Ep 19 Design: The 4 trends that will define the future of UI / UX design

In this episode of The Crazy One, Stephen Gates tackles the challenge of creating standout digital experiences in an ever-evolving technological landscape. Discover the four emerging trends that can elevate your designs across various platforms, including websites, mobile apps, social media, wearables, and other cutting-edge technologies. Join us as we explore innovative strategies to enhance user engagement and deliver memorable experiences that captivate your audience and set you apart from the competition!

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What's going on crazy ones. This is the 19th episode of The Crazy One podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. And this is the place if you want to come to find out more about creativity, leadership, design trends, and a whole host of other things that matter to creative people. So in the show today, we're going to look at one of the things that I love the most probably one of the things that I'm the best known for. And that's digital design, creating experiences for anything in digital. I think this is the work that I've done that has gotten me the most notoriety, it's the place that I enjoy playing in the most. And so I wanted to share a couple of things with you guys. And I think what I really wanted to do was to share Where do I think digital is going? What are the things that I look at whenever I look at new technologies, whenever I sit down to design something new in digital, what are the things that I'm thinking about what are the things that I'm looking at, and so I've tried to break it down into Really four areas that I think are going to be the next big thing that these are the things that are really driving what's going on in digital. And by digital, we can mean social media, we could mean websites, we could mean apps, we could just mean any interaction that's taking place on a digital platform. And a lot of these are really looking at not necessarily individual pieces of technology, because I never really focus in on just that. Because I think if all I'm going to do is focus in on a phone or a particular piece of hardware, well, I'm narrowing in too much and I'm chasing a trend a little bit too much when I want to do is I want to take a step back. And I really want to look at what's going on sociologically, psychologically what's going on underneath the surface that's really driving this that's getting people to interact with this because I feel like when I understand that, when I understand kind of what that underlying trend is, well, then I can start to get at something that's really pretty interesting. There may be shades of things that you've heard from other episodes or stories that I've told before, but in this case, I want to weave them in a slightly different way, I want to bring them together in a slightly different way to be able to kind of highlight what I think some of these trends are. So off we go, the first thing that I really look for and I think this really comes to a lot of experiences when I'm designing in social media, whenever I'm designing for anything that's going to be more community based. Well, I'm looking for things that are what I call spendable. And to explain what spendable means I need to introduce you to somebody, as we all know, we're all on social media, we're on Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, everything else. And let's become fascinating to me is that over that time, it's watching what has become famous what has become interesting, what have my friends started to post on social media, that starts to get a lot of attention. One of the most interesting characters I guess, who emerges on my social media timelines with great writers. hilarity is a dog named potatoes. And potatoes was named by two adults no children were involved in the naming of this dog. And potatoes used to live in New York City potatoes now lives in Florida. And at one point potatoes parents got married. And like any modern dog potatoes had a choice to make potatoes had to think about, well, what am I going to do for last name. And so potatoes now appears on my social media timelines as potatoes to protect the innocent. We'll call it Jones Smith. So a dog with a hyphenated last name. And so my timeline is now filled with these fascinating photos of potatoes. There's potatoes when he takes a bath when he goes to the vet, but then it starts to range out into the slightly more exotic and a little bit more interesting. There's potatoes for Halloween whenever he dresses up in his sombrero and his little blanket, there's potatoes for all sorts of other Halloween costumes and I mean all these just fascinating things by My personal favorite is there are photos of potatoes whenever he drinks. I wish that I was kidding about that. But he actually apparently steals drinks out of his parents martinis. And so potatoes gets a little sloshed. But why do we care? Right? Why? Why am I talking about this? We're talking here about digital. We're talking about trends. We're talking about spendable. Well, what I think that does is it highlights a trend that's really gone on in digital and in the digital ecosystem, where, what social media and what so many of these different digital experiences has done, is that they brought this unprecedented social transparency into the world. It lets you see what your friends are all up to. The challenge. And the problem has been what it lets you see is just how boring they are. And that that's really a huge problem is that, well, we can see everybody's lives and we see that we're not always that