Why is human-first design essential to the future of the internet?

Human-first design is a foundation for responsible innovation. It redefines the technology development lifecycle by challenging developers, product owners and policymakers to determine how to integrate shared responsible innovation commitments. This is defined in the Defining & Building the Metaverse Initiative publication: Shared Commitments in a Blended Reality: Advancing Governance in the Future Internet, which considers the technologies being developed and used today.

While human-centred design tends to focus on addressing human needs by reducing friction within a user experience (UX)/user interface (UI), human-first design seeks to reduce friction while considering human rights and commonly shared values, such as privacy, transparency and education.

Human-first design compels businesses, product owners, UI/UX designers and developers to rigorously examine the decisions and trade-offs inherent in creating technology products and processes. This approach maximizes socially conscious human engagement — meaning technology design actively considers and promotes ethical, inclusive and equitable interactions. Thoughtful identification of these needs and understanding of the trade-offs needed to achieve them ensures that technology is inherently designed to generate a positive social impact.

As Reid Blackman notes in Ethical Machines, technology designers should consider a holistic set of factors that aligns individual expectations with design decisions and business models. While a potential customer browses a webpage, for example, a business may find it helpful to track that potential customer’s actions via cookies. This improves the customer experience, but trades that customer’s privacy for tracking ability.

While privacy is fundamental to human-first design, considerations should also include:

Educational opportunities: offering embedded educational content, making spaces where users can be informed about their interactions.

Accessibility mechanisms: designing technology to be accessible and inclusive via:

• Incorporating customizable and adaptable interfaces that employ assistive technologies.

• Reflecting the diversity of individuals by incorporating a wide range of cultural, social and linguistic elements, enabling considerate engagement.

Governance practices: establishing governance models with corresponding policies and standards that support technology designers in their processes.

Uniform enforcement practices: establishing controls to monitor, track and audit interactions and apply uniform enforcement.

Consideration of impact: identifying the impact that design choices will have on the individual through analysis and creation of issue trees that are data and hypothesis-driven.

Creating human-first metaverse experiences necessitates collaboration across all stakeholders to grasp technical design nuances and governance expectations. For example:

User experience (UX) designers focus on creating intuitive and inclusive interfaces that accommodate a wide range of users, including those with disabilities.

Cultural and community leaders bring an understanding of social dynamics and cultural sensitivities required to design with inclusivity in mind.

Educators and trainers contribute methods and content for digital literacy, education and personal development within the metaverse.

Ethicists and social scientists provide critical perspectives on the societal impact of technology, ensuring that designs consider ethical implications, promote equity and prevent harm to vulnerable populations.

Regulators and policy makers offer guidance on compliance with existing and forthcoming regulations, helping to navigate legal complexities and ensure that the metaverse aligns with global standards for human rights, privacy, safety, data standards and more.

As technologies converge, human-first design is necessary for a socially, economically and environmentally sustainable future. This design principle recognizes that our physical and digital worlds are merging and will continue to blend. By default, new digital experiences must be shaped to reflect and respect human rights, expectations and values established in the physical world.

But what does it mean to say physical and digital realities are merging and blending together? Imagine a world where devices bring the digital world directly into the living room. While sitting on the couch, it’s possible to:

1. Launch a multi-screen augmented reality experience using augmented reality (AR) glasses and no physical displays, play a video game while watching a live stream of a sporting event with your friends from across the globe.

2. Have group chats composed of real-world friends and an AI-powered digital entity (like those found in Character.AI) that makes proactive contributions to expand and deepen peer-to-peer conversations.

3. Project a digital hologram of your grandmother into your kitchen to help you make her famous chocolate chip cookies, while she spatially walks around you and shows you how to properly cream together butter and sugar.

This is not science fiction. The convergence of AR, virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) — commonly termed XR technologies — with other technologies, like AI, 6G, IoT, etc., are already making this a reality. For instance, the Apple Vision Pro enables (near) real-time AR and MR, and AI technologies, via Character.ai and Replika, are already creating chatbot companions.

The convergence of these technologies presents a unique opportunity to prioritize and embed human-first design at all stages of the technology development life cycle. This approach is essential for positioning technology to provide a positive social, economic and environmental impact.

To ensure the future of the internet surpasses today’s version, human-first design must transition from a 'nice-to-have' to an essential component.

Enabling human-first design in the future of the internet requires governance that is tech-stack agnostic and that delivers against critical commitments. These concepts are further explored in the upcoming white paper from the Forum's Defining and Building the Metaverse Initiative, Shared Commitments in a Blended Reality: Advancing Governance in the Future Internet.