In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and National Disability Independence Day, we’re sharing our lessons learned incorporating accessibility into all projects, especially those with fast timelines.

Product release cycles continue to get shorter — days and weeks-long instead of months — making the task of integrating accessibility early in the process look even more challenging. But it’s a myth that making a product accessible is too difficult, too time-consuming, and requires specialized resources. Our experience at Facebook over the last two years building products for over 3 billion people has proved otherwise. Preparing for accessibility early in the product development process can save time and resources, improve overall usability, and set you up to design within fast timelines.

Designing for accessibility means enabling people of all abilities to perceive, understand, interact with, and contribute equally to the web and digital world. We have been learning a lot about this by supporting fast-paced projects, especially in the last few months launching Rooms, the Covid Info Hub, and Covid hashtags.

1. Acknowledge that accessibility is not a one-person job

It’s a common idea that only a specialist can contribute to an accessibility project. We’d like to dispel this myth here and now. It takes a village to launch an accessible product. Accessibility is a team effort. No matter what your level of experience and passion, no single person can do the job well. In order to start on the right foot you’ll need to get the right team in the room. It’s tough enough in normal circumstances to get everyone in the same place at the same time to collaborate, and lately it’s been impossible for us given the coronavirus social distancing limitations.

We have learned the importance of involving people with situational, temporary or permanent disabilities directly into our design process, by either organizing co-design sessions or planning multiple testing rounds with them. These participants might include people with low vision, hearing, cognitive and motor impairments, and people with low technical literacy.

“Waiting to incorporate accessibility after-the-fact sets up your project for failure.”

Finding people with disabilities may seem difficult, but the benefit of their input and feedback in the beginning and throughout the product development process is critical to ensuring the overall usability and success of your products. Reach out to disability advocacy organizations and chapters in your area that represent and support individuals with disabilities, such as the LightHouse for the Blind, United Cerebral Palsy, the National Association of the Deaf, and the National Federation of the Blind.

For some projects, it won’t be feasible to get everything done on the first go. Don’t let that stop you from getting the project off on the right foot. Waiting to incorporate accessibility after-the-fact sets up your project for failure. You may end up building the project on an inaccessible architecture or accrue insurmountable accessibility tech debt before a proper team can be put in place, resulting in a product that excludes the people it was intended to serve.

2. Make a game plan to tackle accessibility in your process

We’ve all been there: everyone is moving fast in every direction and feeling great about how much energy they’re putting into the project — but it’s not working. Stress has a way of showing you what really works, and what’s just wishful thinking. When we started incorporating accessibility into our project process, we weren’t really good at it. But we didn’t let that stop us, and we weren’t afraid to fail because we knew we’d get better. So here’s what we’ve learned to do at each step of the development process to incorporate accessibility into fast-paced projects:

Plan

Integrate accessibility into your project brief and mission

We start by considering how to fill in this phrase: “Our mission is to enable [target audience] by shipping an accessible [product or feature] to give equitable access to people of all abilities to create community.“ Including a phrase like this into your project brief mission statement will help align you and your team and keep the high-level goal crystal clear during development.

Integrate accessibility into your product roadmap

• Plan to review and identify accessibility issues before shipping your product.
• Plan to test for screen readers and keyboard navigation.
• Work with your accessibility QA team to create a burndown list of tasks and bugs to resolve before shipping your product.

Design

Create design specs

(See the design examples in the next section).

Review your design

Evaluate color contrast ratios, tap targets, accessibility labels, focus areas/order, keyboard navigation and whether or not content is accessible to people with low technical literacy.

After struggling through a number of fast-turn projects, we realized that we needed to be better prepared. We began to offer accessibility training for product designers and content strategists and make accessibility “office hours” available on request to review design specs and product accessibility. This helped us identify issues that we would have otherwise missed. We strongly encourage you to listen to and learn from disabled users. There really is no substitute for this. But if you’re not able to engage people with disabilities early in the process, at least engage an accessibility expert in your company (if you have one) or find an external accessibility expert. The key point is that you get someone else who is knowledgeable to validate your work. We all know this is good practice, yet this is one of the first things we skip when under pressure.

Develop

Lint your code

As your engineers begin coding, make sure they are linting. We found this to be a powerful method for finding code issues and recommend implementing linting in your web stack.

Conduct accessibility quality assurance testing

Partner with an external accessibility vendor who employs QA engineers trained to perform accessibility evaluations in lockstep with your product lifecycle process. You should define the user flows to be tested and the optimal cadence for your team. They will test your flows, find bugs, and create tasks for you to address.

Ship

For fast development cycles (measured in weeks, not months or years), it’s not always possible to get in a last-minute check before shipping. But if at all possible, we’ve found that an expert accessibility review just prior to releasing a product almost always reveals issues we missed. At the least, it helps us identify and prioritize what we need to do next immediately after shipping.

Maintain

Continually improve

Chances are good (okay, it’s certain) that you won’t be perfect — especially the first time through the process. Now that you know you need to make improvements, what do you do? In addition to designing for accessibility up front, your process must include remediation when there’s regression. Your method for managing this should match your team’s current regression management process. At Facebook, we have developed our own QA process that has helped us improve how we design and implement accessibility features. This is how we monitor quality and make sure that we are continually improving over time. If you don’t have an established QA process, we encourage you to create one, and accessibility is a great place to start. It will be impossible to make progress on accessibility at scale without at least some monitoring, checks, and remediation to ensure you’re raising your quality bar over time.

Get user feedback

With your product released in the wild, you can and should collect and act on user feedback, and we strongly recommend that you create a mechanism in your product that makes it easy for users to provide it. We apply special rules and tagging on feedback related to accessibility so it’s easier to find and prioritize. Providing a channel for feedback will ensure that you catch major regressions that might be missed by engineering and QA, discover actionable insights from users of your products, and signal to the outside world your commitment to inclusion. You don’t necessarily need to respond to all inquiries, but you should track and taskify everything that is valid and reproducible.

3. Know your priorities

By definition, a fast-paced project doesn’t allow you to do everything you want to do in the first go. However, waiting until later to consider and incorporate accessibility into a design may lead to additional hurdles that may otherwise have been avoided. So consider accessibility from the outset for fast projects (remember, this means days or weeks, not months or years). This will set up your projects for future success, and help prioritize which of the many accessible design considerations you need to incorporate first (on the way to implementing them all). Of course, your priorities will change depending on the project, but we default to the following list unless the project or the schedule demands we shorten it or allows us to lengthen it.

Respect color contrast ratios

Designs should respect at least WCAG’s AA standard of at least 4.5:1 for standard text, 3:1 for large text (18pt and larger when rendered) and graphics.

Test for color perception impairments

Make your design work without depending on color. Convert it into grayscale to see if it relies on color alone to convey important information. The design should convey information as well in grayscale as it does when using color. Use multiple visual cues beyond just color such as icons, textures, patterns or descriptive text to communicate important states.