interesting all the time. And so what it's done is it started to basically make everybody act like a little bit brand, and they suddenly are very concerned with the same things that you'd be concerned with. If you were building a brand. They're concerned about their image, their tone of voice, their differentiators, all these other things, you can often see like, Okay, if we just look at the image that you show the world, your your brand image, well, how often do you see your friends and if you don't notice this, take the next week and just watch. See how often they update their profile photo. And it can never just be a normal profile photo. Of course not. It has to be something standing on the top of the mountain looking into a sunset with a bald eagle on your shoulder, some epic overdone moment that has to be captured and has to be put out there we've seen entire companies have transformed their product to start to account for this. You start to see things like Twitter A few years ago, they changed the entire page of what you would come to for your own personal profile because now it has this massive image across the top where you choose to use it. Just have this like avatar, but that's the thing. This is what's given rise to Instagram and Snapchat and everything else is because we can now broadcast this wonderful image of ourselves that we can now put out there is even given rise to, I think what was it two years ago. One of the two contributions to the English language along with twerking was the concept of the selfie. The idea that nobody can capture the glory of me but me and the entire technique that has to come with that of holding the phone out, three quarter high chin slightly down to be able to get the perfect selfie look. For me, the funniest thing I had ever happened with this was, I don't know what maybe a year year and a half ago, my wife and I were in Miami, we were having brunch at one of our favorite spots on South Beach and the table next to us was empty and four friends come and sit down. It was one of the the woman's birthdays. And so I'm not necessarily paying attention my wife and I are making small talk and I look up to see that one of the friends is dislocating the better part of his upper body trying to crane His arm out to take a selfie of the four of them. My wife being the nice person that she is offered to take the photo for them. The guy's reaction for me was absolutely priceless. He got so pissed off, and scolded her that if she took the photo that it wasn't going to be a selfie, that I'm left thinking, you know, thank god if we're going to protect the sanctity of anything, that we're at least protecting the sanctity that a selfie is still a selfie. But this is the problem, right? is we've constructed this whole need to stand out from other people. We even create these whole other constructs because our lives aren't that interesting. Well, so do we have we have Throwback Thursday, we have flashback Friday, we have all these other things that allow us to be able to draw from the entire archive of our lives to pull forward the moments that were interesting so that this week if we aren't doing anything particularly good, well, we can still be interesting. So we just do that from an image standpoint, then you have like the the tone of voice standpoint, you know, that the easiest one to Look at for this is be able to look at just Twitter. Good grief. I mean, like I know most of the people that I follow on Twitter, I don't follow a whole lot of people I have this kind of strange rule. I don't know where it came from. But it knows social media channel, I follow more than 115 people, I've just figured out that if I follow more than that, the content goes by too quickly. I miss it. I actually want to pay attention. So if I'm at 115, I want to follow somebody else somebody else has to go out leads to a lot of fun conversations with your friends, but hey, it works for me. But if you look at Twitter, I know most of the people that I'm following I've talked to them in real life. You know, look, these are smart people but they aren't you know, this. These aren't Ernest Hemingway's These aren't people who are you know, particularly gifted at prose, but yet every time they write anything on Twitter, it's like, Good lord. They sound like it's Yoda writing fortune cookies. It's this this ridiculously overdone, sort of a thing and, and because that's it. They're so concerned with their tone of voice, but ultimately what people want out of digital Express And ultimately why I tell this whole story is that what people want more and more from any sort of a digital experience is that they want content, they want information, they want something that's going to let them stand out from the crowd. Even in the most innocuous ways, this is why all of a sudden, there's custom emoji cats so that you can show what it is that you stand for. But this is what it is that we do is that anytime that we do anything, anytime that anything happens, that lets us stand out from the crowd. We have to document it. I mean, I'm guilty of this. I mean, good lord, whatever. I was quoting an apple keynote a couple months ago. I mean, you can go near any one of my social media channels without seeing it there. I think this is why stupid people are still famous. Because the reality is if I go to a Britney Spears concert, and I check in there, I know that she's a mess, her products a lie because she lips things. But the reality is, is it still gets a reaction from people and it still gets you to be able to get noticed. But this is what people want. They want these experiences. They want content. They want, I call