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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 true threats 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 possible in hope that we’ll get there one day.

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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. Still, I still think there’s potential in this space.

As Joe mentions, human-in-the-loop authoring of alt text should absolutely be a thing. And if AI can pop in to offer a starting point for alt text—even if that starting point might be a prompt 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 train a model to analyze image usage in context, it could help us more quickly identify which images are likely to be decorative and which ones likely 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 doesn’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 doesn’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 isn’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 isn’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 vein of a company constantly imploring daily consumers to buy more toilet seats—the personalization gap is true. It’s an particularly confusing place to be a modern professional without a map, a map, or a strategy.

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

But you can ensure that your team has packed its bags sensibly.

There’s a DIY formula to increase your chances for success. At minimum, you’ll defuse your boss’s irrational exuberance. Before the party you’ll need to effectively prepare.

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the music

Consider Spotify’s DJ feature, which debuted this past year.

We’re used to seeing the polished final result of a personalization feature. Before the year-end award, the making-of backstory, or the behind-the-scenes victory lap, a personalized feature had to be conceived, budgeted, and prioritized. Before any personalization feature goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a backlog of worthy ideas for expressing customer experiences more dynamically.

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:

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..
1. 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.
2. 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 isn’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 isn’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.

Always since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated with movies. I loved the figures and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I wanted to be an actor. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting activities. I also dreamed up suggestions for videos that my friends and I could create and sun in. But they never went any farther. I did, however, end up working in user experience ( UX). Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer analysis 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 construction 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 know the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two introduces the fight, where the activity is. Here, difficulties 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 inconsequential. If finances or timelines are strong, analysis tends to be one of the first points to go. Instead of investing in study, some goods professionals rely on manufacturers or—worse—their personal judgment to make the “right” options for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get clubs some of the way, but that strategy is so easily miss out on solving people ‘ real problems. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. User studies puts style. It keeps it on record, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay ahead 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 customer study.

Act one: installation

The layout is all about understanding the background, and that’s where fundamental 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 foundational research, you can conduct contextual inquiries or diary studies ( or both! ), which can help you start to identify problems as well as opportunities. It doesn’t need to be a huge investment in time or money.

Erika Hall writes about minimum viable ethnography, which can be as simple as spending 15 minutes with a user and asking them one thing:”‘ 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 didn’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 wouldn’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.

Weekend Favs March 29th written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Selling

My trip blog post program includes posting references to a handful of equipment or great glad I ran across during the week. I don’t go into detail about the sees, but I encourage you to check them out if they sound exciting. The pictures in the article is a favourite for the week from an online ]…]

Build a Brand Gen Z Wants to Work ( and Buy ) From written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Len Silverman

In this instance of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Len Silverman, a former professional, past Learning Center landlord, and creator of Mesh: Aligning Your Personal Brand with Gen Z. With over 30 years of experience and firsthand information into the Gen Z labor, Len offers a clear strategy for businesses struggling to interact with this rising generation of employees and customers.

Len stock why just labeling Gen Z as “lazy” or “hard to control” is a huge misstep. Rather, businesses need to know Gen Z traits and align their business culture and company brand with what this generation really values—authenticity, flexibility, purpose, and opportunity. Whether you &#8217, re hiring Gen Z workers or advertising to them, the essential lies in understanding the intersection of specific brand and company personality.

Len Silverman’s insights are a wake-up contact for any business that wants to be appropriate, both in the hiring industry and in customer wedding. If you want your company to relate with the next century, it starts with getting real about who you are —and who they are.

Important Restaurants:

• Understand the Gen Z Workforce: Gen Z isn’t scared to spirit employers—but it’s usually due to broken hiring experience, not disillusionment. Modify, understand, and customize your process.
• Personal Branding Matters: Gen Z expects companies to have a brand identity that mirrors their personal values. They’re looking for position, not just a money.
• Company Culture Is Everything: This technology wants mentoring, not micromanagement. They crave situations where input is empty, and function drives work.
• Consider Employee Journey, Not Really Customer Journey: Gen Z sees work as part of their life experience. Treat recruitment and retention like a well-crafted selling funnels.
• Authenticity Wins: Theatrical brand won’t last. Gen Z may visit it out. Make sure your principles show up in your leadership, deeds, and contacts.
• Mentorship Over Management: Help Gen Z through gaze mentors or structured applications to link actions, aspirations, and professional advancement.
• Generational Understanding Builds Trust: Bridging the gap between Gen X management and Gen Z workers starts with emotion, open dialogue, and shared value.

Chapters:

• ]00: 09 ] Introduction to Len Silverman
• ]00: 53] What is the Personal Brand of Gen Z
• ]02: 56] Common Stereotypes of Genz
• ]04: 16 ] The Old Ways Aren&#8217, t Going to Work
• ]06: 39] The Employee Journey
• ]08: 35] Importance of Cultural Consistency
• ]10: 39] Changing Mindsets
• ]12: 44] Gen Z Customers
• ]14: 19] Common Mistakes Trying to Align with Gen Z
• ]17: 11] Turning Gen Z into A Players

More About Len Silverman:

Check out Len Silverman&#8217, s Website
• Connect with Len Silverman on LinkedIn
• Read MESH: Aligning the Personal Brand of Gen Z with your Company Culture by Len Silverman

This essay contains Death of a Unicorn clues. ” You know what? We really had placed more stock in art story”. This is a spiritual reality that should be repeated. It also, perhaps, is a thought that flashed through the mind of Odell Leopold ( Richard E. Grant ) right before a unicorn’s horn also smashed into that ]… ]

The article Death of a Unicorn: The True Medieval Lore and Tapestries Explained by the Director appeared first on Den of Geek.

This essay contains Death of a Unicorn clues.

” You know what? We really had placed more stock in art story”. This is a spiritual truth that should be repeated. It also, perhaps, is a thought that flashed through the mind of Odell Leopold ( Richard E. Grant ) right before a unicorn’s horn also smashed into that soft, squishy gray matter. It might have similarly been in the back recesses of Belinda Leopold’s ( Téa Leoni ) head while another unicorn opened her belly.

They were both warned earlier in their movie by art history student Ridley Kintner ( Jenna Ortega ) that ancient masterworks tell us of the dangers posed by horned mythical creatures. She also had JPEGs of the expensive medieval tapestries to show it, with images of death by fairy disembowelment and all. But they refused to listen.

