A Rude Awakening

I woke up one day and there was an announcement within the company I work with that everyone had to start using AI in their work. Claude Code had become so good recently that entire projects that would take about two weeks or more could now be done in an afternoon. While the biggest impact was meant to be seen in the churning out of code, it wasn’t long before the developers started producing frontends that looked pretty well-designed out of the box.

I lead the design team and it seemed like my entire team’s value was being questioned. When someone attacks you, the natural instinct is always to defend yourself. While I pushed back and pointed out the gaps that were in the outputs produced by Claude, (all true by the way), it was also clear to me that there was going to be a point in time when I would be hard-pressed to find issues with the outputs. The writing was on the wall: Adapt, or die!

The Democratisation of Authorship

So I took a step back and tried to figure out what’s actually going on. Engineers were building frontends. Product managers were producing prototypes. Designers were producing code instead of designs alone. There were even marketing people producing websites. But was the output produced good? No. But will they get better over time? Absolutely.

I still remember the day when I first used a printer. I had to get word processing software on my DOS machine, I think it was a program called Word Star. I used that to write out “Welcome to the Fete!” in the largest font that was possible to produce with it. I then printed it out on this dot matrix printer that I got access to at my cousin’s place and I was amazed by the signage that got printed in about 10 minutes! It was exhilarating. Thinking back on it now, the banner looked pretty bad and it wouldn’t pass any graphic artist standards. But I think the excitement was largely driven by the fact that I could do all this myself without going to a specialist banner maker and paying the “big bucks” for a banner that I couldn’t afford as a 7th grader.

I feel we are at a similar point in time today. The authorship of websites, applications and other software has become democratised. The skill barrier that existed before has largely been taken down. With the advent of courses on YouTube, this was already the trend, but there was still a barrier as one had to still learn to use the tools. Today, anyone who can manage to type, or even talk to a computer can now produce a website or an app if they wished to do so. Exciting as it is to see our ideas come alive, let’s be clear that only the baseline has been raised, not the top-line. AI tools at the hands of an expert would produce much better outputs than someone who doesn’t have that domain knowledge. That gap will always remain. But we need to be careful to assess whether that gap is pertinent.

The 8K Television Argument

The most sold resolution of televisions today is 4K. That’s simply because the eye cannot reasonably distinguish between individual pixels at resolutions higher than 4K. So, 8K, while technically superior, is just not worth the premium as it doesn’t qualitatively improve our lives.

The analogy can be seen in enterprises as well. Based on constraints like time and money, the output that “does the job” produced faster will remain more useful than something superior but takes a lot more to produce. This will inevitably be the case with the outputs produced by AI. They will become good enough in most situations.

So, code produced by designers to create websites or apps will meet that standard. These apps will excel on the design end because it’s a designer wielding the tool and will be good enough on the rest of the fronts.

I use coding as an example skill here, but the argument holds for other domains as well. Marketing, sales, finance, operations, product management, etc. will all be fields in which designers can now participate and contribute to in a bigger way than before. But zoom out and you’ll see that the same is possible by people in other fields too. And that, I think is the larger point to pay attention to here — the lines between functional domains is being blurred.

The Question of Taste

I’ve previously maintained that “Taste” is one human quality that can’t be replicated by AI. But I’ve seen what’s possible with AI tools and don’t hold that position anymore. The short version of the reasoning is that taste is a learnt skill. Design schools are doing this every day. And if it can be taught, AI will learn it.

The slightly longer version of that answer: I understand this is an unpopular opinion and it feels like I am threatening our last stronghold. But wouldn’t you rather know and be prepared for the truth than believing in a comforting lie and being shocked when it turns out not to be true? So let me break it down.

I’ve learnt that taste is a skill that is developed by working on three things:

1. Perception: Being more observant to notice the details others miss, like negative space or colour interactions.
2. Discernment: Knowing why something works. Is it the typography or is it a cultural element?
3. Restraint: Knowing what isn’t necessary.

All of these are things that can be taught. When training humans, you explain the science behind human perception and then expose them to hundreds and thousands of examples — essentially pattern recognition and then they are capable of producing tasteful work. If it is pattern recognition, then we’re in the domain of machine learning and AI. It has been proven time and again that the outputs from these generative engines are indistinguishable from those produced by humans. So, if the output from this is indistinguishable from the human generated version, by definition, it cannot be the differentiator.

Therefore even taste delivered by AI will soon (if not already) hit the “good enough” threshold. While some designers will remain and serve the need here, they will be serving an ever diminishing size of market. And when it comes to UX designers specifically, we’ve got the additional threat of interfaces completely disappearing as agents acting on behalf of uses using other applications solely through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This is why I wouldn’t stake my flag on this particular quality in the long term.

Beyond the Function

Intelligence, labour and coordination have been human driven since the beginning of the human journey. With AI, that fundamental idea has changed. They can think, execute and coordinate faster and in some ways better than any human ever. This is going to force companies to reorganise themselves differently and not worry about functional domains.

Jobs that were centred around skill, the domain of “how” something is done, will no longer be around. But this isn’t something that should give us pause. Being a painter in the past meant that they’d create their own paints, starting from the raw materials. They’d make their own canvases, frames and a whole slew of other jobs. It was only after all this that they could paint and express what they wanted to. Painters don’t do that today. Most buy their paints and canvases from a store and focus on the challenge of the blank white space.

Organisations of the future will follow a similar path. We don’t need to do the work of learning different tools, processes and skills. That’s going to be abstracted away. So, when creation becomes easy, there’s nothing to celebrate in the act of simply bringing something to life. The harder question is and has always been the “why” behind it all and we now get to focus on that. We need to go from the brush and the canvas to the very reason for painting at all.

So, we’ve got to stop asking how something should be done and start asking what problem you’re really solving and solve that, whether it belongs within the “UX Designer” function or not. Put simply, we’ve got to become entrepreneurs, and that’s the real moat.

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Microsoft Word and Apple Pages have got to be among the most used applications of all time. Everyone uses them. But these are dinosaurs in the digital age. They are relics of a period that preceded the internet, leave alone AI. They were built to ease publishing in an age of paper and print. Would we build these applications the same way if we were to build it from scratch today?

Look at the media landscape today. We have several forms of content, everything from blogs and social media posts to podcasts and videos. So the model of creating a document just doesn’t work anymore. What if we instead began with a core idea and then derived the various forms of it based on the constraints of the medium on which it would be delivered? Also, people consume content differently today. Some people prefer to listen to things during their commute, some prefer to read stuff on their phone, and some prefer to watch a debate on their tablet. So it isn’t sufficient to simply deliver content in one form and call it a day anymore. We need to be able to reach our audience where they are.

And that’s when it hit me — this is exactly the sort of thing that artificial intelligence (AI), specifically Large Language Models (LLMs) are perfectly suited for. It was like all the universe was conspiring to make this happen for me. If I succeed, a single individual could become a media publishing house delivering content in all forms, all at once, without the multiplication of effort!

But while I had a promising idea, things started to fall apart as I began working on it. I expected that my hurdles would be writing the code or things like that. But I realise that with AI around, no one today needs to worry about how something can be built. No, the harder questions of our times are increasingly going to be the “why’s” behind it all. It’s the nuances, the invisible lines that we should be spending our time thinking about. And this article is a log of my battles with these invisible lines and what I learnt along the way.

The Insight

Being a little neurotic, it was impossible for me to not observe the various ways in which AI could be employed within the application and the effects that each choice would have. If I employ AI well, it is an extremely useful tool that saves an incredible amount of time and effort. If I use it badly, I could create an AI slop generation engine. Or the worst crime of all, I could kill the user’s agency where they don’t use their own judgement anymore and end up becoming button-pushing-monkeys in the long run.