it experiential currency, an experiential currency are really just these things that people get, whether it's content, whether it's experiences, whether it's photos, whether it's something to help them stand out from the crowd, because that's the problem is that we're now all in this branded arms race to be the most interesting, and to be the one who can get the most followers and to do things like this. And well, the reason why I care about that is because whenever I'm designing for digital, if I can tap into this, if I can tap into this experiential currency, well, then what I know is that I can create content, I can create experiences, I can create these sort of things that people will talk about. They'll spend that currency back into their digital network. They'll do it through tweets, or photos or check ins or app reviews or anything like that. I think a lot in a big way. That's the whole point behind this podcast. I want to share a bunch of information with people I want to teach. Yes, but at the end of this, I also asked her Everybody to leave a review because I want to be able to stand out from the crowd from everybody else. I want more listeners, I want more followers. I'm not immune to this, even though I understand what's going on. But I think that's the thing that you need to think about are how can you start to create and craft digital experiences that may be a little bit more spendable, it may be something that you understand that that is a big driver and a big one for people to be able to share back into social media channels. And it can't just be the basic inane sort of a thing. It has to be real, it has to have some level of personalization, it has to have some level of value and meaning for them. And I'm gonna come back to that word value a lot. But that's really what this needs to do. I think that the next big trend that I see that's happening a lot is the fact that whenever you design for digital, it needs to be painless. And I think painless can come in a lot of different forms. I think this is why we suddenly see the rise and the increased value in the In UI UX, and the want for simplification, because we want things to become simpler and easier, but a lot of cases, if we're honest, that's just table stakes, everybody's doing that that's not gonna make you that much different. That's not really gonna let you stand out the area where I think that it starts to get interesting around painless is where painless is starting to become interface less. Because that is a really interesting area. Because one of the things that you see is that for a lot of businesses, there is just inherently a certain level of complexity that they are never going to be able to get around. That it's either because of the number of products that they have the size of their organization, just the way that things are going. It's increasingly hard to be able to go through and build navigations and experiences that really are painless. And then in some cases that just isn't always possible. So that's why you started to see an interesting switch. Part of the switch is being led by voice In navigation, voice driven experiences, this can be something like saying, hey, Siri, there wasn't a pause that was done for any reason that if I actually said it the right way I might actually set your phone off and I wanted to save you all the trouble for that. But you can also look at another example like Alexa for Amazon, because Amazon recognizes that they want to be the go to for everything in your house. It's not just books anymore. But the ability to navigate to what you need to find what you need to be able to do that isn't always convenient. Well, first, they tried to do painless with the the dash button, and if you don't know what that was, it was a, I don't know what maybe a two inch by one inch high little piece of plastic that you would be able to stick anyplace in your house and it had a button on it and pressing that button would order one particular item. So it could be dog food, it could be laundry detergent, it could be milk, so that you would then put the dog food dash button by where the dog Food was you'd put the laundry detergent dash button in your laundry room and you'd put the milk one on the refrigerator. But what it allowed you to do is be able to order one single item. Well, obviously, the downside of pain list was that it was ugly. Because all of a sudden, I have these weird little branded plastic buttons all over my house. And they're single purpose buttons, when the reality is that consumers generally don't like single use much of anything. Our phones aren't just a phone anymore. They're full of apps and all sorts of other things. TVs have to be smart TVs that you know, these single use sort of things just don't really fly anymore. And so what they realized was okay, well the dash button wasn't going to work. So they started work on Alexa and with Alexa was something you could just simply say order milk, order dog food, order laundry detergent, and it would do it but it's that move towards painless and doing it in a very different way that starts to become very interesting. But with that becomes a very, very different design challenge because What comes with that is the fact that one, you have to design an interaction in a very, very different way. Because it's not a linear click path anymore. It's not a linear way of doing things. It's a conversation. Conversations branch. people pronounce things differently. designing something for this interface really becomes very, very different, very, very challenging. And in a lot of cases, you have to deal with that dynamic nature of things. And you