normally wore.

Is this the new Marilyn?

And she turns around and says, no, it's the same Marilyn with a new suit.

Okay? That's what we're looking for.

We wanna be the same human.

We wanna be the same person.

We just want to extend our abilities out a little further.

Again, great technology but if it makes you look like an idiot and

pulls your ego back to, you know, towards yourself so

that you feel self conscious, you're gonna have a bad experience with it.

Oops.

The other thing is that context is really, really important.

We spoke about how your products might get used in different environments.

Vonage launched their product at a time when mobile was taking off.

And they were so convinced that IP was going to beat out

mobile technologies that they didn't even consider for

a moment that people would use their cellular phones as their home phones.

And so they built this massive business, took it IPO, did, like,

500 million in the IPO, and

then immediately crashed and the pieces got picked up by some, some bankers.

So you've got to get out of your building.

You've got to go and find out what they're doing because your users may have already

adopted what the next extension of their super power is and

while you're still building a business around this technology

they've moved on to something completely different.

And finally let's build stuff that makes us feel good.

Let's make stuff that makes us recognized and safe and excited.

It's not just bold stuff that's got more features.

They pick stuff that really makes you feel good.

And that's it. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]