My deep realisation was that there was a very fine line between these two choices and it was important to pay attention not only to the places where AI should be used, but probably more importantly, where not to use it.

Strengths and Weaknesses of AI

Before I began, I wanted to understand what AI is and isn’t capable of within the context of my application. As I saw it, its strengths are:

• AI is multimodal and can produce text, images, audio and video
• Since they are Language Models, they are very good at languages and a perfect fit spelling and grammar checks and also for translations
• AI has a vast knowledge base and can find and check facts very simply
• Unlike programs that can recognise text or images, AI can understand the ideas discussed in them
• AI can be used in ‘fuzzy situations’ where you are not working with exact information

And, its weaknesses are:

• It really doesn’t know when it makes a mistake
• The same input doesn’t produce the same output
• It can be extremely slow if employed in performing basic operations
• It can’t always perform calculations very well

Things to Consider

Privacy

My first thought was about privacy. Granted the application I was building was meant for publishing, but still, I wanted to build this on a strong foundation of privacy. At the very least, I didn’t want any aspect of the data from the application going to centralised AI models if I could help it.

The reason for it is that these centralised models like the ones from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others are very capable, but since the data going to them is going to be collected and mined, I didn’t want any user data to end up in that pile. While no one expects these companies to use the data against their users, it’s safer if we never place ourselves where such a possibility exists.

So if you must use AI, use something locally hosted. If that is not a possibility, try to use open source models from a number of different models and service providers. In Move 37’s case, I went with VeniceAI and OpenRouter and in the unlikely event that both these service providers failed, I do have the frontier models present as a last-resort option. The bottom line was that the user is always able to perform their actions in the application.

Speed

AI can do a lot of things and the temptation to use it in many situations is always present. But even with home automation being all the rage, why haven’t we been able to get rid of physical light switches? The analogy exists in the application world as well. Sometimes it is just faster to use a program to do a job than to employ AI to do it.

For example, Move 37 is capable of taking social media messages and posting them for you. Now, I could have built in methods to instruct AI to go to LinkedIn and post the message for the user. But this would take a very long time to perform as the AI needs to take screenshots of your computer, send it to the server, analyse it, plan the next steps and then perform the actions on the user’s computer. This was the case for every step on every run even if it’s something that the AI had previously done.

But LinkedIn’s website isn’t changing everyday. So, this level of analysis being performed on every run was not only slow and inefficient, it was also quite expensive. The costs were about $0.1 to $0.2 for successfully completing one post! This was much more easily handled by taking a scripted approach where the application would look for this element first, perform this action next, etc. This was incredibly fast and also performed with absolutely no use of AI.

After this, I made it a rule to ask whether I need to employ AI for the task or if there’s a simpler way around it.

Accuracy

I already spoke about not using AI to do mathematics, but it is also important to keep in mind that the output from the models cannot be tightly controlled either. For example, there is a function in Move 37 where if you provide the text for a social media post, it is automatically converted into the different lengths that are required by various social media channels i. e. 280 characters for Twitter/X, 3000 for LinkedIn, etc. In my first attempt at doing this, I sent in all the accounts along with their limits to the AI and asked it to give me a structured JSON output with the text variations assigned to the specific accounts.

This failed because the LLMs wouldn’t always respect the different variants. The most irritating thing was that it did do it right sometimes. That’s way worse than if it got it completely wrong, because it gives you this false sense that what you built will work. But that’s just not true! Things mysteriously started failing for me in situations and I wasted so much time trying to figure out why!

The solution here was to simply break up the steps and have the AI create the text variations first, and then send those variants to a program that would count the characters and assign it reliably to the right social media channels.

Affordances

But that’s not all. Every output can also vary. If I ask the AI to count the number of items in a list, the AI ends up behaving like a teenager and includes every possible variation of the output! It sometimes returned “5”, sometimes “five”, sometimes “There were 5 items” and even “I counted 5 items”. If I need to use this output in the application’s interface, I would first need to think about these possibilities and try to include instructions in the prompt regarding the output and format that I need. Also, if I am not specific about something, I’d be opening myself up to a whole lot of pain!

If I need to use the output within the interface, it would also be good for me to consider these possibilities and build affordances within the interface to be able to handle them. At the very least write functions that would normalise these outputs and only then use them as needed.

Not only that, every model behaves a little differently. Even within specific models, newer versions of the same model will handle scenarios differently. So I had to keep all these aspect in mind when otherwise I’d make my application very brittle.

Creativity

I’d argue that this is one of the best use cases for AI. If there’s any space within an application where a creative take on things is needed, using AI there would be a good idea. But I’d be careful to use the output from the AI only as fodder for the creative endeavour and not make that the output itself.

In Move 37, I built a podcast module that would take the text of the article and create a podcast script from it and also produce the audio version of it automatically. The entire task took about 5 to 10 minutes. I initially thought this was a great use for AI! But I quickly realised that this would take away from the value of the podcast because the human had no role to play in it. The output from that approach sometimes resulted in shallow coverage of an article. In other words, I had inadvertently created AI slop! Trust me, it really does creep up on you if you’re not looking.

So I redesigned the module to first display the script of the podcast that was generated by the AI. This acted as a great starting point for the user and saved them an immense amount of time. The user could always start from scratch of course, but usually seeing a draft of something makes you think about how you could write it better, even if that meant rewriting the whole thing. Suggesting these drafts are a great use of AI in the creative process.

Taste

As I’ve already illustrated in the points above, AI can be used in a lot of ways, but if we make the effort to position it as a tool, we’d be extracting real value from it and keeping our skills sharp, if not making them sharper. The temptation to make AI go “just one step further and complete the job” is exactly the line we must not cross.

One more important point I need to explicitly call out is to never put the AI in a place where it makes decisions for the user. The least important reason for this is that no one knows what data went into training the AI, not even those that trained the AI because the data sets are so large that no single human has ever verified all of it. So you can never really know of the reasons behind why the AI is making the decisions.

But I think the bigger point is that doing so slowly chips away a very important quality from the user, which is taste. We develop our sense of taste by making a vast number of decisions and seeing whether the outcomes match the vision of the world we want to see created. This is a core human quality. It is what drives us to bend and shape the world around us. This is something that should never be outsourced to anyone. Because, in the future neither effort nor skills are going to be barriers for us to do something. In such a world, the only thing that would matter is taste.

Conclusion

There was a time when websites with SSL protection indicated it with a lock icon placed in the address bar. Today, it’s the opposite where websites with SSL protection are the default and you’re warned when you access a site without that protection. In the same way, we’re headed into a world where AI will be the default engine that performs most actions within an application. But until then, it would be a good idea to communicate which parts of your app are using AI so that users take the precaution they need when using it.

Paragraph, the blog publication platform does this really well where it indicates the use of AI clearly within its interface. I am yet to do this consistently for Move 37, but I thought I’d still mention it since this is important.

If you’d like to discuss this or other topics related to AI or UX, feel free to reach out over Twitter/X or other socials listed on Redd XF, my blog. If you’d like to use Move 37 completely for free, go check it out at https://move37.works.

Originally published at https://redd.in on November 25, 2025.

Obi: A Learning Experience

Ever since my twin and I learnt to program when we were 8 years old, we had been dreaming of producing products. Our first real product, one that was actually used by others, was an inventory management system built with Visual Basic 5. It was built for our family’s jewellery store. We were in the ninth grade and were paid with bhel puri! It wasn’t a lucrative project, but it was a delicious one. It was a thrill to see an entire store using and be dependent on our software!

