Human-centric principles and AI innovation's aesthetic edge
Though human-centric design seems obvious to designers, we've found examples proving otherwise. In the AI race, ChatGPT and StreamDiffusion show how simplicity and fun gain the aesthetic edge.
First of all, apologies for the radio silence! We've had some exciting developments at Wonderland. Last year we were acquired and became part of an innovative group where we are now working on some cool projects together!
As a result, the newsletter format will change slightly. We will now focus more on analysing the digital platform / experience environment and providing insights, strategies, and innovations centered on design and technology in an ever-evolving landscape. See here some context:
Supercurrents provides high quality, practical advice and insight at the intersection of data, AI, technology and design to improve digital platforms, experiences and careers.
So in this revamped July issue, we bring you a curated collection of top picks, industry insights, an interview and a comprehensive deep-dive article called 'The Aesthetic Edge'.
Articles, tools & inspirations from the teams
Share product plans and updates straight from Jira.
A new frontier for high-fidelity, controllable video generation.
Train AI on any product, style, or mood board.
A handwriting based messaging app for the Apple iPad.
We need to decide how AI tells stories
Clean notes from scrambled thoughts.
The future of AI in Figma + see more here of Figma AI
A collection of product design exercises for junior designers to improve their design skills.
The amount of mental resources needed to understand and interact with an interface.
Insights
Our research team has been closely monitoring industry trends, and here are some key insights that are shaping the digital landscape.
Next-Gen Shopping: 3-D Social E-commerce for Gen Alpha
New York City-based E.l.f. Cosmetics is set to become the first beauty brand to test real-world commerce on the video game platform Roblox. U.S. users aged 13 and up will be able to purchase products, including a hoodie, sunscreen, lip balm, and lip oil, at a Walmart-powered virtual kiosk within the E.l.f. UP! experience on Roblox. Additionally, buying items from the virtual kiosk will give users a "virtual twin," a digital counterpart for use within Roblox.
The E.l.f. Up! experience has seen over 12 million visits and a 96% positivity rating since launching, per release details. In addition to E.l.f., more and more brands are launching virtual worlds in Roblox, such as Coach launching their spring 2024 collection and Ikea opening a new store.
44.9M
As of Q1 2024, 44.9 million of Roblox's 77.7 million daily active users were over 13, meeting the age requirement to purchase real-world commerce on the platform. (Inc.com)
62%
Gen Z and Gen Alpha favor immersive, social, and visually rich product discovery, with 62% replacing Google search with platforms like TikTok. (SOCi, Marketing Dive).
Suggestions on what to do with this insight
Meet customers where they already are. Utilising gaming platforms such as Roblox or Zepeto allows brands to tap into their existing user base who are native in the virtual world, lowering the barrier of entry to engage with the experience.
Collaborate with online curators and influencers relevant to your audience to drive traffic and generate interest in the products featured in the experience.
Avoid a launch-and-leave strategy. Sustain interest by introducing new partnerships and continuously curating new products.
Must-Ask Five
Putting a spotlight to one of our beloved team members
Can you share a recent project that you’re proud of?
Sure! We recently helped T-Mobile through a complete rebrand into Odido and helped launch their new brand and proposition.
What is the biggest challenge in UX design today?
Maintaining a balance between user privacy and personalisation, while ensuring that AI-enhanced user experiences remain empathetic and human-centered. The integration of AI into UX design brings significant potential for personalization and efficiency but also poses challenges related to user trust and ethical design practices
How do you stay updated with the latest design trends?
I stay updated by balancing the following strategies:
Reading Industry Blogs and Publications: Following reputable design blogs, such as Smashing Magazine, UX Design.cc, and Nielsen Norman Group, helps keep abreast of new methodologies, case studies, and insights.
Participating in Webinars and Conferences: Attending webinars, online courses, and design conferences provides exposure to new trends and networking opportunities with other professionals.
Following Influential Designers: Keeping up with influential designers on social media platforms helps in gaining insights into their thought processes and the latest tools they are using.
What advice would you give to aspiring UX designers?
Focus on developing a strong foundation and never shy away from getting feedback and iterating. Don’t be afraid to share your work and seek feedback from peers and mentors. Most importantly, stay curious and keep learning about new tools, techniques and trends. Continuous improvement is key to staying relevant
What’s your favourite design tool?
