Right, so my name is Tobias
I work as the experience design director for Mojang, which means on a daily basis
I try to figure out what's frustrating when playing Minecraft, and then our teams tries to
fix that, be it inside the game when you're playing, or just like how to reach gameplay to begin with
and
But my background is is really in a UI design and development
So I spent a lot of time at Spotify and Github and other companies - startups like that.
Mojang
There's the difficult thing with experience design is that the word product is taken,
within the gaming industry because that means a physical product like a
Plush toy or like a game, which means if you're product designer you do physical products
So really experience design is like any product design job in at another startup
So it means typically that we listen to the community. We look at the design and we try to figure out what's confusing
What could be frustrating what could be made simpler and then we
build
Alternative solutions and we ship them and we try to measure and figure out if it's better if the community likes it.
Now especially with Minecraft is very tricky because we have a lot of people with a lot of opinions
Which we which we love and we'll listen to that
But but that's the fundamental job to try to improve things and then listen and see.
We are
I can't tell you any details, but I can share that we're working on something big. So we we had an issue that came up with
The merging of our code base actually, so we're in a lot of platforms
It's sort of a joke that any platform there is minecraft base on it
And we merged our code basis so that the same code now basically runs on iOS and Android and Xbox
For example, there used to be another UI on Xbox. So now there's a new UI some people don't like it
So we ended up in this situation where we launched a new version
We have two versions out there
Some prefer the old one rather than the new one, so we know we've made mistakes before and we're looking to fix that
So working with something big to try to fix it
But that means working slowly and listening into the community and and not doing the same mistake again
So I think people will be really excited but it's too early this point to share any details.
Last year, I started studying statistics more and
it might
sound weird to like study the like how to just work with statistics
But I think that's one of the most likely neglected subjects, because we all work with statistics
but we don't even know the fundamental like
phenomenons that happen with statistics so there's a ton of examples
but that's something that where I just I used to buy a lot of programming books and, get up every morning and try to
Work through them now. I've been doing that but with
Statistic books, just trying to understand core concepts. Something that I'm also doing is honestly trying to
relax more and not follow a book. So the opposite of this
So what I did
Which is the best life decision ever - I bought a piano!
I had no idea how to play and I sat down and I started just playing every morning and
I tried to figure out
Why does it not sound good when I play?
And so I kept on iterating and now I try to wake up every day and improvise
for a few minutes and it's starting to sound better and better and
Even though it doesn't sound good at all times. It's one of the best experience that that I have every day
It's like it's a it's a guaranteed way to get into flow and I wish more people would do things without feeling
a pressure to perform
to do something. Well, it's just fun. It's a game so
I'm spending a lot of time with my piano
I think anyone who says anything about cryptocurrencies is bound to make a prediction that turns out to be wrong
I'm very wary to talk about it in general, but I think it sets
It's an exciting technology
personally, I think
investing in it and in the value of it
It's a way too volatile market to even make any predictions about, so therefore it's it's just risk
involved, so therefore I think it also
Better to focus on the technology. I think there's technology interesting
Generally though I'm more interested in
Slower technologies
because we tend to forget about them, like now 3D printing is actually getting interesting now 3D printing is
coming to a stage where we all forgot about it as an exciting new concept.
But we're finding better uses for it and we're seeing companies change their productions like production lines with 3D printing
I'm also mostly excited about seeing the pressure. I'm not excited about I should have phrased this. I'm
curious to see how AI and automation
affect politics, I'm extremely interested and I hope that we'll see
universal basic income be implemented and I think that automation will be a significant driver for that and
that's what I'm trying to learn the most about right now and then the interplay between
those new technologies and politics
Wait a minute, I
I am,
Someone said something interesting at another conference recently, which was that sometimes I don't learn things at a conference
but I learn about my ignorance as in it's not really the information
that someone plays out on stage or a certain conversation is
it's about what people
even talk about as in "oh, they're trying to explain this new technology to me"
Then I realize "oh, I'm ignorant of this technology
completely which means I have to go back and focus on it." So I think that's immensely powerful, but also
This is this is like the highlight. I'm so tired of staring at screens. I'd rather stare at people and this is a great
context to do that and just meet nice people
So it's it's like asking what's the what's the value in eating? Like it's it's the core