have to really take into account how important the content is also going to be because Alexa is one version of this Alexa is much more for ordering and then the occasional play some music or do something like that. But that if it really becomes something like Siri where it's informational, or if you're going to look to move to doing just a speech driven interface for your app or for your website. Well, then the content there really does have to become king. The irony here being that I'm fairly certain that since the printing press was first in invented when a Gutenberg friends was probably standing on a stage somewhere talking about how content was going to be king. But in this case, I think it really is the fact that you have to be able to deliver value out of this that if it becomes too frustrating if it becomes something that I can't do easily, then it's not painless. And it's not easier. This is why so many of these voice driven interfaces are single command, single response sort of things, because anything that becomes more complex becomes a little bit too problematic. The third thing, and I really, really think this is one of the biggest things that I focused on for a long time in my career. I think that whenever you look at Digital, I think this is going to be really a big part of where it is we're going are the ability to create experiences that are predictive. And by predictive What I mean is, so whenever I was at Starwood, we got to this place where I really had decided that one of the biggest things that we needed to do was to stop making dumb brand experiences for smart devices, because that's still the problem with so many apps with so many online experiences. With so many digital experiences, is that I have to tell them everything. It's like working with a child, I have to give them this huge amount of information, a huge amount of insight before they can provide any value to me that they couldn't be predictive. They couldn't really figure out what it was that I was doing. And a big part of that was because this is the, this is the big dirty pink elephant that's in the room for so many companies. Because all of these data models that they've spent so many years building the big data that's going to save us all the big data that's going to change everything. Well, a lot of that big data is wrong. A lot of it's dumb. And so if I want to create a predictive experience on top of that, the problem is that that experience is only going to be magical. It's only going to be influential, it's only going to actually change something if that data is right. Because if it says that I like sleeping in a twin bed with no sheets, but I'm six foot four, so I actually like a king size. bed like my room cold. So probably I want a heavy comforter. Well, that's not a very magical experience. That's actually me getting it pretty wrong. So how do you make predictive experiences? And I think that, you know, for me, the work that I've done around predictive interfaces probably is the closest that I've come to actually like technology proof concepts, because a lot of it was just simply saying, we need to develop interfaces, we need to develop experiences that will simply give the consumer the content they want, when they want it. The big nerdy term that we came up for this was content was context aware, content curation, even I can't say at all after all these years, but content curation really means how do I give you the information that you need when you need it? But to be able to do that, I think that one of the things that you need to do is you need to step back and I do this constantly, is to look at from a digital standpoint, do I really understand the ecosystem that I'm working with and do If I understand the type of message that I want to deliver, if we think about this as content, is this something where I want a big long form book, I want Warren Piece I want something I can really dig into. Is it something smaller? Do I just want a short story? So something that's meaningful, but not quite as in depth? Do I want a magazine article? Do I want a simple Facebook posts? Do I want to tweet? Or do I want just an emoji? This is a whole range of communication forms. But in each case, what you need to do is you need to understand the audience that you're speaking to, I need to understand which one of these things do you want because if all you want is an emoji, and I give you the Warren peace novel, you're not gonna engage with any of it. Well, designing for Digital's not that much different because what you need to do is you need to understand what's the story you're going to tell. I'll refer to this as form factor storytelling. Again, I guess I just have a propensity for making things sound overly important or something But what this is, is okay, let's, let's look at what are all the different possible form factors, the possible devices that we could have to design for. So we would start with something like computer, laptop, desktop, whatever it is. So the story that I can tell there is that on average, a person is going to use and keep information on their computer that are going to be for about a year in the past and for things that they're doing for about a year in the future. So it's this one year on either side of right now is about the horizon that they're going to want to interact with on that device. That's why you still see people when they plan, big vacations, they make big financial decisions, they do things like that, in many cases, they still want to do it on their computer just because of it's just so ingrained interaction for them. Well, if we then go and we look at a tablet, an iPad, something