Designing for Your Hero's Journey

Working on the BuyNothing app introduced me to the world of designing consumer social software experiences. Before that, I was enmeshed in the world of legal enterprise software, and quite happy with it. What I discovered pretty early in the transition process is that the two worlds aren't too far apart.

At the heart of my design process, is the idea of the hero's journey. In designing our enterprise legal collaboration software product, I was the hero. The overwhelmed junior attorney, ambitious, eager and hungry to prove himself in the fast-paced and high-stakes world of corporate legal transactions. I built a tool designed to help plug someone like myself into the complex and opaque system that world class corporate attorneys use to guide their business clients from deal ideation, to deal close. I built software designed to help transform myself from feeling like a lost beginner into a useful and well-informed front-line contributor. The product was built to move me from zero to hero.

That lens animated everything about the product architecture and company I built, including the marketing, recruiting, fundraising and broader product and company positioning and storytelling. My personal hero's journey and the story it told were what brought the product and the company to life, not the technology. My hero's story brought me into communion with a universe of others who felt deeply that they had a similar story to tell, and decided they wanted to see me win publicly, as a representative for all of us.

I believe that's the magic of a powerful product and company story. It's very rarely about the narrator, and more about telling a universal story that places as many people in the world, as possible, in the hero's seat, and then building a product and/or service designed to help that Universal Hero win.

That idea reared its head again for me with BuyNothing. As I believed in the early days of designing the app experience and product roadmap, the gift economy concept is actually only as powerful as the tangible value it creates for the participating individuals - the heroes. While it's beautiful, necessary and worthwhile to build hyperlocal community infrastructure leveraging the gift economy framework, the true value comes from positioning the individual to discover, enter, and meaningfully engage the gift economy at any stage in their life, in a way that feels empowering, natural, seamlessly accessible, timely and truly delightful.

It's one thing for people to understand and love a system, organization, product or movement theoretically. It's another, and entirely more powerful thing, for those same people to see themselves as the primary inspiration and beneficiary. It's that quality of connection, that marks the difference between a cool company, product, brand or movement, and one designed to truly move and travel with people through time and space, ultimately leaving a heart-shaped dent in the universe.

Iconic products and companies first help us see ourselves clearly as the hero in the story. And beyond that, they demonstrate a commitment to building beautiful things designed to help us, the heroes, win at every stage along the way.

Here's to the hero within us each.