Designing Products for Evolving Digital Users
Study UX Behavior Patterns, Online Communities, and Future Digital Trends
1st ed.
For all that is alive.
For Dennis.
“For everything to stay the same, everything must change.”
—Unknown
We live in a world of exponential change. The ripples of change redefined everything we thought we knew, including how we think about ourselves and our role in our global social reality.
Over the past century, digital has become a core element in shaping every part of our reality. What we felt most keenly was that digital has allowed us to collect and carefully curate information about ourselves. We can now control others’ perception of us through the social media posts we share. We can look for any information available on a prospective client before ever entering the meeting by stalking them using Google. We can view the daily life of our favorite vlogger on YouTube. We now compare habits and values from all cultures, systems of thought, bodies of literature, emerging technologies, and countless voices in digital communities.
Recently, something changed in our world, but we hardly noticed. We became a composite entity, part human, part digital. Unlike the dystopia that we apprehensively envisioned in the early days of digital, this reality is one of coevolution. A careful balance of beauty and horror, as we see more and more of ourselves reflected back at us through our digital extensions. As our world transitioned from analog to digital-first, we cleverly created a hyperrealism where digital became more important to us than the analog reality that birthed it. We started to live primarily in the reality enabled by digital. Many digital spaces, many as apps on your phone, all intertwine and merge to become one cohesive reality through their use. Instantiated through the pronoun “I” and changing with each moment of interaction with yet another space that extends our material existence, the two halves that once were (i.e., the analog and digital identities) rapidly became one.
Digital media has enabled us to see, share, empathize, collaborate, and create in significantly new ways. It has allowed for us to trace occurrences and global patterns with remarkable accuracy. We gained a way to see our Earth from its orbit; a protest in the next town over; a sports game live we couldn’t get tickets to. A way to see the house we grew up in without having to leave our new living room, all the while shopping the latest New York fashion. Digital allowed us to transcend the temporal and spatial limits of our bodies, to see and enact change all over the world no matter where we physically inhabit. It has guided us on how to behave and how to interpret the world in broader, more nuanced, and more meaningful ways.
While being alone with our glowing screens, modern humans are constantly connected to a buzzing global network of people, ideas, and opportunities previously beyond our reach. The local has been made global, the global accessible to any locale. To enable connection, purely digital, immaterial, spaces came into being. By creating and adopting digital, we created spaces that have not existed before. Whole digital ecosystems, some of which became an extension of the literal and some of which remained separate in their own right (outside of our engagement with them). They are everywhere and nowhere. We create instances of them when we open our browser or app, and those instances co-create our reality. In this manner, beyond ideas, digital products have shifted our very habits, becoming integrated into our lives to the point of inseparability.
We realized quickly that at the root of most change is information. Transparency or obscurity. Abundance or scarcity. Due to its unprecedented convenience, accessibility, and trustworthiness, our go-to for information has shifted from people to technology. Before, we relied on humans. Now, our questioning starts with: Is there an app for that? What does Google say? Greater access to information has fundamentally transformed our relationship with our world and our place in it. We are still acclimatizing to the changes.
As digital quickly became a literal extension of us, our sense of self and identity adjusted to the changes we experienced. We suddenly needed to position ourselves in relation to all others on the global stage. We had to adjust our perspectives of quality and value, of the purpose and impact of what we create. Prior to digital, who we thought we were and our values were largely dependent on the limited information we could access that helped us contextualize and make sense of our lives. With almost unlimited access to information, digital has fundamentally transformed this foundation.
Identity narratives (i.e., stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and what we do and don’t do) shifted to encompass new tonalities of our being: Am I an Apple or Android kind of person? What’s my position on mobile phones at the dinner table? Who do I know on social media? What kind of personal brand is this Instagram post cultivating? Though identity narratives are not a new phenomenon, their scope, complexity, and rate of change have transformed dramatically in the last century. Identity narratives have helped govern behavior, assist in feeling a sense of purpose and value, and identify with those we consider “our tribe.” Who we are has become more driven by the reflection we see of ourselves in the digital than those that surround us in our geographical locale. We now construct and design ourselves based on countless role models and archetypes that we have access to.