like that, well there we see that that timeframe. The story that I want to learn about drops to about three to four months. So I'm willing to do more, I'm willing to do interactions that are still decently complex, but it's still a bit more immediate gracing the horizon on it's a bit shorter. Whenever we get to a smartphone, we get to a pixel and iPhone or any Android phone. In that case, what I've seen is it usually drops to about a month. So it's about a month in the future about a month in the past. This is why whenever we built the Starwood app, we'd said, Well, look, we're gonna let people take the iPhone app, and they can book for as long as they want to. Well, the problem was, what we saw was that all people wanted to do was to book for about the next 10 days. So we actually changed it to on that app, you could only book for 10 days. But that was wise because it was a shorter horizon phones are a bit more utilitarian. They're a bit more dialed in. It's just because this is something that in many cases, I'm doing a private function, a private thing in a very public setting. So I don't want to do it for terribly long. I want to go in I want to accomplish something and I want to go When then wearables came along. And so I'm one of the few people that I actually was crazy enough to design and launch something on Google Glass. I was one of the first people to work on Apple Watch, continued to do a ton of work on wearables and wearables has been the next evolution of this. And I think that this part of the storytelling is why so many designers and so many brands still can't figure out wearables, because with wearables, that horizon that story, is basically a tweet. It's basically an emoji because on wearables, all that I want is I want an interaction. And I want information is going to help me with what I'm doing right now. Because the average interaction time on a wearable is five to seven seconds for the complete interaction. So that here, this idea of content curation really becomes incredibly important, because if I have to hunt for it, if I have to look for it, I'm not going to do it. So how do you then start to build these more anticipatory experiences and I think a lot of it for me really came from starting with doing two things. The first was using triggers, triggers could be time, it could be location, it could be a whole host of things like, whenever we had built the Starwood app, the trigger was that I knew that you're going to check into a hotel on a particular day, I knew you were going to be there for a particular length of time. And you're going to check out at a particular time. So I could make simple assumptions based on that. I could use GPS to know whenever you're close to the hotel, these are just basic simple triggers that I could use to be able to do things like this. I think that the other thing is that companies need to get comfortable with being radically transparent about the data that they have on their consumers. Because if you want to build these proactive experiences, what you need to do is to make sure that what I know about these people is actually right. Well, the best way to do that is to just simply say, Hey, this is what we think you like, this is what you've told us at different points in time, this is what we've collected. Is any of that right? Well, if you first started my profile whenever I was single and traveling all the time, and now I'm married with two kids and hardly ever travel, that data may be different, my preferences may be wildly different. So I think that one of the things you need to do is to get your companies comfortable with just revealing some of this stuff. I'm saying, Is it right? That whenever you do it, tell the consumers why you're doing it, what's the value? They're gonna get out of it? What are the things that you can do for them for doing it? Because if you don't, then it just feels like, Okay, I'm going to get signed up for a bunch more junk email or something like that. Not that we're actually going to tailor this. And because of answering these questions, these sorts of things will start to happen. That's gonna make your life easier. But that was really the thing was that idea of that product of content curation, it first launched, and I think really, we pioneered it with the Starwood app, because we had a real brand challenge and the fact that we had star preferred guests, which was the rewards program, the umbrella brand, but then we had nine different brands that sat underneath that. Well, if you think about it from a user experience, person perspective, I can't have nine different apps so that if I'm going to W one night and a shirt and the next night, I have to change apps to be able to do that it makes no sense. Plus, we had a big brand problem because our brand problem was the fact that we weren't something by Hyatt or Marriott. We were W and Sheridan and le meridian and a bunch of separate brands that people had trouble connecting and understanding that the rewards program cut across everything. It wasn't just a shared and rewards program. It wasn't just a W rewards program. So how is that all underneath this one app? Well, with that comes a real challenge. How do I then talk to 10 different brands in 10 different ways so that yes, the umbrella program SPG can still come through but if I'm going to go stay at a W or a St. Regis or a Western that that brand could come through? Well, so this is where the proactive part of it came in. So that what you would do is whenever you would go and interact with the app normally it would look like Starwood preferred guest it would be the the standard purple that we used, but 