Create accessibility labels and image alt-text

All controls should have succinct and informative accessibility labels, whether they have a visible label or not. Decorative elements that do not communicate specific meaning do not require accessibility labels.

Create focus areas and order

Cursor and screen reader focus should move in a predictable, logical way to aid in user comprehension and efficiency.

Respect touch target size standards

Tappable elements should have at least a 44x44dp surface area that accurately respond to people’s taps and have at least 8dp space between tappable elements.

Design for low digital literacy

Content should be written and presented in a way that enables people who are less tech savvy to understand and interact with your products. Examples include simple workflows, reducing visual density, pairing text labels with iconography, using plain, simple language in short sentences, and using images or drawings in addition to text.

Create inclusive visual representation

Visual assets such as illustrations, icons and emojis should represent the diversity of people’s abilities (or disability) including race, gender, and culture.

We’re not suggesting these are the only considerations for accessible design. We’ve simply found that these serve well as a feasible, solid place to begin, even on the fastest project startups. All of these recommendations have high value to people with various disabilities. Refer to the WC3’s WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines for a more complete list of accessibility considerations.

4. Transform an accessibility challenge into an opportunity

Invariably, you’re going to find a few accessibility barriers in your design, and you’ll find them in places you may never have expected. In one recent project, a team received input from people with disabilities that hashtags not displayed in CamelCase (#designforeveryone vs CamelCase #DesignForEveryone) were preventing screen readers from accurately speaking descriptions for people who are blind. We also found that hashtags in all uppercase and all lowercase are difficult for people with cognitive and learning disabilities to read and understand. While remedying the hashtag accessibility barrier wasn’t a ‘quick fix,’ having this information was important. In response, we were able to highlight this barrier for a future fix with another team, while also keeping our focus on other barriers we could surmount more quickly to deliver a strong accessibility result for the disability community.

While this may sound like a miss, we consider it a victory. By incorporating accessibility into our design thinking from the outset, we caught this issue early and were able to get another team, unrelated to our project, to investigate it. That team proposed a fix in parallel while we quickly got our project up and running. That never would have happened if we had waited until after the project was “mature” to perform our first accessibility audit, and we may have been so far down the line that the effort to fix it would have cost us more in time and engineering, elongating our delivery time. The more we’ve incorporated accessibility from the outset, the better we’ve become and the more we’ve learned about which issues are common and which are unusual. This approach has enabled us to fine-tune our process, our tools, and our intuition so we can find problems and fix them even faster in the future.

5. Nurture an inclusive design culture

Influencing your whole company or team culture may not be easy, but it’s definitely one of the most impactful and long-term outcomes you can make happen through your work.

Designing for accessibility in the digital space has for decades been an engineering-driven practice, and unfortunately, an afterthought for many product teams. More recently, awareness of designing for accessibility has increased in the design community and more product designers have started advocating for it and writing about it. We’re all now much more aware of the importance of creating a corporate culture of inclusive and accessible design and hope you join us on this journey.

Facebook’s well-known bottom-up culture has allowed many individuals and teams to innovate and push boundaries in accessibility, and inspired a volunteerism culture. But in order to make a lasting, significant change in how we design products, we must also have a top-down culture of accessible and inclusive design.

To address this, we spun-up a series of activities and programs to help product teams to integrate accessibility in their process. These programs inspired leadership to adopt accessibility more formally into our company culture and policies. Here are a few of the initiatives we kicked-off to inspire you, and hopefully help you nurture a more inclusive design culture in your company:

• Accessibility guides, resources and best practices
  We created corporate design accessibility guidelines, training resources, design cases, best practices, and an accessibility component library. These enable product teams to be more self-sufficient and improve our consistency across products and platforms.
• Accessibility training sessions
  We kicked off an onboarding training program to provide an overview of what inclusive design and accessibility is and to orient our “n00bs” (“new-bees” or “noobs” are our new designers, researchers, content strategists and engineers) on what’s expected of them.
• Accessibility office hours
  We make available “office hours” (originally in person but now virtual) hosted by our more experienced designers and accessibility program managers. During office hours, anyone can get answers to their questions about accessibility and inclusive design, and we can review product designs together.
• Open (digital) space to discuss accessibility
  We created an internal online company forum using our own Workplace product to answer common questions from product teams and share updates on best practices, new tools and techniques from our team. This space often provides answers faster than scheduling office hours, and reaches more people who may share the same question.
• Internal and public events
  We organized several events to amplify awareness and inspire and educate internal and external communities about accessibility and inclusive design. Recently, we hosted “Accessibility Week 2020” in celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day in May. We normally host this only for employees but decided to make it virtual this year and made two of the three sessions public. In the first we hosted design icon Don Norman, who set the stage for “why accessibility” by sharing his thoughts on the importance of designing for disability and the elderly. We then hosted three amazing and diverse speakers who shared what it’s like to live a typical day with a disability. This session helped our designers better understand who they’re designing for. The final session trained all of our designers on how to apply the lessons we’ve shared in this article, our priorities and process, and how to use our internal tools to create accessible designs.
• Accessibility council
  We’ve also recently started an accessibility council to facilitate cross-pollination across the org about inclusive design, and to align guides, best practices and training across our company.
• Accessibility task force
  We created an accessibility task force to support unexpected projects, like the Covid Info Hub and other projects, to ensure they integrate accessibility thinking from the start.

The Bottom Line

We hope these lessons will enable you, and give you the courage to incorporate accessibility and inclusion into even your fastest, most aggressive product development cycles. It’s okay if you’re not immediately successful. Your company culture may not change overnight, but we’ve learned that the tipping point for this shift lies with individuals. If you’re willing to integrate inclusive design and accessibility into your mindset, you can and will influence your entire design practice, product development process, and corporate culture.

We certainly don’t yet have all the answers, but we’ve learned a lot along the way and wanted to share what we’ve learned with the hope that it will encourage others who have yet to take this step. We continue to learn how to support designers and product teams by integrating accessibility into our design practice, and we’re taking a stand for inclusion through design. We hope you do, too, and that this article will help empower the broader design community to do the same.

_

Caterina Falleni is also the author of Accessible by Design, due out in 2021.

Thanks to:

Gui Schneider, Virginia Cagney, Jonathan Lee, Gregory Sarkis-Kelly, Gillian Terzis for being great teammates and for the great feedback and support along the journey of publishing this article.

Matt Brennan, Matt King, and the entire Facebook Accessibility team for their invaluable help, experience, and knowledge of accessibility and inclusion.

Tori McGoogan for her artistic direction of this article’s illustrations.

Mike Shebanek, Jesse Beach, Tali Krakowsky Apel, Shali Nguyen, Jeff Wieland and Espen Tuft for their continuous support in Caterina’s evolution as an accessibility design lead.