It&#8217, s a funny look befitting a film actively infused with Jurassic Park pictures as wealthy elites try and fail to control the natural world. Yet it’s not merely a joke. In fact, Death of a Unicorn writer-director Alex Scharfman extensively studied fairy folklore and tradition, telling us earlier in a Den of Geek include tale that he went back to Roman historians and the Old Testament Bible while researching the video. He also profoundly examined those pony embroideries you see in the movie. Aye, they &#8217, re true and now live in the Met Cloisters in New York City. So we just decided to sit down afterwards with Scharfman to explain how deeply these Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries informed his picture.

” I grew up around New York in the cities and went on field trips to the Cloisters Museum where those are held and maintained”, Scharfman recalls in our latest discussion about the movie and these Romanesque magic. ” They must have been buried in my incapacitated, because at some point I forgot about them but finally when researching the film, I came upon them once and I was like’ oh right, those items!’”

These vases, which were made by an unknown artist at the turn of the 16th century, and therefore resided in an aristocratic Parisian household until almost being destroyed in the French Revolution, became a North Star for everything in Death of a Unicorn. Ortega also recently told us they were a &#8220, cheat plate” for understanding their video. But meet us below as we unpack each of the seven sequences composing the Unicorn Tapestries while Scharfman explains how they influenced and shaped his man-eating pony thing feature.

The Hunters Enter the Woods

An exciting thing to note is that while the Cloisters and many craft historians place these embroideries in a normally recognized sequence—and it is the format we are using in this article—no a is exactly certain about the established order of things.

” There’s not like on the back of them a’ number one’ or a ‘ number two,’” Scharfman explains”, so people have put them in an order that seems to make sense. And I totally agree that this makes sense as the first one, but one thing that I thought was fun with the movie is they’re not necessarily in the right order.”

Still most agree this is the first composition since it distinctly lacks either a unicorn or a king and/or lord. Instead it is just dogs and kingsmen approaching a formidable wilderness.

” One thing that’s nice about this tapestry specifically is there&#8217, s just so much foliage and just this overwhelming sense of nature,” says Scharfman”. That is something people write about with the Unicorn Tapestries a lot: this sense of the way nature is depicted. ” Yet it is the humans in this specific tapestry that inspire so much of the bent of Death of a Unicorn, the movie about a CEO, or feudal lord, who summons a prospective servant, Paul Rudd‘s Elliot Kintner, to court.

” I think it’s telling that]the Lord ] is not in this one,” Scharfman says”. He sent out his minions to go get him this thing that he wants in the woods and to bring it back for him. So I totally think when you start digging into the tapestries, and more broadly most medieval unicorn mythology and lore, you end up with something that really presents itself as a class commentary in that way.”

The writer-director notes that he also modeled one of his shots of Grant leading Rudd and other characters into the wilderness while hunting a unicorn specifically after this tapestry.

The Unicorn Purifies Water

The next tableau sets the scene of a unicorn purifying the water in an enchanted fountain hidden deep within the wood. The implication is that the unicorn&#8217, s horn, and perhaps blood, has restorative magical powers, which some scholars perceive as an allusion to Christ. The myth about a unicorn’s body having healing properties long predates the tapestries and was already a key element in Scharfman&#8217, s vision for the developing movie when he rediscovered these tapestries. But this image had other significant influences on the film.

” It&#8217, s a funny thing,” Scharfman chuckles”, I don’t know why there’s this fountain in the woods. The unicorn is not purifying a stream, it’s purifying water from a fountain that’s pouring out. ” It is an odd sight, but one the director sought to recreate by placing a near replica of this fountain in the Leopold estate:” In the courtyard of the house, there’s a fountain that is exactly like that one. We modeled it pretty much as close as we could possibly get to it… and that is where the unicorn is discovered by most of the characters.”

Furthermore, this tapestry inspired even the name of the film’s villains.

Says Scharfman”, Among the other animals that are drinking from the water in this tapestry, there are a couple lions, and the Leopold family is of course the antagonists, the pharmaceutical family in the movie. ” As the director acknowledges, the name &#8220, Leopold &#8221, is an allusion to Leo the lion in astrology. The Leopolds &#8217, company sigil is also a lion.

” In a lot of unicorn mythology, lions and unicorns were enemies,” Scharfman adds. &#8220, But here they’re kind of allies, or at least the unicorn seems to be happy to let them drink from the water the unicorn has purified”. It’s a departure from the myths, as well as where Death of a Unicorn goes next….

The Unicorn Crosses a Stream

In this scene, the kingsmen fall upon the poor unicorn and begin their attack as it attempts to flee across a stream. The image sets the stage for the bigger carnage to come later, but right down to the costumes of the hunters, beginning with the gent attending to the dog in the bottom left corner, this image helped inform the look of many of&nbsp, costume designer Andrea Flesch’s creations for the film.

” There’s certainly lots of little textures and details like Will Poulter&#8217, s bathing suits”, Scharfman comments. ” There’s these really great stripes, vertical stripes on one of the characters &#8217, pants, and that was certainly an influence that we took for Will. Costume-wise, Paul wears blue throughout the movie, Jenna wears red throughout the movie. They’re kind of moving towards each other]which gives you purple ] … the Leopold family, which is played by Richard, Téa, and Will, they wear a lot of gold. Gold, white, black, that’s their palette, and when you look at the characters in these tapestries, they’re wearing red, blue, gold, and then there’s a lot of green in the background”.

Even the scientists ‘ lab coats in the film are made to mimic the high collars of late Middle Ages fashion.

The Unicorn Defends Himself

Now we get into the images that really start to influence the strange, bemused tone of Death of a Unicorn. And we are not referring to the orange tree high above the action of this scene or the red-roofed castle far off in the background. Both of those informed the look and garden of the Leopold estate, which the director is quick to point out to us. But it is the violent carnage and death in the foreground of this tapestry that immediately catches the eye.

” This was one of the first bits of unicorn violence that I had seen in any artwork”, Scharfman remembers. ” When you look in this tapestry, when you go up close and you see it, it’s stabbing this dog in the intestines. It’s a hunting dog, so I think it’s self-defense. But when you go very close or if you got a high enough resolution version of it, it is very gory with the level of detail in this wound that it’s inflicting on the dog”.

He continues,” Beyond that it’s also kicking with its hind legs, which when you go back into historical accounts of unicorns, there is a lot of violence described and there’s a lot of very violent imagery that you can find. They were not these passive creatures. They really were not afraid to bite and kick and use their horn to gore people”.