48 hours before you had a steak coming up. The app would change, it would change the way that it looked, it would change the way that it talks so that if I had a state coming up with a W, Barcelona, well, then all of a sudden, whenever I logged in, I saw a photo of the room I was going to be staying in, that the branding color suddenly changed to W, the nomenclature that was used was suddenly for W that we could change to be able to shift that brand. And then before I got there, well, then we would promote things that you would need before you got to a hotel, signing up for the SPG keyless entry. So you could use your phone as your room key contacts and directions to be able to figure out how to get to the hotel. One of the most popular things was the address in the local language. If you've ever jumped in the back of a cab in a foreign country, you know just how challenging that can be. But it was just this basic platform saying okay, well that's what you need before you get there. Well, then once you arrive, then the interface would be smart enough to change again, we could see that you had checked in. So then it became more about things to go do dining features at the hotels, local attractions, things like that, because That's what you care about is well, now that I'm here. So those sort of things about my reservation numbers and things like that, well, those aren't important anymore. So that we would let them let you do things like that we could do things so that through the watch or through the app, we could have a geo fence. And whenever you came back to the hotel, we could do things like give you the number one most forgotten piece of information, your room number, we could give you the address to the hotel in the local language. And again, we did it in a way that was smart, because what you don't want is you don't want to walk through the door and have your room number pop up on your phone. If you think about your wife or your daughter or somebody you care about. That's a huge security problem. So again, you have to be smart about it. But that is what really led us to be able to do that. And then once you are gone, then it was about writing a review booking the next hotel, that we could use that sort of continuum and then layer in those triggers to create a really much smarter experience. And I think that was what set us up to create what I would still, egotistically argue is still the best experience on Apple Watch, which was the SPG app that we He had done because it just really focused in on what you needed right now, it will tell you how much should a taxi cost, it would let you unlock your room door, it would give you room, your room number and basic directions and things like that. But it was just that stuff that you needed in the moment. And we use notifications based on those locations to be able to help you with those things. So if it was the first time that you were checking into the hotel, whenever you trip that geo fence, it would pop up with the dates and your confirmation number because sometimes you need those Well, great, let's put it on your wrist. But I think that that's what you really have to think about are How can you be more predictive? How can you provide value? Because that's really the challenge is that unless you're in gaming or something like that, for the average brand, how do you create enough value that people want to keep these experiences that people find value in them that they want to hold on to them? And it's not just a transient sort of thing? Well, I think that the brands that can demonstrate this sort of proactive insight, the brands that can do things like this that really kind of show that they have real answers. insight into their their consumers, those are going to be the brands that win, those are going to be the brands that really stand out. So I think that a lot of this concept of trying to take these different triggers and try to be a bit more proactive about it really is still a huge untapped frontier in digital design. And the last one that I'll see, and I think that this is really one of those things where people have changed, and this tends to happen. And the last thing that I would say is that I think experiences need to start to figure out how can they be more introspective? Because one of the things that I hear a lot is, and we've even talked about this a little bit before, I talked about painless, but not frictionless, because I think frictionless often is something that people will talk about that that's what they want more. It should be a frictionless experience a frictionless experience. You hear it all the time. But I think that honestly, a lot of the new economies inside of digital are really actually being shaped by consumers who want some degree of friction. They want something that's going to make them Think that's going to let them learn that's going to let them grow and become something more. And that it really is becoming the way that I guess I can only describe it as it's an expertise economy. And let me explain what that means. So I think as you look at these evolution of these new economies, just we've seen a lot of these sort of things come into play. In 1995, we saw Craigslist come in. So this was something where you can go out and you can start to get a whole host of things that you could really kind of want or need, but you sort of started to cut out the middleman. In 2008. We saw Airbnb, and this was an expertise economy and the fact that no longer did I want to live in what often felt like a sanitized hotel room. I wanted to be a local I wanted to actually live in someone's home. I wanted more of a locals view