Bringing Humanity Back — Why Anatha Isn’t Building for “Users”

EDWARD DELEON HICKMAN

BRINGING HUMANITY BACK WHY ANATHA ISN’T BUILDING FOR “USERS”

THE WORD ‘USE’ HAS A NUMBER OF CONNOTATIONS IN BOTH EVERYDAY LANGUAGE AND IN DIGITAL PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT.

All the time we use products and services in our lives, sometimes with great deliberation and intent, at other times quite unconsciously and habitually. Some of them we use in the sense of consuming, using up — like the data plans on our phones or the toothpaste in the tube. Other things we simply avail ourselves of, generally on a temporary if regular basis — we use the metro to get into the city, and we use a tote bag to carry home our purchases.

In every case though the term defines us, the user, solely in terms of relationship to the product or service. Marketing segmentation, from the toothpaste brand to software as a service, defines its users in the same way — this is a loyal user of our brand, here a power user, there an early-adopter, and so on.

BUT WHO ARE THE PEOPLE DOING THE ‘USING’?

Each of them is so much more than the persona.

Their use of the product is one narrow aspect of their character and behavior… Each one may be a parent or a diabetic or a volunteer firefighter or a vegetarian or a coffee addict or an arachnophobe.

In fact deep down we’re all a mess of contradictions, and through our choices of brands and products we engage with, we’re expressing different aspects of both our true character and our curated ‘image’ we’re choosing to demonstrate to this part of the world today — as well as the unconscious associations and influences which shape our lives and drive our instinctive choices and behaviors. Such is the beauty of humanity in all its diversity and imagination. We don’t just ‘use’ things. We invest them with meaning, we engage them to fulfill aspects of our varied and complex lives with all their motivations.

Defining people as users not only strips them of their fascinating complexity, it supports the fallacy of the rational actor, the thoroughly-debunked idea that people behave in predictable ways.

People-as-users can be segmented, optimized-for, and they’ll respond robotically to whatever you place in front of them, is how this theory goes.Unsurprising then that the ‘user’ paradigm also frequently leaves developers and marketers on the back foot, carrying out marketing research to try and figure out why their ‘users’ behaved as they did, instead of complying with their designated persona… a persona that never existed outside of the marketing plan in the first place, yet somehow an entire organization has lost sight of that — maybe around the time their “human-computer interaction” team became their “user experience” team.

HUMANS, INSTEAD OF USERS, DESERVE BETTER. At Anatha, we’re humans building for humans, bringing human integrity and individuality, to the most powerful and intuitive technological applications, with human motives: to drive progress towards reducing the structural inequalities in the world today.

Something as simple as building our cryptocurrency management tool around humanreadable addresses, is a fundamental shift from the way the crypto world has evolved to date.

Alphanumeric strings of data, QR codes, and blockchain addresses are built for machines to recognize, and while they are navigable by people with advanced technical skills and interests — much like the internet of the early 90s — they could not be more excluding of the everyday people whose adoption is critical to the success of the new decentralized economy.

Just as the world wide web had to shift from running on IP addresses to a domain registry system in order for the 99% to ‘get it’ and start engaging with it — growing and changing and transforming it beyond recognition — cryptocurrency desperately needs this step, which is why we are building our wallet with this human layer incorporated from the outset.

Of course it’s still driven by blockchain private keys and transaction IDs, just as the online space is still powered by the IP addresses which sit underneath every human-readable web address. But very few humans need or want to interact with that layer, and the vast majority never give it a thought even if they know it exists. Modern web browsers are so intuitive to access and search, that small children can, and do, interact with them instinctively. And as the internet of things continues to develop, we’re increasingly integrating all these smart ‘things’ into our complex messy and unpredictable human lives… not as users, but as people.

SO AT ANATHA WE DON’T HAVE USERS OR CUSTOMERS OR INVESTORS, WE HAVE PARTNERS — people we interact with and talk to and identify by their chosen name. People we share diverse and rich information streams with and between, from media content to encrypted messaging, in a responsive and truly multi-way environment.

This human relationship basis is not just talk, it’s central to our business model, which rebates 50% of our profits to the people on our network. We’re incentivizing people to join us, recommend us, grow with us, and be part of something bigger than any of us.

Because rather than the reductive and isolated ‘user’, people live in within a society, and with complex interactive social structures, which are forever evolving. And humanity as a whole is facing some serious challenges, from our climate to our economy to the way we communicate. The inherently transparent and tamper-evident nature of cryptocurrency and the blockchain revolution offers genuine potential to transform users into human beings — and that means building from the ground up to meet human needs.