Infrastructural UX

I remember writing about this in February.

At the time, I was researching UX3 and Large Blockchain Models, and honestly, I thought I was failing.

I was publishing research about something that almost nobody seemed interested in.

I would write these long papers about why user experience could not always be solved at the interface layer.

Why some systems needed to understand behaviour.

Why machines needed to interpret intent.

Why complexity should be absorbed by infrastructure instead of constantly being pushed back to the user.

I was looking at blockchain because that was the system I was studying.

But looking back at it now, I think I was asking a much bigger question.

How do we build systems that understand humans instead of forcing humans to understand systems?

That was the real beginning of my research journey.

I wasn’t really researching UX in the conventional sense.

I wasn’t going around asking people what button they liked or whether a screen was intuitive.

I was asking the system questions.

Why does the user have to understand this?

Why does this complexity reach the user at all?

Why can’t the system infer what the user is trying to do?

Why should a human have to become an expert just to safely use a piece of technology?

My UX3 research eventually framed this as a problem of where intelligence lives.

If the intelligence lives only in the interface, the user still has to carry the complexity.

If intelligence moves into the system, the system can begin to absorb that complexity before it reaches the user.

That was the idea.

And my Large Blockchain Models research pushed it further.

I was looking at models that could understand behavioural patterns and infer intent from onchain activity, rather than simply giving people more information to interpret.

At the time, it felt extremely niche.

Now I’m watching designers, product people, engineers and AI researchers have conversations about agents, intent, natural language interfaces and systems that can understand what people are trying to accomplish.

And I’m realizing that I wasn’t really researching blockchain UX.

I was researching the relationship between human intention and machine behaviour.

Blockchain was just where I happened to find the problem first.

That’s probably why leaving blockchain ended up being such an important decision for me.

I had spent so much time trying to fit my thinking into an industry that I forgot the industry wasn’t the subject.

The subject was always the thinking.

Now I can look at AI, architecture, finance, software, products, interfaces or whatever else catches my attention and ask the same question:

What happens when the system becomes intelligent enough to understand what the human actually means?

And that changes everything.

It changes what an interface needs to be.

It changes what a designer does.

It changes how products are built.

It changes what engineers have to worry about.

It changes what UX even means.

And maybe the funniest part is that I almost gave up on this research because nobody was reading it.

I got chicken feet and ran. 😂

But I think that’s when I actually became a researcher.

Not when people started reading.

When I kept asking questions nobody around me seemed particularly interested in yet.

I’m still very far from where I want to be.

But I’m finally starting to see the thread.

And that’s a pretty beautiful feeling.