of that so that yes, it did create some friction because I didn't have a maid that was going to clean my room every day. I didn't have somebody that was going to put new toilet paper on the Roller make my bed every night. And yes that was some amount of friction but it made it feel like I was actually living there and that little bit of friction was something that people really liked. Also in 2008 we saw companies like TaskRabbit come along so that now all of a sudden I could have somebody come to my house and help get things done and maybe I can work with them. Maybe they could do it on their own but again, a little bit of friction 2009 we saw the rise of Uber and and we've seen so many of these other sort of things in this expertise economy come along one of the biggest ones that I see a ton of and if you listen to the show at all, you know how big of a foodie I am, is that you've seen the rise of the blue aprons, the plate IDs, the the difference services like this that will provide you with the ingredients to cook things but it's still up to you to actually make the meal they aren't delivering frozen pre cooked meals for you. Well this is why because there is the want to be able to cook but there's not the want to go to the grocery store to get the expense to have to source the ingredients. But it is something that I want to do more of I want to learn and that little bit of fun really gets to a place of doing two things, I think one is that it's skill building, which we talked about, but it also helps create self reflection. What do I want to do more of? What's the person that I want to be like? What are the sort of things that are going to change me, this is why you can do it for plated so that I can figure out how to cook more and be able to create a different connection with my family why it's with Airbnb, because I want to be able to kind of understand what's it like to really be somebody who lives in Paris. So I think that that idea of bringing introspection skill, building self reflection into things I think is applicable to honestly, probably any industry. Because you think about that, what consumer doesn't want to learn more? What consumer doesn't want to be better? I think this also feeds in to the first thing that I said about, you know, a lot of experiences being spendable because out of that skill building, I know that self reflection also comes the ability for me to have some experiential currency that I can share. But I think that it's one of those things where you You just you've got to start giving your users more credit. I think I will also say I've often joked that I also do find it incredibly funny that only people who create digital experiences and drug dealers refer to the people who use their end product as users completely aside, but just always find that weird. But I think that it's just this is the thing, right? Give, give those people some credit. Understand that, that digital ism isn't a place and it isn't a place of maturity, where people want to be able to start reaching out and want to be able to do more of these things. So I think that, you know, we have to be able to provide value. And that's really the outcome of all of this. And that's always the thing that I try to focus on with all this, whenever I design anything for digital is what is the value? What's the value in something that is spendable that people can spend back into the system? What's the value that we can provide them by making things a little bit easier? What's the value by letting them be a little bit more introspective and learning something because I think that that's what really matters to this stuff as well. Because digital isn't just these boring one way transactions anymore, it has the ability to affect people, it has the ability to really let them connect with things. I think this is why you're starting to see just with wearables, just a physical connection that this is now technology that we wear on our bodies. But just start to think about some of these things as you start to design your work, understand these trends, but also look for these trends yourself. I've talked about this in the past about the importance of trying to find what is underlying a trend that what's really going on here that don't just chase the execution. Don't just chase the fact that people like Uber, why do they what's the underlying reason behind that? What's the trend there? And then how can you tap into that? Because that's where you get something that's really powerful and not just a copycat that's going to come and go, you know, really quickly because it doesn't really understand the underlying psychology. And so with that, hopefully this is stuff that will lead you to doing better work to leading Doing some more interesting work. As always, if you have any questions about any of this, you want me to talk about anything more anything I can do about any of this shoot me an email, you can as always send it to ask at Stephen Gates comm Steven is S TPHN. And as always, the boys down league wanted me to remind you all the views here are my own. They don't represent any of my current or former employers. Please, if you have a minute, I always really appreciate it. Take a minute and go leave a review. It's always it does make a big difference. It helps bring more people to the show. And it's the only currency I'm ever going to ask for. And finally, as always, I say it every time because I mean it every time but thank you for your time. I know time is truly the only luxury that we have. And I'm always incredibly humbled you want to spend any of it with me. So, as always, and until we get to talk again. Stay crazy.