In one way, we freed ourselves from having to accept linear evolutionary trajectories and disciplines of thought that characterized our past. At the same time, we have overloaded ourselves with choice while forcing ourselves to reexamine the very nature of our being. This is a good thing. A profound state of empowerment that we, as a species, have not had a chance to experience before on a global scale.
As digital designers, we are keenly aware of these constant changes. We comprehend that the users we design for are part of a global myriad of interconnected, often symbiotic, networks, some of which do not exist outside the digital realm they constitute yet are more important to our users than anything else. The only interface to these realities is through the digital products and/or services that allow us to interact and enact change within that space (and beyond).
As digital designers, we have a responsibility to our users to create the optimal experience for them. An experience that enhances their lives, brings about positive social change, and enables them to go beyond what is possible. As our users change, we need to preempt their changes and allow them to transition to a new state of being through positive experiences. We act as enablers of their dreams, their aspirations, their needs and wants, their feeling of safety as they navigate the external, full of new challenges and complexities. Our goal is to enhance their lives, make them easier, improve quality, and add to elusive feelings of happiness they are searching for.
In creating digital products and services, digital designers become the leaders of the changes that constitute our modern world and our identity. That is a lot of responsibility.
So how do we do it? By designing for life.
Our Digitally Distributed World
Life at the turn of the 21st century marked a new era. An era of true digital extension of ourselves. Unlike ever before, we developed a symbiotic relationship between us and the tools we created. Digital has become a part of who we are, an enabler of what we do, and a constant interface between us and “other.”
Digital has become inseparable from our identity. It became invisible, something that is so common that it simply is, hidden in plain sight even for those of us working to create within its boundaries. Since the power of language in transforming our entire being, it is hard to point to something more profound than digital technology. This is something that comes as no surprise to those looking at the past through the lens of exponential evolution and refinement of information. The more sophisticated our information ecosystem, the more advanced we become.
Digital has rewired us, unified culture, broadened horizons, and made time and space irrelevant in participating in global affairs. New patterns of being have emerged. With Google, we can find, see, compare, watch, listen, and learn. With Facebook, we can cultivate, discover, connect with, see, watch, self-express, record, curate, discuss, and dream. With Amazon, we can reach, acquire, create, and save. With eBay, we can downsize, upsize, search for, hunt, get, and sell. With SecondLife, we can become, experiment, explore, discover, test, create, destroy, play, and connect. With Reddit, we can argue, share, delight, learn, connect with, and empathize. With Netflix, we can escape, relax, immerse, suspend, discover, and feel.
We can do more than ever before, everywhere, all the time. We can cycle through different modes of being, no matter how different, in seconds. We can see ourselves reflected to us through each pattern of interaction. As our knowledge of ourselves grows, so do we. Nothing encourages self-reflection and reflexivity more than transparency over our own choices. We are now free in ways we have not been before. And we have gradually become more mature, empathetic, aware, conscious, and caring. Paradoxically, at the same time, we have become more disillusioned, disassociated, overloaded, overworked, and burnt out.
We have developed incredibly high standards for ourselves and our expectations of others. We know what the “cutting edge” standard is at any time, and we are not willing to compromise on it without a good reason. We, as users, have developed increasingly high expectations of what a digital product or service can offer us. Due to the amount of choice we have, anything that creates a hindrance to our progress (in performance, functionality, or UX) becomes instantly replaced by something that is more aligned with our preferences.
Successful products and services became leaders of global change in standards and user expectations. Any one successful innovation generates waves of adopters, who follow the new standard to make sure that they do not become obsolete, as some inevitably do. Global waves of innovation merge in the melting pot of digital, and create new patterns of life, which can be both positive and negative from a holistic perspective.
