UX User Experience and the Evolution of Writing from Web 1.0 to Web 3.0
Once Upon a Time…
UX User Experience era is here, in case you haven’t noticed.
When I launched my writing career 40 years ago
- Writers wrote text.
- Editors edited the text.
- Publishers published the text.
- Page layout designers designed the page.
- Illustrators drew illustrations to accompany the text.
- There was no Internet.
And that was that.
Then, the Web 1.0 era arrived in the early 90s with the Internet.
My Compuserve account displayed the world news in white pixelated fonts on an ugly blue screen and I had to type in specific commands on my keyboard to turn the page or do anything else.
We writers gradually started to learn how to write SEO text and web articles. We started to dabble with HTML on the side.
From “Text” to “Content”
Slowly the written text evolved into “content.” Reading was replaced with interactivity, with things we could click and move on.
Surveys, quizzes, lists, HTML links were everywhere.
Everybody had a blog, a website. And a computer, of course, sometimes more than one.
Enter Streaming
With cloud computing and WordPress we entered the years of streaming Web 2.0.
In addition to HTML, we also started to dabble with CSS and JavaScript even though we were still “writers,” or still thought of ourselves in that way, not realizing the tectonic shifts under our feet.
We were still writing but our eyes were glued on Google and rankings while SEO evolved into a separate content creation niche in itself.
We started to publish ads with text for a new kind of income stream.
Mobile Everything
Our smartphones became our new home, an extension of our eyes and hands.
There were apps now, Software As Service (SAS), and we started to write online, edit online, store and refer and retrieve online.
Companies like Amazon, Uber, Google, Facebook, and others raised “customer satisfaction” into a new orbit.
Enter Interactivity
Now every text, every website was expected to create an “interactive experience.”
Rapidly Web 2.0 developed into Web 3.0 with blockchain networks, mobile-everything and AI.
Introducing UX User Experience
Now we are all communicators at the temple of the Greatest User Experience. And we are publishing all day long without any gatekeepers.
If the user is not having a good time, there are no rankings, no sales, no profits. They click and run away. User Attention became the new blood circulating in the arteries of the Cloud.
Also, somewhere in the Web 2.0 age, we were introduced to XML and “Structured Authoring,” a corporate trend that continues strong today.
Avatars and VR
This is the META age now with no individual identities but avatars and virtual reality (VR).
Content is marketing. Marketing is experience. And the experience is your fate as a communicator. It all melded into one digital lifestyle and lifeform in Web 3.0.
What Time and Location?
Time and location don’t make sense anymore. Nouns like “morning,” “evening” or “6 o’clock” lost their meaning. Daily attendance during the week still follows its sinusoidal up-and-down rhythm but even that is losing its significance in this age of work-from-home post-pandemic environment where office buildings are mostly empty. These days a Sunday is as good as a Monday or a Wednesday to hit the keyboard.
Universities Under Siege
Expensive university diplomas lost their meaning as well when a 3-month crash course in Python can open the doors for you that a 4-year traditional college degree cannot.
Humanities? Comparative Literature? Forget it. They’re so 19th century. Give me a full-stack code jockey who knows how to migrate databases and then publishes them on six different Cloud platforms, with security layers. I’ll be happy to fork out $150,000 without any complaints.
Multiple Hats on Every Head
So it’s no surprise that user experience became the way we professional communicators write, edit, design, ask, get feedback, regroup, relaunch, and improve non-stop on the go, almost in real-time.
The competition for the eyeballs and dollar bills is fierce.
Empowerment of the Individual
But the empowerment of the individual creator (who used to be a writer or designer only) is at its peak and the tools are mouth-watering and powerful.
We are all “the best” for fifteen eyeball seconds until the new Twitter post knocks us off our throne. The roar of the digital flow is deafening, it’s our New Niagara.
New Meritocracy
Gone are the pension plans and the proverbial gold watch at retirement. Enter multiple streams of income with no retirement.
The youth with fresh brains, eagle eyes, and healthy bodies that don’t need medical coverage, are enjoying nomadic lifestyles with laptops and smart phones pinging 24-7.
A new meritocracy emerged, widening the gap between the haves and have-nots. Elon Musk created PayPal bypassing the old banking system. He then thought himself how to build a rocket through textbooks he borrowed from Jim Cantrell while the streets of San Francisco, just around the corner from the Silicon Valley, turned into the broken land of the homeless.
Web 3.0 – The New Wild West
Bitcoin and NFT speculators are continuing the wild Web 3.0 ride, creating new wealth of unknown provenance and implications.
Web 2.0 was about Internet services and client-server software that enabled the creation and sharing of user-generated content, such as social networking sites, wikis, blogs and video sharing sites.
Our Web 3.0 future, on the other hand, is now being built with blockchains, peer-to-peer networking and file sharing, universal protocols, Virtual Reality apps and AI platforms that know you better than your mom did.
In Web 2.0, thanks to IoT (Internet of Things), we attached an IP address to everything, even to our refrigerators, for nonstop data mining. Even our buildings became “smart,” paying techno-homage to scarce resources and melting polar caps.
In Web 3.0 we attached superior user experience to everything, combating for those expensive eyeballs.
Designing User Experience is the New Writing
That’s how the writers of the 20th century found themselves one day looking in the mirror and noticing the UX User Experience Designer looking back at them.
UX User Experience Designers are researching users’ needs for products or services. Developing personas or scenarios that represent different types of users. Creating wireframes and storyboards to display an interactive design on how a service should work. And doing usability testing with users to identify problems.
And they are pulling down annual salaries well in excess of 6-figures.
6-Figure Salaries
Their managers are doing even better, much better.
I could not believe my eyes the other day when I saw a remote executive UX position offering $400,000 — the kind of compensation that only CEOs of Fortune 100 companies could dream of in the 20th century.
In case you think I’m making this up, here is the screenshot:
Did you notice that at the time 83 candidates have already applied for this position?
Our New Writer is an AI Algorithm
So are we writers anymore?
In a way yes, as far as the fundamentals of word-stringing are concerned, even though AI writing apps are rapidly eating into that home base as well. Soon anyone who can click a button would step forward as a writer as well.
The Turing Test for artificial intelligence is suddenly valid for writing as well: if you cannot tell whether a piece of text is written by a machine or a human being, then it’s still writing whether we know who wrote it or not.
But in other respects, there is no writing-as-such anymore. We are busy with “content creation” of the Nth degree, and “designing user experience” whether we are aware of it or not.
Last Words
Taking care of your adverbs and adjectives is fine but take care of your keywords first I would say in this new world of Web 3.0 UX User Experience.
Let longtails be your best friend; Google it if you still don’t know what that means.
Make sure you’ve included the most arresting and head-spinning images and videos in your copy. That’s why Web 3.0 free-image repositories like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay exit. They became sub-niche powerhouses to connect with readers with short attention spans but lightning-quick fingers.
YouTube is a writer’s must friend these days. Three hundred hours of video is published on YouTube every minute. Don’t forget to grab your due share of traffic by publishing videos as well since (did I forget to tell?) Web 3.0 writer is also a videographer and filmmaker.
Make sure to build your in-house mail list religiously. Blogs and writing platforms disappear as fast as they appear. Your mail list (not your thesaurus) is eventually your most precious asset as a writer.
Welcome to this new age of user experience designing and eyeball corralling.
May the best once-a-writer and now-a-UX-User-Experience-Designer win.
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