Shannon O’Malley for her gentle editing of this piece.

5 Ways to Integrate Accessible Design into Fast-paced Projects was originally published in Design at Meta on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Representatives from companies such as Figma, Lego, Unity, Mckinsey, WeTransfer, Slack, Duolingo, Adobe, and design consultancies from allover the world gave lectures and workshops.

At the intro, everyone got warmed up by Ingrid Haug, one of the main organizers of the event, explaining the 3 themes of the conference:

1) Minimal Tech

2) Design + Activism

3) Are we on the same page?

Ingrid invited the designers and creatives in the room to really take design more in a serious and responsible way.

Here are some highlights of the talks and workshops I’ve attended:

Playful Machine Learning

Andreas Refsgaard, Creative Coder Refsgaard

Andreas described how machine learning is becoming more and more an integrated part of the design practice. By enabling people to decide upon and train their own unique controls for a system, the creative power shifts from the designer of the system to the person interacting with it. He presented several playful projects showing unconventional connections between inputs and outputs using machine learning techniques. An example of his latest projects is Booksby.ai is an online bookstore which sells science fiction novels generated by an artificial intelligence.

In his projects, games are controlled by making silly sounds, music is composed by drawing instruments on paper and algorithms are trained to decide what is funny, funky or boring.

My main takeaway from his talk is that algorithms are making mistakes and sometimes these mistakes could be a matter of life or death for people, and designers should influence way more algorithms logic to fully advocate for users.

On a side note, this reminds of Tragic Design, a thought-provoking book, which talks about how poorly designed products can anger, sadden, exclude, and even kill people who use them.

New Algorithmic Approaches to Graphic Design

Martin Bravo, Co-Founder Design Systems International

In this talk, Martin talked about the intersection of graphic design and programming languages by focusing on the work of his design studio, Design Systems International. The talk explored how the discipline of graphic design evolved from static media to digital products, and how Martin and his team are exploring different tools and workflows when developing design systems for digital products, dynamic identities, or custom design tools.

One of the main takeaways is that in order to align product designers working on the same products the best way to align is to not deliver guidelines but to deliver workflows and tools!

Climate Adaptation, Design at the Front Lines

Francesca Desmarais. IxD Lead CIID

As designers, we’re familiar with the push of technological change to unlock new potential and innovation. What about the push of environmental change? What does it mean to be a designer when the physical and biologic infrastructure of our world starts rapidly changing?

Francesca during her talk explained how CIID shifted from user-centered to life-centered design.

Francesca is a design lead for the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) where she spearheads a venture to use digital design to help communities adapt to a changing climate.

She sharing case studies and experiences from the field, and how to incorporate Natural Sciences into design work.

The Power of Authenticity

Sydney Banta, Girls Boss Senior Designer

Crafting a message that sticks requires a motive, an identity, and an honest approach to both, which begs the question, “do you believe in what you design?
“As designers we are part of the problem but also part of the solution.”

Sydney finds designers being instrumental to giving voice to important topics and problems.

In a modern landscape overflowing with communication, visual storytellers (designers) have the power to guide the narrative, exposing the public to new ways of thinking and seeing. Yet, with great responsibility comes the absolute need to be authentic and resist the pitfall of turning activism into trend.

“To be authentic is to care and to have a purpose! Is to give a shit about something! Activism is not a trend. Activism is about giving a shit of something you care!”

As the design lead for Girl Boss, Sydney shared how she challenges design-norms while staying tru to her mission of reminding women that we are all the authors of our life.

“Ethics” and Ethics

Oliver Reichenstein, Founder & CEO

Oliver questioned the audience with several questions: “What is ethics? What is ethic design? What is good design?”

Through his speech he talked about the difference between ethics and morals.

Ethics:
- Universal
- It’s a philosophical term
- Don’t judge or command
Morals:
- Cultural phenomenon (based on context)
- It’s a cultural answer
- Judges you

Ethics and Morals are similar but not the same, like dude and mate.
‘The times of thoughtless design for thoughtless consumption are over’ — Dieter Riems

The conclusion of Oliver talk is that designer should design for freedom. Designers should allow users to be free, allow them to take decisions and to be free to independently choosing.

The solution for all of this: “Ethics”. Design ethics! Tech ethics! Business ethics! Ethics for AI! But is it?

Behavioural Science Workshop

Roxy & Jerome, Coglode Co-Founders

This was the most energizing and interesting workshop on behavioral design ever! During this session we got introduced to six core behavioral principles:
- Prospect Theory
- Reciprocity
- Social Proff
- Commitment
- Superiority
- Authority
These principles were summarized in Nuggets, part of Coglode’s behavioral design toolkit, with insights, case studies and stats.

During this workshop we learned from a few case studies and worked in groups to face a challenge like “How would you incentivize users to signup to X newsletter to donate blood?” and apply the core cognitive principles just presented to us.

I reccomend to every designer, content strategist, sresearcher, and anyone interested in behavioral science to checkout Coglode’s Nuggets and if possible participae in one of their events and/or workshops! it’s worth it!

Will A.I. make designers irrelevant?

Allison & Tey, McKinsey Design Design Directors

Another cool workshop! Here the brief they gave us to work in teams:

The year is 2027. The Artificial Intelligence revolution is well underway — ushering in a new era of innovation and fundamentally changing the way we work.

Companies big and small are now leveraging AI to meet user and customer needs, work with machines with immense power and utilising new skills and processes to inform decision-making. But where are all of the Designers?

After dividing into groups of 5–8 people we had an AI designed company name, logo and mission. In my case I was part of GovMachine and our mission was to “Give the power to people”. Pretty broad as theme right? 😅

Well, I’m not gonna tell all of our crazy ideas, but I can tell you that the main take away from this workshop.

Designers should be way more involved within the creation of algorithms and AI companies as algorithms are making so many mistakes, designers could have the unique role of being more the strategic thinker of these new AI powered services, could be the main advocates for users for more equal services and a more overall equal society.

Creating Inclusion in Play

Petter Karlsson, Play Designer

The last (and great) talk on the main stage was from Petter, play designer, who shared with us his work on making toys inclusive and accessible for everyone. It was great to see a full talk on Design Accessibility and its importance on the main stage!

In this talk, Petter shared how Toca Boca started to define what they mean by diversity and how they include it in their products.

Petter also shared some other types of support structures they use in their mission to create apps that feel inclusive for kids all over the world.

And this was it!
A great conference, super well organized, (most delicious organic apple juice) that I would totally recommend.

“Don’t follow your heart, follow your reason” — Kant

Two years ago exactly, on November 2015, I was on the TEDx Youth stage in Roma, talking about how mobile devices and social media was profoundly altering the way we perceive and interact with the environment and people around us.

