Andrej Berlin - How to build products that feel like real magic

Hey, do you mind actually here uh because I'll show you something in real life. Um this is non-technical or like less technical. Um and I'm actually happy that you came more from an from a curiosity background. Yeah, just sit here. Um because my background is more in product and UX.

I do understand and have been building applications, but this is more focused on kind of like the experience side. So yeah. Oh, closer. Okay, great. Thank you.

Um, yeah. So, what what made you curious about web 3 in the first place or or how did you get into it? To be honest, I first found a road map about blockchain and it started out with a series of articles of why it's important and for many industries I think it's can be the next step to ensure security I know privacy low cost and so

right [Music] this is

yeah okay that makes sense Um I think that's uh at least in my experience that's very similar. I think a lot of people who have been in web 3 are around because they see the potential in this like I would call it kind of magical technology because the potential is to actually transform society into something different. Um but it's kind of hard to see why we're barely scratching the surface of making the most out of it or using it actually wisely. So um yeah my my presentation or like the slides are mostly about uh what I mean by magic based on the history of magic. Um why most of tech is not used in a in that same way at least for now.

Um and also I want to kind of elaborate on what I learned from UX and product design and the history of magic to create like transformative applications and use the technology that we have in order to create a world that we haven't been before. Um, hey man, good to see you. Um, so before I go into that, uh, I wanted to just define the term magic. Uh, if you ask, um, a lot of men about what they think that magic is, they mostly would say like, "Oh, it's a magic trick." Um, and actually, let me let me show you something.

Um, could you do you mind helping me with the microphone because I might Okay, thanks so much, man. Thank you for for being so interactive. Um, this is hopefully the future of presentations.

Wait, are you going to perform a magic trick for us?

Yeah. Okay.

I think so. The reason I'm doing this is because I want to show you what it feels like the comparison uh between magic tricks and magic experiences. So, here's something that I would consider a magic trick. So, you have the ace here. Could you just tap on anyone from the middle?

That one. Yeah. Uh I just hold it hold it back or like could you uh or like Yeah. Have you did you have a look at it?

Yeah.

Okay, cool. Um remember it? Does anyone else see it? Do you have it? Okay, cool.

Uh could you actually keep your finger extended like your four uh your what is it? Uh right forefinger.

Just your your index finger extended. Yeah. Right. And uh and push it in like fully push it in. Okay, cool.

Now this is um watch the ace. What was the card again? Could you say it or uh you you didn't say it, right? Uh could you say it out loud for everybody?

King of hearts.

The king of hearts. I want the ace. Yay. Okay. So So this is what I would consider a magic trick.

Like it's um it's a very short moment of delight, but it's also kind of like followed by a sense of like, "Oh, that was a trick, and I must have done a move. Maybe you saw like the something that I've done with the cards." And um I think that most of and you kind of like just carry on with your life. And I think most technology is kind of used in that same way. And by technology I don't just mean like you know apps or uh computers but um it's kind of blending further how we use technical infrastructure also like for oops um for organizations.

or organizations kind of trick us into believing that we should be wealthy and rich if we keep increasing our salary and they make it super easy to be unkind to each other and isolate us. Um, so it's kind of like a little bit of a trick or educational systems, they reward us for staying in that's in the system and kind of like trick us into believing that we can be smart and wise and influence others if we just collect the right certificates and obviously products that kind of try to pretend that we can live forever and happy and healthy um if we keep using them or keep engaging with them. And it's I think a um kind of technoutopia that is completely frictionless but actually dehumanizing society and um removes the things that that make us um uh make us feel good in the long run and transform us into a better place. And it's different from uh the actual history of magic before society and the rise of the technosphere which was more um the a symbol for predicting the future and controlling nature and it involved the entire society into kind of like restoring the uh social relationships and the whole community. So this is a picture from a child birth in Thailand where the child was not meant to survive and then the whole village came together and they like healed them and then now the child is like in the mid20s and that was a magical experience because it involved everybody and like restoring the connections between each other and healing the actual um person.

So let me attempt to show you something similar uh with playing cards. That would be great. Yeah, thank you. Okay. So, uh yeah.

Okay. I can try it with you now. Okay. Great. Could you uh just point to any one of the face up ones?

Okay. The ace of diamonds. Is that okay? Okay. Cool.

Just leave it here. Could you um could you actually extend your hand? Um maybe you and just push it push it inside. Cool. Just so you know it's in the middle.

And just take the deck so I don't I don't touch it. Put it on your hand. Okay. Square it up so it's like, you know, it's not showing anywhere. Uh, you're left-handed, right?

Or right? Righ right handed. Can I have your left hand? Just turn it face down. Right here.