Scharfman admits that ripping out a character’s intestines like he depicted happening to poor Belinda was his own flourish, but” there are accounts of them using their teeth to bite people, so it felt like it wasn’t that big of a jump”.

The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden

Perhaps the most influential tapestry on all of Death of a Unicorn,” The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden” is as important for what it doesn’t show as for what it does.

” Jenna wears a red hoodie throughout the movie, which has a very unusual shape”, notes Scharfman. ” This actually is very much inspired by what the maiden is wearing in this, with these very kind of wide sleeves. And that was a hoodie we found from a Japanese designer that they made in gray and other colors, but we asked them to make it custom for us in red. It had this really interesting cloak kind of shape to it”.

After discovering this tapestry, it became quite indicative of how Scharfman imagined the Ridley character within the film:” It got me thinking,’ Well, what is a pure hearted maiden in 2025?’ And I started thinking it’s probably a Gen-Z leftist who’s protesting on a campus somewhere right now. Someone with very strong morals and ideals”.

However, more than just the idea of having a pure-hearted maiden, this tapestry’s incompleteness created space for Scharfman to fill in his own grisly details.

” When you look at it in real life, it’s about a third the size of the other ones”, the director points out. ” That’s because it was tremendously damaged. It was recovered after the French Revolution, so it is believed to have been damaged during the revolution, perhaps. It was used on top of a sack of potatoes to keep them warm in the winter time, and so they got totally tattered”.

What is left of the tapestry is actually torn into two pieces, and it is missing crucial information &#8230, like the maiden it is named after.

” If you look in the bottom right corner of this tapestry, just under the unicorn, you can see a woman&#8217, s hand”, says Scharfman. ” So the maiden that the unicorn is actually surrendering to is not in the tapestry, which is very confusing. This is another maiden who happens to be like a handmaiden working with the maiden who is the bait. And I thought about putting that into the movie, but I was like’ that is so confusing to try and teach people ‘—that there is a maiden in the tapestry, but that’s not the maiden it &#8217, s surrendering to. It’s surrendering to an off-screen maiden that we’ll never see”.

Nonetheless, the actual maiden’s absence gave Scharfman the creative liberty to suggest there is a fuller, more complete “lost tapestry &#8221, introduced in the film that includes so much of the monster movie mayhem that was to come.

” We had these brilliant artists do this incredible artwork to take the figures of the tapestries and the style of the tapestries, and infuse it with scenes from our movie, “he explains”. So we expanded this tapestry into this lost tapestry that includes a lot of the kills and a lot of the fun elements of the horror language that we employ in the movie, but to put it in this medieval context.”

It also allowed Scharfman to reconfigure the way the tapestries are meant to be interpreted. Whereas the following two tapestries are perceived by many historians to be the end of the story, in Scharfman&#8217, s film the actual ending is this tapestry with the maiden and unicorn resting after all the death and carnage had been carried out.

The Hunters Return to the Castle / The Unicorn Rests in a Garden

The last two actual tapestries tell an interesting if aloof conclusion to their tale: first the unicorn appears to be deceased, presumably killed by the hunters after the maiden beguiled the mythical creature long enough for them to get close—and then the creature appears to be resurrected and curiously happy in captivity.

Of the former tableau’s influences, the Lady of the Manor&#8217, s golden gown informed Leoni’s cream colored suits in the movie. Scharfman also points to the shape of the unicorn&#8217, s corpse as it lies draped over a horse in the center of the scene”. When the unicorn is killed ]and taken to ] the house in our movie, it has a similar pose where it &#8217, s kind of draped out the window of a car,” says the director. In which case, perhaps historians &#8217, interpretations of the tapestries &#8217, sequence is wrong, and this is the real first tapestry, which like Death of a Unicorn sets the stage for all the carnage that is to follow?

Either way, it &#8217, s the generally accepted final image of the story which inspires at least the oblique motivation of the film &#8217, s greediest Leopold, Will Poulter&#8217, s nepobaby Shepherd”. The unicorn in captivity, that is the vision that Will Poulter&#8217, s character is going after,” Scharfman says”. This idea that we can own this thing and possess it forever, and it will be ours within these confines. ” Yet there are multiple ways of reading the actual tapestry.

Adds the director”, What&#8217, s funny about it is when you look at it, it has a very thin chain on it. It seems like it could break out of this, but it’s not. So there are questions about the symbolic meaning there. Is it there by choice? Is it there being held as captive? Who knows? But that is his vision of the future if]Shep] can possess them and contain them. Then he will have a limitless supply of unicorns.”

Given the tone and tenor of Death of a Unicorn, we might suggest the creature’s contentment is nothing more than medieval propaganda for how they actually handle confinement. Whatever the case might be, the film ends with the beasts running free and even attacking the police vehicle that Elliot and Ridley are being driven away in. However, Scharfman doesn’t think his film’s heroes are in too much danger.

” I think they’re there to try and help Jenna and Paul’s characters,” Scharfman muses of his unicorns”, but I also think they don’t really understand how cars work or police, or how any of these things actually function, because they exist outside of society. ” Still, should either Ridley or Elliot perish in the ensuing car crash, it’s no biggie”. Worst case scenario, they can resurrect some people.”

Much like the tapestries show, when it comes to unicorns, death is more of a temporary inconvenience than a bitter fact of life. And with any luck, Death of a Unicorn might inspire some folks to learn more about the O. G. medieval roots of the pop culture creature.

” We put a lot of easter eggs from these tapestries into the movie, and I think there’s something fun about that, “muses the filmmaker”. Hopefully it adds a layer of rewatchability and maybe sends some people to the Cloisters to check out the tapestries in person. ” That would be a nice kind of enchantment.

Death of a Unicorn is playing in theaters now.

The article Death of a Unicorn: The True Medieval Lore and Tapestries Explained by the Director appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for 1883, 1923 times 1-2 and Wyoming. Throughout the next year of Yellowstone prequel 1923, people have witnessed how difficult it was for Dutton family to survive year after year. The Montana winters were especially difficult, as creator Taylor Sheridan and his team have highlighted in this sophomore season, and it ]… ]

The article 1923’s Duttons May Be Ashamed of Yellowstone’s John Dutton appeared first on Den of Geek.

This essay contains Death of a Unicorn clues.