Later, around 2008, we had a second run at building another version of the inventory management system, when we had a custom software development company and were considering building a product to help us scale our revenues. We looked at the competition and what they offered, their feature sets, their pricing methods and understood all the artificial boundaries they had in place and decided we could do better, way better.

Our software, named Obi, would be the following:

1. On the software side — we would deliver a modern UX that any user could figure out how to use on their own. We didn’t want to build the clunky software that required “training” that companies would charge handsomely for.

2. On the pricing side — we would deliver the software on the web (the term “cloud” hadn’t been invented at this time) and charge per user without bifurcation within user types.

3. On the upgrades front — we wouldn’t charge for upgrades. We just factored the cost of upgrading once a year and melded that into the monthly cost.

There were several other aspects that were different in our case, but for the sake of brevity, we were doing exactly what SaaS companies do today.

We went out the door and started talking to customers and waiting for the hordes to come and break our doors down. But, that didn’t happen. The objections we got from our customers were unsurmountable for a small software company like ours and after 1 year of running the operations and only a few clients to speak of, paying us a very small amount, we just couldn’t sustain it any longer and had to shut down. This, despite a customer actually walking into our office and offering to pay us more than we asked so that he could keep using it at his store!

I joined Adobe as a UX designer at the end of 2009 using Obi to demonstrate that I had the experience of building “beautiful software” (the UX term hadn’t become well known at the time).

Two years later, around 2010, most of the competitors had begun to do everything almost exactly as we had and found great success. It would have been more comforting if we had been completely wrong, but our predictions of the future came out to be exactly true. I heard someone say “Being too early is the same as being wrong”. While they described my problem perfectly, I still didn’t know what the solution was. I needed to break down what “being early” was. In the relative stability of a 9 to 5 job, I finally figured it out.

The Existing Environment

An innovator imagines that their ability to look far into the future is what gives them an edge. We build the vision of the future based on a series of logical milestones, and arrive at the shape of what we believe is the future. The fault in our approach was that we didn’t consider their existing environment in which our potential customers exist, which is integral to the decisions they make.

For example, we were right in assuming that most software of the future would be web based because it not only solves the need for installation, but also makes it simple for upgrades and makes the system infinitely more accessible from anywhere on the planet. But our customers lived in a world where nearly all software was sold on CDs that they could hold in their hands. It gave them the confidence that they would always have and be able to use it whereas something on the web could disappear tomorrow.

They were also transitioning from a world that believed software wasn’t something one paid for leave alone pay in perpetuity for. They also believed that choosing to upgrade was meant to be optional. “Normal” upgrade cycles were once a year and done only when they saw that new version had a lot of improvements over the existing one. They wanted to be able to compare and then make the choice to upgrade or not.

They also saw the training was an essential service that a software developer had to provide because in their experience, they had always used clunky software that required that training. No upstart like us would come and shake that notion with our fancy user-oriented design. But having the infrastructure to provide the training was also a signal that indicated that we were big enough to be around in the future. Inventory management systems are a core part of the operation of a company, so this was an assurance that they would need before they switched to using our software.

It’s quite interesting that I find a lot of parallels exist between architecture and product design. There is a famous quote by Eliel Saarinen, the architect, that goes, “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context-a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” He really was onto something there.

The Comfort of the Status Quo

Obi was different in all these respects. It was new and different on too many fronts all at once. In a sales cycle, we may have the opportunity to counter one or two of the objections that a potential customer may pose to us, but if there are so many different aspects that they have to wrap their heads around, then the default decision is to maintain status quo and reject the offer.

Customers will make the effort of doing the cognitive work if the end result is something that is 10X better than the current situation not when something is only a moderate improvement over the existing solution. In our case with Obi, we were doing a lot of things differently, but the end result was that the customer would still only be able to manage their inventory a little more efficiently, nothing changed apart from that.

There’s the old adage, “One can only be wrong if they try to do something.” (which is an interesting antonym of “Only those who try can succeed” which is meant to motivate entrepreneurs, but that’s a different discussion altogether). In other words, we simply didn’t offer the user a big enough of a reason to experiment with so many different variables. All they’d see at the end was a modest improvement in the operation and a reduction in cost that didn’t really make a difference to their profits.

The EnR Framework

Given this understanding I began to work on a framework that would allow us to chart a course for how to develop products.

Starting with a vision of the future is good. It works well as a goal to shoot for but also solves the “faster horses” problem, as the Henry Ford quote goes. No one but the innovator can dream up a future vision of a product. Only solid domain expertise will allow us to see that.

But once that vision is well understood, the next step is actually to chart a course from the present to that future. You can do that by creating milestones that take into consideration what the current environment is and makes tweaks that will get you from the present to the next milestone. Each milestone makes one change and one change only. This will afford time for the environment to catch up and the user to be brought along the path making only minor changes to their understanding each time.

It also makes sense to poll users on their opinions of the features developed at this resolution because these changes are gradual. The feedback can be integrated into the development of the next milestone even making fixes wherever required. Before long, we’d have arrived safely at the future you had imagined long ago. This way of getting to that future is a more resilient option as well as it will be on solid footing each time.

But this framework is heavily dependent on a strong feedback mechanism that allows you to hear from users often and in large numbers. I’ll cover more about this in a future article. This framework is also not useful in some leapfrog products such as ChatGPT or the like that had no precedents. So it is not useful in those situations.

Conclusion

The ‘Evolution, not Revolution’ framework is an important concept in design and innovation that I had to develop in order to handle my work in product design.

If Apple had launched Newton at a lower price point that validated whether someone would want a PDA, they may have given themselves the opportunity to validate that idea before packing in expensive touchpad technology or handwriting recognition. If they had done that, they may have not only cornered the PDA market but could very well have entered the mobile phone market about 15 years before they actually did.

I hoped they’d have learnt their lesson from previous mistakes, but we’re seeing instead that they’re repeating them with the Vision Pro. The platform has some great potential, so I hope they fix things soon.

Originally published at https://redd.in on September 8, 2025.

I recently embarked on an exciting journey, developing an application called Move 37, designed to tackle key challenges I faced in managing my ideation and social media workflows. Inspired by the potential of AI to streamline creative workflows, I incorporated AI tools wherever possible. This project turned out to be a valuable learning experience, yielding numerous insights that I’ve outlined below. These lessons will be particularly useful for UX designers contemplating the development of their own applications.

Lesson 1: The Strategic Use of Chat Interfaces

The integration of AI within an app should be judicious and measured. Initially, I was tempted to design an interface that relied heavily on chat functionality, envisioning a simplistic and unified user experience. However, I soon realised that this approach, although appealing, was not practical for all interactions. Just as physical switches coexist with smart home technology due to their simplicity and efficiency, certain tasks are better suited to traditional interfaces, such as clicking a “Generate Image” button rather than typing out the command.

Lesson 2: Selecting the Right AI Model

My experience showed that Claude 4 Sonnet excelled in terms of performance and understanding my intentions. For those who find this model too expensive or frequently unavailable, Claude 3.7 Thinking is a viable alternative. If this option is also not feasible, Kimi K2 proves to be highly effective. A crucial lesson learned was the importance of not compromising on model quality for simpler tasks, as the time spent fixing errors generated by cheaper models could outweigh any initial cost savings.

Lesson 3: Distinguishing Between Coding Tools

Initially, I perceived tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code with Github Copilot as essentially similar, given their ability to utilize the same LLM model. However, each platform’s unique prompting approach yields distinct default outputs, even when using the same model. While Cursor excels at immediate productivity, Windsurf’s project memory capability makes it more user-friendly over time, especially for complex and evolving projects.

Lesson 4: The Evolution of Coding Skills

The statement that the ability to write code no longer matters may raise eyebrows, but it reflects the significant evolution in how we interact with computers. From punchcards to programming languages that mimic human language, the advent of AI coding tools marks a new era where instructions can be given in plain English (or any language), to be reliably converted into necessary programming languages. Thus, while the skill of writing code becomes less critical, the ability to read code and understand algorithms remains invaluable.

Lesson 5: The Feasibility of Solo App Development

The cost of producing apps is plummeting, making it feasible for a single individual to develop an application. With the aid of AI tools, I was able to write about 95% of the Move 37 code myself. This capability not only saves time and resources but also empowers individuals to create personalised solutions without needing a large team or significant funding. While technical debt is a consideration, the benefits of rapid development and customisation for specific needs can outweigh the drawbacks.

Lesson 6: Embracing Iteration

One of the most significant advantages of using AI for coding is the ease of testing multiple ideas. This process, once cumbersome and time-consuming, now requires minimal effort. To leverage this capability fully, it’s essential to use built-in tools for backtracking to previous states of the app and to utilize versioning systems like Git within the IDE. This approach enables effortless exploration of different coding paths and the selection of the most suitable outcome.

Lesson 7: The Impact of Taste and Trends

The democratisation of development tools will lead to an influx of new apps, resulting in a noisy landscape where taste and the ability to identify trends will become critical differentiators. Just as fashion trends evolve rapidly, app trends will emerge and fade quickly, with the cost of changing an interface design approaching zero. Being able to spot and adapt to these trends will be essential for success, and the overall user experience, beyond mere aesthetics, will play a pivotal role in an app’s adoption and longevity.

Lesson 8: The Pyramid of Attention

The advent of AI coding tools allows developers to focus on higher-level questions, such as what they want to achieve, rather than how to achieve it. This shift enables operating at a more abstract and creative level. For instance, in Move 37, I wanted to create an unobtrusive indicator for the connection status with the backend. By simply describing the desired outcome to the LLM, it generated the necessary code, exemplifying how these tools can facilitate working at the “what” level of abstraction, freeing time for more strategic and innovative thinking.

Conclusion

This journey of building Move 37 has been incredibly enriching, filling me with confidence in the potential of AI-infused development. I’m now ready to explore iOS app development and automate more aspects of my workflow, empowered by the realisation that these tasks are within my reach. The future of app development, with its lowered barriers to entry and enhanced capabilities, promises to be exciting and accessible to a broader range of creators.

Originally published at https://redd.in on August 4, 2025.

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Let’s Set the Context

The debate surrounding ideal ways to organise societies is nearly as old as there have been people on this planet. We’ve gone from small bands of people living as hunter-gatherers whose primary concern was survival, to settlements centred around agriculture, which then formed countries whose primary concern became security.

Because of the labour surplus created by each successive organisational structure of society, individuals gained more time to focus and specialise since they were able to depend on other members for the things necessary for their survival instead of having to produce it themselves. For example, the hunter-gatherers had to do the hunting, sheltering, protecting, entertaining, sewing, medicating and child-rearing all by themselves, leaving them little time in the day to focus on figuring out the science behind space travel; whereas today, I can write this article without worrying about hunting a boar to feed myself later. Interestingly, this specialisation of individuals has allowed the group to flourish and grow and this has spurred people on to develop even more focussed skillsets.

On a side note, one of my favourite quotes is that of Robert Heinlein’s where he’s defining the “competent man” as I do feel a fuller perspective is useful. But it’s also special to me because it highlights how rapidly society has changed in the 50 years since it was coined!

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

— Robert Heinlein, Author

But while constructing societies around specialisation has obviously been beneficial, it hasn’t been without its flaws. There are still gross inefficiencies, inequities and injustices in any sizeable society. One may be tempted to blame it on corruption, but I think of it as a symptom and not the cause because it’s extremely hard to align any large group of people along a common goal — ask anyone who’s tried to arrange a dinner for a group! You try to select the restaurant that the majority prefer, or the most neutral place, or simply the boss’s favourite eatery — but none of these are going to satisfy the desires of the whole group and is bound to leave someone dissatisfied. While these strategies may be okay to apply in the case of planning dinners, they are problematic if used for anything more important; but these are also the models for the distribution of wealth, voting rights, laws to guide society, etc.

The problems with organising societies based on majoritarian or authoritarian models are not new. They usually leave minorities without a voice and positive evolution takes a much longer time to take effect. Moreover, they enable a few of those in power to not just unduly enrich themselves, but to also change laws and processes that benefit them greatly. And far too often, there is discord between factions of people (domestically or internationally) so those in power are portrayed as necessary to maintain the peace. We allow these paradigms for societies to exist because we believe there isn’t a better way. But that’s an assumption based on the technologies of the past. However, technology has evolved and it’s time to reconsider our long-held beliefs.

To develop a better model for societies, you need three things — the first is a way to organise groups around a common goal to achieve the things that can’t be done as individuals; second, a method to transact with other individuals in a trustworthy way so we don’t have to use violence as a method of resolving disagreements; and third, a foolproof system of owning property that allows us to benefit from the fruits of our labour. It wasn’t possible to provide these privileges without relying on central power structures to enforce them. Those in charge of these power structures (either through divine decree or as elected officials) used a varied set of tools like organised religion, currencies, laws, public relations and censorship to keep societies compliant and under control. When they weren’t able to do so with some individuals, they resorted to their usurped monopoly on violence to impose that control.

I once heard the line in a movie: “Geography is destiny, my friend”, and it struck me as the fundamental definition of life for a lot of us. It’s purely the luck of the draw and far too few have opportunities to change them.

The world of cryptography, blockchains and cryptocurrencies is one where trustless architectures are laying the foundations that will enable the reorganisation of societies in any number of ways that we may wish. These technologies allow for individuals to hold custody over their currencies on their own; organise themselves into groups, vote to perform a certain action and immediately disband thereafter; recognise efforts put in by people who participate in developing “public goods” that benefit society and many others. And if the crypto world can achieve what it has set out to, societies may never be organised around geographies again and instead be driven by ideas and philosophies. One could even belong to more than one society at a time if they chose to. How amazing would that world be?

Now, the Design Stuff

If you’ve navigated through the sociology nerd forest above and are still reading this, you may be wondering what all that has to do with Web3 wallets. Well, I’ve always believed that any good UX designer has to understand the context they’re designing within as well as possible.

“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”

— Eliel Saarinen, Architect

Web3 wallets are the first things anyone who is interested in becoming a part of the decentralised world will be exposed to. So it’s important to understand what its role is in the bigger picture before designing it otherwise your work will always be incremental.

Having been first exposed to cryptocurrencies back in 2016, I’ve made mistakes, understood and overcome many of the technical limitations placed on me by the tech involved. I am now in a position to list improvements that will have the greatest impact on improving the user experience of these wallets and I’ve boiled it down to the following six areas:

1. Education and awareness
2. Security
3. Daily usage
4. Motivation for usage
5. Taxation management
6. Preferences management

Let’s get into each of these in detail below.

| Focus Area #1: Education and Awareness

In my crypto-related conversations with people over the years, I’ve found that there are specific questions that most seem to have before they feel comfortable enough to dive in and learn the concepts themselves. The following are topics we need to cover whether through simple FAQs, orientation videos and/or interactive experiences.

How can cryptocurrency be better than fiat?
Incremental benefits will not captivate anyone. We need to find a way to explain why cryptocurrencies and decentralised apps are 10X better than the fiat equivalents. We need to:

1. Explain why decentralised money is better than allowing a select few to decide what’s good for everyone else.

2. Show how no one will be able to confiscate them for reasons as trivial as “the home address on record hasn’t been updated in a while”.