The changes that have resulted in the positive gains over the last century also created a host of pain points that we are still working to design out of the system. Technological progress has significantly improved quality of life for a lot of us, while at the same time created waves of ecological instability and pandemic existential crises in even the most highly developed societies. As digital designers, our power is in the level of impact that we can achieve through the products and services that we create. We can, in theory, use technology to solve the most complex “wicked” problems that we face within our lifetime. We are aware of the issues that are still preventing groups from achieving a state of symbiotic sustainability with the broader ecosystem. We are also aware of the responsibility we have in leading the transformation.
Just as we became more empathetic as a society, we became more empathetic as designers. We now learn from our users, rather than dictating what their experience should and should not be. We have more ways to see what users do in the digital spaces we create, and interact with them as they interact with the product and/or service created. The more information comes to light, the more we are able to make an informed decision for the benefit of our users and their purpose. The choices we make, as digital designers, are more complex than ever before.
The more we are able to see the similarities and differences, the more we are able to comprehend that what separates us is as meaningless as a candy wrapper, but what unites us is so fundamental that we can all agree to its indispensable relevance to our existence. We recognize that to be human is to be humane, to think beyond our short-term interests, and to design our role in our collective evolution.
Digital Design
Welcome to the exciting world of digital design. If you are a veteran forging its path, or someone with a keen interest, welcome to the most exciting design project of our time: digital. It started in the shadows, out of the main bustle of business activity. Then it became a part of every office, every meeting, every mass production operation, every home. Digital has proliferated and become embedded in everyday life to the point of inseparability with those that use it.
At all points in its evolution, digital had one purpose: to enhance the lives of those who interact with it. Though originally digital was thought of as a mechanistic “thing,” it soon became something that is an undeniable extension of us. Our phone and laptop are now something without which we cannot function in modern society. There are still overlaps with prior waves of society where digital technology did not play such a critical role. The mindset of the past is one of fear of change, while the modern fear is one of stagnation. We no longer want to be anything other than changing rapidly, to keep up, to become something better. We cannot stand to be kept out of the new wave of progress. We don’t want to become irrelevant, or worse, unfashionable or out of touch.
We are now designing digital for evolving users. We are creating something mostly intangible: an experience. As it emerges, it has effects that we deliberately designed into the system, and others completely unpredicted. Something as simple as a “Like” button and where it is placed on a page (hierarchy of importance) can have unintended consequences of shaping user behavior, such as to focus on posting content that aims solely to boost its own popularity (and also its dominance in the idea pool).
As designers, we make countless design decisions in every project that have the same dilemma. We can predict the impact of features on user behavior only so far. We are still very limited in predicting how the product or service will truly impact someone’s life, how it may shape their perspectives and habits. Or the more personal questions: How might interacting with this product or service shape how users will feel about themselves? How might the product/service affect the formation of users’ identity?
Identity in the digital space is complex. Before we could represent ourselves online, we primarily had a static view of identity. Who we were was closely linked to our material bodies. Identity came from biological relations, and those of similar agents in the society that we constituted. Then digital allowed us to be 100 people and 1 at the same time. There are no limits of the number of identities, profiles, and avatars that you can have in the digital realm. We gained digital identities and started to question the “other” identities that suddenly became apparent as, perhaps, not being a 100% complete representation of ourselves. We realized we are far more nuanced and complex than we originally thought. We realized that who we are is more a product of our choices than the static attributes that defined us before (e.g., gender, age, wealth, status, etc.).
Who we were online bled into who we were offline. The two are now the same. Digital design has enabled this to happen.
Identity in Digital Design
Identity is a narrative and/or a set of attributes we use to define ourselves. Identity is the filter that interprets our sense of self and enhances it as it sees fit in the memories that it curates. It is something that we develop over time, since birth, and is the outcome of our comprehension of our world and our experience in it.