Okay. Could you take a deep breath in? Okay. And as you exhale, think about a moment when you thought of uh of something and it turned into reality. like a moment of serendipity or when you thought of a person and then they called you up or sent you a message or when you felt like you're alone and then someone actually like reached out to you and you felt better.

Could you just think of that? Okay, cool. Now, in a moment, the inevitable will happen. You will find your card. Whenever you're ready, in your own time, I just wanted to let down your hand and just lift off approximately half of the deck, maybe a little bit less.

What was it? What was the card that you had? Was that yours? The ace of diamonds. Okay.

So, thank you. Could you actually give them a mix, please? Just mix them up a little bit. Um, we might need them later. Um, yeah.

So, so this is a different sensation, right? So, this felt different from the trick that I showed before like everything was in your control. And also, we all just witnessed that that experience together. So, like most likely and in with most magical moments, people don't forget that for the rest of their lives or um have some new ideas or a new perspective on things and these things are uh like truly connected. So, okay.

Um, so basically, yeah, sorry,

sorry, sorry to interrupt this stupid comment, but I kind of have like goosebumps from this experience. So, I kind of can relate to it. It's like, wa, that's crazy. He actually did it. I I Yeah, I just wanted to add that it's like a very magical experience.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you. And you probably as well, right? Like you witnessed something and it you had a kind of somatic experience, right? Okay.

Um so so my point is that most of technology is mostly used to uh show us tricks rather than creating what is kind of like historically called a magical experience. And we've been here before like I've spoken about card tricks. Um playing cards uh used to be handdrawn and the drawings on the cards used to make people tell stories about each other. The imperfection of these drawings made people recognize archetypes and connected them. And that's the reason why card trick uh sorry playing cards actually started surviving or like survived through a certain amount of time and only later they uh the printing press came out in the 1500s and made it very easy to influence uh an individual artistic style.

The human part slowly drifted away and then we had a lot of like gambling and people learned slight of hand skills in order to cheat to each other. Some people uh started casinos and then others um used their slight of hand skills in order to create magical effects again and tell stories about each other. Oh yeah, I keep forgetting that. And they ended up influencing they and they ended up influencing performance arts and film and and movie history. These are all technologies that are used to create this like unique experience.

I don't know if you know this uh um I think Eisenstein was one of the directors who who filmed uh like a train and and and a boat. Okay, doesn't matter. But um the in the early days film was also very very like captivating and a very intense experience. And um for I know you haven't been in web 3 for a long time but like those of you who have been in web 3 for a long time might recognize the pattern. We have been first like playing around with things and then uh spiritual influence came into solar punk ideas that were all over Twitter and then everything uh slowly turned into a massive casino and then there are still a few people and a few teams that are usually self-funded but they're working on this kind of transformative experiences and technology that is supposed to keep us together and use blockchain infrastructure and AI in order to maintain our society and and keep it coherent and and I think that is basically like what I would consider a magical experience just to get back to, you know, why why we're all here and talking about magic.

It's essentially just using some technology that we're making completely invisible in order to predict or control the future, but in a as a consequence to kind of reconnect and restore our society with a few principles. And so like for the last couple of minutes, I'm just going to walk you through uh the patterns or like there's basically four things that I found or like that I wanted to synthesize based on these kind of patterns that come across in magic or in history of magic but also in uh um in uh technology or within these uh experiences that teams design that use web 3 uh in particular to um to build more like social socio technical systems that keep humans together at a at a global scale. So in one of them is having a very granular vision of the future hiding the method and technology. So method and method is more like a magic term. Technology is like you can uh imagine what that is.

And the same goes for like a simple effect or experience. The experience can be an app or like a real world experience or like a trick or something. And then um also very important is a value aligned process and organizational structure because without all of these things that it's not going to work. So, uh, I'll try to walk through these as quickly as possible, but, um, these are really like the the things that stand out to me, at least in my experience as a designer and, uh, ex-magician or something, uh, the most. Um, this is Darren Brown and, um, one of the things he said about kind of the vision or creating transformative experiences is that we're doing something really serious and not solemn.

We're taking people to the edge of their understanding. We're showing them the abyss and then we're showing them what's there and then slowly pulling them back into uh the place. And the abyss is not just like a simple um one-off mission statement. Usually they're used like for branding. Um but the way I would look at it is more like a complex and constantly evolving narrative and a story of the future that you would like to see.

So um the I I was working with a really nice team from uh Doogos. they're building like infrastructure for creative discourse or like for um constructive discourse and um they have a really refined way of articulating what they want the world to look like and then because they wrote it all down they know how that impacts every single kind of area of work that they're engaging in. So I know you're kind of like mostly in the engineering part but like a lot of the things that you'll be talking about when you're building applications are like maybe market focused. you have to run certain experiments in order to validate your thing. Um building certain smaller products which are the actual experiences.

Um and so by having that vision the whole idea of your um optimistic future will shine through in every single aspect like also hiring processes, also sales processes, also community etc. And that will make it a lot more um easy for people to relate to it. Um, the next thing and probably one of the reasons why we're why we don't have the next billion users in web 3 yet is um because we're running uh incomplete experiments and um use technical jargon and and that's okay. Like as as magicians like I constantly fail, I make mistakes and you probably also know that when you like write code or like create an application, it's like doesn't work or like doesn't compile. It's like with a computer that's uh that's easy to see on the screen and with people it's the same thing.

and just like, "Oh, damn. They they didn't they they saw my move or like they they didn't experience the right thing." Um, this, by the way, also from a friend of mine, uh, uh, Bitnote. Um, I recommend checking out just the application itself because he's really, uh, Rockwell is really good at, uh, simplifying the effect and the experience so that the technology doesn't actually matter. like yes it's your information is encrypted but like how it's encrypted that you have to like how you're paying for it it's uh for the most part almost completely abstracted also if you're interested in digging into magic literature also a very very famous book from a famous magician called Marice um he describes basically this magic way that you're walking at and uh every time someone spots you or spots a move or asks about your technology um this is how it relates to like engineering, it's just like, oh, does that use AI?

Is that a DAO? Is that like um I don't know, does that have a token? It's like anytime people say that, you're like, okay, maybe I should go back to the drawing board because I'm like misleading them into some other place that is going to be more confusing and I I want them to experience this thing. and and those people who do um realize what you're building or like you know you they realize oh you're using AI you're using an LLM or like oh you're using the Ethereum blockchain they can be part of your community and they can contribute to building it they're probably not going to be like the best users because they already seen how it works um but they're the ones who will help you achieve the dream scenario and like look into the abyss. Okay, this is actually like a good example maybe for just how it looks in practice.

So when you design things, this is like tool we uh designed a long time ago um for liquidity and this was before we user tested it. We just showed it to people and we're just like hey do you understand this? Like what do you get out of this? And just after a few conversations this was a lending platform so I'm I'm not going to go into super uh high details on this but um essentially just from a few conversations it was clear that they couldn't really focus on where to click and where to borrow. They weren't really uh clear on like what these um benefits should be.

And then uh like it made it very easy to kind of simplify it. Obviously this is just the first step but like as you go through the cycle it gets more and more refined and uh the method and like the technology gets abstracted away um more and more. Obviously, this is still DeFi and there's still a lot of like potential for other applications, but yeah. Um, okay. Then the effect uh the effect is essentially your ability or like your um option to give your spectators and users a glimpse into the abyss.

And it's pretty narrow. So like it's of course it's often um tempting to have your complex vision and a lot of features and show people everything. Um but this is for example um also a used to be a platform for DAW coordination a lot of different features and um you had to like coordinate work and the founder essentially threw a lot of different um mechanisms figured out that people don't actually care about a lot of the parts and it's only unique to his thing. So he simplified the whole experience to just his kind of legal infrastructure of offboarding people and getting uh paid in any currency. And now this is the product.

But like the vision and the the whole like idea of this world is much more complex. Um actually yeah I might show you something else in a in a second. Um I'm running out of time. Uh yeah and oh yeah this one more thing I think what might be interesting for you as um as you're kind of like playing around and wondering how you can use technology. It's very easy to um uh forget uh what we can actually do with that technology.

So, like a good friend of mine uh brought up an idea of like, well, if you have a to-do list, of course you can look at it as like, yeah, we're going to make people check off the check marks and give them a cool experience by having a blip sound and like a whatever checkbox animation, but the reality is also that as as like the creators of that technology, we have the power of showing people um making people think a thought and then turn that into reality. And I think that framing is like way more powerful. So for example also with with web3 tech if you um like in DeFi of course you can offer people a certain percentage on their returns and that's one way of convincing them or like persuading them of a benefit of a platform. But a much more powerful thing is like oh wait you make people feel safe with their assets. So it's like it's just a different experience that you're designing for.

Or with encryption like if you encrypt data rather than thinking about it as like oh going to make someone feel private with their data. It's like okay fine but what if we actually frame it into like how do we um use that technology in order to make people trust each other even if they have never met. And so this the whole story becomes different. And I think that's where a lot of the kind of abilities and power comes in in what we do as as creators because we can use that technology in order to create completely different um social experiences. Um if you uh if you've known or if you've read the um uh user journey process from design thinking, that's a really good starting point by the way.

So like just think step by step of like what do you want people to experience and then figure out like what is the thing that you want to create and then you can see oh does that actually use AI or does that do I need like some blockchain tech in many cases you don't need like the most complicated tech but then you can focus on the actual experience okay and lastly none of this is going to work if we don't have uh organizational processes that are value aligned like of course it's easier to earn faster to build up a profitable organization but if you work with other people and they feel like they can be free and work on whatever they want and wherever they want to live healthy and social lives and the products that they'll create will reflect that and will make their users feel like they're free and live healthy and social lives. Um David Blaine is like famous for taking his time over years and like pushing his boundaries. Um I'm I'm almost done. Okay. Uh pushing his boundaries over years and um creating these crazy stunts because he's also curating some of the best magicians in the world and works with them.

Um there's an example in uh oh does that still work? Oh yeah. Um there are a lot of examples of like communities like this is IKEA DAO. um they are really really good at or I collective sorry they're really really good at curating people in their discord and online community and like keeping them up to date and as a consequence of having this like curated group of people um they create really cool products like tea houses or now they're building an unmanned shop uh in Japan and uh and these are the things that we can use to like web three tech for as well to save reputation make people trust each other understand who's really good at stuff uh collaborate, write down certain kind of like roles and responsibilities and solve these kinds of problems. Um yeah, where is it?

Ah, here. Okay. And yeah, and that's like these are a few ideas just for how to use tech in order to solve real world problems. So like when you think about collaboration, well, you can figure out what's the value and and use stable coins to trans uh to pay people in real time for their uh worth uh for the value of their work. Uh or onchain reputation to make people feel more confident in their abilities or um obviously encryption to make sure that conflicts and discussions make sense and are uh constructive rather than destructive.

So, um yeah, long story short, um and there, yeah, long story short, when you go back to your um place and work on things, um remember the the moments when working together felt like you have fun with your friends or when you make someone light up in the light and pushed your boundaries to do something that you thought was actually impossible. Um because these are the magical moments that actually transform us all together. Um, and if you have some ideas also, um, let me know. Um, I would love to talk about them. I I love playing around with technology and the applications and making them, um, making real world problems more, um, easy to solve with the tech that you have from that kind of perspective.

And um, yeah, let's create cool magical stuff together. Do you want to see another thing? I don't have much time, right? or do you have some questions?

Yeah. Do you guys have any questions? You can show us another trick if you want to. Uh but let's just go for one question.

Thank you. Uh I just want to say that I really like the talk and uh the one question I have is how can I get better at designing the the perfect experience for the user in my app? Like what other recommendations do you have where to go to study? maybe a book, maybe a course, maybe in your experience, what do you think I can do?

Thank you for that question. I I really appreciate that and I wish more people would ask that. Um, so definitely look up um just the design thinking process for user journeys or like an experience map. Um, I think the the easiest way to look at it is that it's just practice, but obviously you want to know what to practice. And I personally like um I don't like referring to like books.

If you if you if you want to like the magic way is a good one just to kind of have a mindset because it's more theoretical but it's very applicable to like um product design and creation. And um I think the I'm also happy to share with you uh a write up that I did uh for like specifically that process that you kind of like go through the loop. So essentially the first step is to decide on what's your idea. So what do you want to kind of like explore what's the goal you want people to like what's the thing you want people to experience. Um then the kind of experience map where you map out step by step like where do you pick them up?

Where are they right now? This is important because um a lot of tech is like not really picking people up where they are. So, um kind of like make an assumption of where people are and guide them along the journey of like let's say um I don't know if you have like a to-do list app or something. Uh it's like very very basic example but you're like oh someone wants to write down something then like okay they write it down then they like I don't know um put their phone away and then they get a notification or something they get a reminder. So that's kind of like the process and then you think about what technologies and skills you have in order to make each step possible.

So the first thing is really just to map out the experience and think about like what would be impossible, what would feel like a cool wow moment and then think about what technologies you can use in order to make that possible. And so both things also require a little bit of like just curiosity. So like what are the cool things you want to see in the world? Like what what feels impossible to you? And then um what technologies do you have access to or like what things do you pick up on here that drive you curiosity where like oh this is a cool framework or um like this is a cool application that I that I saw and then I can kind of like put that into the um actual kind of technological implementation of it.

And so then you build a prototype and do that fast like you don't need to spend like months on it. You just need a day or two and just directly show it to someone and let them experience it. like these car tricks that I showed, I was like, "Oh, okay. Okay." I've been repeating them like many, many times and I just showed them to people.

Um, and then every time something comes back and you go back and refine it. Is that helpful? More or less.

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Thank you so much for that. That was amazing. Thanks for the magic tricks and the presentation. Thank you.