3. Talk about the layers of people that are involved in traditional banking and how their salaries translate to the fees they apply on allowing us to perform even the most basic of transactions with our own money.

4. Highlight the convenience of being able to transact with anyone instantaneously, without restrictions, and for a very small fee.

5. Illustrate the benefits of being able to carry our capital anywhere in the world without any kind of constraints.

What are the benefits of using Web3?
No one will use something if they don’t understand the reasons for doing so. Once the benefits of decentralised currencies are understood by our users, we need to explain the advantages of Web3 dApps.

Here, we can highlight the obvious privacy benefits, the ability to carry our social network with us across platforms, the capacity to earn from anywhere, new job opportunities (including the ones for non-techies, which is usually a surprise to most) in the space and new business models that can help launch entirely new services and products that have not yet been built.

What exactly are these Web3 concepts?
We need to create a glossary of terms and concepts that explains all the ideas that one needs to understand in order to use a Web3 wallet.

Are there security measures in place?
One of the biggest fears is about security and the potential of losing money. We should build interfaces that take users step-by-step through the security measures that they need to take in order to secure themselves on the decentralised web. This section can also be updated on an ongoing basis if new threat vectors are found.

There’s no substitute for real sandboxes, is there?
Let’s face it, there’s no substitute to actually using the wallets and sending and receiving our first transactions for us to get the hang of using it. We must create sandboxes in which people can send and receive test tokens to simulate the real environment that they are working with. This should be as real as possible, including the ability to send and receive test tokens from friends.

Conversation, anyone?
This has been one of the best ways to learn about crypto for me. I can ask the questions that aren’t covered by videos, discussion threads, FAQs or the like to figure out exactly what we need to do. Wallets should have interfaces where such conversations can take place because asking someone to jump on Discord isn’t really a good alternative.

| Focus Area #2: Security

One of the biggest hurdles to adoption are the fears about security — security of key generation and management, recovery methods, volatility of currencies and, of course, scams.

Seed Phrases
While seed phrases have come a long way in simplifying the generation of private and public keys, it could be further eased by allowing users to specify their own words. They could then try to form sentences that will help with better recall if it ever becomes necessary.

Key Management
There’s a common phrase in the crypto world that goes: “Not your keys, not your crypto”, that encourages people to get off centralised exchanges and store their crypto on their own in cold wallets. But counterintuitively, it’s even more frightening to the everyday user because most of them don’t feel qualified enough to manage their own keys. This is a crucial area that needs to be addressed and solutions like those being developed by the likes of Arcana could help alleviate this problem.

Recovery Methods
Forgetting to store your keys is an all-too familiar problem as evidenced by the number of support calls on Coinbase about retrieving access to wallets because the users no longer remembered where their keys were. Good UX is forgiving and allows for people to recover from mistakes. So developing good and secure ways to regain wallet access is a necessity. There are several proposals for doing this, each trying to solve the problem for a certain type of user because there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

Assistance
Users that are unfamiliar with crypto wallets should be able to seek assistance from their family or friends. They could also appoint them as “guardians” who jump in to verify transactions in case the payment is an unexpectedly high amount or is being performed on an unsafe website or dApp.

Scams
Unfortunately there are rug pulls and cons all the time on the web — something about the anonymity seems to bring out the worst in some people. However, the wallet can take on the role of notifying users that they are operating on a website, a dApp or a wallet that’s been reported for scams by others. There are lots of details to wade through here to make this successful, but this is the higher-order bit.

| Focus Area #3: Daily Usage

The greatest impact will lie in UX refinements in the parts of the wallet that are used frequently. This includes making payment for purchases made, receiving of funds, buying things, etc.

Payments
This is the primary use of most wallets, but it’s too complex primarily because of wallet addresses. We will need to focus on ways to make it as easy as sending payments on Venmo or Google Pay where the transfer of money takes place using people’s names or phone numbers.

Receipts
Receiving money is usually a four-step process where we have to first determine the currency to be used, share the appropriate wallet address next, then specify the amount that needs to be transferred and finally verify if the right amount was received. Simplification? Yes, please! Ethereum Name Service has taken a good vital first step, but wallets could go further in making this even easier.

Conversions
In the future, people may hold coins/tokens of various projects that they would like to support. But these coins and tokens will be superfluous when transacting with each other. The receiver will specify which coin/token they want to receive the payment in and the bridging between chains and tokens will need to be taken care of without the user’s intervention or awareness.

Volatility
People are also apprehensive of the volatility in the crypto world. In everyday usage, this is mainly caused by the denominator (typically USD) that is used to display the balance in wallets. However, our bank balances are not constantly showing us what the value is in another currency so why do we do this with our crypto wallets?

Transaction Fees
Sometimes, a big deterrent to performing transactions is the sky-high fees charged when the network is busy. There are lots of transactions that aren’t time-sensitive, such as moving funds between the user’s many wallets, settling bills between friends, and others that can actually wait to be done at a less expensive time. But there aren’t simple solutions to allow these to happen.

The solution currently is to either try the same transaction at another time when the network isn’t as busy and expensive, or to try and fiddle with the settings to set a lower gas fee. These are not ideal as firstly, the fees a user may be willing to pay may occur several days later on the network and may require multiple attempts. Secondly, most people aren’t savvy enough to understand what the right settings for gas fees need to be and trial and error is sometimes more expensive than actually paying the fee amount that was being charged earlier.

In addition to the features available today, users should also be able to simply set the price they are willing to pay and allow the transaction to occur whenever the network fees drop to that point. The wallet could let the user know if the fees set are so low as to be impractical and never occur.

| Focus Area #4: Motivation for Usage

Just holding the coins or tokens isn’t going to be enough to build mass adoption. We need to encourage users to utilise their tokens too. The following are some ways to help them to do so.

Shopping
While it may not be the case in the future, the need of the hour is for people to understand where they can spend this money that they are accumulating. Knowing that they can purchase domains, pay for utilities or even spend it on pizza will help them to understand that cryptocurrencies aren’t just meant to be held but used.

Investing Easily
Undoubtedly, if the currencies held in a wallet can earn you money while they just sit there, it’s a big draw. Investments in DeFi should be made simple through an integration with the wallets.

| Focus Area #5: Taxes

Once regulation is more solidified, the role of the wallet in enabling tax filing and management starts to become important.

Simplifying Taxes
The wallets will need to handle more complex things like whether a transaction is taxable or not; for example, what if the user gets a virtual sword instead of tokens when trading, or what if I swap one NFT for two others? These and other questions will need to be managed by wallets.

Tax Guide
The wallets can also start to inform users of transactions that will incur high taxes compared to others that are tax beneficial. No tax consultant today can do this stuff and has therefore got to be handled by the wallets based on the regulations.

| Focus Area #6: Preferences

The settings features of wallets today extend only to how the wallet is set up and used — like default currency denominators, themes, languages, etc. But this is the decentralised world after all and the user’s preferences for the entire web and all the dApps are going to be eventually stored in the wallets.

ZK Proofs
Some dApps will require the user’s preference for light or dark modes so the dApp can adapt to it. But others will need to verify if the user is above a certain age and the wallet will have to share the relevant ZK proof for these kinds of interactions on their behalf.

Censorship Options
This is going to be another big area of focus. As detailed in another article I’ve written before, users can define their preferences for censorship and subscribe to different filters of the web as well.