The rise of the internet and smartphones has dramatically democratized our access to information. We never witnessed better, faster and cheaper information for all.

But getting information is not enough to effectively learn. As the pioneer philosopher and psychologist William James stated: “the art of remembering is the art of thinking”. Building knowledge indeed requires an active effort to effectively encode information in our biological memory, and create dialectical relations between concepts and ideas.

Too often today, the internet has become the external hard drive for our memories. If the positive outcomes of this tremendous development of mobile use are countless and obvious, however, a growing number of voices have started to point out concerning issues, such as an increasing lack of attention — especially in young users — as well as a reduction of cognitive capacity, often coupled with difficulties to learn effectively.

During my 2015 talk, I described how designers and the tech giants are playing a crucial role in setting the rules to solve these issues.
At the time however, I didn’t have a solution or an applicable plan to tackle these wicked problems.

Today, I seem to finally start connecting the dots.

I recently learned that I was the laureate of a company-wide internal contest at Samsung Research America, and I couldn’t be more excited. Starting from January 2018 I will lead a project that could potentially improve the lives of millions of people.

I cannot say much about it at this point, beside the fact that I will focus on education. I will have my own space, time, and budget to develop my project, hire and work on a PoC.

As Steve Jobs famously said in his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Today I start to relate to this. The last 8 years of my life have been such a rollercoaster. I lived in 8 different cities, worked on local and global projects, in design consultancies and with startups, on projects related to healthcare, robotics, energy, wellness, payments… and even crossed the Atlantic ocean for a research project.

There were moments of doubt, moments when I questioned my choices and had trouble seeing the consistency of it all. But my decisions have always been guided by intuition, optimism, and the drive to use my design skills and passion to serve a bigger purpose.

Now I can see the dots connecting, with a unique opportunity to contribute to solve issues I could only diagnose a few years back, all of this within one of the most influential technology company worldwide. Yes, it can take time to connect the dots, but we always need to trust our gut, it pays off eventually.

Thank you all at Samsung Research America for your trust. Thank you to the ones who I have been working side by side in the last year, from whom I learned so much and to the ones who believed in me and are investing in my ideas. And thank you to my loved ones who support me and inspire me behind the scenes.

Exciting times ahead!

Few days ago, while I was trying to order an uber going home from the Caltrain station on 4th and King St I noticed something different in the Uber app..
At first sight I thought ‘it’s a bug!’
for few seconds the app was showing an altered UI with different cars and streets colors.
This made me wonder ‘Is Uber doing something behind the curtains?!’

Well yes, Uber just launched a new — way better — app version!
“We needed a new system to deal with the growing set of features that were sort of piling up in an older design” co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick said yesterday during a presentation of the new app to the press.

But first things first! The app logo is — finally — back to normality!
The app’s icon made it back to the black background with the white logo.
For the last several months, the logo was including a colored pattern in the background, part of the new branding the company introduced in February.
Now it feels so much better!

Since yesterday launch, I already used the new app few times, and I can really perceive the good intensions and the amount of time time spent on re-thinking the whole ride experience!
But let’s analyse it in order: from request, to ride, to rate.

1. Request

1. Enter the destination
Ride destinations are taking the center stage in the app new look. ‘Where to’ is fasting the process!
The user has two main choices: manually add the destination on the top or select from three circles on the bottom menu which act as destination “shortcuts” tailored to the users habits.

2. People are the new places!*
Why go back and forth about where to meet someone when you can just go directly to them? If you connect your contacts to the Uber app, you can make your friends and family the actual destination.

3. Select the pool type - Compare the options
Users can slide through the options and select which type of ride they want. To make timing and cost more transparent, the app now immediately shows the ride’s cost and the estimated time at which the rider would reach their destination below each type of ride.

2. Ride

1. Manage your trip

Once you request a ride, you’ll see all your driver’s details and you can track their arrival on the map (nothing really different). You can also easily change your destination (finally!), split the payment with friends (again nothing new, but the good thing is that it’s positioned in a better spot easier to see), and share your status (amazing feature I’m already abusing to compensate my chronic lateness) and listen your music.

2. Enjoy the ride - Feed pops up
‘While playing your favourite music you can order UberEATS, get local tips from Foursquare and Yelp and unlock exclusive Snapchat filters.’
Ehm.. I’m not really sure about the fact that I could enjoy a ride when I have all these things I can (should) do.
Please Uber, be kind and don’t overwhelm my rides of promotions!
I’m definitely excited to play my music while receiving local tips of bars, coffees and restaurants.
It would be also cool to add another layer of ‘things to do’ like which kind of cool events are around me based on my interests and habits.

3. Rate

1. Rate?!
Well nothing has really changed radically to write about it.

Other (coming soon) features

1. Connect the calendar
A nifty new feature is the ability to link the smartphone’s native calendar to Uber’s app. This way, the app will automatically pull up any meeting’s destination, if included, without the rider having to worry about typing it in manually.

2. Speed up the pick up
Uber will provide easy walking directions to a nearby location that will save time and make easier the pick up from the drivers!

3. Integration of Transit (public transportation app)
While riders can manually add the addresses of their home and office, all the other shortcuts will be automatically deduced by Uber’s system. Similarly, through an integration mobile app Transit, if a rider’s destination is a public transit hub, such as one of the Caltrain stations in the Bay Area, the app will immediately pull up the relevant train schedule so they can more easily coordinate their travel.

3. People as destinations
In the coming weeks Uber also plans to introduce a feature to make it easier for riders to meet up with others. A rider can send a location-sharing request to a contact in their smartphone, and once accepted, that person’s GPS location will be set as their ride’s destination. The idea is to eliminate those “Where are you exactly?” text message and calls everyone knows all too well.

Overall the load time and the whole experience is way faster and smother.

Now I understand why Uber few months ago introduced the 2 dollars fee every time you cancel a ride.. it was to pay all this work! And it’s worth it!

Sorry Lyft, I was in love with you for your unique, charming, hairy and soft moustache but I think it’s time to move on and ride a bit faster (or bring back the pink moustache)!

Why Uber made a Radical Redesign? was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the last few weeks I took a deep dive into the self-driving industry for a design experiment I’m conducting for a company in the sector (which of course I cannot disclose) studying service and experience design, providers, car industry acquisitions, investment and strategic partnerships.
Even if my focus was supposed to primarily be on the digital experience and the user interface I realized that the machine-driven world we are forecasting is not really far from us, and has already started shaping policies, laws, infrastructures and micro-finance initiatives.

Self-driving trucks are already making their first deliveries, private self-driving car services are already in function: it looks like that 2016 has been a crucial year for the future of mobility!

