The UX of the Metaverse

I had the opportunity to work at a couple different metaverse companies back in the day. One was a fully realized virtual world, and the other was more of just a 3D avatar-based chat with different interactions. With the recent announcement from Facebook about it’s new focus on metaverse products, I thought this would be a good time to share some of the things I learned from my experience and hopefully this is helpful as I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of these products come up in the future.

The Problem with Problem Solving

If you don’t know me, I currently work in R&D for a major automotive OEM. My job most often involves creating new product concepts that convey how humans will interact with technology in the future, and I work with my team to help bring these ideas to life. The reason I bring this up is because as a result of this experience, I often work in less conventional ways, simply because conventional means don’t always work. I recently tweeted a thought that occurred to me and due to the limitations of Twitter, I felt like this subject was perhaps something worth digging a little bit deeper. So let’s begin.

Balancing design simplicity, product complexity, and business growth

Are all products doomed to complexity?

— 劉達人 🇺🇸 (@machinehuman) October 16, 2015

I wrote that tweet after an experience at work. It seemed like people were requesting to scale up the complexity of some of the features we were designing, without really any clear rationale (at least initially), and especially not following some sort of iterative release process. And the more I thought about it, the more it started to make sense. That is, there seems to be this idea that as designers, we work to make things simpler, and in the best of cases, we succeed. But in reality (where most of us live :P), this is not always the case, and in fact, products scale towards complexity as they become popular or successful at achieving their early goals.

The Start of Something – Just make it!

I took a bit of a detour this weekend from the main (side-)project to create another small project. It’s called Designers & Shoes (designersandshoes.com) and I hope you go visit it and sign up to be interviewed! 😀

But the real reason for writing about it is based on something that I tell people when they ask me about what to do to get started. Just make something!

The Start of Something – Begin at the Beginning

Over the course of the past year, I have been in a state of transition. I changed jobs from leading UX design for new products at Alexa Internet (yes, that Alexa…) to working on in-car HMI and UX design at Mercedes Benz R&D North America (MBRDNA). As a designer, it’s an interesting change of focus to say the least.

But this post isn’t about that.

3 Simple UX Tips to Help Improve Your Product

Earlier I wrote about how UX design is about “curing diseases”. So to totally contradict that post (HA!), not every UX project needs to be a huge, dragged out project. When approaching any project/product, there are a few simple things that I consider first. These simple tips/tricks/hacks can help any kind of product whether it’s for enterprise or consumer, mobile apps or desktop software. Timelines are, of course, up to you.

Curing the disease vs. treating the symptoms: Why good UX intentions can fail

Let’s start off by first saying this: nobody ever sets out to intentionally create bad UX. But it happens. A lot! Even with the best of intentions, people can make really bad decisions regarding the UX of their products. Here’s why.