I. C. D.
While the industry is pretty young, having started in earnest around 2010, and the individuals in it relatively youthful, the demographics of the users will also be changing. Concerns regarding what needs to happen in case of death or permanent incapacitation of the primary wallet holder are springing up now. If the keys or access is not granted to their legal heir, the crypto stored by them are lost forever. Wallets can play a critical role here and enable the funds to be released (all at once or in specified instalments) to the next of kin in such cases.

Conclusion

A long time ago, Personal Digital Assistants existed alongside mobile phones and the question of which device will take over the functionality of the other was being asked then. This is similar to the question that’s in front of us today. Will the wallet replace the functionality of the browser or will the browser take over the wallet? I don’t think the answer is any clearer today, but this is why we come to work everyday, isn’t it?

We are going through the biggest paradigm shift in the technology space since Web 1.0 and the role the wallet is going to play in terms of providing access, protecting users and a whole lot more cannot be overstated. The dream of Web 1.0, to help create a decentralised world had one fatal flaw — it didn’t allow commerce on it then. But we’re able to put the final piece of the puzzle together today through cryptocurrencies and DeFi.

While the tech is here, the role of user experience design will be extremely important in helping to remove all the complexity and making it ready for mainstream adoption. There’s a very long road ahead, but it’s also filled with opportunities. I hope this article will help to generate ideas and hopefully inspire you to start working in the field of wallets or even something in Web3.

If you’d like to continue the conversation on any of these topics, please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter: @sharan01x.

— Sharan Grandigae, Founder and CEO of Redd Experience Design

P. S. Did you like this article? You can own a copy of it as an NFT!

Users visiting websites, especially in the field of e-commerce, lie somewhere on the spectrum of those who know what they’re looking for on one end to the ones that have come just to browse on the other.

Search, Sort and Filter are essential to help the groups of users on the first half of the spectrum. These mechanisms are particularly important as the time taken by the user to find a product is inversely proportional to the likelihood of a purchase.

These were also mechanisms invented before the advent of machine learning. We need a new interface now that keeps up with the times instead and that’s what we’re discussing here.

THE PROBLEM

So Search, Sort and Filter: how different are they from each other? Conventionally, they’re very different. Users “Search” to find something specific from large amounts of information. They usually use keywords or type in phrases to find what they’re looking for. It is the most common way of finding things on a website or an app.

They “Filter” when they want to narrow the list of available items based on specific criteria such as brand, price range or colour. This mechanism is useful in situations where the user may not know exactly what terms to search for or where choosing from a list of search criteria is faster than typing in all the search terms.

They “Sort” when they don’t want to narrow their search but rather, arrange it in a certain order, for example, newest first or alphabetically.

However, all three functions eventually lead to the same outcome: surfacing relevant content. Yet, on most websites and apps, they’re split into three separate functions. Baymard Institute reports that users tend to use Sort and Filter interchangeably. What this means is that a task that can be accomplished in a single click unnecessarily takes three.

THE SOLUTION

A singular Search, Sort and Filter functionality

To save space, some websites (such as Etsy and Foursquare) have chosen to merge the Sort and Filter options into one page. It’s here that the distinction between Sort and Filter becomes redundant and the Sort function becomes a Filter itself.

Alternatively, some websites have arranged the Sort and Filter functionality and the Search one in separate parts of the page. Since both serve the same purpose, separating them doesn’t make sense. From these observations, a layout that combines all three functions into one holistic Search function is the most logical solution.

HOW IT HELPS

The time spent searching is reduced

By reducing the number of pages the user has to click through to find relevant content, the amount of time spent searching is reduced significantly. The less time a user spends searching is more time spent browsing, thereby increasing the chances of a purchase.

It guides the user towards relevant content

By displaying the filters upfront, the user is made privy to exactly what the site has to offer. This reduces the time the user spends searching as they can simply click on whatever they’re searching for. Furthermore, it can also inform the user of what the site has to offer beyond what they were initially looking for.

Rigid categories and fluid filters

Traditionally, products are listed in categories. While categories are pertinent on sites with a large amount of content, that isn’t the case when the content isn’t vast. In fact, this can lead to the problem of over-categorisation. This occurs when a website lists its products as rigid, individual categories. Instead of this, listing products as combinable, fluid filters allows the user to customise the result list to exactly what they’re looking for.

By reducing the number of pages the user has to click through to find relevant content, the amount of time spent searching is reduced significantly.

THE LIMITATIONS

Much like any other interface, this comes with its limitations too. It may enable users to find content fast now but to find content even faster, the way these filters are designed needs to be redesigned.

One particularly important filter that needs to be thought through well is the price range filter. Useful in some e-commerce verticals, it doesn’t lend itself to the proposed idea easily.

However, it can still be achieved by creating individual filters out of the various price ranges. Additionally, with the help of machine learning, the ranges could be specified based on what users are most likely to type rather than having it be pre-decided.

If you have more ideas on this, do sound off in the comments below or write to us at social@redd.in.

— Rozann Peter, Experience Designer at Redd Experience Design

UX Design Patterns #6: Search, Sort and Filter Sorted was originally published in Human Friendly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Have you ever checked out at your favourite e-commerce site only to find that sneaky something added to your cart? Or opened your inbox and found that all your contacts have been spammed by you? Yikes! Welcome to the dark side, my friend. Most of us have fallen victim to what is called “dark patterns”.

Harry Brignull (PhD, Cognitive Science), a London-based UX designer, was the first to coin the term in August 2010. He defined it as: “A user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills.”

Have e-commerce sites gone dark?

It’s no secret that many popular e-commerce retailers use dark patterns to benefit their business, purposefully making it harder to get out of this labyrinth. Social and casual gaming platforms also use dark patterns blatantly to their advantage — accidental in-game currency spends, buttons placed awkwardly close together or game tasks that are impossible to complete without spending game currency or cash.

Our moral predicament as user experience designers

As designers, we have the power to influence how people use a certain product and with this great power, comes great responsibility. It is our job to create seamless and delightful user experiences and dark patterns do the exact opposite.

More often than not, I find myself caught in the middle of the business and the users. Business needs often take the front seat and it is at this point that we designers are faced with the dilemma of either helping businesses meet their OKRs or be the voice for the users.

In such situations what does one do? Where do we draw the line? What should our UX code be? There is no definite solution but two approaches present themselves here.

Many professions have a code of ethics as their guiding principle. This is the first step. The use of dark patterns is in no way ethical. We need to design with the intent of creating something that both meets business goals and is socially responsible. Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag, the founders of Ind.ie, outline an ethical hierarchy of needs that describes the code of ethical design in the digital age very well:

The lower layers of the pyramid support the ones above them. If one of them fails, those above them fail too. So if a design does not support human rights, it is unethical. If it adheres to human rights but not human effort (easy to use), once again it is unethical. Finally, if it respects human effort but not human experience, for example, if a UI is purely functional with no user delight like positive feedback or UI interactions to create a better user experience, it is still unethical.

Now that we have covered this first basic step, the next step would be to design with the three layers in mind. But that is not enough to make a product worth using, is it? Even with the right aims and desires, the product would still need to attract an audience. This is where we come to the second step.

Persuasive design

“Persuasive design, when used responsibly, can leverage a good understanding of cognitive science to add value to a user’s experience and increase user engagement.” (Source: https://uxmastery.com/dark-patterns-and-the-power-of-persuasive-design/)

This means that we should use design patterns for good. If an action that the user intends to take is made easier, it is essentially the right use of UX practices. The Fogg Behaviour Model by Stanford University’s B.J. Fogg illustrates this idea very clearly:

So according to the graph, the best patterns lie where there is high motivation or need from the user and the need is met by accomplishing a simple task. For example, in the well-known language app Duolingo, the user is reminded each day through pop-up notifications “You are going to drop in the leaderboard”. This kind of competitiveness urges the user to keep using the app, but the results here are positive as it is being used to help motivate the user to learn the language. Such persuasive techniques do more than just make a person use a product.