Here is a non-exhaustive list of recent news and milestones in the industry:

• GM Invested $500M in Lyft to develop a fleet of autonomous cars
• Volkswagen poured $300M in the Israeli ride-hailing startup Gett
• Uber acquired the self-driving lorry startup Otto for $680M
• Apple invested $1 B in Didi, Uber’s biggest rival in China
• Toyota partnered with Uber to explore a ride-sharing collaboration
• Uber started self-driving car pickups in Pittsburgh
• Ford acquired Chariot for 65M to boost its smart city plans and said it intends to deliver a fully autonomous vehicle for ride sharing by 2021
• Apple iCar rumours evoke the possibility of buying McLaren and seems that the Project Titan team is now focusing on autonomous driving systems
• Tesla exhibited a fully autonomous car in a new video demonstration
• Tata companies invested in Uber to offer a comprehensive vehicle purchase and ownership solution to Uber users in India and China
• Ola partnered with BMW India for luxury ride hailing
• Mercedes unveiled a new vision for delivery and self-driving vans
• NextEV hired former top Tesla and Apple autonomous driving engineer
• Mercedes-Benz teamed up with Udacity to offer self-driving nanodegree
• Tesla announced a ride hailing program for 2017, to ban owners from Uber, Lyft and offer an $8,000 retail price for self-driving features
• Otto’s Self-Driving 18-wheeler has made its first delivery
• Veeo Systems is developing vehicles as small as 2-seaters to as large as 70-seat buses, and will be testing them in 30 US cities by the end of 2017

Strategic partnerships, investments and acquisitions in the automotive industry are signaling both a growing role for on-demand cars and a new groundwork for app-enabled self-driving fleets.

On-demand startups from Uber to Lyft are changing how we move around cities, and in order to stay relevant, car makers want their hooks into this new world. At the same time, traditional car companies are looking towards the inevitable future where cars drive themselves, and these cars may ultimately power services like Uber and Lyft.

What I’m really questioning is how a future of optimized smart mobility and self driving vehicles will look. Will the vehicles be privately or publicly-owned? How will time and space be optimized? Will these vehicles be accessible for the few or the many? How will these vehicles interact with each other, with the people onboard and the pedestrians? How smart mobility will integrate in the existing infrastructures, other vehicles and how it will impact our society?

According to Morgan Stanley, complete autonomous capability will be here by 2022, followed by massive market penetration by 2026 and the cars we know and love today then entirely extinct in another 20 years thereafter.

As this only is one estimate among many others.
Here there are some of them:

Nissan: “In 2020 we’re talking more autonomous drive capability. It’s going to be an evolutionary process and 2020 will be the first year to truly see some of these capabilities start to be introduced in the vehicle.”

• ABI Research: “Half of new vehicles shipping in North America to have driverless, robotic capabilities by 2032.”
• Navigant Research: “By 2035, sales of autonomous vehicles will reach 95.4 million annually, representing 75% of all light-duty vehicle sales.”
• IHS Automotive: “There should be nearly 54 million self-driving cars in use globally by 2035.”

Between 2020 and 2030, it thus seems that will witness a massive disruption from mobility, to energy and real estate!

From AutoMobiles to AutoMobility

We can envision a future where self-driving vehicles will be integrated in dense urban grids of existing infrastructures, combined with other smart vehicles to unlock a new wave of optimization, convenience, efficiency and urban growth. Will be these vehicles owned by individuals, by a close group of family and friends or by a network of neighborhood.

A near future of a smart grid of self-driving vehicles will need to take in consideration people’s flexible workspaces and schedules, social interactions and individual interests and attitudes to optimize the most convenient transportation options.

Connecting the dots, I summarized below the three main visions of combined services that may be implemented in the near-future and reshape our cities and economic systems:

1# Shared-Self-Driving Cars
A self-driving car system that share automated vehicles in a neighborhood proximity to optimize the transportation for instant requests and leisure time transportation. The vehicles will not be owned by individuals but by the municipality, that will offer the service as part of thepublic transportation. Cities will partner with self-driving car service providers.

2# Commute Solutions Integrated in Urban Grid Infrastructures
A system of automated commute vehicles will take into account people’s work locations, pick-up positions and destinations, automatically adapting to their work schedules.
Commuters will save time and will be far more productive while en route since they will no longer actively be driving vehicles.

3# Fleets of Self-Driving Vehicles for Goods Delivery
A capillary grid of autonomous delivery goods service will run a 24-hour period which will help reducing traffic congestion.
The fleets of autonomous delivery vehicles will travel intelligent routes when the roads are least busy.

These trucks will hit us like a human-driven truck

Self-driving trucks are no longer the future. They’re here.

This is a map of the most common jobs in each US state in 2014.

It should be clear at a glance just how dependent the American economy is on truck drivers. According to the American Trucker Association, there are 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the US, and an additional 5.2 million people employed within the truck-driving industry who don’t drive the trucks. That’s 8.7 million trucking-related jobs.

Entire businesses have been built around serving their wants and needs. Think restaurants and motels. We’re talking about millions more whose employment depends on the employment of truck drivers. Those working in these restaurants and motels along truck-driving routes are also consumers within their own local economies.
So we’re talking about entire small town communities full of people who depend on all of the above in more rural areas. With any amount of reduced consumer spending, these local economies will shrink.

In 2012 in the US, 330,000 large trucks were involved in crashes that killed nearly 4,000 people, most of them in passenger cars. About 90 percent of those were caused by driver error.

Autonomous trucks will kill far fewer people, if any, because machines don’t get tired. Machines don’t get distracted. Machines don’t look at phones instead of the road. Machines don’t drink alcohol or do any kind of drugs or involve any of the numerous things that somehow contribute to the total number of accidents every year involving trucks. Following this same reasoning, pilots too are bound to be removed from airplanes.

Self-driving trucks don’t need salaries — salaries that stand to go up because fewer and fewer people want to be truckers.

The only real barrier to the immediate adoption of self-driven trucks is purely political in nature, not technical or economic.
Sergey Brin has estimated that autonomous vehicles will be legal at the national level as soon as 2017. Therefore…

From self-driving cars to the need of a basic income

With self-driving cars and trucks, we face the prospect of millions and millions of people with no jobs in few years, no need for entire towns to even exist at all. (The Guardian)

As a good friend of mine says “Robots will steal our jobs, but that’s ok!” and we don’t need to be afraid!
Not allowing this to happen would be truly foolish, for what is the entire purpose of technology but to free us to pursue all we wish to pursue? Fearing the loss of jobs shouldn’t be a fear at all. It should be welcomed. It should be freeing.

No one should be asking what we’re going to do if computers take our jobs, we should all be asking what we get to do once freed from them.

As close as 2025 — that is in a mere 10 years — our advancing state of technology will begin disrupting our economy in ways we can’t even yet imagine. Human labor is increasingly unnecessary and even economically unviable compared to machine labor. And yet we still insist on money to pay for what our machines are making for us. As long as this remains true, we must begin providing ourselves the money required to purchase what the machines are producing.