” You know what? We really had placed more investment in art story”. This is a spiritual truth that should be repeated. It also, perhaps, is a thought that flashed through the mind of Odell Leopold ( Richard E. Grant ) right before a unicorn’s horn also smashed into that soft, squishy gray matter. It might have similarly been in the back recesses of Belinda Leopold’s ( Téa Leoni ) head while another unicorn opened her belly.

They were both warned earlier in their movie by art history student Ridley Kintner ( Jenna Ortega ) that ancient masterworks tell us of the dangers posed by horned mythical creatures. She also had JPEGs of the expensive medieval tapestries to show it, with images of death by fairy disembowelment and all. But they refused to listen.

It&#8217, s a funny look befitting a film actively infused with Jurassic Park pictures as wealthy elites try and fail to control the natural world. Yet it’s not merely a joke. In fact, Death of a Unicorn writer-director Alex Scharfman extensively studied fairy folklore and tradition, telling us earlier in a Den of Geek include tale that he went back to Roman historians and the Old Testament Bible while researching the video. He also profoundly examined those pony embroideries you see in the film. Aye, they &#8217, re authentic and now live in the Met Cloisters in New York City. So we just decided to sit down afterwards with Scharfman to explain how deeply these Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries informed his picture.

” I grew up around New York in the cities and went on field trips to the Cloisters Museum where those are held and maintained”, Scharfman recalls in our latest discussion about the picture and these Romanesque magic. ” They must have been buried in my incapacitated, because at some point I forgot about them but finally when researching the film, I came upon them once and I was like’ oh right, those points!’”

These vases, which were made by an unknown artist at the turn of the 16th century, and therefore resided in an aristocratic Parisian household until almost being destroyed in the French Revolution, became a North Star for everything in Death of a Unicorn. Ortega also recently told us they were a &#8220, cheat plate” for understanding their video. But meet us below as we unpack each of the seven sequences composing the Unicorn Tapestries while Scharfman explains how they influenced and shaped his man-eating pony thing feature.

The Hunters Enter the Woods

An exciting thing to note is that while the Cloisters and many craft historians place these embroideries in a normally recognized sequence—and it is the format we are using in this article—no a is exactly certain about the established order of things.

” There’s not like on the back of them a’ number one’ or a ‘ number two,’” Scharfman explains”, so people have put them in an order that seems to make sense. And I totally agree that this makes sense as the first one, but one thing that I thought was fun with the movie is they’re not necessarily in the right order.”

Still most agree this is the first composition since it distinctly lacks either a unicorn or a king and/or lord. Instead it is just dogs and kingsmen approaching a formidable wilderness.

” One thing that’s nice about this tapestry specifically is there&#8217, s just so much foliage and just this overwhelming sense of nature,” says Scharfman”. That is something people write about with the Unicorn Tapestries a lot: this sense of the way nature is depicted. ” Yet it is the humans in this specific tapestry that inspire so much of the bent of Death of a Unicorn, the movie about a CEO, or feudal lord, who summons a prospective servant, Paul Rudd‘s Elliot Kintner, to court.

” I think it’s telling that]the Lord ] is not in this one,” Scharfman says”. He sent out his minions to go get him this thing that he wants in the woods and to bring it back for him. So I totally think when you start digging into the tapestries, and more broadly most medieval unicorn mythology and lore, you end up with something that really presents itself as a class commentary in that way.”

The writer-director notes that he also modeled one of his shots of Grant leading Rudd and other characters into the wilderness while hunting a unicorn specifically after this tapestry.

The Unicorn Purifies Water

The next tableau sets the scene of a unicorn purifying the water in an enchanted fountain hidden deep within the wood. The implication is that the unicorn&#8217, s horn, and perhaps blood, has restorative magical powers, which some scholars perceive as an allusion to Christ. The myth about a unicorn’s body having healing properties long predates the tapestries and was already a key element in Scharfman&#8217, s vision for the developing movie when he rediscovered these tapestries. But this image had other significant influences on the film.

” It&#8217, s a funny thing,” Scharfman chuckles”, I don’t know why there’s this fountain in the woods. The unicorn is not purifying a stream, it’s purifying water from a fountain that’s pouring out. ” It is an odd sight, but one the director sought to recreate by placing a near replica of this fountain in the Leopold estate:” In the courtyard of the house, there’s a fountain that is exactly like that one. We modeled it pretty much as close as we could possibly get to it… and that is where the unicorn is discovered by most of the characters.”

Furthermore, this tapestry inspired even the name of the film’s villains.

Says Scharfman”, Among the other animals that are drinking from the water in this tapestry, there are a couple lions, and the Leopold family is of course the antagonists, the pharmaceutical family in the movie. ” As the director acknowledges, the name &#8220, Leopold &#8221, is an allusion to Leo the lion in astrology. The Leopolds &#8217, company sigil is also a lion.

” In a lot of unicorn mythology, lions and unicorns were enemies,” Scharfman adds. &#8220, But here they’re kind of allies, or at least the unicorn seems to be happy to let them drink from the water the unicorn has purified”. It’s a departure from the myths, as well as where Death of a Unicorn goes next….

The Unicorn Crosses a Stream

In this scene, the kingsmen fall upon the poor unicorn and begin their attack as it attempts to flee across a stream. The image sets the stage for the bigger carnage to come later, but right down to the costumes of the hunters, beginning with the gent attending to the dog in the bottom left corner, this image helped inform the look of many of&nbsp, costume designer Andrea Flesch’s creations for the film.

” There’s certainly lots of little textures and details like Will Poulter&#8217, s bathing suits”, Scharfman comments. ” There’s these really great stripes, vertical stripes on one of the characters &#8217, pants, and that was certainly an influence that we took for Will. Costume-wise, Paul wears blue throughout the movie, Jenna wears red throughout the movie. They’re kind of moving towards each other]which gives you purple ] … the Leopold family, which is played by Richard, Téa, and Will, they wear a lot of gold. Gold, white, black, that’s their palette, and when you look at the characters in these tapestries, they’re wearing red, blue, gold, and then there’s a lot of green in the background”.

Even the scientists ‘ lab coats in the film are made to mimic the high collars of late Middle Ages fashion.

The Unicorn Defends Himself

Now we get into the images that really start to influence the strange, bemused tone of Death of a Unicorn. And we are not referring to the orange tree high above the action of this scene or the red-roofed castle far off in the background. Both of those informed the look and garden of the Leopold estate, which the director is quick to point out to us. But it is the violent carnage and death in the foreground of this tapestry that immediately catches the eye.

” This was one of the first bits of unicorn violence that I had seen in any artwork”, Scharfman remembers. ” When you look in this tapestry, when you go up close and you see it, it’s stabbing this dog in the intestines. It’s a hunting dog, so I think it’s self-defense. But when you go very close or if you got a high enough resolution version of it, it is very gory with the level of detail in this wound that it’s inflicting on the dog”.

He continues,” Beyond that it’s also kicking with its hind legs, which when you go back into historical accounts of unicorns, there is a lot of violence described and there’s a lot of very violent imagery that you can find. They were not these passive creatures. They really were not afraid to bite and kick and use their horn to gore people”.

Scharfman admits that ripping out a character’s intestines like he depicted happening to poor Belinda was his own flourish, but” there are accounts of them using their teeth to bite people, so it felt like it wasn’t that big of a jump”.

The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden

Perhaps the most influential tapestry on all of Death of a Unicorn,” The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden” is as important for what it doesn’t show as for what it does.

” Jenna wears a red hoodie throughout the movie, which has a very unusual shape”, notes Scharfman. ” This actually is very much inspired by what the maiden is wearing in this, with these very kind of wide sleeves. And that was a hoodie we found from a Japanese designer that they made in gray and other colors, but we asked them to make it custom for us in red. It had this really interesting cloak kind of shape to it”.

After discovering this tapestry, it became quite indicative of how Scharfman imagined the Ridley character within the film:” It got me thinking,’ Well, what is a pure hearted maiden in 2025?’ And I started thinking it’s probably a Gen-Z leftist who’s protesting on a campus somewhere right now. Someone with very strong morals and ideals”.

However, more than just the idea of having a pure-hearted maiden, this tapestry’s incompleteness created space for Scharfman to fill in his own grisly details.

” When you look at it in real life, it’s about a third the size of the other ones”, the director points out. ” That’s because it was tremendously damaged. It was recovered after the French Revolution, so it is believed to have been damaged during the revolution, perhaps. It was used on top of a sack of potatoes to keep them warm in the winter time, and so they got totally tattered”.

What is left of the tapestry is actually torn into two pieces, and it is missing crucial information &#8230, like the maiden it is named after.

” If you look in the bottom right corner of this tapestry, just under the unicorn, you can see a woman&#8217, s hand”, says Scharfman. ” So the maiden that the unicorn is actually surrendering to is not in the tapestry, which is very confusing. This is another maiden who happens to be like a handmaiden working with the maiden who is the bait. And I thought about putting that into the movie, but I was like’ that is so confusing to try and teach people ‘—that there is a maiden in the tapestry, but that’s not the maiden it &#8217, s surrendering to. It’s surrendering to an off-screen maiden that we’ll never see”.

Nonetheless, the actual maiden’s absence gave Scharfman the creative liberty to suggest there is a fuller, more complete “lost tapestry &#8221, introduced in the film that includes so much of the monster movie mayhem that was to come.

” We had these brilliant artists do this incredible artwork to take the figures of the tapestries and the style of the tapestries, and infuse it with scenes from our movie, “he explains”. So we expanded this tapestry into this lost tapestry that includes a lot of the kills and a lot of the fun elements of the horror language that we employ in the movie, but to put it in this medieval context.”

It also allowed Scharfman to reconfigure the way the tapestries are meant to be interpreted. Whereas the following two tapestries are perceived by many historians to be the end of the story, in Scharfman&#8217, s film the actual ending is this tapestry with the maiden and unicorn resting after all the death and carnage had been carried out.

The Hunters Return to the Castle / The Unicorn Rests in a Garden

The last two actual tapestries tell an interesting if aloof conclusion to their tale: first the unicorn appears to be deceased, presumably killed by the hunters after the maiden beguiled the mythical creature long enough for them to get close—and then the creature appears to be resurrected and curiously happy in captivity.

Of the former tableau’s influences, the Lady of the Manor&#8217, s golden gown informed Leoni’s cream colored suits in the movie. Scharfman also points to the shape of the unicorn&#8217, s corpse as it lies draped over a horse in the center of the scene”. When the unicorn is killed ]and taken to ] the house in our movie, it has a similar pose where it &#8217, s kind of draped out the window of a car,” says the director. In which case, perhaps historians &#8217, interpretations of the tapestries &#8217, sequence is wrong, and this is the real first tapestry, which like Death of a Unicorn sets the stage for all the carnage that is to follow?

Either way, it &#8217, s the generally accepted final image of the story which inspires at least the oblique motivation of the film &#8217, s greediest Leopold, Will Poulter&#8217, s nepobaby Shepherd”. The unicorn in captivity, that is the vision that Will Poulter&#8217, s character is going after,” Scharfman says”. This idea that we can own this thing and possess it forever, and it will be ours within these confines. ” Yet there are multiple ways of reading the actual tapestry.

Adds the director”, What&#8217, s funny about it is when you look at it, it has a very thin chain on it. It seems like it could break out of this, but it’s not. So there are questions about the symbolic meaning there. Is it there by choice? Is it there being held as captive? Who knows? But that is his vision of the future if]Shep] can possess them and contain them. Then he will have a limitless supply of unicorns.”

Given the tone and tenor of Death of a Unicorn, we might suggest the creature’s contentment is nothing more than medieval propaganda for how they actually handle confinement. Whatever the case might be, the film ends with the beasts running free and even attacking the police vehicle that Elliot and Ridley are being driven away in. However, Scharfman doesn’t think his film’s heroes are in too much danger.

” I think they’re there to try and help Jenna and Paul’s characters,” Scharfman muses of his unicorns”, but I also think they don’t really understand how cars work or police, or how any of these things actually function, because they exist outside of society. ” Still, should either Ridley or Elliot perish in the ensuing car crash, it’s no biggie”. Worst case scenario, they can resurrect some people.”

Much like the tapestries show, when it comes to unicorns, death is more of a temporary inconvenience than a bitter fact of life. And with any luck, Death of a Unicorn might inspire some folks to learn more about the O. G. medieval roots of the pop culture creature.

” We put a lot of easter eggs from these tapestries into the movie, and I think there’s something fun about that, “muses the filmmaker”. Hopefully it adds a layer of rewatchability and maybe sends some people to the Cloisters to check out the tapestries in person. ” That would be a nice kind of enchantment.

Death of a Unicorn is playing in theaters now.

The post Death of a Unicorn: The Real Medieval Lore and Tapestries Explained by the Director appeared first on Den of Geek.

We agree: the computer-generated eyes 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 photos. Knowledge is taken out of natural environment and recombined into an isolated preview that’s detached from reality.

However, oddly enough, people are personalities to serve as a source of inspiration for architecture in the real world.

Personas: A action up

Most manufacturers have created, used, or come across personalities at least once in their profession. The Interaction Design Foundation defines profile as “fictional characters that you create based upon your research in order to represent the various consumer types that might use your company, product, page, or brand,” according to 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 relatable, ]and ] easy to communicate, digest, reference, and apply to product and service development.”

The decontextualization of personalities

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 analyze the information in a way that excludes the subjects from their particular contexts. As a result, personalities don’t describe important factors that make you realize 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 stable, according to individuals.

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, you go about doing things. 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.

Personalities do not account for this variation in their attempt to improve reality; instead, they present a consumer as a predetermined set of features. Like character tests, personas seize people away from real life. 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 discredits diversity, perpetuates stereotypes, and doesn’t reveal reality.

Personas rely on people, not the environment

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 pattern for one or more specific situations where a certain product might be used by a large number of people. Personas, but, show the customer alone rather than explain how the consumer relates to the environment.

Did 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 explain the circumstances under which you make your decisions, the persona 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? Unfortunately, what often happens is that you take a fictional character and based on that fiction determine how this character might deal with a certain situation. How could you possibly understand how someone you want to represent behave in new circumstances if you hadn’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 made up of observations from numerous 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”. The celebrity’s statement was literally reported, but the reporter failed to explain the context and how the non-verbal expressions were used. 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 a step further, combining a decontextualized finding with another decontextualized finding from someone else. 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?

The validity of personas is deceiving.

To a certain extent, designers realize that a persona is a lifeless average. Designers create “relatable” personas to make them appear like 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, dismissed the importance of their environment, and added 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 life. 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 certain 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. A visual impairment may be temporary ( recovery from eye surgery ), permanent ( blindness ), 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.

In qualitative research, accuracy comes from accurate sampling rather than quantity. You select the people that best represent the “population” you’re designing for. If you select the right sample and 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 remains: how do you select a sample representative? 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 needed to understand the reason behind these early adopters in order to build a significant 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. Each interviewee would provide a story that would then become much more interesting and precise with the additions made by their spouses, husbands, kids, or occasionally even pets. 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. Follow-up questions will be written down in a way that is best suited for an interview, and they should be conducted in a semi-structured manner. 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 with several Dynamic Selves, each” Self” representing one of the circumstances you have examined throughout the research analysis. 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. These photos should be taken directly from field research, but any image that is evocative and representative will do, as long as it’s accurate and depicts meaningful actions that you associate with your participants. For example, one of our interviewees told us about his mountain home where he used to spend every weekend with his family. Therefore, we depicted him taking a hike with his young daughter.

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 creative uses

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, has come to know 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 empathy for people; the bigger the group, the smaller 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 creating new plot devices to “realize” the character, no more implausible bias. It’s simply how this person is in real life. In fact, as we all know, personas quickly turn into nothing more than a name in our priority guides and prototype screens because we all know these characters don’t really exist.

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 effective at persuasion. Documentation of real research is essential in achieving this result. The circumstances of your design proposals resound in your mind when you encounter Alessandra. 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 contexts.

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. Use those as metaphors for 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.

Design needs to shift away from fiction and embrace reality as our guide and inspiration in its messy, surprising, and unquantifiable beauty.

But what on earth is a zealous stress?

Envision a person determined to do it all. She has two wonderful children whom she, along with her father who is also working mildly, is homeschooling during a crisis. She has a demanding customer weight at work—all of whom she loves. She gets up early to get some movement in ( or frequently catch up on work ), does meal training as the children are eating breakfast, and gets to work while positioning herself near “fourth quality” to listen in as she juggles clients, jobs, and expenses. Sound like a bit? Also with a supportive group both at home and at work, it is.

Sounds like this person has too much on her disk and needs self-care. But no, she doesn’t have occasion for that. In truth, she starts to feel like she’s dropping balls. Never accomplishing much. There’s not enough of her to be here and that, she is trying to divide her head in two all the time, all day, every day. She starts to fear herself. And as those thoughts creep in more and more, her domestic tale becomes more and more important.

Instantly she KNOWS what she needs to accomplish! She really Would MORE.

This is a difficult and dangerous period. Hear why? Because when she doesn’t end that new purpose, that storyline will get worse. Immediately she’s failing. She isn’t doing much. SHE is not enough. She may fail, she might fail her home… so she’ll get more she should accomplish. She doesn’t nap as much, proceed because much, all in the attempts to do more. Caught in this period of trying to prove herself to herself, not reaching any purpose. Not feeling “enough”.

But, yeah, that’s what zealous burnout looks like for me. It doesn’t happen overnight in some magnificent sign but rather carefully builds over weeks and months. My burning out procedure looks like speeding up, not a man losing focus. I rate up and up and up… and therefore I simply stop.

I am the one who was

It’s amusing the things that shape us. Through the glass of youth, I viewed the worries, problems, and sacrifices of someone who had to make it all work without having much. I was happy that my mom was so competent and my dad sympathetic, I never went without and also got an extra here or there.

Growing up, I did not think pity when my family paid with meal stamps, in truth, I’d have probably taken on any debate on the topic, orally eviscerating anyone who dared to criticize the disabled person trying to make sure all our needs were met with so little. As a child, I watched the way the fear of not making those ends meet impacted people I love. As the non-disabled person in my home, I would take on many of the physical tasks because I was” the one who could” make our lives a little easier. I learned early to associate fears or uncertainty with putting more of myself into it— I am the one who can. I learned early that when something frightens me, I can double down and work harder to make it better. I can own the challenge. When people have seen this in me as an adult, I’ve been told I seem fearless, but make no mistake, I’m not. If I seem fearless, it’s because this behavior was forged from other people’s fears.

And here I am, more than 30 years later still feeling the urge to mindlessly push myself forward when faced with overwhelming tasks ahead of me, assuming that I am the one who can and therefore should. I find myself driven to prove that I can make things happen if I work longer hours, take on more responsibility, and do more.

I do not see people who struggle financially as failures, because I have seen how strong that tide can be—it pulls you along the way. I truly get that I have been privileged to be able to avoid many of the challenges that were present in my youth. That said, I am still” the one who can” who feels she should, so if I were faced with not having enough to make ends meet for my own family, I would see myself as having failed. Though I am supported and educated, most of this is due to good fortune. I will, however, allow myself the arrogance of saying I have been careful with my choices to have encouraged that luck. My identity stems from the idea that I am” the one who can” so therefore feel obligated to do the most. I can choose to stop, and with some quite literal cold water splashed in my face, I’ve made the choice to before. But that choosing to stop is not my go-to, I move forward, driven by a fear that is so a part of me that I barely notice it’s there until I’m feeling utterly worn away.

So why all the history? You see, burnout is a fickle thing. I have heard and read a lot about burnout over the years. Burnout is real. Especially now, with COVID, many of us are balancing more than we ever have before—all at once! It’s hard, and the procrastinating, the avoidance, the shutting down impacts so many amazing professionals. There are important articles that relate to what I imagine must be the majority of people out there, but not me. That’s not what my burnout looks like.

The dangerous invisibility of zealous burnout

A lot of work environments see the extra hours, extra effort, and overall focused commitment as an asset ( and sometimes that’s all it is ). They see someone trying to rise to challenges, not someone stuck in their fear. Many well-meaning organizations have safeguards in place to protect their teams from burnout. But in cases like this, those alarms are not always tripped, and then when the inevitable stop comes, some members of the organization feel surprised and disappointed. And sometimes maybe even betrayed.

Parents—more so mothers, statistically speaking—are praised as being so on top of it all when they can work, be involved in the after-school activities, practice self-care in the form of diet and exercise, and still meet friends for coffee or wine. During COVID many of us have binged countless streaming episodes showing how it’s so hard for the female protagonist, but she is strong and funny and can do it. It’s a “very special episode” when she breaks down, cries in the bathroom, woefully admits she needs help, and just stops for a bit. Truth is, countless people are hiding their tears or are doom-scrolling to escape. We know that the media is a lie to amuse us, but often the perception that it’s what we should strive for has penetrated much of society.

Women and burnout

I love men. And though I don’t love every man ( heads up, I don’t love every woman or nonbinary person either ), I think there is a beautiful spectrum of individuals who represent that particular binary gender.

That said, women are still more often at risk of burnout than their male counterparts, especially in these COVID stressed times. Mothers in the workplace feel the pressure to do all the “mom” things while giving 110 %. Mothers not in the workplace feel they need to do more to” justify” their lack of traditional employment. Women who are not mothers often feel the need to do even more because they don’t have that extra pressure at home. It’s vicious and systemic and so a part of our culture that we’re often not even aware of the enormity of the pressures we put on ourselves and each other.

And there are prices beyond happiness too. Harvard Health Publishing released a study a decade ago that “uncovered strong links between women’s job stress and cardiovascular disease”. The CDC noted,” Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, killing 299, 578 women in 2017—or about 1 in every 5 female deaths”.

This relationship between work stress and health, from what I have read, is more dangerous for women than it is for their non-female counterparts.

But what if your burnout isn’t like that either?

That might not be you either. After all, each of us is so different and how we respond to stressors is too. It’s part of what makes us human. Don’t stress what burnout looks like, just learn to recognize it in yourself. Here are a few questions I sometimes ask friends if I am concerned about them.

Are you happy? This simple question should be the first thing you ask yourself. Chances are, even if you’re burning out doing all the things you love, as you approach burnout you’ll just stop taking as much joy from it all.

Do you feel empowered to say no? I have observed in myself and others that when someone is burning out, they no longer feel they can say no to things. Even those who don’t” speed up” feel pressure to say yes to not disappoint the people around them.

What are three things you’ve done for yourself? Another observance is that we all tend to stop doing things for ourselves. Anything from skipping showers and eating poorly to avoiding talking to friends. These can be red flags.

Are you making excuses? Many of us try to disregard feelings of burnout. Over and over I have heard,” It’s just crunch time”,” As soon as I do this one thing, it will all be better”, and” Well I should be able to handle this, so I’ll figure it out”. And it might really be crunch time, a single goal, and/or a skill set you need to learn. That happens—life happens. BUT if this doesn’t stop, be honest with yourself. If you’ve worked more 50-hour weeks since January than not, maybe it’s not crunch time—maybe it’s a bad situation that you’re burning out from.

Do you have a plan to stop feeling this way? If something is truly temporary and you do need to just push through, then it has an exit route with a
defined end.

Take the time to listen to yourself as you would a friend. Be honest, allow yourself to be uncomfortable, and break the thought cycles that prevent you from healing.

So now what?

What I just described is a different path to burnout, but it’s still burnout. There are well-established approaches to working through burnout:

• Get enough sleep.
• Eat healthy.
• Work out.
• Get outside.
• Take a break.
• Overall, practice self-care.

Those are hard for me because they feel like more tasks. If I’m in the burnout cycle, doing any of the above for me feels like a waste. The narrative is that if I’m already failing, why would I take care of myself when I’m dropping all those other balls? People need me, right?

If you’re deep in the cycle, your inner voice might be pretty awful by now. If you need to, tell yourself you need to take care of the person your people depend on. If your roles are pushing you toward burnout, use them to help make healing easier by justifying the time spent working on you.

To help remind myself of the airline attendant message about putting the mask on yourself first, I have come up with a few things that I do when I start feeling myself going into a zealous burnout.

Cook an elaborate meal for someone!

OK, I am a “food-focused” individual so cooking for someone is always my go-to. There are countless tales in my home of someone walking into the kitchen and turning right around and walking out when they noticed I was” chopping angrily”. But it’s more than that, and you should give it a try. Seriously. It’s the perfect go-to if you don’t feel worthy of taking time for yourself—do it for someone else. Most of us work in a digital world, so cooking can fill all of your senses and force you to be in the moment with all the ways you perceive the world. It can break you out of your head and help you gain a better perspective. In my house, I’ve been known to pick a place on the map and cook food that comes from wherever that is ( thank you, Pinterest ). I love cooking Indian food, as the smells are warm, the bread needs just enough kneading to keep my hands busy, and the process takes real attention for me because it’s not what I was brought up making. And in the end, we all win!

Vent like a foul-mouthed fool

Be careful with this one!

I have been making an effort to practice more gratitude over the past few years, and I recognize the true benefits of that. That said, sometimes you just gotta let it all out—even the ugly. Hell, I’m a big fan of not sugarcoating our lives, and that sometimes means that to get past the big pile of poop, you’re gonna wanna complain about it a bit.