What did we learn?

Products are initially created (in most cases) for the right reasons. A user has a problem, designers and engineers find that problem, solve it through developing a product and sell it. But in the midst of it all, other motivations that are not aligned with the user’s needs can fog the real reasons behind that product. Dubious upselling may start to litter the experience with sneaky checkboxes and 8 pt. fonts, obscuring the real agenda.

Business needs often take the front seat and it is at this point that we designers are faced with the dilemma of either helping businesses meet their OKRs or be the voice for the users.

While these dark patterns could generate results in the short term, the eventuality that doesn’t often get highlighted is that users will wise up to them and once that happens, the integrity of the company behind these patterns is laid bare, even prompting the users to switch to the competition. Now that’s something to think about, isn’t it?

— Krithika Nagarajan, Experience Designer, Redd Experience Design

Read the article as published in Dataquest, India.

Have e-commerce sites gone dark? was originally published in Human Friendly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Voice interfaces are going to be big

Voice user interfaces (VUI) have been coming into their own over the past few years and have now been able to achieve the accuracy that is required to be useful. VUI is not only helpful to people who are savvy in using smartphones or computers, but are also great for those who are new to technology. Furthermore, this technology has the capability to bridge the language gap as well and is an essential development for India.

Focusing on the next billion users

India has been seeing a surge in the adoption of smartphones and it doesn’t seem to be letting up. This group comprises people for whom smartphones are going to be their first computing platform. As designers, we cannot make the same assumptions about these users as we do with other, more technologically savvy users; as their ways of learning, their fears and even their motivations are going to be entirely different.

A buddy by your side

Especially important when it comes to designing for the NBUs described above, having a buddy or an agent always available to assist will be important. Just as the infamous (annoying?) paper clip assistant helped users learn and use the Microsoft Office product suite, having an agent within applications may make it easy for new users. We’re seeing more of these kinds of agents pop up within applications and expect that this will remain a trend in 2020.

Privacy and trust will need to be earned

Given that there have been so many lapses in the protection of private user data, people have become extremely wary of providing their private information online. In addition, the number of online frauds has been on the rise among users of digital wallets in India. All this has given rise to the fear of transacting on the internet. Companies now have to combat this perception and offer ways in which users can transact with them without providing any personal information or if they do, only after establishing the reasons for it.

We are in for a major leap forward this coming year…

Multi-lingual? Not exactly

More companies are developing apps for the tier-2, -3 and -4 cities of India and are feeling the pressure to make their interfaces multi-lingual. We have worked with clients whose users fit this description and found that while they don’t speak English very fluently, they have quite a bit of trouble using interfaces completely modified into their regional languages as well. The comfort zone seems to be somewhere in between. “Tamlish”, “Hinglish” and such are the preferred languages for these kinds of interfaces and we expect more of them in 2020.

Sound is finally going centrestage

Sound is an essential part of interface design and while the capabilities have existed within smartphones and desktops for a while, they were restricted to success or error messages. We are now seeing it being used more and more for the purpose of creating delightful experiences and will continue to see it being applied to a greater extent in the coming year.

3D interface design is taking shape

While 2D and faux 3D interfaces have been the trend these past two years, the tools for authoring 3D interfaces have become widespread. 3D interfaces are especially economical when it comes to using the same real estate for multiple purposes and this trend is promising to go big in 2020.

Assistive workflows

A trend that we are hoping to see and one which may be very useful in engendering more trust in the adoption of technology among NBUs are “assistive workflows”. I think it is a common phenomenon where all the youngsters are the tech-support team for their parents. This is only natural as the younger generation has grown up with technology and has a better understanding of its capabilities and failings. The idea is to extend this into the application designs. For example, if my dad got a request to send money and he initiates the payment, the app could ask for me to verify the transaction on his behalf and allow me to keep my dad secure in the digital world. This would be especially helpful in preventing fraud with e-wallets and also enable people like him to become members of the digital world without the fear that it usually comes loaded with.

Conclusion

Trends are cyclical in nature and what may have been visions of the future in some year gone past, have now become practical because certain environmental conditions have begun to favour it. This is undoubtedly the theme of 2020 because voice, 3D and designing for NBUs have been in development before but have only become feasible now because of the prevalence of smartphones, the affordability of internet connections and the processing power of computers. We are in for a major leap forward this coming year and at Redd, we are looking forward to doing our part.

— Sharan Grandigae, Founder and CEO of Redd Experience Design

Read the article as published in Entrepreneur India.

User Experience Design Trends for 2020 was originally published in Human Friendly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Aligning UX To Consumer Behaviour During Festivals

1. Appeal to the customer’s inner Sherlock

Customer’s behaviour: We Indians are canny pre-shopping researchers. Come the festive season and this ability goes into overdrive, magnifying glass and all. The customer is out there, looking for something new, comparing prices and scouting for the best deal.

UX implications: It’s important to break through the clutter at this time by creating a large number of useful starting points that pop up on your site and link back to your products such as “Trending looks this festive season”, “Lighting ideas for your home this festive season” or “Perfect for an Eco-friendly festival”. Chances are the customer is too swamped to think about all this on their own so this kind of help provided by your app or site will help them a great deal.

2. What to do about relatives that a customer is unsure of?

Customer’s behaviour: Some family members are easy to shop for. Some are very hard. There’s always that aunt or uncle whose tastes we aren’t quite sure of.

UX implications: You can “re-present” some of your merchandise during the festive season in terms of gifting categories. Sections like “5 great gifts for fathers” or “Your aunt will love this” should be upfront on the site. They will not just catch the browser’s attention instantly but will also streamline and concentrate their efforts and help them save time. This contributes to a great overall experience, one they’re sure not to forget soon.

3. Timely gift > perfect gift

Customer’s behaviour: Let’s face it. Some customers mostly get to their shopping list late. That means they’re going to be anxious about delivery. If they don’t get the right guarantee at the right time, they’re likely to renege on their purchase.

UX implications: To reassure customers who are obviously shopping for an occasion, communicating the delivery date clearly will be extremely important. Because the festive season is a time when timing takes precedence over everything else. Allow them the option of a faster delivery period so their loved one gets their gift on time. Give them updates so they know it’s on the way. And if someone absolutely needs it by a time that you cannot ship it by, consider redirecting them to a store of yours near them that they can walk into and pick it up. It’s better to redirect them to another channel than to lose a customer after all.

Many brands make around 40% of their annual sales during this period alone. So it’s important to use good UX to help customers find what they want and finish their shopping quickly and effectively.

4. Don’t forget to sync offline and online

Customer’s behaviour: Now there’s one thing some customers do during this time and they’re not afraid to indulge in it. They go online for the research and then look to shop for the same thing in retail stores. Somehow, they’re convinced they can get a better deal offline. This is a bugbear for online marketers. Many report millions lost when consumers browse but leave without buying, presumably to fulfill the need elsewhere.

UX implications: Once a customer has zeroed in on a gift, enrich their experience by plying them with the right offers at that point in the purchase. It could be discounts, cash back or just free gift-wrapping. Whatever it is, close the dissonance at this stage of their experience and seal the deal so you don’t lose them to an offline store. For brands with online and offline presence, ensure the customer’s online experience is linked to the stores. If they start to spend too long oscillating over a product, tell them that they always have the option to check out the product at the nearest store. Supply them with the address and the store timings. Close the loop.

5. Video killed the grapevine

Customer’s behaviour: A covert shopping behaviour among many people is that they look up videos on YouTube for suggestions instead of asking their friends about it. If, say, a customer wants to buy a camera, there’s a high chance they will look for a video to find out more about its performance and reviews.