Without non-work income, we will necessarily fight to keep from being replaced by the technology we built to replace us.
Silicon Valley main incubator Y Combinator has recently launched a basic income pilot experiment in Oakland as well as countries as Finland, Netherlands experiment in Utrecht, and the World Bank initiatives in India to provide low-income people with money to reduce poverty!

Designing tomorrow’s smart mobility means to provide a smooth transportation system of integrated services to move people and goods while at the same time achieving a sustainability grid for society in terms of basic income policies and systems.

Our roads are not yet full of driverless cars or trucks, but the day is approaching and if we don’t provide ourselves a universal and unconditional basic income soon, the future is going to hit us like a truck, a truck driven solely by ourselves.

Special thanks to Scott Santens that inspired my thoughts about the impacts of a machine driven future and the urge of a basic income, Pietro Masi for brainstorming, Royal Ground Coffee on Polk St for hosting me while writing this and Hocine Lourdani for his meticulous help in correcting typos and insightful food for thoughts! If interested in supporting the first crowdfunded basic income community check Patreon.

If you enjoyed this, click the little ❤ or share it on your channels.

Exponential Medicine 2016 takeaways.

This weekend tomorrow’s healthcare was in San Diego.
Daniel Kraft, the curator of the conference, and faculty chair of Medicine and Neuroscience at Singularity University, took the audience on a tour of the latest developments in healthcare and medicine.

It would be hard for me to summarize the intense four days conference made of talks, keynotes, workshops and events from more than 80 experts in the field.

Therefore I decided to share the key highlights, quotes and a slide-deck of the companies that has been showcased in the Innovation Lab or mentioned in the various panels. I hope this will give you a glimpse of the developments in the healthcare and medical tech space.

“10 years from now, you’ll prefer the robotic surgeon over its human counterpart.” — Peter Diamandis

“Don’t give people dashboards, give them steering wheels. Orient the patient, in their own experience.” Thomas Goetz, CEO, Iodine — Former Wired US Editor

“Kaiser Permanente are doing 2k video-based patient visits per month today, and will be doing 20k per month next year” John Mattison, Chief Medical Information Officer, Kaiser Permanente

“Healthcare shifted from INNOVATING for > with > by, and it brings a whole new area of knowledge with it.” Lucien Engelen, Founding Director of REshape Center, Radboud University Medical Center

“We can change our mindset from “sickcare” to “healthcare” by shifting from a reactive era of medicine to an era of medicine that is proactive, preventative, and continuous care.” Dr. Kraft

“Real food is the most powerful tool we have to fight illness; it’s a better drug than drugs.” Mark Hyman, Director, Cleveland Clinic

“Help someone get rid of a task that they hate, and you’ll have yourself an exponential #medicaltechnology" Ellen Strahlman, Chief Medical Officer, Becton Dickinson

“The FDA bends the exponential curve, slightly. But, we HAVE TO PROVE that our #digitalhealth technologies actually work.”

“I’m here to seek help from digital health companies to understand how we can work better together.” Bakul Patel, Associate Director of Digital Health, FDA

“We need to talk about genetic engineering; it’s not just about the future of disease, it’s the future of our species.” Jamie Metzl Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council & Author, Genesis Code”

“Current R&D cycles are too slow to stop ‘Agent X’ (a global pandemic)” George Poste, Chief Scientist, Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative- Arizona State University

“The problem — “We don’t practice evidence-based medicine, we practice reimbursement-based medicine.” Dr. Daniel Kraft, Founding Executive Director & Chair, Exponential Medicine

“AI is actually advancing healthcare, but the data is the problem; it’s unstructured, escalating, unknown, fragmented and unsecured.” Marc Goodman, Policy Law and Ethics Faculty Chair, Singularity University & Founder, FutureCrimes

“In the next years data science and software will do more for medicine than all of the biological sciences together.’” Vinod Khosla, Founder Khosla Ventures

“A new genome race is starting, and it’s no longer about reading base pairs, it’s about writing them; 1–2% by 2020.” Andrew Hessel, Founder, Pink Army, Researcher, Autodesk Inc.’s Bio/Nano Programmable Matter Group

“Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are being tested in the operating room to give surgeons a closer look at their patients. For example, using AR to overlay MRI images on a patient before an incision is made. On the patient side, AR and VR are helping with pain control in recovering burn victims, and the results are incredible.” Dr. Kraft,

These are just few selected quotes, but the most important lesson for me was listening the story of Dr Janet Sollod a pediatrician who has been living with metastatic breast cancer since her early 30s. Her optimism, energy and will power astonished the audience and myself into a long standing ovation.

Please watch her journey on living with metastatic breast cancer — the most optimistic approach to life I’ve ever seen.

To conclude as David Roberts reminded us in his talk, technology makes us powerful but doesn’t’ change who we are. Even if we will get all the technology of the universe we are gonna still be ‘human’ or ‘augmented-humans’ and what will make the difference will be the moral courage.

“Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.” Robert F. Kennedy

Thanks for reading and please share this post or Dr Janet Sollod amazing and brave talk for today (Oct 13th) Metastatic Breast Cancer Awareness Day.

What will healthcare look like in the future? was originally published in Healthcare in America on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lessons from linguists and Pixar character designers

There has been a lot of discussion around conversational UI and how conversational commerce is a dominant trend of consumer computing apps in 2016.
We’ve seen how messaging apps have eclipsed social networks in monthly activities. After the launch of ‘bots on Messenger’ Facebook opened a brave new world of direct channels between customers and brands.
Chatbots will play a main role as a primary touch point of the users to services.

One of the first integration on Messenger has been Uber, Lyft and maps.
How many of us who have called DMV and been on hold “forever” wouldn’t love to chat with a rep and get our issue handled in a minute.
How many of us would love to chat with an airline and resolve an issue in real time?
How many would like to shop easily saving money and time?

Every community, marketplace, on-demand service, dating app, social game or e-commerce product has or will soon have messaging as part of the experience to drive retention, engagement and transaction volume.

Key reasons for a Conversational Experience

First and foremost this is the right time. An entire generation of mobile-native consumers are comfortable and fluent with messaging as an interaction paradigm. Then the key reasons to explore a Conversational Experience for your business might be:

• Bypass incumbent vertically integrated player such as Apple and Google.
• Remove expensive humans from customer communication.
• Differentiate and extend the distribution channel and branding values. Someone says the end of apps and app stores is coming. (is it?!)
• Tailor recommendations based on personal interests and profiles.
• Address customer’s needs in real time providing relevant content.
• Create opportunities for services integration.
• Open a direct and honest channel between brands and customers.

Are bots always an answer?

