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I’d like you to consider this a “yes … and ” piece to complement Joe’s post. I’m not trying to reject any of what he’s saying but instead provide some awareness to projects and possibilities where AI can generate substantial differences for people with disabilities. To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t real challenges or pressing problems with AI that need to be addressed—there are, and we’ve needed to address them, like, yesterday—but I want to take a little time to talk about what’s probable in hopes that we’ll find it one day.

Other words

Joe’s part spends a lot of time talking about computer-vision types generating other words. He highlights a ton of true issues with the current state of things. And while computer-vision concepts continue to improve in the quality and complexity of information in their information, their effects aren’t wonderful. As he rightly points out, the current state of image analysis is pretty poor—especially for certain image types—in large part because current AI systems examine images in isolation rather than within the contexts that they’re in ( which is a consequence of having separate “foundation ” models for text analysis and image analysis ). Today’s models aren’t trained to distinguish between images that are contextually relevant ( that should probably have descriptions ) and those that are purely decorative ( which might not need a description ) either. However, I still think there’s possible in this area.

As Joe mentions, human-in-the-loop publishing of alt word should definitely be a factor. And if AI is pop in to offer a starting point for ctrl text—even if that starting point might be a quick saying What is this BS? That’s not right at all … Let me try to offer a starting point— I think that ’s a win.

Taking things a step further, if we can specifically station a model to evaluate image usage in context, it may assist us more quickly identify which images are likely to be elegant and which ones possibly require a description. That will help reinforce which contexts call for image descriptions and it’ll improve authors ’ efficiency toward making their pages more accessible.

While complex images—like graphs and charts—are challenging to describe in any sort of succinct way ( even for humans ), the image example shared in the GPT4 announcement points to an interesting opportunity as well. Let’s suppose that you came across a chart whose description was simply the title of the chart and the kind of visualization it was, such as: Pie chart comparing smartphone usage to feature phone usage among US households making under$ 30,000 a year. ( That would be a pretty awful alt text for a chart since that would tend to leave many questions about the data unanswered, but then again, let’s suppose that that was the description that was in place. ) If your browser knew that that image was a pie chart ( because an onboard model concluded this ), imagine a world where users could ask questions like these about the graphic:

• Do more people use smartphones or feature phones?
• How many more?
• Is there a group of people that don’t fall into either of these buckets?
• How many is that?

Setting aside the realities of large language model ( LLM) hallucinations—where a model just makes up plausible-sounding “facts ”—for a moment, the opportunity to learn more about images and data in this way could be revolutionary for blind and low-vision folks as well as for people with various forms of color blindness, cognitive disabilities, and so on. It could also be useful in educational contexts to help people who can see these charts, as is, to understand the data in the charts.

Taking things a step further: What if you could ask your browser to simplify a complex chart? What if you could ask it to isolate a single line on a line graph? What if you could ask your browser to transpose the colors of the different lines to work better for form of color blindness you have? What if you could ask it to swap colors for patterns? Given these tools ’ chat-based interfaces and our existing ability to manipulate images in today’s AI tools, that seems like a possibility.

Now imagine a purpose-built model that could extract the information from that chart and convert it to another format. For example, perhaps it could turn that pie chart ( or better yet, a series of pie charts ) into more accessible ( and useful ) formats, like spreadsheets. That would be amazing!

Matching algorithms

Safiya Umoja Noble absolutely hit the nail on the head when she titled her book Algorithms of Oppression. While her book was focused on the ways that search engines reinforce racism, I think that it ’s equally true that all computer models have the potential to amplify conflict, bias, and intolerance. Whether it ’s Twitter always showing you the latest tweet from a bored billionaire, YouTube sending us into a Q-hole, or Instagram warping our ideas of what natural bodies look like, we know that poorly authored and maintained algorithms are incredibly harmful. A lot of this stems from a lack of diversity among the people who shape and build them. When these platforms are built with inclusively baked in, however, there’s real potential for algorithm development to help people with disabilities.

Take Mentra, for example. They are an employment network for neurodivergent people. They use an algorithm to match job seekers with potential employers based on over 75 data points. On the job-seeker side of things, it considers each candidate’s strengths, their necessary and preferred workplace accommodations, environmental sensitivities, and so on. On the employer side, it considers each work environment, communication factors related to each job, and the like. As a company run by neurodivergent folks, Mentra made the decision to flip the script when it came to typical employment sites. They use their algorithm to propose available candidates to companies, who can then connect with job seekers that they are interested in; reducing the emotional and physical labor on the job-seeker side of things.

When more people with disabilities are involved in the creation of algorithms, that can reduce the chances that these algorithms will inflict harm on their communities. That’s why diverse teams are so important.

Imagine that a social media company ’s recommendation engine was tuned to analyze who you’re following and if it was tuned to prioritize follow recommendations for people who talked about similar things but who were different in some key ways from your existing sphere of influence. For example, if you were to follow a bunch of nondisabled white male academics who talk about AI, it could suggest that you follow academics who are disabled or aren’t white or aren’t male who also talk about AI. If you took its recommendations, perhaps you’d get a more holistic and nuanced understanding of what’s happening in the AI field. These same systems should also use their understanding of biases about particular communities—including, for instance, the disability community—to make sure that they aren’t recommending any of their users follow accounts that perpetuate biases against (or, worse, spewing hate toward ) those groups.

Other ways that AI can helps people with disabilities

If I weren’t trying to put this together between other tasks, I’m sure that I could go on and on, providing all kinds of examples of how AI could be used to help people with disabilities, but I’m going to make this last section into a bit of a lightning round. In no particular order:

Voice preservation. You may have seen the VALL-E paper or Apple’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day announcement or you may be familiar with the voice-preservation offerings from Microsoft, Acapela, or others. It’s possible to train an AI model to replicate your voice, which can be a tremendous boon for people who have ALS ( Lou Gehrig’s disease ) or motor-neuron disease or other medical conditions that can lead to an inability to talk. This is, of course, the same tech that can also be used to create audio deepfakes, so it ’s something that we need to approach responsibly, but the tech has truly transformative potential.
• Voice recognition. Researchers like those in the Speech Accessibility Project are paying people with disabilities for their help in collecting recordings of people with atypical speech. As I type, they are actively recruiting people with Parkinson’s and related conditions, and they have plans to expand this to other conditions as the project progresses. This research will result in more inclusive data sets that will let more people with disabilities use voice assistants, dictation software, and voice-response services as well as control their computers and other devices more easily, using only their voice.
• Text transformation. The current generation of LLMs is quite capable of adjusting existing text content without injecting hallucinations. This is hugely empowering for people with cognitive disabilities who may benefit from text summaries or simplified versions of text or even text that ’s prepped for Bionic Reading.

The importance of diverse teams and data

We need to recognize that our differences matter. Our lived experiences are influenced by the intersections of the identities that we exist in. These lived experiences—with all their complexities ( and joys and pain )—are valuable inputs to the software, services, and societies that we shape. Our differences need to be represented in the data that we use to train new models, and the folks who contribute that valuable information need to be compensated for sharing it with us. Inclusive data sets yield more robust models that foster more equitable outcomes.

Want a model that does n’t demean or patronize or objectify people with disabilities? Make sure that you have content about disabilities that ’s authored by people with a range of disabilities, and make sure that that ’s well represented in the training data.

Want a model that does n’t use ableist language? You may be able to use existing data sets to build a filter that can intercept and remediate ableist language before it reaches readers. That being said, when it comes to sensitivity reading, AI models won’t be replacing human copy editors anytime soon.

Want a coding copilot that gives you accessible recommendations from the jump? Train it on code that you know to be accessible.

I have no doubt that AI can and will harm people … today, tomorrow, and well into the future. But I also believe that we can acknowledge that and, with an eye towards accessibility ( and, more broadly, inclusion ), make thoughtful, considerate, and intentional changes in our approaches to AI that will reduce harm over time as well. Today, tomorrow, and well into the future.

Many thanks to Kartik Sawhney for helping me with the development of this piece, Ashley Bischoff for her invaluable editorial assistance, and, of course, Joe Dolson for the prompt.

The same applies for those of us working in design and development these times. Having worked on the web for about three years at this point, I’ve seen the typical wax and wane of concepts, strategies, and systems. Each day that we as developers and designers get into a regular rhythm, some innovative idea or technology comes down to shake things up and copy our world.

How we got below

I built my first website in the mid-’90s. Design and development on the web back then was a free-for-all, with few established norms. For any layout aside from a single column, we used table elements, often with empty cells containing a single pixel spacer GIF to add empty space. We styled text with numerous font tags, nesting the tags every time we wanted to vary the font style. And we had only three or four typefaces to choose from: Arial, Courier, or Times New Roman. When Verdana and Georgia came out in 1996, we rejoiced because our options had nearly doubled. The only safe colors to choose from were the 216 “web safe” colors known to work across platforms. The few interactive elements (like contact forms, guest books, and counters) were mostly powered by CGI scripts (predominantly written in Perl at the time). Achieving any kind of unique look involved a pile of hacks all the way down. Interaction was often limited to specific pages in a site.

The beginning of website standards

At the turn of the century, a new cycle started. Crufty code littered with table layouts and font tags waned, and a push for web standards waxed. Newer technologies like CSS got more widespread adoption by browsers makers, developers, and designers. This shift toward standards didn’t happen accidentally or overnight. It took active engagement between the W3C and browser vendors and heavy evangelism from folks like the Web Standards Project to build standards. A List Apart and books like Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman played key roles in teaching developers and designers why standards are important, how to implement them, and how to sell them to their organizations. And approaches like progressive enhancement introduced the idea that content should be available for all browsers—with additional enhancements available for more advanced browsers. Meanwhile, sites like the CSS Zen Garden showcased just how powerful and versatile CSS can be when combined with a solid semantic HTML structure.

Server-side languages like PHP, Java, and. NET overtook Perl as the predominant back-end processors, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the trash bin. With these better server-side tools came the first era of web applications, starting with content-management systems ( particularly in the blogging space with tools like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress ). In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened doors for asynchronous interaction between the front end and back end. Suddenly, pages could update their content without needing to reload. A crop of JavaScript frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and jQuery arose to help developers build more reliable client-side interaction across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like image replacement let crafty designers and developers display fonts of their choosing. And technologies like Flash made it possible to add animations, games, and even more interactivity.

These new technologies, standards, and techniques reinvigorated the industry in many ways. Web design flourished as designers and developers explored more diverse styles and layouts. But we still relied on tons of hacks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes ( such as rounded or angled corners ) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks ). Complicated layouts required all manner of nested floats or absolute positioning ( or both ). Flash and image replacement for custom fonts was a great start toward varying the typefaces from the big five, but both hacks introduced accessibility and performance problems. And JavaScript libraries made it easy for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, although at the cost of doubling or even quadrupling the download size of simple websites.

The web as software platform

The symbiosis between the front end and back end continued to improve, and that led to the current era of modern web applications. Between expanded server-side programming languages ( which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others ) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Alongside these tools came others, including collaborative version control, build automation, and shared package libraries. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.

At the same time, mobile devices became more capable, and they gave us internet access in our pockets. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.

This combination of capable mobile devices and powerful development tools contributed to the waxing of social media and other centralized tools for people to connect and consume. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media offered connections on a global scale, with both the good and bad that that entails.

Want a much more extensive history of how we got here, with some other takes on ways that we can improve? Jeremy Keith wrote “Of Time and the Web. ” Or check out the “Web Design History Timeline ” at the Web Design Museum. Neal Agarwal also has a fun tour through “Internet Artifacts. ”

Where we are now

In the last couple of years, it ’s felt like we’ve begun to reach another major inflection point. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. There are many different ways to make a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all flavors. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other tools of the IndieWeb can help with this, but they’re still relatively underimplemented and hard to use for the less nerdy. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.

Browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other standards like web components has accelerated, especially through efforts like Interop. New technologies gain support across the board in a fraction of the time that they used to. I often learn about a new feature and check its browser support only to find that its coverage is already above 80 percent. Nowadays, the barrier to using newer techniques often is n’t browser support but simply the limits of how quickly designers and developers can learn what’s available and how to adopt it.

Today, with a few commands and a couple of lines of code, we can prototype almost any idea. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. But the upfront cost that these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes due as upgrading and maintaining them becomes a part of our technical debt.

If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks—which used to let us adopt new techniques sooner—have now become hindrances instead. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And when scripts fail ( whether through poor code, network issues, or other environmental factors ), there’s often no alternative, leaving users with blank or broken pages.

Where do we go from here?

Today’s hacks help to shape tomorrow’s standards. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks —for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we’re unwilling to admit that they’re hacks or we hesitate to replace them. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?

Build for the long haul. Optimize for performance, for accessibility, and for the user. Weigh the costs of those developer-friendly tools. They may make your job a little easier today, but how do they affect everything else? What’s the cost to users? To future developers? To standards adoption? Sometimes the convenience may be worth it. Sometimes it ’s just a hack that you ’ve grown accustomed to. And sometimes it ’s holding you back from even better options.

Start from standards. Standards continue to evolve over time, but browsers have done a remarkably good job of continuing to support older standards. The same is n’t always true of third-party frameworks. Sites built with even the hackiest of HTML from the ’90s still work just fine today. The same can’t always be said of sites built with frameworks even after just a couple years.

Design with care. Whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes, consider the impacts of each decision. The convenience of many a modern tool comes at the cost of not always understanding the underlying decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the impact that those decisions can have. Rather than rushing headlong to “move fast and break things, ” use the time saved by modern tools to consider more carefully and design with deliberation.

Always be learning. If you’re always learning, you’re also growing. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. You might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year, even if you were to focus solely on learning standards. ( Remember XHTML? ) But constant learning opens up new connections in your brain, and the hacks that you learn one day may help to inform different experiments another day.

Play, experiment, and be weird! This web that we’ve built is the ultimate experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be courageous and try new things. Build a playground for ideas. Make goofy experiments in your own mad science lab. Start your own small business. There has never been a more empowering place to be creative, take risks, and explore what we’re capable of.

Share and amplify. As you experiment, play, and learn, share what’s worked for you. Write on your own website, post on whichever social media site you prefer, or shout it from a TikTok. Write something for A List Apart! But take the time to amplify others too: find new voices, learn from them, and share what they’ve taught you.

Go forth and make

As designers and developers for the web ( and beyond ), we’re responsible for building the future every day, whether that may take the shape of personal websites, social media tools used by billions, or anything in between. Let’s imbue our values into the things that we create, and let’s make the web a better place for everyone. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then share it, make it better, make it again, or make something new. Learn. Make. Share. Grow. Rinse and repeat. Every time you think that you ’ve mastered the web, everything will change.

Between the dream of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong—like when we encounter “persofails ” in the spirit of a company regularly imploring everyday users to buy additional potty seats—the personalization difference is real. It’s an particularly confusing place to be a modern competent without a chart, a map, or a plan.

For those of you venturing into customisation, there’s no Lonely Planet and some tour guides because powerful personalization is so specific to each organization’s talent, technology, and market place.

But you can ensure that your group has packed its carriers reasonably.

There’s a DIY method to increase your chances for victory. At least, you’ll alleviate your boss’s foolish excitement. Before the gathering you’ll needed to successfully plan.

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the song

Acquire Spotify’s DJ element, which debuted this past year.

We’re used to seeing the polished final outcome of a personalization function. Before the year-end prize, the making-of story, or the behind-the-scenes success shoulder, a personalized have had to be conceived, budgeted, and valued. Before any customisation have goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a delay of valuable ideas for expressing client experiences more automatically.

So how do you know where to place your personalization bets? How do you design consistent interactions that won’t trip up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve found that for many budgeted programs to justify their ongoing investments, they first needed one or more workshops to convene key stakeholders and internal customers of the technology. Make yours count.

​ From Big Tech to fledgling startups, we’ve seen the same evolution up close with our clients. In our experiences with working on small and large personalization efforts, a program’s ultimate track record—and its ability to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and organize its design and technology efforts—turns on how effectively these prepersonalization activities play out.

Time and again, we’ve seen effective workshops separate future success stories from unsuccessful efforts, saving countless time, resources, and collective well-being in the process.

A personalization practice involves a multiyear effort of testing and feature development. It’s not a switch-flip moment in your tech stack. It’s best managed as a backlog that often evolves through three steps:

1. customer experience optimization ( CXO, also known as A/B testing or experimentation )
2. always-on automations ( whether rules-based or machine-generated )
3. mature features or standalone product development ( such as Spotify’s DJ experience )

This is why we created our progressive personalization framework and why we’re field-testing an accompanying deck of cards: we believe that there’s a base grammar, a set of “nouns and verbs ” that your organization can use to design experiences that are customized, personalized, or automated. You won’t need these cards. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.

Set your kitchen timer

How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The surrounding assessment activities that we recommend including can ( and often do ) span weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Here’s a summary of our broader approach along with details on the essential first-day activities.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

1. Kickstart: This sets the terms of engagement as you focus on the opportunity as well as the readiness and drive of your team and your leadership. .
2. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
3. Work your plan: This phase is all about creating a competitive environment for team participants to individually pitch their own pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept project, its business case, and its operating model.

Give yourself at least a day, split into two large time blocks, to power through a concentrated version of those first two phases.

Kickstart: Whet your appetite

We call the first lesson the “landscape of connected experience. ” It explores the personalization possibilities in your organization. A connected experience, in our parlance, is any UX requiring the orchestration of multiple systems of record on the backend. This could be a content-management system combined with a marketing-automation platform. It could be a digital-asset manager combined with a customer-data platform.

Spark conversation by naming consumer examples and business-to-business examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions ( such as onboarding sequences or wizards ), notifications, and recommenders. We have a catalog of these in the cards. Here’s a list of 142 different interactions to jog your thinking.

This is all about setting the table. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? If you want a broader view, here ’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework.

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature ( or something similar ). In our cards, we divide connected experiences into five levels: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to focus the conversation on the merits of ongoing investment as well as the gap between what you deliver today and what you want to deliver in the future.

Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is critical because it emphasizes how personalization can not only help your external customers but also affect your own ways of working. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Each team member should vote on where they see your product or service putting its emphasis. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. The intention here is to flesh out how different departments may view their own upsides to the effort, which can vary from one to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final kickstart activity is about naming your personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will data and privacy compliance be too big of a challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? ( We’re pretty sure that you do: it ’s just a matter of recognizing the relative size of that need and its remedy. ) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. Our Detractor card, for example, lists six stakeholder behaviors that hinder progress.

Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential barriers to your future progress. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. As studies have shown, personalization efforts face many common barriers.

At this point, you ’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? Good—you’re ready to continue.

Hit that test kitchen

Next, let’s look at what you’ll need to bring your personalization recipes to life. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. Their capabilities are sweeping and powerful, and they present broad options for how your organization can conduct its activities. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

What’s important here is to avoid treating the installed software like it were a dream kitchen from some fantasy remodeling project ( as one of our client executives memorably put it ). These software engines are more like test kitchens where your team can begin devising, tasting, and refining the snacks and meals that will become a part of your personalization program’s regularly evolving menu.

The ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together over the course of the workshop. And creating “dishes ” is the way that you’ll have individual team stakeholders construct personalized interactions that serve their needs or the needs of others.

The dishes will come from recipes, and those recipes have set ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

Like a good product manager, you’ll make sure—andyou’ll validate with the right stakeholders present—that you have all the ingredients on hand to cook up your desired interaction ( or that you can work out what needs to be added to your pantry ). These ingredients include the audience that you’re targeting, content and design elements, the context for the interaction, and your measure for how it’ll come together.

This is n’t just about discovering requirements. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team:

1. compare findings toward a unified approach for developing features, not unlike when artists paint with the same palette;
2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar;
3. and develop parity across performance measurements and key performance indicators too.

This helps you streamline your designs and your technical efforts while you deliver a shared palette of core motifs of your personalized or automated experience.

Compose your recipe

What ingredients are important to you? Think of a who-what-when-why construct:

• Who are your key audience segments or groups?
• What kind of content will you give them, in what design elements, and under what circumstances?
• And for which business and user benefits?

We first developed these cards and card categories five years ago. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And we still encounter new possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

Here are three examples for a subscription-based reading app, which you can generally follow along with right to left in the cards in the accompanying photo below.

1. Nurture personalization: When a guest or an unknown visitor interacts with a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it easier for them to encounter a related title they may want to read, saving them time.
2. Welcome automation: When there’s a newly registered user, an email is generated to call out the breadth of the content catalog and to make them a happier subscriber.
3. Winback automation: Before their subscription lapses or after a recent failed renewal, a user is sent an email that gives them a promotional offer to suggest that they reconsider renewing or to remind them to renew.

A useful preworkshop activity may be to think through a first draft of what these cards might be for your organization, although we’ve also found that this process sometimes flows best through cocreating the recipes themselves. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

You can think of the later stages of the workshop as moving from recipes toward a cookbook in focus—like a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual “cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.

Better kitchens require better architecture

Simplifying a customer experience is a complicated effort for those who are inside delivering it. Beware anyone who says otherwise. With that being said, “Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes. ”

When personalization becomes a laugh line, it ’s because a team is overfitting: they aren’t designing with their best data. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. Your AI’s output quality, for example, is indeed limited by your IA. Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture.

You can definitely stand the heat …

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach will bring about the necessary focus and intention to succeed. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, hit the test kitchen to save time, preserve job satisfaction and security, and safely dispense with the fanciful ideas that originate upstairs of the doers in your organization. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.

This workshop framework gives you a fighting shot at lasting success as well as sound beginnings. Wiring up your information layer is n’t an overnight affair. But if you use the same cookbook and shared recipes, you’ll have solid footing for success. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.

While there are associated costs toward investing in this kind of technology and product design, your ability to size up and confront your unique situation and your digital capabilities is time well spent. Don’t squander it. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated with videos. I loved the heroes and the excitement—but most of all the stories. I wanted to be an actor. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on fascinating experiences. I also dreamed up suggestions for videos that my friends and I could render and sun in. But they never went any farther. I did, however, end up working in user experience ( UX). Now, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I had n’t actually considered it before, but consumer research is story. And to get the most out of consumer research, you need to show a good account where you bring stakeholders—the solution team and choice makers—along and getting them interested in learning more.

Think of your favorite film. More than likely it follows a three-act framework that ’s frequently seen in story: the layout, the fight, and the quality. The second act shows what exists now, and it helps you get to understand the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two introduces the fight, where the action is. Here, issues grow or get worse. And the third and final work is the solution. This is where the issues are resolved and the figures learn and change. I believe that this architecture is also a great way to think about customer study, and I think that it can be particularly helpful in explaining person exploration to others.

Use story as a framework to complete research

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see studies as being dispensable. If finances or timelines are small, analysis tends to be one of the first points to go. Instead of investing in research, some product managers rely on designers or—worse—their own opinion to make the “right ” choices for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get clubs some of the way, but that approach is so quickly miss out on solving people ’ real problems. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. User study puts style. It keeps it on trail, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay away of your competition.

In the three-act structure, each action corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is important to telling the whole story. Let’s look at the different functions and how they align with consumer study.

Act one: installation

The layout is all about understanding the history, and that ’s where basic research comes in. Basic research ( also called conceptual, discovery, or preliminary research ) helps you understand people and identify their problems. You’re learning about what exists now, the obstacles people have, and how the problems affect them—just like in the videos. To do basic research, you may conduct cultural inquiries or journal studies ( or both! ), which can help you start to identify issues as well as opportunities. It does n’t need to be a great investment in time or money.

Erika Hall writes about minimum practical anthropology, which can be as easy as spending 15 minutes with a customer and asking them one point: “‘Walk me through your day yesterday. ’ That’s it. Present that one request. Shut up and listen to them for 15 minutes. Do your damndest to keep yourself and your interests out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography. ” According to Hall,“[ This ] will probably prove quite illuminating. In the highly unlikely case that you did n’t learn anything new or useful, carry on with enhanced confidence in your direction. ”

This makes total sense to me. And I love that this makes user research so accessible. You don’t need to prepare a lot of documentation; you can just recruit participants and do it! This can yield a wealth of information about your users, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their lives. That’s really what act one is all about: understanding where users are coming from.

Jared Spool talks about the importance of foundational research and how it should form the bulk of your research. If you can draw from any additional user data that you can get your hands on, such as surveys or analytics, that can supplement what you ’ve heard in the foundational studies or even point to areas that need further investigation. Together, all this data paints a clearer picture of the state of things and all its shortcomings. And that ’s the beginning of a compelling story. It’s the point in the plot where you realize that the main characters—or the users in this case—are facing challenges that they need to overcome. Like in the movies, this is where you start to build empathy for the characters and root for them to succeed. And hopefully stakeholders are now doing the same. Their sympathy may be with their business, which could be losing money because users can’t complete certain tasks. Or maybe they do empathize with users ’ struggles. Either way, act one is your initial hook to get the stakeholders interested and invested.

Once stakeholders begin to understand the value of foundational research, that can open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making process. And that can guide product teams toward being more user-centered. This benefits everyone—users, the product, and stakeholders. It’s like winning an Oscar in movie terms—it often leads to your product being well received and successful. And this can be an incentive for stakeholders to repeat this process with other products. Storytelling is the key to this process, and knowing how to tell a good story is the only way to get stakeholders to really care about doing more research.

This brings us to act two, where you iteratively evaluate a design or concept to see whether it addresses the issues.

Act two: conflict

Act two is all about digging deeper into the problems that you identified in act one. This usually involves directional research, such as usability tests, where you assess a potential solution ( such as a design ) to see whether it addresses the issues that you found. The issues could include unmet needs or problems with a flow or process that ’s tripping users up. Like act two in a movie, more issues will crop up along the way. It’s here that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this act.

Usability tests should typically include around five participants according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can usually identify most of the problems: “As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new. ”

There are parallels with storytelling here too; if you try to tell a story with too many characters, the plot may get lost. Having fewer participants means that each user’s struggles will be more memorable and easier to relay to other stakeholders when talking about the research. This can help convey the issues that need to be addressed while also highlighting the value of doing the research in the first place.

Researchers have run usability tests in person for decades, but you can also conduct usability tests remotely using tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You can think of in-person usability tests like going to a play and remote sessions as more like watching a movie. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. In-person usability research is a much richer experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. You also get real-time reactions—including surprise, agreement, disagreement, and discussions about what they’re seeing. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors ’ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.

If in-person usability testing is like watching a play—staged and controlled—then conducting usability testing in the field is like immersive theater where any two sessions might be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can go out to meet users at their location to do your research. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that would n’t have in a lab environment—and conversion can shift in entirely different directions. As researchers, you have less control over how these sessions go, but this can sometimes help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests provide another level of detail that ’s often missing from remote usability tests.

That’s not to say that the “movies ”—remote sessions—aren’t a good option. Remote sessions can reach a wider audience. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see what’s going on. And they open the doors to a much wider geographical pool of users. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working.

The benefit of usability testing, whether remote or in person, is that you get to see real users interact with the designs in real time, and you can ask them questions to understand their thought processes and grasp of the solution. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. Furthermore, you can test hypotheses and gauge whether your thinking is correct. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. Act two is the heart of the story—where the excitement is—but there can be surprises too. This is equally true of usability tests. Often, participants will say unexpected things, which change the way that you look at things —and these twists in the story can move things in new directions.

Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. And too often usability testing is the only research process that some stakeholders think that they ever need. In fact, if the designs that you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a solid understanding of your users ( foundational research ), there’s not much to be gained by doing usability testing in the first place. That’s because you’re narrowing the focus of what you’re getting feedback on, without understanding the users ‘ needs. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. It’s only feedback on a particular design in the context of a usability test.

On the other hand, if you only do foundational research, while you might have set out to solve the right problem, you won’t know whether the thing that you’re building will actually solve that. This illustrates the importance of doing both foundational and directional research.

In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can help motivate stakeholders to address the issues that come up.

Act three: resolution

While the first two acts are about understanding the background and the tensions that can propel stakeholders into action, the third part is about resolving the problems from the first two acts. While it ’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it ’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That means the whole product team, including developers, UX practitioners, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other stakeholders that have a say in the next steps. It allows the whole team to hear users ’ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. And it lets the UX research and design teams clarify, suggest alternatives, or give more context behind their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

This act is mostly told in voiceover with some audience participation. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They give the stakeholders their recommendations and their guidance on creating this vision.

Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. “The most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved, ” writes Duarte. “That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently. ”

This type of structure aligns well with research results, and particularly results from usability tests. It provides evidence for “what is ”—the problems that you ’ve identified. And “what could be”—your recommendations on how to address them. And so on and so forth.

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be visual, like quick mockups of how a new design could look that solves a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the end of the session when you ’ve wrapped everything up in the conclusion by summarizing the main issues and suggesting a way forward. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. This stage gives stakeholders the next steps and hopefully the momentum to take those steps!

While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. All the elements of a good story are there in the three-act structure of user research:

Act one: You meet the protagonists ( the users ) and the antagonists ( the problems affecting users ). This is the beginning of the plot. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. The output of these methods can include personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards.

• Act two: Next, there’s character development. There’s conflict and tension as the protagonists encounter problems and challenges, which they must overcome. In act two, researchers might use methods including usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and heuristics evaluation. The output of these can include usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices.

Act three: The protagonists triumph and you see what a better future looks like. In act three, researchers may use methods including presentation decks, storytelling, and digital media. The output of these can be: presentation decks, video clips, audio clips, and pictures.

The researcher has multiple roles: they’re the storyteller, the director, and the producer. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters ( in the research ). And the stakeholders are the audience. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users ’ stories through research. By the end, the stakeholders should walk away with a purpose and an eagerness to resolve the product’s ills.

So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you ’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. Ultimately, user research is a win-win for everyone, and you just need to get stakeholders interested in how the story ends.

Like many players, I was hesitant as Microsoft gradually acquired some of the biggest sport producers in the world, including Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax Media. It was worrying to believe this could lead to a renewed time of big names trapped within the confines of software luxury. These concerns were largely alleviated, however, in the [ …]

The article Indiana Jones on PS5: Was Microsoft Be Going the Way of Sega? appeared second on Den of Geek.

With a grappling present, the opening match may be nearly as important as the main event. While the main function is about finishing the show in a climax style and leaving a lasting impact, you also need to get the visitors into the proceedings with a criminal start. Find the blood pumping and start all the energy to carry the next few days.

With WrestleMania being WWE’s biggest display of the year, those opening hours can often send us some great fits to get the game rolling. Here are the seamers that really started the show out right. For the sake of earth rules, we’re counting fits on the standard show itself, but no pre-shows or black matches.

The Rockers vs. Haku and The Barbarian ( WrestleMania VII )

WrestleMania VII was a good WrestleMania display with an additional hour or so of little matches topped on for the sake of getting people a paycheck. This opening worked to that edge, as there was zero history between The Rockers and Bobby Heenan’s warriors going in, but they ended up pulling off precisely the kind of match the present needed. It helped that this was the last real gasp of tag team wrestling actually mattering in WWF and just having two teams go out there and put on a solid performance was a regular thing.

It also helped that it had a great dynamic that any new viewer could pick up on: the lumbering and powerful heels up against the plucky faces who were smaller but could run rings around them. Lots of fun tag tropes and teamwork thrown in from The Rockers made this work and showed that even before he broke out as a solo star, Shawn Michaels was earning his reputation as Mr. WrestleMania.

Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart ( WrestleMania X )

Bret Hart had an eventful time at Royal Rumble 1994. In the undercard, he and his brother Owen lost when challenging for the tag team titles, causing Owen to snap and brutalize Bret’s hurt leg. Bret then pulled himself together to compete in the Royal Rumble match that night, becoming co-winners with Lex Luger due to falling to the floor at the same time. It was decided that Bret would face Owen at WrestleMania in an exhibition, as he’d then go on to face the winner of Lex Luger vs. Yokozuna in the main event.

Owen was already mad about how reluctant Bret was to face him, only now he was madder that Bret was technically looking past him, as he was going to compete for the title, win or lose. On the same night that gave us the legendary ladder match between Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon, the event peaked early with this battle between brothers. The two put on an excellent show full of amazing ringwork and reversals. That it ended with Owen cleanly getting an upset win was the icing on the cake.

Rey Mysterio vs. Eddie Guerrero ( WrestleMania 21 )

Awesome as this one is, it ’s also a bittersweet middle to a thematic trilogy between the two competitors. At the previous WrestleMania, Eddie Guerrero successfully defended the WWE Championship and stood tall in the PPV’s final shot. In the months that followed, Eddie fell down the card and ended up as tag champ with Rey Mysterio. To open WrestleMania 21, the two partners had a singles match against each other, trying to stand on the legacy of their classic from Halloween Havoc 1997. While the two did n’t quite reach those heights, they still killed it and showed that they still had that chemistry. Despite Eddie’s best efforts, he could n’t keep Mysterio down for three and ended up losing to a flash pin, setting the stage for a heel turn and ridiculous storyline centered around the custody of a young Dominik Mysterio.

Sadly, this would be Eddie’s final WrestleMania due to a sudden death from heart issues. In the follow-up, Rey Mysterio would win the 2006 Royal Rumble match to make his way to WrestleMania 22, where he would win the World Heavyweight Championship. All the while, it was used as a tribute to his former tag partner and one of his greatest opponents.

Money in the Bank ( WrestleMania 23 )

The Money in the Bank concept was introduced at WrestleMania 21 and ended up being a huge success. It was n’t until its third installment at WrestleMania 23 that they decided to lead with it, and they went full ham by making it an eight-man match. A great set of talent here with initial winner Edge being joined by CM Punk, Randy Orton, King Booker, Finlay, Mr. Kennedy, Jeff Hardy, and Matt Hardy. Then you get Sharmell and Hornswoggle showing up, making this one of the more chaotic takes on the match.

There was rarely a bad Money in the Bank match, especially early on, and this one’s no different. They do get silly, like having Booker pull out a tiny ladder in the heat of the moment and the later bit where he could win the match, but Matt Hardy threatens Sharmell with a Twist of Fate unless he steps down. Then you get the crazy spots, like when Edge is laying on a ladder acting as a bridge and Jeff Hardy jumps off another ladder and into Edge. Or the time when Mr. Kennedy does the Green Bay Plunge on Hornswoggle off a ladder. Kennedy himself would end up winning this one, though his aftermath as the briefcase holder was entirely cursed.

Finlay vs. JBL ( WrestleMania XXIV )

Mercifully, WWE was finally putting an end to one of their most grueling ongoing stories about Hornswoggle being Vince McMahon’s illegitimate son. Only it turns out Vince was n’t the father, as it was really Finlay. Sure. This was all revealed after JBL beat the leprechaun half to death, setting up this “Belfast Brawl, ” which is quite a sentence I just typed. After months and months of awful McMahon sketches and segments, we were at least going to get a cool hardcore match out of it. We’ll take our wins where we can get them.

It’ s rare for WrestleMania to start off with a plunder match, but this one really gets the crowd going thanks to it being two stiff workers who can take it as much as they can dish it out. This also gives us the fantastic moment where JBL is in the ring with a trash can, sees Hornswoggle scrambling around on the outside, and just whips the can at him at lightning speed. JBL winning might have been seen as a downer, but putting this whole angle out of its misery was something to be celebrated.

Daniel Bryan vs. Triple H ( WrestleMania XXX )

The road to WrestleMania XXX was like somebody falling down the stairs, somehow landing on their feet, and insisting that they meant to do that. Daniel Bryan was meant to be swept under the rug as a top guy, but between CM Punk’s abrupt exodus from the company, the fanbase’s complete rejection of Batista as the top face, and an utterly disastrous Royal Rumble, they ended up being bullied into a fantastic main event storyline centering around Bryan winning the WWE World Heavyweight Championship against Randy Orton and Batista.

But that was n’t his only match of the night. In order to earn his spot in the main event, he had to face evil boss Triple H at the start of the show. It was their one and only match together, which made it more of a novelty to see so early on. The two jibed perfectly and we got one of the last truly great matches in Triple H’s career. Even though this was Bryan’s match to win, Triple H’s tendency to use his real life backstage sway mixed with how many times Bryan’s fans had been burned threw in a non-zero chance that the hero was n’t going to pull it off.

Seth Rollins vs. Finn Balor vs. The Miz ( WrestleMania 34 )

When done right, a triple threat match can really complement what the talent brings to the table. Seth Rollins and Finn Balor once had a great match to crown the first ever Universal Champion. Here, they were fighting for Miz’s Intercontinental Championship and by throwing the extra guy in there, it just allowed for a fast-paced match full of inventive spots and the ability to trade out a wrestler to rest up before jumping back into the fray.

Even with Miz being the weakest of the three wrestlers, he still adds a fantastic dynamic of being the one who takes advantage of the situation. Lots of moments of him trying to be an opportunist, including a wonderful spot where Rollins just barely escapes a roll-up pin from Balor, and is so distraught and distracted by making sure the ref only counted to two that it leaves him open for a sudden Skull-Crushing Finale. The extra man keeps spoiling the pinfalls until it ’s time for Rollins to flatten both opponents one after another with his Curb Stomp.

Seth Rollins vs. Brock Lesnar ( WrestleMania 35 )

Brock Lesnar was at one point the ultimate threat in WWE. At the same time, Seth Rollins was being built up as a top face and was challenging him for the Universal Championship. Despite the high-profile nature of this bout, the narrative, according to Paul Heyman, was that Brock was pissed about not being the main event. If he was n’t going to be the main event, he would open the show so he could be done with things early and skip town. Brock was so furious that he jumped Rollins during the entrance and unfairly destroyed him before the bell could even ring.

Rollins insisted on going through with the match and turned things around with an illegal punch to the balls. It was cheating, but it was justified. Rollins then spammed his Curb Stomp three times in a row to keep Brock down, winning the title in just a couple of minutes. Rollins would eventually beat Brock fair and square to give him that major rub ( immediately undone by his Fiend feud ), but this quick and impactful win was definitely a great start to the PPV.

Drew McIntyre vs. Bobby Lashley ( WrestleMania 37 )

WrestleMania 37 Night 1 had a very unique situation going on at the start. For one, this was the first major WWE show since the pandemic that had a full crowd. By default, this crowd starting off WrestleMania would be off the wall pumped. The problem was that there was a nasty storm that caused a major delay, and by the time they were ready to do the actual wrestling, the crowd was wet and defused.

It was n’t instantaneous, but Drew McIntyre and Bobby Lashley going at it eventually woke them up. Two big, meaty men slapping meat will do that sometimes. A great pairing who played off each other well, they did a good job making both of them seem like irresistible forces and immovable objects at the same time. It did involve a screwy finish, but Lashley being able to knock out Drew with the Hurt Lock really put a bow on how dominating the Almighty could be. Definitely better than the following night’s goofball Randy Orton vs. Fiend match and its “box-like structure ” bullshit.

Becky Lynch vs. Rhea Ripley ( WrestleMania XL )

Fun fact, it was n’t until WrestleMania 36 that a women’s match started off one of these shows. Even then, Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross vs. The Kabuki Warriors had no crowd to win over thanks to that pesky COVID thing that just made a mess of the world. We would n’t see any women fight it out at the beginning until the 40th WrestleMania in what was arguably the biggest potential match that WWE could put together with that division.

On one side, it was Rhea Ripley, who had an incredibly lengthy and popular run as WWE Women’s World Champion. On the other side, it was Becky Lynch, the woman who once won the main event of WrestleMania and was fresh off releasing her autobiography. It was a hard-hitting passing of the torch that ’s way more impressive when you realize that Becky was also battling through strep throat that week. Even with that handicap, the two started the show off with a bang.

The post The Best Opening Matches in WWE WrestleMania History appeared first on Den of Geek.

Warning: contains clues for Doctor Who show “Lux”. Picking up sheer times after “The Robot Revolution“, the Doctor and Belinda find themselves in 1950s America, where they face off against another part of the Pantheon in an energetic, brilliant follow-up to previous year’s “The Devil’s Chord“. Along the way, they encounter malevolent cartoons, banal human [ … ]

The article Doctor Who Series 15 Episode 2 Review: Lux appeared initially on Den of Geek.

With a grappling present, the opening match may be nearly as important as the main event. While the main function is about finishing the show in a climax style and leaving a lasting impact, you also need to get the visitors into the proceedings with a criminal start. Find the blood pumping and start all the energy to carry the next few days.

With WrestleMania being WWE’s biggest display of the year, those opening hours can often send us some great fits to get the game rolling. Here are the seamers that really started the show out right. For the sake of earth rules, we’re counting fits on the standard show itself, but no pre-shows or black matches.

The Rockers vs. Haku and The Barbarian ( WrestleMania VII )

WrestleMania VII was a good WrestleMania display with an additional hour or so of little matches topped on for the sake of getting people a paycheck. This opening worked to that edge, as there was zero history between The Rockers and Bobby Heenan’s warriors going in, but they ended up pulling off precisely the kind of match the present needed. It helped that this was the last real gasp of tag team wrestling actually mattering in WWF and just having two teams go out there and put on a solid performance was a regular thing.

It also helped that it had a great dynamic that any new viewer could pick up on: the lumbering and powerful heels up against the plucky faces who were smaller but could run rings around them. Lots of fun tag tropes and teamwork thrown in from The Rockers made this work and showed that even before he broke out as a solo star, Shawn Michaels was earning his reputation as Mr. WrestleMania.

Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart ( WrestleMania X )

Bret Hart had an eventful time at Royal Rumble 1994. In the undercard, he and his brother Owen lost when challenging for the tag team titles, causing Owen to snap and brutalize Bret’s hurt leg. Bret then pulled himself together to compete in the Royal Rumble match that night, becoming co-winners with Lex Luger due to falling to the floor at the same time. It was decided that Bret would face Owen at WrestleMania in an exhibition, as he’d then go on to face the winner of Lex Luger vs. Yokozuna in the main event.

Owen was already mad about how reluctant Bret was to face him, only now he was madder that Bret was technically looking past him, as he was going to compete for the title, win or lose. On the same night that gave us the legendary ladder match between Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon, the event peaked early with this battle between brothers. The two put on an excellent show full of amazing ringwork and reversals. That it ended with Owen cleanly getting an upset win was the icing on the cake.

Rey Mysterio vs. Eddie Guerrero ( WrestleMania 21 )

Awesome as this one is, it ’s also a bittersweet middle to a thematic trilogy between the two competitors. At the previous WrestleMania, Eddie Guerrero successfully defended the WWE Championship and stood tall in the PPV’s final shot. In the months that followed, Eddie fell down the card and ended up as tag champ with Rey Mysterio. To open WrestleMania 21, the two partners had a singles match against each other, trying to stand on the legacy of their classic from Halloween Havoc 1997. While the two did n’t quite reach those heights, they still killed it and showed that they still had that chemistry. Despite Eddie’s best efforts, he could n’t keep Mysterio down for three and ended up losing to a flash pin, setting the stage for a heel turn and ridiculous storyline centered around the custody of a young Dominik Mysterio.

Sadly, this would be Eddie’s final WrestleMania due to a sudden death from heart issues. In the follow-up, Rey Mysterio would win the 2006 Royal Rumble match to make his way to WrestleMania 22, where he would win the World Heavyweight Championship. All the while, it was used as a tribute to his former tag partner and one of his greatest opponents.

Money in the Bank ( WrestleMania 23 )

The Money in the Bank concept was introduced at WrestleMania 21 and ended up being a huge success. It was n’t until its third installment at WrestleMania 23 that they decided to lead with it, and they went full ham by making it an eight-man match. A great set of talent here with initial winner Edge being joined by CM Punk, Randy Orton, King Booker, Finlay, Mr. Kennedy, Jeff Hardy, and Matt Hardy. Then you get Sharmell and Hornswoggle showing up, making this one of the more chaotic takes on the match.

There was rarely a bad Money in the Bank match, especially early on, and this one’s no different. They do get silly, like having Booker pull out a tiny ladder in the heat of the moment and the later bit where he could win the match, but Matt Hardy threatens Sharmell with a Twist of Fate unless he steps down. Then you get the crazy spots, like when Edge is laying on a ladder acting as a bridge and Jeff Hardy jumps off another ladder and into Edge. Or the time when Mr. Kennedy does the Green Bay Plunge on Hornswoggle off a ladder. Kennedy himself would end up winning this one, though his aftermath as the briefcase holder was entirely cursed.

Finlay vs. JBL ( WrestleMania XXIV )

Mercifully, WWE was finally putting an end to one of their most grueling ongoing stories about Hornswoggle being Vince McMahon’s illegitimate son. Only it turns out Vince was n’t the father, as it was really Finlay. Sure. This was all revealed after JBL beat the leprechaun half to death, setting up this “Belfast Brawl, ” which is quite a sentence I just typed. After months and months of awful McMahon sketches and segments, we were at least going to get a cool hardcore match out of it. We’ll take our wins where we can get them.

It’ s rare for WrestleMania to start off with a plunder match, but this one really gets the crowd going thanks to it being two stiff workers who can take it as much as they can dish it out. This also gives us the fantastic moment where JBL is in the ring with a trash can, sees Hornswoggle scrambling around on the outside, and just whips the can at him at lightning speed. JBL winning might have been seen as a downer, but putting this whole angle out of its misery was something to be celebrated.

Daniel Bryan vs. Triple H ( WrestleMania XXX )

The road to WrestleMania XXX was like somebody falling down the stairs, somehow landing on their feet, and insisting that they meant to do that. Daniel Bryan was meant to be swept under the rug as a top guy, but between CM Punk’s abrupt exodus from the company, the fanbase’s complete rejection of Batista as the top face, and an utterly disastrous Royal Rumble, they ended up being bullied into a fantastic main event storyline centering around Bryan winning the WWE World Heavyweight Championship against Randy Orton and Batista.

But that was n’t his only match of the night. In order to earn his spot in the main event, he had to face evil boss Triple H at the start of the show. It was their one and only match together, which made it more of a novelty to see so early on. The two jibed perfectly and we got one of the last truly great matches in Triple H’s career. Even though this was Bryan’s match to win, Triple H’s tendency to use his real life backstage sway mixed with how many times Bryan’s fans had been burned threw in a non-zero chance that the hero was n’t going to pull it off.

Seth Rollins vs. Finn Balor vs. The Miz ( WrestleMania 34 )

When done right, a triple threat match can really complement what the talent brings to the table. Seth Rollins and Finn Balor once had a great match to crown the first ever Universal Champion. Here, they were fighting for Miz’s Intercontinental Championship and by throwing the extra guy in there, it just allowed for a fast-paced match full of inventive spots and the ability to trade out a wrestler to rest up before jumping back into the fray.

Even with Miz being the weakest of the three wrestlers, he still adds a fantastic dynamic of being the one who takes advantage of the situation. Lots of moments of him trying to be an opportunist, including a wonderful spot where Rollins just barely escapes a roll-up pin from Balor, and is so distraught and distracted by making sure the ref only counted to two that it leaves him open for a sudden Skull-Crushing Finale. The extra man keeps spoiling the pinfalls until it ’s time for Rollins to flatten both opponents one after another with his Curb Stomp.

Seth Rollins vs. Brock Lesnar ( WrestleMania 35 )

Brock Lesnar was at one point the ultimate threat in WWE. At the same time, Seth Rollins was being built up as a top face and was challenging him for the Universal Championship. Despite the high-profile nature of this bout, the narrative, according to Paul Heyman, was that Brock was pissed about not being the main event. If he was n’t going to be the main event, he would open the show so he could be done with things early and skip town. Brock was so furious that he jumped Rollins during the entrance and unfairly destroyed him before the bell could even ring.

Rollins insisted on going through with the match and turned things around with an illegal punch to the balls. It was cheating, but it was justified. Rollins then spammed his Curb Stomp three times in a row to keep Brock down, winning the title in just a couple of minutes. Rollins would eventually beat Brock fair and square to give him that major rub ( immediately undone by his Fiend feud ), but this quick and impactful win was definitely a great start to the PPV.

Drew McIntyre vs. Bobby Lashley ( WrestleMania 37 )

WrestleMania 37 Night 1 had a very unique situation going on at the start. For one, this was the first major WWE show since the pandemic that had a full crowd. By default, this crowd starting off WrestleMania would be off the wall pumped. The problem was that there was a nasty storm that caused a major delay, and by the time they were ready to do the actual wrestling, the crowd was wet and defused.

It was n’t instantaneous, but Drew McIntyre and Bobby Lashley going at it eventually woke them up. Two big, meaty men slapping meat will do that sometimes. A great pairing who played off each other well, they did a good job making both of them seem like irresistible forces and immovable objects at the same time. It did involve a screwy finish, but Lashley being able to knock out Drew with the Hurt Lock really put a bow on how dominating the Almighty could be. Definitely better than the following night’s goofball Randy Orton vs. Fiend match and its “box-like structure ” bullshit.

Becky Lynch vs. Rhea Ripley ( WrestleMania XL )

Fun fact, it was n’t until WrestleMania 36 that a women’s match started off one of these shows. Even then, Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross vs. The Kabuki Warriors had no crowd to win over thanks to that pesky COVID thing that just made a mess of the world. We would n’t see any women fight it out at the beginning until the 40th WrestleMania in what was arguably the biggest potential match that WWE could put together with that division.

On one side, it was Rhea Ripley, who had an incredibly lengthy and popular run as WWE Women’s World Champion. On the other side, it was Becky Lynch, the woman who once won the main event of WrestleMania and was fresh off releasing her autobiography. It was a hard-hitting passing of the torch that ’s way more impressive when you realize that Becky was also battling through strep throat that week. Even with that handicap, the two started the show off with a bang.

The post The Best Opening Matches in WWE WrestleMania History appeared first on Den of Geek.

The Man Who Fell to Earth. Labyrinth. The Notoriety. These are the headings that often come to mind when people think of David Bowie’s movie profession, and with good cause. Also when playing real-world scholar Nikola Tesla in The Fame, each of these shows captured Bowie’s ephemeral public image. Bowie floated through the movies like [ …]

The article David Bowie’s Best Performance Came in a Jesus Movie appeared second on Den of Geek.

With a grappling present, the opening match may be nearly as important as the main event. While the main function is about finishing the show in a climax style and leaving a lasting impact, you also need to get the visitors into the proceedings with a criminal start. Find the blood pumping and start all the energy to carry the next few days.

With WrestleMania being WWE’s biggest display of the year, those opening hours can often send us some great fits to get the game rolling. Here are the seamers that really started the show out right. For the sake of earth rules, we’re counting fits on the formal show itself, but no pre-shows or black matches.

The Rockers vs. Haku and The Barbarian ( WrestleMania VII )

WrestleMania VII was a good WrestleMania display with an additional hour or so of little matches topped on for the sake of getting people a paycheck. This opening worked to that edge, as there was zero history between The Rockers and Bobby Heenan’s warriors going in, but they ended up pulling off precisely the kind of match the present needed. It helped that this was the last real gasp of tag team wrestling actually mattering in WWF and just having two teams go out there and put on a solid performance was a regular thing.

It also helped that it had a great dynamic that any new viewer could pick up on: the lumbering and powerful heels up against the plucky faces who were smaller but could run rings around them. Lots of fun tag tropes and teamwork thrown in from The Rockers made this work and showed that even before he broke out as a solo star, Shawn Michaels was earning his reputation as Mr. WrestleMania.

Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart ( WrestleMania X )

Bret Hart had an eventful time at Royal Rumble 1994. In the undercard, he and his brother Owen lost when challenging for the tag team titles, causing Owen to snap and brutalize Bret’s hurt leg. Bret then pulled himself together to compete in the Royal Rumble match that night, becoming co-winners with Lex Luger due to falling to the floor at the same time. It was decided that Bret would face Owen at WrestleMania in an exhibition, as he’d then go on to face the winner of Lex Luger vs. Yokozuna in the main event.

Owen was already mad about how reluctant Bret was to face him, only now he was madder that Bret was technically looking past him, as he was going to compete for the title, win or lose. On the same night that gave us the legendary ladder match between Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon, the event peaked early with this battle between brothers. The two put on an excellent show full of amazing ringwork and reversals. That it ended with Owen cleanly getting an upset win was the icing on the cake.

Rey Mysterio vs. Eddie Guerrero ( WrestleMania 21 )

Awesome as this one is, it ’s also a bittersweet middle to a thematic trilogy between the two competitors. At the previous WrestleMania, Eddie Guerrero successfully defended the WWE Championship and stood tall in the PPV’s final shot. In the months that followed, Eddie fell down the card and ended up as tag champ with Rey Mysterio. To open WrestleMania 21, the two partners had a singles match against each other, trying to stand on the legacy of their classic from Halloween Havoc 1997. While the two did n’t quite reach those heights, they still killed it and showed that they still had that chemistry. Despite Eddie’s best efforts, he could n’t keep Mysterio down for three and ended up losing to a flash pin, setting the stage for a heel turn and ridiculous storyline centered around the custody of a young Dominik Mysterio.

Sadly, this would be Eddie’s final WrestleMania due to a sudden death from heart issues. In the follow-up, Rey Mysterio would win the 2006 Royal Rumble match to make his way to WrestleMania 22, where he would win the World Heavyweight Championship. All the while, it was used as a tribute to his former tag partner and one of his greatest opponents.

Money in the Bank ( WrestleMania 23 )

The Money in the Bank concept was introduced at WrestleMania 21 and ended up being a huge success. It was n’t until its third installment at WrestleMania 23 that they decided to lead with it, and they went full ham by making it an eight-man match. A great set of talent here with initial winner Edge being joined by CM Punk, Randy Orton, King Booker, Finlay, Mr. Kennedy, Jeff Hardy, and Matt Hardy. Then you get Sharmell and Hornswoggle showing up, making this one of the more chaotic takes on the match.

There was rarely a bad Money in the Bank match, especially early on, and this one’s no different. They do get silly, like having Booker pull out a tiny ladder in the heat of the moment and the later bit where he could win the match, but Matt Hardy threatens Sharmell with a Twist of Fate unless he steps down. Then you get the crazy spots, like when Edge is laying on a ladder acting as a bridge and Jeff Hardy jumps off another ladder and into Edge. Or the time when Mr. Kennedy does the Green Bay Plunge on Hornswoggle off a ladder. Kennedy himself would end up winning this one, though his aftermath as the briefcase holder was entirely cursed.

Finlay vs. JBL ( WrestleMania XXIV )

Mercifully, WWE was finally putting an end to one of their most grueling ongoing stories about Hornswoggle being Vince McMahon’s illegitimate son. Only it turns out Vince was n’t the father, as it was really Finlay. Sure. This was all revealed after JBL beat the leprechaun half to death, setting up this “Belfast Brawl, ” which is quite a sentence I just typed. After months and months of awful McMahon sketches and segments, we were at least going to get a cool hardcore match out of it. We’ll take our wins where we can get them.

It’ s rare for WrestleMania to start off with a plunder match, but this one really gets the crowd going thanks to it being two stiff workers who can take it as much as they can dish it out. This also gives us the fantastic moment where JBL is in the ring with a trash can, sees Hornswoggle scrambling around on the outside, and just whips the can at him at lightning speed. JBL winning might have been seen as a downer, but putting this whole angle out of its misery was something to be celebrated.

Daniel Bryan vs. Triple H ( WrestleMania XXX )

The road to WrestleMania XXX was like somebody falling down the stairs, somehow landing on their feet, and insisting that they meant to do that. Daniel Bryan was meant to be swept under the rug as a top guy, but between CM Punk’s abrupt exodus from the company, the fanbase’s complete rejection of Batista as the top face, and an utterly disastrous Royal Rumble, they ended up being bullied into a fantastic main event storyline centering around Bryan winning the WWE World Heavyweight Championship against Randy Orton and Batista.

But that was n’t his only match of the night. In order to earn his spot in the main event, he had to face evil boss Triple H at the start of the show. It was their one and only match together, which made it more of a novelty to see so early on. The two jibed perfectly and we got one of the last truly great matches in Triple H’s career. Even though this was Bryan’s match to win, Triple H’s tendency to use his real life backstage sway mixed with how many times Bryan’s fans had been burned threw in a non-zero chance that the hero was n’t going to pull it off.

Seth Rollins vs. Finn Balor vs. The Miz ( WrestleMania 34 )

When done right, a triple threat match can really complement what the talent brings to the table. Seth Rollins and Finn Balor once had a great match to crown the first ever Universal Champion. Here, they were fighting for Miz’s Intercontinental Championship and by throwing the extra guy in there, it just allowed for a fast-paced match full of inventive spots and the ability to trade out a wrestler to rest up before jumping back into the fray.

Even with Miz being the weakest of the three wrestlers, he still adds a fantastic dynamic of being the one who takes advantage of the situation. Lots of moments of him trying to be an opportunist, including a wonderful spot where Rollins just barely escapes a roll-up pin from Balor, and is so distraught and distracted by making sure the ref only counted to two that it leaves him open for a sudden Skull-Crushing Finale. The extra man keeps spoiling the pinfalls until it ’s time for Rollins to flatten both opponents one after another with his Curb Stomp.

Seth Rollins vs. Brock Lesnar ( WrestleMania 35 )

Brock Lesnar was at one point the ultimate threat in WWE. At the same time, Seth Rollins was being built up as a top face and was challenging him for the Universal Championship. Despite the high-profile nature of this bout, the narrative, according to Paul Heyman, was that Brock was pissed about not being the main event. If he was n’t going to be the main event, he would open the show so he could be done with things early and skip town. Brock was so furious that he jumped Rollins during the entrance and unfairly destroyed him before the bell could even ring.

Rollins insisted on going through with the match and turned things around with an illegal punch to the balls. It was cheating, but it was justified. Rollins then spammed his Curb Stomp three times in a row to keep Brock down, winning the title in just a couple of minutes. Rollins would eventually beat Brock fair and square to give him that major rub ( immediately undone by his Fiend feud ), but this quick and impactful win was definitely a great start to the PPV.

Drew McIntyre vs. Bobby Lashley ( WrestleMania 37 )

WrestleMania 37 Night 1 had a very unique situation going on at the start. For one, this was the first major WWE show since the pandemic that had a full crowd. By default, this crowd starting off WrestleMania would be off the wall pumped. The problem was that there was a nasty storm that caused a major delay, and by the time they were ready to do the actual wrestling, the crowd was wet and defused.

It was n’t instantaneous, but Drew McIntyre and Bobby Lashley going at it eventually woke them up. Two big, meaty men slapping meat will do that sometimes. A great pairing who played off each other well, they did a good job making both of them seem like irresistible forces and immovable objects at the same time. It did involve a screwy finish, but Lashley being able to knock out Drew with the Hurt Lock really put a bow on how dominating the Almighty could be. Definitely better than the following night’s goofball Randy Orton vs. Fiend match and its “box-like structure ” bullshit.

Becky Lynch vs. Rhea Ripley ( WrestleMania XL )

Fun fact, it was n’t until WrestleMania 36 that a women’s match started off one of these shows. Even then, Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross vs. The Kabuki Warriors had no crowd to win over thanks to that pesky COVID thing that just made a mess of the world. We would n’t see any women fight it out at the beginning until the 40th WrestleMania in what was arguably the biggest potential match that WWE could put together with that division.

On one side, it was Rhea Ripley, who had an incredibly lengthy and popular run as WWE Women’s World Champion. On the other side, it was Becky Lynch, the woman who once won the main event of WrestleMania and was fresh off releasing her autobiography. It was a hard-hitting passing of the torch that ’s way more impressive when you realize that Becky was also battling through strep throat that week. Even with that handicap, the two started the show off with a bang.

The post The Best Opening Matches in WWE WrestleMania History appeared first on Den of Geek.

This essay contains Sinners clues. In a film suffused with unearthly music sequences and fantastical imagery, it is simply the weirdest point we see. Jack O’Connell’s presumably thousand-year-old Remmick is performing a Celtic jig from his homeland, and freshly turned vampires like poor disfigured Cornbread ( Omar Benson Miller ), lonely Mary ( Hailee Steinfeld ), and even rebellious [ … ]

The article Sinners: Ryan Coogler Reveals the Devil’s Bargain of America appeared initially on Den of Geek.

With a grappling present, the opening match may be nearly as important as the main event. While the main function is about finishing the show in a climax style and leaving a lasting impact, you also need to get the visitors into the proceedings with a criminal start. Find the blood pumping and start all the energy to carry the next few days.

With WrestleMania being WWE’s biggest display of the year, those opening hours can often send us some great fits to get the game rolling. Here are the seamers that really started the show out right. For the sake of earth rules, we’re counting fits on the standard show itself, but no pre-shows or black matches.

The Rockers vs. Haku and The Barbarian ( WrestleMania VII )

WrestleMania VII was a good WrestleMania display with an additional hour or so of little matches topped on for the sake of getting people a paycheck. This opening worked to that edge, as there was zero history between The Rockers and Bobby Heenan’s warriors going in, but they ended up pulling off precisely the kind of match the present needed. It helped that this was the last real gasp of tag team wrestling actually mattering in WWF and just having two teams go out there and put on a solid performance was a regular thing.

It also helped that it had a great dynamic that any new viewer could pick up on: the lumbering and powerful heels up against the plucky faces who were smaller but could run rings around them. Lots of fun tag tropes and teamwork thrown in from The Rockers made this work and showed that even before he broke out as a solo star, Shawn Michaels was earning his reputation as Mr. WrestleMania.

Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart ( WrestleMania X )

Bret Hart had an eventful time at Royal Rumble 1994. In the undercard, he and his brother Owen lost when challenging for the tag team titles, causing Owen to snap and brutalize Bret’s hurt leg. Bret then pulled himself together to compete in the Royal Rumble match that night, becoming co-winners with Lex Luger due to falling to the floor at the same time. It was decided that Bret would face Owen at WrestleMania in an exhibition, as he’d then go on to face the winner of Lex Luger vs. Yokozuna in the main event.

Owen was already mad about how reluctant Bret was to face him, only now he was madder that Bret was technically looking past him, as he was going to compete for the title, win or lose. On the same night that gave us the legendary ladder match between Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon, the event peaked early with this battle between brothers. The two put on an excellent show full of amazing ringwork and reversals. That it ended with Owen cleanly getting an upset win was the icing on the cake.

Rey Mysterio vs. Eddie Guerrero ( WrestleMania 21 )

Awesome as this one is, it ’s also a bittersweet middle to a thematic trilogy between the two competitors. At the previous WrestleMania, Eddie Guerrero successfully defended the WWE Championship and stood tall in the PPV’s final shot. In the months that followed, Eddie fell down the card and ended up as tag champ with Rey Mysterio. To open WrestleMania 21, the two partners had a singles match against each other, trying to stand on the legacy of their classic from Halloween Havoc 1997. While the two did n’t quite reach those heights, they still killed it and showed that they still had that chemistry. Despite Eddie’s best efforts, he could n’t keep Mysterio down for three and ended up losing to a flash pin, setting the stage for a heel turn and ridiculous storyline centered around the custody of a young Dominik Mysterio.

Sadly, this would be Eddie’s final WrestleMania due to a sudden death from heart issues. In the follow-up, Rey Mysterio would win the 2006 Royal Rumble match to make his way to WrestleMania 22, where he would win the World Heavyweight Championship. All the while, it was used as a tribute to his former tag partner and one of his greatest opponents.

Money in the Bank ( WrestleMania 23 )

The Money in the Bank concept was introduced at WrestleMania 21 and ended up being a huge success. It was n’t until its third installment at WrestleMania 23 that they decided to lead with it, and they went full ham by making it an eight-man match. A great set of talent here with initial winner Edge being joined by CM Punk, Randy Orton, King Booker, Finlay, Mr. Kennedy, Jeff Hardy, and Matt Hardy. Then you get Sharmell and Hornswoggle showing up, making this one of the more chaotic takes on the match.

There was rarely a bad Money in the Bank match, especially early on, and this one’s no different. They do get silly, like having Booker pull out a tiny ladder in the heat of the moment and the later bit where he could win the match, but Matt Hardy threatens Sharmell with a Twist of Fate unless he steps down. Then you get the crazy spots, like when Edge is laying on a ladder acting as a bridge and Jeff Hardy jumps off another ladder and into Edge. Or the time when Mr. Kennedy does the Green Bay Plunge on Hornswoggle off a ladder. Kennedy himself would end up winning this one, though his aftermath as the briefcase holder was entirely cursed.

Finlay vs. JBL ( WrestleMania XXIV )

Mercifully, WWE was finally putting an end to one of their most grueling ongoing stories about Hornswoggle being Vince McMahon’s illegitimate son. Only it turns out Vince was n’t the father, as it was really Finlay. Sure. This was all revealed after JBL beat the leprechaun half to death, setting up this “Belfast Brawl, ” which is quite a sentence I just typed. After months and months of awful McMahon sketches and segments, we were at least going to get a cool hardcore match out of it. We’ll take our wins where we can get them.

It’ s rare for WrestleMania to start off with a plunder match, but this one really gets the crowd going thanks to it being two stiff workers who can take it as much as they can dish it out. This also gives us the fantastic moment where JBL is in the ring with a trash can, sees Hornswoggle scrambling around on the outside, and just whips the can at him at lightning speed. JBL winning might have been seen as a downer, but putting this whole angle out of its misery was something to be celebrated.

Daniel Bryan vs. Triple H ( WrestleMania XXX )

The road to WrestleMania XXX was like somebody falling down the stairs, somehow landing on their feet, and insisting that they meant to do that. Daniel Bryan was meant to be swept under the rug as a top guy, but between CM Punk’s abrupt exodus from the company, the fanbase’s complete rejection of Batista as the top face, and an utterly disastrous Royal Rumble, they ended up being bullied into a fantastic main event storyline centering around Bryan winning the WWE World Heavyweight Championship against Randy Orton and Batista.

But that was n’t his only match of the night. In order to earn his spot in the main event, he had to face evil boss Triple H at the start of the show. It was their one and only match together, which made it more of a novelty to see so early on. The two jibed perfectly and we got one of the last truly great matches in Triple H’s career. Even though this was Bryan’s match to win, Triple H’s tendency to use his real life backstage sway mixed with how many times Bryan’s fans had been burned threw in a non-zero chance that the hero was n’t going to pull it off.

Seth Rollins vs. Finn Balor vs. The Miz ( WrestleMania 34 )

When done right, a triple threat match can really complement what the talent brings to the table. Seth Rollins and Finn Balor once had a great match to crown the first ever Universal Champion. Here, they were fighting for Miz’s Intercontinental Championship and by throwing the extra guy in there, it just allowed for a fast-paced match full of inventive spots and the ability to trade out a wrestler to rest up before jumping back into the fray.

Even with Miz being the weakest of the three wrestlers, he still adds a fantastic dynamic of being the one who takes advantage of the situation. Lots of moments of him trying to be an opportunist, including a wonderful spot where Rollins just barely escapes a roll-up pin from Balor, and is so distraught and distracted by making sure the ref only counted to two that it leaves him open for a sudden Skull-Crushing Finale. The extra man keeps spoiling the pinfalls until it ’s time for Rollins to flatten both opponents one after another with his Curb Stomp.

Seth Rollins vs. Brock Lesnar ( WrestleMania 35 )

Brock Lesnar was at one point the ultimate threat in WWE. At the same time, Seth Rollins was being built up as a top face and was challenging him for the Universal Championship. Despite the high-profile nature of this bout, the narrative, according to Paul Heyman, was that Brock was pissed about not being the main event. If he was n’t going to be the main event, he would open the show so he could be done with things early and skip town. Brock was so furious that he jumped Rollins during the entrance and unfairly destroyed him before the bell could even ring.

Rollins insisted on going through with the match and turned things around with an illegal punch to the balls. It was cheating, but it was justified. Rollins then spammed his Curb Stomp three times in a row to keep Brock down, winning the title in just a couple of minutes. Rollins would eventually beat Brock fair and square to give him that major rub ( immediately undone by his Fiend feud ), but this quick and impactful win was definitely a great start to the PPV.

Drew McIntyre vs. Bobby Lashley ( WrestleMania 37 )

WrestleMania 37 Night 1 had a very unique situation going on at the start. For one, this was the first major WWE show since the pandemic that had a full crowd. By default, this crowd starting off WrestleMania would be off the wall pumped. The problem was that there was a nasty storm that caused a major delay, and by the time they were ready to do the actual wrestling, the crowd was wet and defused.

It was n’t instantaneous, but Drew McIntyre and Bobby Lashley going at it eventually woke them up. Two big, meaty men slapping meat will do that sometimes. A great pairing who played off each other well, they did a good job making both of them seem like irresistible forces and immovable objects at the same time. It did involve a screwy finish, but Lashley being able to knock out Drew with the Hurt Lock really put a bow on how dominating the Almighty could be. Definitely better than the following night’s goofball Randy Orton vs. Fiend match and its “box-like structure ” bullshit.

Becky Lynch vs. Rhea Ripley ( WrestleMania XL )

Fun fact, it was n’t until WrestleMania 36 that a women’s match started off one of these shows. Even then, Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross vs. The Kabuki Warriors had no crowd to win over thanks to that pesky COVID thing that just made a mess of the world. We would n’t see any women fight it out at the beginning until the 40th WrestleMania in what was arguably the biggest potential match that WWE could put together with that division.

On one side, it was Rhea Ripley, who had an incredibly lengthy and popular run as WWE Women’s World Champion. On the other side, it was Becky Lynch, the woman who once won the main event of WrestleMania and was fresh off releasing her autobiography. It was a hard-hitting passing of the torch that ’s way more impressive when you realize that Becky was also battling through strep throat that week. Even with that handicap, the two started the show off with a bang.

The post The Best Opening Matches in WWE WrestleMania History appeared first on Den of Geek.

With a grappling present, the opening match may be nearly as important as the main event. While the main function is about finishing the show in a climax style and leaving a lasting impact, you also need to get the visitors into the proceedings with a criminal start. Get the blood pumping and start all [ …]

The article The Best Starting Games in WWE WrestleMania History appeared initially on Den of Geek.

With a grappling present, the opening match may be nearly as important as the main event. While the main function is about finishing the show in a climax style and leaving a lasting impact, you also need to get the visitors into the proceedings with a criminal start. Find the blood pumping and start all the energy to carry the next few days.

With WrestleMania being WWE’s biggest display of the year, those opening hours can often send us some great matches to get the game rolling. Here are the openers that truly started the show off right. For the sake of ground rules, we’re counting matches on the official show itself, so no pre-shows or dark matches.

The Rockers vs. Haku and The Barbarian ( WrestleMania VII )

WrestleMania VII was a solid WrestleMania show with an extra hour or so of nothing matches topped on for the sake of getting everyone a paycheck. This opener worked to that advantage, as there was zero story between The Rockers and Bobby Heenan’s goons going in, but they ended up pulling off exactly the kind of match the show needed. It helped that this was the last real gasp of tag team wrestling actually mattering in WWF and just having two teams go out there and put on a solid performance was a regular thing.

It also helped that it had a great dynamic that any new viewer could pick up on: the lumbering and powerful heels up against the plucky faces who were smaller but could run rings around them. Lots of fun tag tropes and teamwork thrown in from The Rockers made this work and showed that even before he broke out as a solo star, Shawn Michaels was earning his reputation as Mr. WrestleMania.

Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart ( WrestleMania X )

Bret Hart had an eventful time at Royal Rumble 1994. In the undercard, he and his brother Owen lost when challenging for the tag team titles, causing Owen to snap and brutalize Bret’s hurt leg. Bret then pulled himself together to compete in the Royal Rumble match that night, becoming co-winners with Lex Luger due to falling to the floor at the same time. It was decided that Bret would face Owen at WrestleMania in an exhibition, as he’d then go on to face the winner of Lex Luger vs. Yokozuna in the main event.

Owen was already mad about how reluctant Bret was to face him, only now he was madder that Bret was technically looking past him, as he was going to compete for the title, win or lose. On the same night that gave us the legendary ladder match between Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon, the event peaked early with this battle between brothers. The two put on an excellent show full of amazing ringwork and reversals. That it ended with Owen cleanly getting an upset win was the icing on the cake.

Rey Mysterio vs. Eddie Guerrero ( WrestleMania 21 )

Awesome as this one is, it ’s also a bittersweet middle to a thematic trilogy between the two competitors. At the previous WrestleMania, Eddie Guerrero successfully defended the WWE Championship and stood tall in the PPV’s final shot. In the months that followed, Eddie fell down the card and ended up as tag champ with Rey Mysterio. To open WrestleMania 21, the two partners had a singles match against each other, trying to stand on the legacy of their classic from Halloween Havoc 1997. While the two did n’t quite reach those heights, they still killed it and showed that they still had that chemistry. Despite Eddie’s best efforts, he could n’t keep Mysterio down for three and ended up losing to a flash pin, setting the stage for a heel turn and ridiculous storyline centered around the custody of a young Dominik Mysterio.

Sadly, this would be Eddie’s final WrestleMania due to a sudden death from heart issues. In the follow-up, Rey Mysterio would win the 2006 Royal Rumble match to make his way to WrestleMania 22, where he would win the World Heavyweight Championship. All the while, it was used as a tribute to his former tag partner and one of his greatest opponents.

Money in the Bank ( WrestleMania 23 )

The Money in the Bank concept was introduced at WrestleMania 21 and ended up being a huge success. It was n’t until its third installment at WrestleMania 23 that they decided to lead with it, and they went full ham by making it an eight-man match. A great set of talent here with initial winner Edge being joined by CM Punk, Randy Orton, King Booker, Finlay, Mr. Kennedy, Jeff Hardy, and Matt Hardy. Then you get Sharmell and Hornswoggle showing up, making this one of the more chaotic takes on the match.

There was rarely a bad Money in the Bank match, especially early on, and this one’s no different. They do get silly, like having Booker pull out a tiny ladder in the heat of the moment and the later bit where he could win the match, but Matt Hardy threatens Sharmell with a Twist of Fate unless he steps down. Then you get the crazy spots, like when Edge is laying on a ladder acting as a bridge and Jeff Hardy jumps off another ladder and into Edge. Or the time when Mr. Kennedy does the Green Bay Plunge on Hornswoggle off a ladder. Kennedy himself would end up winning this one, though his aftermath as the briefcase holder was entirely cursed.

Finlay vs. JBL ( WrestleMania XXIV )

Mercifully, WWE was finally putting an end to one of their most grueling ongoing stories about Hornswoggle being Vince McMahon’s illegitimate son. Only it turns out Vince was n’t the father, as it was really Finlay. Sure. This was all revealed after JBL beat the leprechaun half to death, setting up this “Belfast Brawl, ” which is quite a sentence I just typed. After months and months of awful McMahon sketches and segments, we were at least going to get a cool hardcore match out of it. We’ll take our wins where we can get them.

It’ s rare for WrestleMania to start off with a plunder match, but this one really gets the crowd going thanks to it being two stiff workers who can take it as much as they can dish it out. This also gives us the fantastic moment where JBL is in the ring with a trash can, sees Hornswoggle scrambling around on the outside, and just whips the can at him at lightning speed. JBL winning might have been seen as a downer, but putting this whole angle out of its misery was something to be celebrated.

Daniel Bryan vs. Triple H ( WrestleMania XXX )

The road to WrestleMania XXX was like somebody falling down the stairs, somehow landing on their feet, and insisting that they meant to do that. Daniel Bryan was meant to be swept under the rug as a top guy, but between CM Punk’s abrupt exodus from the company, the fanbase’s complete rejection of Batista as the top face, and an utterly disastrous Royal Rumble, they ended up being bullied into a fantastic main event storyline centering around Bryan winning the WWE World Heavyweight Championship against Randy Orton and Batista.

But that was n’t his only match of the night. In order to earn his spot in the main event, he had to face evil boss Triple H at the start of the show. It was their one and only match together, which made it more of a novelty to see so early on. The two jibed perfectly and we got one of the last truly great matches in Triple H’s career. Even though this was Bryan’s match to win, Triple H’s tendency to use his real life backstage sway mixed with how many times Bryan’s fans had been burned threw in a non-zero chance that the hero was n’t going to pull it off.

Seth Rollins vs. Finn Balor vs. The Miz ( WrestleMania 34 )

When done right, a triple threat match can really complement what the talent brings to the table. Seth Rollins and Finn Balor once had a great match to crown the first ever Universal Champion. Here, they were fighting for Miz’s Intercontinental Championship and by throwing the extra guy in there, it just allowed for a fast-paced match full of inventive spots and the ability to trade out a wrestler to rest up before jumping back into the fray.

Even with Miz being the weakest of the three wrestlers, he still adds a fantastic dynamic of being the one who takes advantage of the situation. Lots of moments of him trying to be an opportunist, including a wonderful spot where Rollins just barely escapes a roll-up pin from Balor, and is so distraught and distracted by making sure the ref only counted to two that it leaves him open for a sudden Skull-Crushing Finale. The extra man keeps spoiling the pinfalls until it ’s time for Rollins to flatten both opponents one after another with his Curb Stomp.

Seth Rollins vs. Brock Lesnar ( WrestleMania 35 )

Brock Lesnar was at one point the ultimate threat in WWE. At the same time, Seth Rollins was being built up as a top face and was challenging him for the Universal Championship. Despite the high-profile nature of this bout, the narrative, according to Paul Heyman, was that Brock was pissed about not being the main event. If he was n’t going to be the main event, he would open the show so he could be done with things early and skip town. Brock was so furious that he jumped Rollins during the entrance and unfairly destroyed him before the bell could even ring.

Rollins insisted on going through with the match and turned things around with an illegal punch to the balls. It was cheating, but it was justified. Rollins then spammed his Curb Stomp three times in a row to keep Brock down, winning the title in just a couple of minutes. Rollins would eventually beat Brock fair and square to give him that major rub ( immediately undone by his Fiend feud ), but this quick and impactful win was definitely a great start to the PPV.

Drew McIntyre vs. Bobby Lashley ( WrestleMania 37 )

WrestleMania 37 Night 1 had a very unique situation going on at the start. For one, this was the first major WWE show since the pandemic that had a full crowd. By default, this crowd starting off WrestleMania would be off the wall pumped. The problem was that there was a nasty storm that caused a major delay, and by the time they were ready to do the actual wrestling, the crowd was wet and defused.

It was n’t instantaneous, but Drew McIntyre and Bobby Lashley going at it eventually woke them up. Two big, meaty men slapping meat will do that sometimes. A great pairing who played off each other well, they did a good job making both of them seem like irresistible forces and immovable objects at the same time. It did involve a screwy finish, but Lashley being able to knock out Drew with the Hurt Lock really put a bow on how dominating the Almighty could be. Definitely better than the following night’s goofball Randy Orton vs. Fiend match and its “box-like structure ” bullshit.

Becky Lynch vs. Rhea Ripley ( WrestleMania XL )

Fun fact, it was n’t until WrestleMania 36 that a women’s match started off one of these shows. Even then, Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross vs. The Kabuki Warriors had no crowd to win over thanks to that pesky COVID thing that just made a mess of the world. We would n’t see any women fight it out at the beginning until the 40th WrestleMania in what was arguably the biggest potential match that WWE could put together with that division.

On one side, it was Rhea Ripley, who had an incredibly lengthy and popular run as WWE Women’s World Champion. On the other side, it was Becky Lynch, the woman who once won the main event of WrestleMania and was fresh off releasing her autobiography. It was a hard-hitting passing of the torch that ’s way more impressive when you realize that Becky was also battling through strep throat that week. Even with that handicap, the two started the show off with a bang.

The article The Best Starting Games in WWE WrestleMania History appeared initially on Den of Geek.

We agree: the computer-generated heads could be a great fit for personas—but not for the purpose you might think. Ironically, the website highlights the core issue of this very common design method: the person ( a ) does not exist. Personas are deliberately created, just like in the pictures. Knowledge is taken out of natural environment and recombined into an isolated preview that’s detached from reality.

However, it’s odd that manufacturers use personalities to guide their style in the real world.

Personas: A action up

Most manufacturers have created, used, or come across personalities at least once in their job. The Interaction Design Foundation defines profile as “fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the various consumer types that might use your company, product, page, or brand” in their article” Personas- A Simple Introduction.” In their most complete expression, personas typically consist of a name, profile picture, quotes, demographics, goals, needs, behavior in relation to a certain service/product, emotions, and motivations ( for example, see Creative Companion’s Persona Core Poster ). According to design firm Designit, the goal of personas is to “make the research relateable, ]and ] easy to communicate, digest, reference, and apply to product and service development.”

The decontextualization of identities

Personas are common because they make “dry” research information more realistic, more people. However, this approach places a cap on the author’s ability to exclude the target customers from their particular contexts. As a result, personalities don’t describe important factors that make you know their decision-making method or allow you to connect to users ‘ thoughts and behavior, they lack stories. You are aware of the persona’s actions, but you lack the knowledge to know why. You end up with images of people that are really less people.

This “decontextualization” we see in identities happens in four way, which we’ll discuss below.

People are assumed to be dynamic, according to people.

Although many companies still try to box in their employees and customers with outdated personality tests ( referring to you, Myers-Briggs ), here’s a painfully obvious truth: people are not a fixed set of features. Depending on how you feel, how you act, think, and think, what you do and do. You appear distinct to different people, you may act helpful to some, tough to others. And you change your mind all the time about selections you’ve taken.

Current psychologists concur that while individuals typically act in accordance with specific patterns, how people act and make decisions is ultimately influenced by a combination of history and culture. The context—the atmosphere, the effect of other people, your feelings, the whole story that led up to a situation—determines the kind of person you are in each particular time.

Personas provide a consumer as a predetermined set of features in an effort to improve reality, but do so without taking this variability into account. Like personality tests, personas seize people away from real existence. Even worse, individuals are reduced to a brand and categorized as” that kind of guy” with no means to practice their inherent flexibility. This behavior lowers diversity, reinforces stereotypes, and doesn’t reveal reality.

Personas rely on people, not the setting

You’re designing for a environment, not an individual, in the real world. Each individual lives in a community, a group, an habitat, where there are environmental, social, and cultural factors you need to consider. A pattern is not meant for a single customer. Instead, you create a product that is intended to be used by a certain number of people. Personas, yet, show the customer alone rather than define how the consumer relates to the environment.

Do you make the same choice over and over again? Maybe you’re a dedicated vegan but also decide to buy some meats when your family are coming across. As they depend on various situations and characteristics, your decisions—and behavior, thoughts, and comments —are no absolute but extremely contextual. Because it doesn’t identify the grounds for your decisions, the image that “represents” you doesn’t take into account this interdependence. It doesn’t provide a explanation of why you act the way you do. People practice the well-known attribution error, which states that they too often attribute others ‘ behavior to their personalities and not to the circumstances.

As mentioned by the Interaction Design Foundation, identities are often placed in a situation that’s a” specific environment with a problem they want to or have to solve “—does that mean environment actually is considered? However, what frequently happens is that you take a hypothetical figure and based on that fiction decide how this character may deal with a particular situation. How could you possibly comprehend how someone you want to represent behave in new circumstances given that you haven’t even fully investigated and understood the current context of the people you want to represent?

Personas are meaningless averages

A persona is depicted as a specific person but is not a real person, as stated in Shlomo Goltz’s introduction article on Smashing Magazine; rather, it is synthesized from observations of many people. A well-known critique to this aspect of personas is that the average person does not exist, as per the famous example of the USA Air Force designing planes based on the average of 140 of their pilots ‘ physical dimensions and not a single pilot actually fitting within that average seat.

The same limitation applies to mental aspects of people. Have you ever heard a famous person say something was taken out of context? They used my words, but I didn’t mean it like that”. Although the celebrity’s statement was literally reported, the reporter failed to explain the context of the statement and to explain the non-verbal expressions. As a result, the intended meaning was lost. You do the same when you create personas: you collect somebody’s statement ( or goal, or need, or emotion ), of which the meaning can only be understood if you provide its own specific context, yet report it as an isolated finding.

However, personas go one step further, combining a decontextualized finding with another decontextualized finding from another. The resulting set of findings often does not make sense: it’s unclear, or even contrasting, because it lacks the underlying reasons on why and how that finding has arisen. It lacks any significance. And the persona doesn’t give you the full background of the person ( s ) to uncover this meaning: you would need to dive into the raw data for each single persona item to find it. What, then, is the usefulness of the persona?

People’s relatability can be deceiving.

To a certain extent, designers realize that a persona is a lifeless average. Designers invent and add “relatable” details to personas to make them resemble real people in order to overcome this. Nothing captures the absurdity of this better than a sentence by the Interaction Design Foundation:” Add a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character”. In other words, you add non-realism in an attempt to create more realism. Wouldn’t it be much more responsible to emphasize that John is only an abstraction if you purposefully conceal the fact that” John Doe” is an abstract representation of research findings? If something is artificial, let’s present it as such.

After accepting that people’s personalities are fixed, ignored the importance of their environment, and hidden meaning by joining isolated, non-generalizable findings, designers create new context to create ( their own ) meaning. In doing so, as with everything they create, they introduce a host of biases. As phrased by Designit, as designers we can” contextualize]the persona ] based on our reality and experience. We make connections that are well-known to us. This practice reinforces stereotypes, doesn’t reflect real-world diversity, and gets further away from people’s actual reality with every detail added.

Everyone should use their own empathy and develop their own interpretation and emotional response if we want to conduct good design research by reporting the reality “as-is” and making it relatable for our audience.

Dynamic Selves: The alternative to personas

If we shouldn’t use personas, what should we do instead?

Designit suggests using mindsets rather than personas. Each Mindset is a” spectrum of attitudes and emotional responses that different people have within the same context or life experience”. It challenges designers to avoid becoming fixated on just one person’s way of being. Unfortunately, while being a step in the right direction, this proposal doesn’t take into account that people are part of an environment that determines their personality, their behavior, and, yes, their mindset. Therefore, Mindsets are also not absolute but change in regard to the situation. What determines a particular Mindset, remains to be seen.

Another alternative comes from Margaret P., author of the article” Kill Your Personas“, who has argued for replacing personas with persona spectrums that consist of a range of user abilities. For instance, a visual impairment could be permanent ( blindness ), temporary ( recovery from eye surgery ), or situational (screen glare ). Persona spectrums are highly useful for more inclusive and context-based design, as they’re based on the understanding that the context is the pattern, not the personality. Their limitation, however, is that they have a very functional take on users that misses the relatability of a real person taken from within a spectrum.

We want to change the traditional design process to be context-based by creating an alternative to personas. Contexts are generalizable and have patterns that we can identify, just like we tried to do previously with people. How can we identify these patterns, then? How do we ensure truly context-based design?

Understand real individuals in multiple contexts

Nothing about reality can be more relatable and inspiring. Therefore, we have to understand real individuals in their multi-faceted contexts, and use this understanding to fuel our design. We refer to this method as Dynamic Selves.

Let’s take a look at what the approach looks like, based on an example of how one of us applied it in a recent project that researched habits of Italians around energy consumption. We drafted a design research plan aimed at investigating people’s attitudes toward energy consumption and sustainable behavior, with a focus on smart thermostats.

1. Choose the right sample

We frequently get slammed for saying,” Where are you going to find a single person that encapsulates all the information from one of these advanced personas ]” when we debate personas. The answer is simple: you don’t have to. You don’t need to have information about many people for your insights to be deep and meaningful.

Quantity is key to qualitative research, but sampling accuracy is key to its validity. You select the people that best represent the “population” you’re designing for. If this sample is chosen wisely and you have a deep understanding of the sampled people, you can infer how the rest of the population thinks and acts. There’s no need to study seven Susans and five Yuriys, one of each will do.

Similarly, you don’t need to understand Susan in fifteen different contexts. You have understood Susan’s plan of action once you have seen her in a few different settings. Not Susan as an atomic being but Susan in relation to the surrounding environment: how she might act, feel, and think in different situations.

It becomes clear why each person should be portrayed as an individual because each already represents an abstraction of a larger group of people in similar circumstances because each person is representative of a portion of the total population you’re researching. You don’t want abstractions of abstractions! These selected people need to be understood and shown in their full expression, remaining in their microcosmos—and if you want to identify patterns you can focus on identifying patterns in contexts.

However, the question persists: how do you choose a representative sample? First of all, you have to consider what’s the target audience of the product or service you are designing: it might be useful to look at the company’s goals and strategy, the current customer base, and/or a possible future target audience.

We were creating an application for those who already have a smart thermostat in our example project. In the future, everyone could have a smart thermostat in their house. Right now, though, only early adopters own one. We had to understand the causes behind these early adopters ‘ development in order to create a sizable sample. We therefore recruited by asking people why they had a smart thermostat and how they got it. There were those who had made the decision to purchase it, those who had been influenced by others to do so, and those who had located it in their homes. So we selected representatives of these three situations, from different age groups and geographical locations, with an equal balance of tech savvy and non-tech savvy participants.

2. Conduct your research

After having chosen and recruited your sample, conduct your research using ethnographic methodologies. This will give you more examples and anecdotes to enrich your qualitative data. In our example project, given COVID-19 restrictions, we converted an in-house ethnographic research effort into remote family interviews, conducted from home and accompanied by diary studies.

To gain an in-depth understanding of attitudes and decision-making trade-offs, the research focus was not limited to the interviewee alone but deliberately included the whole family. With the additions or corrections made by wives, husbands, children, or occasionally even pets, each interviewee would tell a story that would then become much more engaging and precise. We also focused on the relationships with other meaningful people ( such as colleagues or distant family ) and all the behaviors that resulted from those relationships. This extensive field of study gave us the ability to create a vivid mental image of dynamic situations involving multiple actors.

It’s essential that the scope of the research remains broad enough to be able to include all possible actors. Therefore, it normally works best to define broad research areas with macro questions. Interviews should be conducted in a semi-structured manner, with follow-up questions delve into subjects that the interviewee has blatantly mentioned. This open-minded “plan to be surprised” will yield the most insightful findings. One of our participants responded,” My wife has not installed the thermostat’s app; she uses WhatsApp instead,” when we asked how his family controlled the house temperature. If she wants to turn on the heater and she is not home, she will text me. I am her thermostat”.

3. Analysis: Create the Dynamic Selves

You begin to represent each individual as a series of dynamic selves during the research analysis, each” Self” representing a particular context. The core of each Dynamic Self is a quote, which comes supported by a photo and a few relevant demographics that illustrate the wider context. The research findings themselves will show which demographics are relevant to show. The key demographics were family type, number and type of homes owned, economic status, and technological maturity in our case because our research focused on families and their way of life to understand their needs for thermal regulation. ( We also included the individual’s name and age, but they’re optional—we included them to ease the stakeholders ‘ transition from personas and be able to connect multiple actions and contexts to the same person ).

Interviews must be video-recorded in order to capture precise quotes, and notes must be as much as possible taken verbatim. This is essential to the truthfulness of the several Selves of each participant. In the case of real-life ethnographic research, photos of the context and anonymized actors are essential to build realistic Selves. As long as these photos are realistic and depict meaningful actions that you associate with your participants, they should be taken directly from field research, but an evocative and representative image can also work. For example, one of our interviewees told us about his mountain home where he used to spend every weekend with his family. We depicted him hiking with his young daughter as a result.

At the end of the research analysis, we displayed all of the Selves ‘” cards” on a single canvas, categorized by activities. Each card displayed a situation, represented by a quote and a unique photo. All participants had several cards about themselves.

4. Identify potential design challenges

Once you have collected all main quotes from the interview transcripts and diaries, and laid them all down as Self cards, you will see patterns emerge. These patterns will highlight the opportunity areas for new product creation, new functionalities, and new services—for new design.

A particularly intriguing finding was made in our example project regarding the concept of humidity. We realized that people don’t know what humidity is and why it is important to monitor it for health: an environment that’s too dry or too wet can cause respiratory problems or worsen existing ones. This made clear that our client had a significant opportunity to train users about the concept and work as a health advisor.

Benefits of Dynamic Selves

When you use the Dynamic Selves approach in your research, you start to notice unique social relations, peculiar situations real people face and the actions that follow, and that people are surrounded by changing environments. One of the participants in our thermostat project, Davide, is described as a boyfriend, dog lover, and tech nut.

Davide is an individual we might have once reduced to a persona called “tech enthusiast”. However, there are also those who are wealthy or poor, who are tech enthusiasts and have families or are single. Their motivations and priorities when deciding to purchase a new thermostat can be opposite according to these different frames.

Once you have understood Davide in multiple situations, and for each situation have understood in sufficient depth the underlying reasons for his behavior, you’re able to generalize how he would act in another situation. You can infer what he would think and do in the circumstances ( or scenarios ) you design for using your understanding of him.

The Dynamic Selves approach aims to dismiss the conflicted dual purpose of personas—to summarize and empathize at the same time—by separating your research summary from the people you’re seeking to empathize with. This is crucial because scale affects how we feel about people and how difficult it is to feel empathy for others. We feel the strongest empathy for individuals we can personally relate to.

If you take a real person as inspiration for your design, you no longer need to create an artificial character. No more developing plot devices to “realize” the character, and no more need for additional bias. It’s simply how this person is in real life. We all know that these characters don’t really exist, so in our experience personas quickly turn into nothing more than a name in our priority guides and prototype screens.

Another powerful benefit of the Dynamic Selves approach is that it raises the stakes of your work: if you mess up your design, someone real, a person you and the team know and have met, is going to feel the consequences. It might stop you from taking shortcuts and will remind you to conduct daily checks on your designs.

Finally, real people in their specific contexts provide a better foundation for anecdotal storytelling and are thus more persuasive. Documentation of real research is essential in achieving this result. It reinforces your design arguments by adding more weight and urgency:” When I met Alessandra, the conditions of her workplace struck me. Noise, bad ergonomics, lack of light, you name it. If we go for this functionality, I’m afraid we’re going to add complexity to her life”.

Conclusion

In their article on Mindsets, Designit mentioned that “design thinking tools provide a shortcut to deal with reality’s complexities, but this process of simplification can occasionally flatten out people’s lives into a few general characteristics.” Unfortunately, personas have been culprits in a crime of oversimplification. They fail to account for the complex nature of our users ‘ decision-making processes and don’t take into account the fact that people are immersed in environments.

Design needs simplification but not generalization. You have to look at the research elements that stand out: the sentences that captured your attention, the images that struck you, the sounds that linger. Avoid using those and use them to describe the person in all of their contexts. Both insights and people come with a context, they cannot be cut from that context because it would remove meaning.

It’s high time for design to break away from fiction and use reality as our guide and inspiration, in all of its messy, surprising, and unquantifiable beauty.