UX implication: Enrich the customer’s experience with links to relevant, contextually rich videos so they can be better informed right there. This sort of digital intertextuality can enhance shopping experiences greatly and lead to conversion.

6. Show me the money!

Customer’s behaviour: Festival shopping is exciting but it can also burn a hole in one’s pocket. It’s natural for customers to look for the best deals.

UX implications: Craft a shopping experience that allows for easy financing options, if they apply, and which are visible and comprehensible easily to browsers. Many of these gifts are likely to be big-ticket items and so the right message about financing at the right time can go a long way in closing the deal. It’s also important to let customers know they can cash in on those coupons at this time of the year.

7. Do you want to send a note?

Customer’s behaviour: The only thing more satisfying than finding the right gift for your best friend is customising it. But, too often, customers have no time, considering they start festival shopping late.

UX implications: Surprise the customer. Ask them if they would like to personalise the gift and make it more special. There are many ways you can make this come alive for the customer. You can offer a range of gift-wrap options, making sure to obscure the price label, of course. Or to add a note. Or even flowers. Little touches like these will delight both the customer and the person they’re gifting and create a memorable experience all round.

8. Build the festive world

Customer’s behaviour: The festive season is a time when customers are happy and receptive to all sorts of new ideas. This creates opportunities for rich, diverse content. A customer might be in the market looking for a new outfit for a festive party. This means that they’re also in the mood to binge on a new haircut, try some new dessert recipes and maybe even check out the new neighborhood restaurant.

UX implications: Don’t make it all about the product or the service. Create the festive world. If you’re a food site, share tips on how to make the perfect healthy and tasty Diwali sweets. If you’re a décor site, explain how to elevate the lighting of the room in 3 simple steps. If you’re a fashion site, win them over with tips on how to pair certain clothes with simple, DIY accessories. Content like this has great influence during the festive season when people want to look their best and appear like they’re ahead of the Joneses!

Conclusion

Online purchasing is sure to heat up with Christmas, New Year and Sankranti around the corner. Make sure that in addition to great merchandise, you’re creating an easy, happy, thoughtful experience as well. This way, when your customers go online to shop during the celebrations, your brands can engage them at the right time with the right message to create the most alluring and complete experience. May the best experience win!

— Sharan Grandigae, Founder and CEO of Redd Experience Design

Read the article as published in Dataquest, India.

8 Ways UX Can Enhance Online Shopping in the Festive Season was originally published in Human Friendly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Of late, we’ve been working with a few clients that have customer bases in tier-3 and tier-4 cities in India. This trend is an important one to note as it represents a huge population that has so far been untouched by technology. This group is significant for yet another reason because it also represents the migrant populations that travel to bigger cities for work. So we began working on a framework that aims to help design applications for the next billion users.

To begin with, let’s understand who we are designing for a little better. All the descriptions can be debated but the objective is to describe the majority of users:

• The user may be young or old but not very tech savvy.
• Smartphones are the first computing platforms they’ve handled.
• They use Android phones.
• Their income levels could vary quite greatly as this is not a group defined by economics.
• They seek technical help from other friends and family members.
• They best understand new ideas through metaphorical comparison with real-world concepts.

There are a number of dos and don’ts to keep in mind and if we went through all of them, it would simply make for a very long day. So let’s discuss the most important things here:

#1 — Using Permanent Positions for Objects

In the real world, different objects occupy different spaces. This is starkly different in the digital world where the same area of the screen is occupied by different “objects” at different times. This is a huge hurdle to overcome for a new user. One way to design for this kind of user is to allocate spaces within the screens for certain types of actions.

For example, you can allocate the bottom right of the application for confirmatory actions such as Save, Submit, Okay or Approve. The other corner of the screen can be allocated for the negative actions such as Cancel, Disapprove, Reject, etc. Having a permanent place on the screen for certain types of functions helps build a relationship between the position and the action. In the long run, it also helps build muscle memory for the required kinds of actions. The users, then, can also guess where to tap on a screen that they may have never encountered yet.

#2 — Avoid Scrolling

The second thing to do is to avoid scrolling. Scrolling by itself isn’t something that this group of users will find intuitive. If possible, present all the information on multiple screens instead, with a progress button that takes them through each of them.

But if you must use scrolling, provide the user with some kind of hint which will allow them to understand that more of the screen is available below. Make sure that the information on a screen doesn’t “cut” exactly where the physical screen ends and instead lay out the screen such that there’s a portion of what’s below peeking above the bottom of the screen. Another hint that can be provided is to show an illustration of a finger tapping and dragging the screen.

#3 — Use Transitions When Going Between Screens

The third thing to keep in mind is to use transitions when going between screens. When the same real estate is being used by different sets of information, it helps a user to understand that the same space is being used by a new lot of information if you use some kind of transition animation between the screens. If you slide a screen left, the user will know that the first set of screens has moved to the left to make space for the new screen. In addition, the user will also know that if they “go left”, they will be able to see the old screen.

What doesn’t work is a quick switch from one screen to another because that doesn’t allow a user to switch contexts seamlessly. This is one of those principles that actually makes sense to use for all users and not just this group, but it is essential for this particular group.

Voice can become assistive and allow users to handle applications even if they aren’t very well-versed in GUI-based ones.

#4 — Use Skeuomorphism

It is also recommended that you use skeuomorphism. If you’ve never heard the term before, it’s a fancy way of saying that the interface should use depictions of real-world objects. For example, if there’s a need to indicate a delete function, the functionality should be depicted using an icon that resembles an eraser or a trash can as opposed to an “X” which would make sense to someone familiar with technology but not to the others.

#5 — Build User Confidence

As interface designers, we must also work hard to build the confidence of digital novices. These kinds of users will be worried about making mistakes, especially when it comes to using applications related to money. It would be good to let them know what they need to have available in order to perform the task and to also let them know the steps involved to complete the task.

Additionally, messaging on the screen can let the user know that they are doing a good job with each step. This will encourage them to go from step to step in a simple manner. A summary step that indicates all their inputs and decisions before performing the task will be required in order to allay any fears that the user may have.

For tasks that require the users to make multiple decisions, try and keep it to one decision per screen so the user can focus on performing that one action as accurately as possible. A mini celebration after the task is performed correctly will also reinforce the user’s confidence in being able to perform it the next time.

#6 — Use Voice Interfaces When Possible

The most important tool in the basket is the use of voice interfaces. If there is a possibility to use them within the application, the return on investment is extremely high. We frequently underestimate the amount of learning we have gone through in getting used to GUI or touch-based interfaces. While tech-savvy users get through each of these steps quickly and seamlessly, it is a huge hurdle to learn even basic actions like scrolling, copy/paste functions, navigating within screens, etc., for those who haven’t grown up with technology.

But voice interfaces bridge these gaps seamlessly. Everyone knows what they want to achieve and most people can put it into words easily. As designers, we could use technologies like Slang or Dialogflow which allow you to infuse voice interfaces within GUI, creating dual-modal interfaces. In this way, voice can become assistive and allow users to handle applications even if they aren’t very well-versed in GUI-based ones.

So these are just some of the many things one needs to think about when designing for the next billion users from India. This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list but something to get you started in thinking about how design can help bridge the technological gap that’s forming in our society. Do you have other ideas on how design can help? Make sure to mention it in the comments below or write to us at social@redd.in and we’ll be sure to respond.

— Sharan Grandigae, Founder and CEO of Redd Experience Design

UX Design Patterns #5: Designing for the Next Billion Users was originally published in Human Friendly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.