No. Sometimes the excitement behind a technology makes us forget that humans might be better in offering a service insider knowledge instead of bots. It’s crucial to keep in mind the limitations and affordances of the bot experience.

Airbnb VP of Product, Joe Zadeh, stated that only humans — in this case, Airbnb hosts — can provide authentic hospitality and help foster the emotional relationship to a new place that travelers often seek.

“Bots potential is in doing things that they can do better than humans, like logistical tasks and taking as much work off the host’s plate as possible, so the host can focus on personal hospitality. Technology is not antithetical to humans but should be used to bring out more humanity,” Zadeh said.

So what we can learn from Zadeh experience in running a 60 million users service (valued $25 billion) is that building bots is not always an answer.

Here are just a few of the constraints and affordances to keep in mind:

• Discoverability of the interface and working memory
• Features/security of the messaging platform
• Storing user preferences
• Support for financial transactions
• Push notifications
• Using voice controls

Your bot could fall completely flat if it relies on the novelty of the latest tech trend rather than the needs of your users. Therefore we need always to ask ourselves what a bot can do better then a human.

Lessons from linguists

Linguists have certainly thought a lot about conversations and as the designer role is shifting from designing interactions to designing relationships and conversations I think linguists might teach us something.

Here’s a sentence diagram; something linguists use to map sentences and break them down into their structural components, verb, subject, object, and so on. Think of it like musical notation for words.

Each sentence has its own whole architecture, its own meaning and structure. It could branch and flow in all kinds of directions.
How does a UX designer model the conversation flow?

In all the excitement of diving into this new technology most of us seem to have forgotten about the most important actor in this enterprise: the human being who is expected to talk to the bot.

Conversations usually consist of two kinds of interactions — the structured (forms, menus, choices etc) and the unstructured (freestyle plain text).

Few examples from an offline structured conversation: ordering from a menu at the restaurant, filling a form at the doctor’s office, sending an invoice to your customer. On the other hand, conversations with friends, family, teachers, colleagues and acquaintances tend be unstructured.

The conversational interface designer must avoid force-fitting a naturally structured conversation into unstructured format, and vice versa.
Thankfully, there are tools being developed for programming bots to handle unstructured conversations (e.g.Superscript) while others are taking the “AI” approach (e.g. Api.ai, wit.ai, getmyra).

Lesson from Pixar characters design

How designers at Pixar are bringing to life new characters, can teach us so much on how to get birth to a bot character.

The connection of the audience to the character is the primary goal when designing a Pixar character. Imbuing the characters with humanity, and focusing on their humanity is vitally important to creating this connection. When designing a character, a Pixar artist needs to know what to exaggerate and what to play down, what to add to give a hint of background and depth, and what to do to develop personality.

Think about the meaning of the word ‘character’. You’re supposed to breath life into these things, make them appealing and give them the magic that will allow people to imagine what they’re like to meet and how they might move.
Neil McFarland

If every service is entering messaging channels how each chatbot should behave interact and chat with us and ‘be unique’? Which tone shall they have? Should they chat as one of our friends, more as a loyal personal assistant or keep their robotic soul?

Should they behave as an individual movie character with a defined personality or collaborate with each other as teammates in helping achieving our goals, and supporting what we really care and need?

When opening an app we usually follow an established and structured pattern of categories, folders and buckets, but if we have a free flow conversation with a smart chatbot is like an improv theater show compared to a normal movie that has a fixed beginning and end.

Principles of Bot-Character Design

Here what I extrapolated from linguists and Pixar designers lessons on how to design a bot personality character to help brands better connect with their customers through a converstaional experience.

1. Make it relevant

Think of what your bot can provide as unique and relevant type of content. Bots aren’t people, and shouldn’t pretend to be. Bots are great for making interactions efficient and scalable, the goal is to develop a unique and richer connection with your customers.

2. Find the right voice

Craft the right words and tone. Messaging is intimate and shouldn’t sound like marketing or corporate-speak. Every business will sound different, but think about what’s appropriate for your market, your audience and the medium. Would you like to hear entrepreneurial or inspirational quotes from a sock company or jokes from a funeral home? The point is: find whatever voice speaks to your consumers the best and stick with it.

3. Who is it aimed at?

Think about your audience. Characters aimed for a wellness Agent should be more bossy or more sympathetic? An agent for fashion and style should be more friendly or more ‘Devil wears Prada’ way? Well it depends both on your branding core values and on the audience. The Bot-character should react based on the unique audience personality, interests, goals and needs.

4. Structured VS unstructured format

Avoid to force-fit a naturally structured conversation into unstructured format, and vice versa. The key is to assemble the right medium at the right time. When you need a precise answer or when you are providing a set of choices, the structured format is the answer, but when you wanna give freedom of speech to understand the real needs and interests of the audience the unstructured freestyle plain text it’s for you.

5. Make it chat-able (but to the point!)

Messaging is its own medium with its own pros and cons. Conversationalizing something already done well on a website will often make the experience worse, not better. Instead of recreating experiences that are already good, ask yourself: How can I enhance a trustworthy, honest and loyal relationship (channel of communication) with my audience? Focus on that. Keep the interaction simple, efficient, and natural and people will come back for more. So keep in mind the end goal of your customers, chat with them but go straight to the point!

6. Convey Personality: Goals and Dreams

A bot-character personality can be reveled through tone of the voice, UI colours and animations. Your bot-character should express a range of emotions to express itself. Give your character opinions. The driving force behind a character’s personality is what it wants to achieve. Often the incompleteness or flaws in a character are what make it interesting.

7. Staging — Beyond the character

In the same way that you create a personality for you bot-character, you need to create an environment to help further cement believability in your creation. The world in which the character lives and interacts should in some way make sense to who the character is and what it gets up to. So in this case the overall interface experience should behave as the bot-character as colours, animations, textures, patterns and plot twists.

8. Timing etiquette

When we are chatting with a friend, a colleague or a shop assistant our rhythm and way of talking may vary in tone and timing.
You may interrupt a friend while talking, you may be more indulgent to a shop assistant, or vice versa. The same applies to your bot-character. When and how it should interrupt your customers daily routine with relevant information? Timing of conversation and interruption is critical for establishing a character’s mood, emotion, and reaction.

9. Why it should exist?! Could it be done better by a human?

The lesson from Airbnb is key to understand what could be done better by the bot and what from humans. Is the bot-character generating a long lasting, loyal and trustworthy relationship with the audience?
Why it should exist and which problem it should solve?
If you answer to these question, half of the job is done for your Bot-Character Design!

How to measure the effectiveness of a conversational flow?

Just as in traditional UX design, a good place to start is by comparing the effort required by the user (input) to accomplish a certain goal (output). This gives a measure of the “efficiency” of the conversation. For a given goal (such as ordering pizza or a jacket), the more efficient conversational interface is the one that requires the fewest clicks, words, responses or iterations. Maybe the most efficient pizza-ordering conversation is simply “the usual” since the bot knows everything else from prior history.