Not sure about my favourite but I’ve been looking into Gen AI tools lately like Adobe Sensei and Uizard, to see how I can automate any repetitive tasks and streamline the design process.
Deep Dive
Each month, we will publish an in-depth exploration of a key element essential for understanding today’s digital landscape. This month we bring you:
“The Aesthetic Edge”
The idea of an edge-to-edge display has been around in hardware for ages, but edge-to-edge design is actually quite rare. Making truly optimal, intuitive use of all available screen real estate is what separates the best products and services from their thwarted rivals. The design kings of the tech world have an aesthetic edge over the competition, and that aesthetic edge is what I want to talk about today.
The phrase 'it just works' is legendary/infamous for how self-evident it is at face value, but how extremely difficult it is to achieve in practice.
This applies not only to consumers, but also to the design process. There are numerous factors and variations on those factors, but if I had to boil it down to one basic dichotomy, I'd say it's a balancing act between novelty and comfort.
When It Just Works Right
Screen real estate usually refers only to the available space on a screen as defined by its characteristics. But real estate can be interpreted in many ways. Joseph Eichner, for example, was a 20th-century pioneer in applying clean, elegant design principles to low-income housing.
That too is real estate. The two types of property are more closely related than you might think. Beautiful, purposeful design elevates the utilitarian to the aesthetically and ergonomically fulfilling. Making the most of the real estate available to elevate the end result beyond the sum of its parts works the same way for hardware, software and, more importantly, their integration. In this way, Eichler could serve as an inspiration to titans of the tech and design worlds such as Steve Jobs and John Ive.
They may not have been architects, but they understood that the relationship between form and function is one of synergy rather than antagonism. While this most fundamental truth of user experience design may seem too self-evident to devote so many words to in a design newsletter .... recent high-profile UX disasters such as the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI Pin would beg to differ.
The fact that AI is all the rage at the moment also means that we have some great case studies of UX success. One is the original text-based version of ChatGPT, the spark that ignited the inferno. It was designed to make something as complex and involved as AI accessible and instantly intuitive to the layman. Another is the experimental StreamDiffusion system, which demonstrates the future potential of AI-assisted design for heavier, visual workflows. Let's start with ChatGPT
The Breakout Success of ChatGPT
While the underlying technology of ChatGPT is impressive, its real masterstroke has been to successfully combine the cutting edge with the familiar and comfortable. Everyone knows how to use chat applications and uses at least one of them in their daily lives.
Like Eichler's architecture, ChatGPT was revolutionary because it took complex, overwhelming and cumbersome technologies and processes and made them simple, fun and effective for users. While the novelty has long since worn off, ChatGPT's core design principles have now been universally adopted by all competing services because (at least in terms of UX) it just works. What makes designing for simplicity, fun and effectiveness so powerful?
Simplicity: You don't have to waste time with a cumbersome onboarding process, and users are less likely to have a 'break-off moment'.
Fun: If the thing you make is fun to use, people will use it. In fact, they'll want to use it over competing offerings that may be better than yours on paper.
Effectiveness: It may seem boring and trite, but the cold, hard truth is that people will use what works over what doesn't.
Stream Diffusion – The Potential Of AI Augmented Workflows
For those curious about how complicated the backends of these generative AI systems can actually be, here's a diagram of the diffusion transformer architecture used in the development of Stable Diffusion!
Intuitive right? No? Ok, how about this example of StreamDiffusion. This experimental tool uses Stable Diffusion, but like ChatGPT, gives the actual user of the system a natural and intuitive means to tap into all that raw algorithmic power:
What a difference, right? Design makes the difference! Design gives you the aesthetic edge over the competition. While this is still experimental work in progress, I hope it's clear how this could eventually fit into designers' workflows, allowing them to show clients customised mock-ups in real time during the ideation process.
Two potential use cases that immediately come to mind are Xbox's design lab for its controllers, or Nike's product customisation toolkit. And all of this in real time - a pretty exciting prospect, don't you think? No matter how much you want to automate this process, someone is going to be the user. Whether it is a designer or a customer, it will make all the difference if the user interaction is simple, fun and effective. Through technology we can imagine, and through elegant design we can use that technology to innovate on the platform/digital experience.