The most useful way to think about identity in digital design is as an algorithm that works within certain sets of parameters. Certain inputs are interpreted through existing schemata we have cultivated over time and recognize as “I”. We can predict our own actions based on what we know of ourselves. We can, to a degree, predict how we will be perceived by others. We now know what drives us, and what we can and cannot do based on our personal ethics. We know what values we uphold and what we are willing to compromise at what price. We realize that who we are is a product of what we choose, rather than what we were born into.
No two humans perceive the world the same way. How identity is constructed depends on what someone identifies with/as, and how that formed throughout their life. Someone may identify as their emotions, another as their thoughts. Another may identify as the role they play in society, their gender, their social status, or their achievements. Some may identify themselves as a part of a group, like a family or business. Others may identify with their personal choices, their lifestyle choices, or whom they choose to associate with. Some may identify themselves as their looks or their biology. Some identities resemble complex stories where the protagonist “I” acts differently in each context, yet maintains their coherent self through upholding of values and ethics. Others are based on social media profiles, abstract ideas, trends, or political movements. And someone else may identify as the persona(s) they are online, more than anything else in their reality. Each identity is constructed out of a complex set of parameters and interpretation algorithms.
To design for identity we need to examine how and, more importantly, why users make choices and how those choices reflect their identity. We need to comprehend how to orchestrate the interplay of action and content into a seamless frictionless experience that delights and improves the quality of life of those partaking in it.
As digital designers, we have learned to pay close attention to different paradigms that emerge through the affordances and constraints of the digital products and services we create. We began to realize that what users can and cannot do creates certain pathways for them to follow, like water flowing through textures of terrain in a valley. We realized that how we designed the product or service to behave had direct impact on the behaviors of users. We realized that what we rewarded and encouraged in the digital space skewed community evolution around optimizing those characteristics. We realized that the identity of someone has more of an impact on what they say they do than what they may actually do.
To design for identity through affordances and constraints of digital requires us to comprehend where our users are and where they aspire to go. Then, to create truly meaningful digital products and/or services.
How might we design for identity? How might we out innovate competitors? How might we create phenomenal products and services?
Design for life.
How to Use This Book
This book provides an exploration of how to design digital for evolving users. Depending on where you are in your journey, this book can be read in a number of ways.
The first way is to read the chapters in sequential order. This reading provides a high-level overview of trends in technological evolution, followed by a discussion of the evolution of human identity. Then we delve into how to design for identity, how to get to know users through Design Thinking, and how to create meaningful and purposeful products and services. The book concludes with an overview of trends that we currently experience and where we may go next.
The second way to read this book is by topic. The chapters provide stand-alone discussions, so reading by interest will not undermine the value of the book.
The third way to read this book is to read the chapters in reverse order. This way is most suitable for practitioners who just want to get to the applicable methods, tips, and insights, and get started designing. The last three chapters provide practical insights, while the first three provide the context and conceptual exploration of the phenomena discussed.
I hope you enjoy this book and take away something practical to apply to your digital design practice.
I sincerely thank Shiva Ramachandran and Rita Fernando for their guidance and encouragement in the publication of this work. I deeply appreciate your perspectives, enthusiasm, and kind help in expressing the most complex of ideas.
I also want to thank the staff of Apress for the opportunity to embark on this project and for their assistance in the publication.
Thank you to my friends and family for making the journey that much better. For your love, your patience, and your ability to make me see everything anew.
Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to everyone from whom I have had the honor of learning. Without you, the ideas would not be of the form they are today.
has dedicated her career to improving quality of life through strategic design. Her experience working across academia, government, and private sector organizations has shaped her pragmatic approach to sustainable systemic change. Anastasia believes that the coevolution of humans and technology is core to transforming legacy ways of being and creating truly beautiful and sustainable ways of life. Anastasia specializes in shifting thought systems to empower creators to (re)design through empathy and core value alignment.