And how does the designer debug the conversational flow? Drop-offs, abandoned conversations, delayed responses, extra iterations, re-dos, are all indicative of errors in the flow. Tracking these metrics is key.

Near future of conversational technology

Design is about drawing connections and delightful relationships between people. Bots should not over promise and under deliver.
So long as its capability matches the expectation set with the user, the experience will be great.

As this space evolves, conversational interface design will become a lot more analytical than it is today. As more developers build bots and share best practices, we will better understand rules and techniques of conversational interface design.

One of the most promising technologies in this field I feel is Viv born by the creators of Siri.

Viv is the next AI generation assistant, offering the ability to connect with third-party merchants and vendors so that it can execute on requests to purchase goods or book reservations (similar to Amazon’s Alexa and Facebook’s Messenger bots). The company’s tagline — intelligence becomes a utility — nicely sums up its goal of powering the conversational AI inside a multitude of gadgets and digital services.

Bots may soon address a wider range of consumer needs — by anticipating them through service integration and personalization.
But chatting through an interface or by voice are not the only element of the human experience making a comeback.

The emotional intent facial recognition, along with hand and body gestures, will become a critical addition to the integration of the conversation and voice first future.
Combining a real-time decoding of the 43 muscles that form an array of expressions, can communicate not only deeper meaning but deeper understanding of volition and intent.

The last 60 years of computing humans were adapting to the computer. The next years the computer will adapt to us. It will be our voices that will lead the way.

Sources (Articles):

Conversational interfaces design-the new UX frontier
The future of conversational UI belongs to hybrid interfaces
How Viv is about to change the world
Conversational Commerce
Bots Versus Humans
The state of the bots
Airbnb says ‘not so fast’ to bots
Don’t shoot the Messenger
Bots, Messenger and the future of customer service
The next phase of UX: Designing chatbot personalities
Pixar Character Design

Brand Voice: BotCharacter Design Principles was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Technology has helped us go further, go faster, go to the moon, cure rare diseases, solve problems previous generations couldn’t even imagine and I believe we are definitely living in an extraordinary period.

But let’s admit it: we are constantly living our life with a screen in front of us, between friends, kids, family members, partners, at almost anytime.
Even now you are holding a screen in your hands or a laptop is in front of your eyes. Which is amazing ’cause I can talk directly to you but all these screens might hijacks our brain.

Our magic shiny screen is giving us, at any time, a new set of life’s menu choices, that’s “sweeter” than reality.

Recently I read a book called ‘The best interface is NO interface’ by Golden Krishna UX designer at Google.
The book was materialising all my thoughts about stupid and irrational design and business decisions that are mainly screen and technology driven to solve simple tasks such as opening a car, watering plants, or feeding cats.

If you are a company and you need to solve a problem it seems that the best solution is to slap an interface on it!
How to design a better car?
How do you make a better fridge?
How do you make a better trash can?
How do you make a better restaurant?
How do you make a better vending machine?
It’s easy.
SLAP A SCREEN ON IT!

Another interesting article about this topic is ‘How Technology Hijacks people’s minds’ from Tristan Harris ex Google Design Product Philosopher which made me realised that we are using our smartphones as an endless slot machine for instant rewards.

Harris compares tech designers to magicians, suggesting that they look for “blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities, and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it.” When you give tech this power, it controls your experiences in more ways than you realize, he says. It fuels what’s the new FOMO, called FOMSI (Fear Of Missing Something Important).

Every morning when I wake up the first thing I do and I bet YOU do the same is taking my phone and scrolling the list of notifications, texts, latest news, missed calls, missed events, etc.. building a silent anxiety about ‘all the things I’ve missed since yesterday’.

In the morning I just would like to stretch my body, eat a nourishing breakfast, talk with the people I care about and head to the office with my bike. Is a list of notifications helping me out achieving my stretch goals and overall purpose or is just building a silent anxiety while trying to sell me something?

The more choices technology gives us in nearly every domain of our lives (information, events, places to go, friends, dating, jobs) the more we assume that our phone is always the most empowering and useful menu to pick from. Is it?
The closer we pay attention to the options we’re given, the more we’ll notice when they don’t actually align with our true needs.

We are becoming less patient with reality, life, friends and ourself.
A study on the brain activity of 2,000 participants showed the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000, to eight seconds. Goldfish, meanwhile, are believed to have an attention span of nine seconds.

A study from 37,000 college students, narcissistic personality traits rose just as fast as obesity and it raised of 30% in the last 15 years among college students while empathy traits declined of 40% since 2000.

A research from the University of Sussex found from MRI scans that high multitaskers had less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region responsible for empathy as well as cognitive and emotional control.

So here it goes our unhealthy relationship with the shiny screens changes us on the inside. We are reducing our attention span, we are becoming more narcissist and less empathic.

As we are living in the attention economy, every product will only get more persuasive over time, giving us always more choices..“yeah I want that!”

Shall we focus on designing better choices instead of more choices and focusing on solving problems instead of slapping interfaces around when they are not needed?

I’m also wondering when Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality will become far more spread and used offering whole new immersive realities are those gonna be more persuasive than physical reality?

As Tom Uglow says ‘reality is richer than screens’. So what makes this a richer experience than a screen?

We still need screens, for the moment. But I feel there’s more than we can do with these magic boxes. ‘Your phone is not the Internet’s door bitch’.

So for the moment I’m dreaming a world with no screens, where the best interfaces are no interfaces, where our attention span is increasing and our emotional intelligence and creativity fosters collaborating with AI, machine learning and funky robots.
A world where technology can help us spend our time in the way we really want and not just being sucked into a turbine of things to do or notifications to see.

Technology has a great power to liberate us, and give us knowledge, but this freedom comes at a price. The digitization of our everyday lives saves us time, makes us smarter, faster, more productive and brings us closer to the people we love. ‘Yet at the same time, we feel rushed, isolated or enslaved by our devices’.

This is a design problem, not just a personal responsibility problem.

Someone said that computers could be “bicycles for our minds” and amplify human potential, and I truly believe in this. The only concern is that it depends on how we are driving these bicycles if safely and with awareness or naively.

So instead of getting crazy on finding a solution to this unhealthy relationship I have with technology or instead of developing a mindfulness or focus app (that I believe many of us thought of doing, and many are doing it elegantly) I recently acquired designforx.org dominion for the admirable cost of 12 dollars to launch soon a Global Challenge for Creative thinkers to open this discussion and try to envision a shared healthier near-future relationships with technology. Soon there will be more news!

Now I’ve been already spending too much time in front of this screen, it’s time for me to get some fresh air…and if you’ve arrived until this point it’s probably time to get some fresh air too.

Dreaming a screenless world was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.