How The Whole Earth Catalogue Was Decades Ahead of Its Time
Such processes are what ultimately give birth to affective ecosystems. They organically arise from a product or service that’s designed so beautifully that people don’t want to stop using it because it brings them joy, inspiration, and community. To be clear, I’m not saying any of this is necessarily exclusive to generative AI, or indeed requires that you use any kind of Algorithms.
What I am saying is that the two examples, ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, were the big wolves on that particular campus because they designed (ChatGPT’s UX) or facilitated (Stable Diffusion’s modularity) superior user experiences compared to rivals.
To give a non-AI example from back before we even had the internet as we know it, let’s look at Steward Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue (WEC). It is sometimes referred to as paperback Google, though unlike Google, the front page results actually work.
The WEC was a paper catalogue full of product reviews and DIY tips, the WEC earned its name thanks to a campaign by Brand to have NASA publish the first ever images of the earth shot from outer space. He felt that this could be a powerful symbol to unite people and inspire them.
The lasting legacy of the WEC can be seen in the way its search functions simply work. A paperback Google, 35 years before Google was founded. This seemingly impossible thing worked because beautiful design is both timeless and platform-agnostic.
Ecosystems Arise Organically Via User-Centric Design
I'm going to use some Journey Mapping terminology to explain why the WEC worked as well as it did.
Timescale - The first issue of the WEC was published in 1968, the last in 1971. Brand's own prominence, as well as the quality and novelty of the writing, led to a high level of awareness of the publication. This in turn led to conversion and retention so good that it is still remembered and talked about today, several decades later.
Scenarios - The scenarios in which users might use the WEC varied from wanting reviews to DIY tips, and from simply wanting to read interesting think pieces to wanting a sense of place within a movement.
Channels - Items were worthy of inclusion in the catalogue if they were useful as a tool, relevant to independent education, of high quality and low cost, not already common knowledge and, last but not least, easily available by post.
Touchpoints - Readers didn't just interact with the WEC by reading it. To quote Brand himself, the WEC was designed to empower individuals to "do their own education, find their own inspiration, create their own environment and share their adventure with those who are interested". Anything that supported that goal could reasonably be considered a touchpoint.
Thoughts and feelings - the customer's thoughts and feelings at each touchpoint. The careful curation and tightly managed design of the WEC made the seemingly wildly overambitious and vague approach to touchpoints a core strength of the publication.
All this is to say that if your user-centric design is so authentic, robust, and genuine that it can inspire people, they themselves will figure out more concrete reasons to stay with you. This is great because it saves you marketing costs, but also because the most effective marketing is a passionate user making their friends choose you instead of rivals.
To put it another way, ecosystems naturally arise when user-centric design is executed correctly. Never, ever try to brute force an ecosystem. Don’t design quick gimmicks just so you can be the first. Instead, design to be the best and trust users to reward you for it.
To Gain The Aesthetic Edge
Whilst the human centric design principles covered in this article might have felt self-evident to the veteran designer, we’ve explored several examples of breakout success that proved the contrary. They succeeded exactly because so many have lost sight of our basic human need for simple, fun, and effective user experiences.Hence the comparison to architecture, where such differences are felt most acutely in every interaction with the spaces we both literally and figuratively inhabit.
Given that we’re still caught up in the AI arms race, I thought it meaningful to look at just how two of that arms race’s frontrunners managed to gain the aesthetic edge over their many rivals. Hence the design delves into ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion’s StreamDiffusion use case. Finally, the WEC served as a means to historically ground the approach, proof that clean, purposeful design architectures appreciate, rather than deprecate in value over time.
Regardless of what or who you’re designing for, you need solid foundations if you want to build something that lasts. That’s how you gain and maintain the aesthetic edge.
Written by Tim Groot (Tech), James Milton (Tech) & Martijn van der Does (Design)
For 25+ years, industry leaders like Polestar, Vodafone, and CitizenM trust us to solve their complex problems and build their brand experiences that stand out through hands-on insight, design, and technology expertise. Take a look at Triple, Code or Wonderland.
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