Open Beta Realness

There are plenty of reasons for going open beta. For one thing, this space had been lying fallow for years (it used to be home to missmoss.de), so I assume hardly anyone wanders in here. And if they do, I wouldn't know anyway: there's so little going on that nothing is even being tracked. Mostly, though, I liked the idea of Truly XD having a public origin story. In a world that algorithms and AI keep standardising and polishing, a bit of realness strikes me as pretty exciting right now. Oddly fresh, even.

I like that this approach makes the design process visible – a process that is always messy before things settle, only to – let's be real – head straight into the next iteration. All the more so when you're working on several fronts at once: not just on the experience and visual design of a website, but also on design principles, brand design, brand stance and voice, and on new processes for how projects get tackled in the first place.

Finding a voice: the baby brand

It all started with the idea of a new project process. I wanted to create a process, a framework, that makes it possible to approach (digital) projects in a way that lets them succeed – for ALL clients, whether or not they've worked with user-centred UX support before. More on this process in the article: The Truly XD design process. What 'success' actually means in this context was itself up for debate.

Out of these thoughts came the first sketches for a project framework, ideas for products and names, and gradually the first images in my head. So when I talk about Open Beta Realness, I mean an open beta running one to two months behind. I deliberately gave myself that time to explore in several directions.

Why open beta, and for whom?

I find openly documenting how a brand comes into being – even right at the very start – genuinely exciting, because it can explain the 'why' behind the result. Following the process can teach you something and turn you into an insider. A visible process offers different incentives to the various groups of people who might interact with a company or a brand:

• Peers: People in a similar situation, facing comparable decisions, can use an open brand origin story as input. They can compare their own design decisions and confirm or rethink their own processes. The openly visible process is probably also a little more honest than the case study or news piece that comes later.
• Potential collaborators: People and organisations thinking about working together can learn something about ways of thinking and designing – beyond the finished results of service or product design. That makes it easier to judge whether you're a good fit. A work-in-progress status also makes a handy sketch for explaining plans more vividly.
• Project partners: Anyone considering commissioning work can also tell from an open (brand) design process whether a service provider suits them. In my view, watching the actual doing is a far better way to judge whether someone's way of working fits your own organisational culture. And if the doing also reveals relevant, lived and therefore visible values (walk the walk, don't just talk the talk), that may well tip the balance for value-driven project partners.

What visible design processes can do for the internet: a small detour

In early June 2026, according to Cloudflare, bot traffic overtook human traffic for the first time: 57.5% of all requests came from machines (source). Add to that the growing capabilities of generative AI and the slop fatigue that comes with them. Combine all this with the enshittification of social networks (Cory Doctorow's term for the gradual decay of platforms, more on Wikipedia) and you get content slop distributed in an attention economy on steroids.

The results are so loud, so flashy and so alike that people may no longer be interested in distinguishing the real from the fake. The polished end product might become utterly uninteresting, because without the story, without the realness, what you're looking at could be nothing more than AI-generated fodder, made by bots for bots. And who has time for that? Who even fancies it?

In my opinion, one way to breathe life and substance into a brand (and, incidentally, into the internet) is a public creation process – beyond the slick case studies of finished, wrapped-up projects. The messy bit, in other words: where it gets human.

Current Status: No Beginning, No End and Real Vibes

Some decisions about Truly XD were made before I decided to go into open beta; I'm now disclosing them after the fact, time permitting. But this piece isn't really about Truly XD at all. It's about a broader question: how do we want to treat the design process – and with it the design outcome – in future? How do we want to handle both, and how much weight do we want to give them? Because design can only be a genuine differentiator if we don't simply prompt every tiny change into the machine in trial-and-error mode. Which brings us back to where we started: in a world that algorithms and AI keep standardising and polishing, that's exactly what strikes me as pretty exciting. Oddly fresh, even.

Further reading

• Bots Now Outnumber Humans Online And The Internet Was Never Built For This: https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/06/04/bots-now-outnumber-humans-online-and-the-internet-was-never-built-for-this/
• Enshittification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification