Platform Design

Textile 2023 week 44 note

Platform Design is not a term that comes up often in user experience design or in conversations around developer tools, yet should be in both. While crafting a presentation to be made during IPFS Connect Istanbul, and thinking about design and what it means for developers, but what it means for data tools and decentralisation. The main premise is that when designing for developer tools, especially developer tools for apps that are especially niche or complex for end users, that the design thinking needs to be quite wide and loose. The designer and the developers together need to think not in terms of classic user centred-design with defined end users, but about the platform. That means that the tools and interactions they design and build take place in a large playing field of sorts where a lot more things than a limited set of interactions and tasks. This means that thinking about designing tools to build tools means designers and developers don’t just need to think about the length of width of the playing field, but need to think about how and where that field ends and not dictating how the play happens, but setting up the rules.