When that is what’s needed, turn to a trusted friend and allow yourself some pure verbal diarrhea, saying all the things that are bothering you. You need to trust this friend not to judge, to see your pain, and, most importantly, to tell you to remove your cranium from your own rectal cavity. Seriously, it’s about getting a reality check here! One of the things I admire the most about my husband ( though often after the fact ) is his ability to break things down to their simplest. ” We’re spending our lives together, of course you’re going to disappoint me from time to time, so get over it” has been his way of speaking his dedication, love, and acceptance of me—and I could not be more grateful. It also, of course, has meant that I needed to remove my head from that rectal cavity. So, again, usually those moments are appreciated in hindsight.

Pick up a book!

There are many books out there that aren’t so much self-help as they are people just like you sharing their stories and how they’ve come to find greater balance. Maybe you’ll find something that speaks to you. Titles that have stood out to me include:

• Thrive by Arianna Huffington
• Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
• Girl, Stop Apologizing by Rachel Hollis
• Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Or, another tactic I love to employ is to read or listen to a book that has NOTHING to do with my work-life balance. I’ve read the following books and found they helped balance me out because my mind was pondering their interesting topics instead of running in circles:

• The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart
• Superlife by Darin Olien
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford
• Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway

If you’re not into reading, pick up a topic on YouTube or choose a podcast to subscribe to. I’ve watched countless permaculture and gardening topics in addition to how to raise chickens and ducks. For the record, I do not have a particularly large food garden, nor do I own livestock of any kind… yet. I just find the topic interesting, and it has nothing to do with any aspect of my life that needs anything from me.

Forgive yourself

You are never going to be perfect—hell, it would be boring if you were. It’s OK to be broken and flawed. It’s human to be tired and sad and worried. It’s OK to not do it all. It’s scary to be imperfect, but you cannot be brave if nothing were scary.

This last one is the most important: allow yourself permission to NOT do it all. You never promised to be everything to everyone at all times. We are more powerful than the fears that drive us.

This is hard. It is hard for me. It’s what’s driven me to write this—that it’s OK to stop. It’s OK that your unhealthy habit that might even benefit those around you needs to end. You can still be successful in life.

I recently read that we are all writing our eulogy in how we live. Knowing that your professional accomplishments won’t be mentioned in that speech, what will yours say? What do you want it to say?

Look, I get that none of these ideas will “fix it”, and that’s not their purpose. None of us are in control of our surroundings, only how we respond to them. These suggestions are to help stop the spiral effect so that you are empowered to address the underlying issues and choose your response. They are things that work for me most of the time. Maybe they’ll work for you.

Does this sound familiar?

If this sounds familiar, it’s not just you. Don’t let your negative self-talk tell you that you “even burn out wrong”. It’s not wrong. Even if rooted in fear like my own drivers, I believe that this need to do more comes from a place of love, determination, motivation, and other wonderful attributes that make you the amazing person you are. We’re going to be OK, ya know. The lives that unfold before us might never look like that story in our head—that idea of “perfect” or “done” we’re looking for, but that’s OK. Really, when we stop and look around, usually the only eyes that judge us are in the mirror.

Do you remember that Winnie the Pooh sketch that had Pooh eat so much at Rabbit’s house that his buttocks couldn’t fit through the door? Well, I already associate a lot with Rabbit, so it came as no surprise when he abruptly declared that this was unacceptable. But do you recall what happened next? He put a shelf across poor Pooh’s ankles and decorations on his back, and made the best of the big butt in his kitchen.

At the end of the day we are resourceful and know that we are able to push ourselves if we need to—even when we are tired to our core or have a big butt of fluff’ n’ stuff in our room. None of us has to be afraid, as we can manage any obstacle put in front of us. And maybe that means we will need to redefine success to allow space for being uncomfortably human, but that doesn’t really sound so bad either.

So, wherever you are right now, please breathe. Do what you need to do to get out of your head. Forgive and take care.

Feedback, in whichever form it takes, and whatever it may be called, is one of the most powerful sweet skills that we have at our disposal to jointly get our models to a better position while growing our own skills and ideas.

Feedback is also one of the most underestimated equipment, and generally by assuming that we’re now great at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a skill that can be trained, grown, and improved. Bad feedback can make confusion in projects, send down confidence, and change faith and team collaboration over the long term. Quality comments can be a revolutionary force.

Practicing our knowledge is absolutely a good way to enhance, but the learning gets yet faster when it’s paired with a good base that programs and focuses the exercise. What are some basic aspects of giving excellent feedback? And how can comments be adjusted for isolated and distributed job settings?

On the web, we can discover a long history of sequential suggestions: from the early weeks of open source, script was shared and discussed on email lists. Today, developers engage on pull requests, designers comment in their favorite design tools, project managers and scrum masters exchange ideas on tickets, and so on.

Design critique is often the name used for a type of feedback that’s provided to make our work better, collaboratively. So it shares a lot of the principles with feedback in general, but it also has some differences.

The content

The foundation of every good critique is the feedback’s content, so that’s where we need to start. There are many models that you can use to shape your content. The one that I personally like best—because it’s clear and actionable—is this one from Lara Hogan.

While this equation is generally used to give feedback to people, it also fits really well in a design critique because it ultimately answers some of the core questions that we work on: What? Where? Why? How? Imagine that you’re giving some feedback about some design work that spans multiple screens, like an onboarding flow: there are some pages shown, a flow blueprint, and an outline of the decisions made. You spot something that could be improved. If you keep the three elements of the equation in mind, you’ll have a mental model that can help you be more precise and effective.

Here is a comment that could be given as a part of some feedback, and it might look reasonable at a first glance: it seems to superficially fulfill the elements in the equation. But does it?

Not sure about the buttons ‘ styles and hierarchy—it feels off. Can you change them?

Observation for design feedback doesn’t just mean pointing out which part of the interface your feedback refers to, but it also refers to offering a perspective that’s as specific as possible. Are you providing the user’s perspective? Your expert perspective? A business perspective? The project manager’s perspective? A first-time user’s perspective?

When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back.

Impact is about the why. Just pointing out a UI element might sometimes be enough if the issue may be obvious, but more often than not, you should add an explanation of what you’re pointing out.

When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an” ×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow.

The question approach is meant to provide open guidance by eliciting the critical thinking in the designer receiving the feedback. Notably, in Lara’s equation she provides a second approach: request, which instead provides guidance toward a specific solution. While that’s a viable option for feedback in general, for design critiques, in my experience, defaulting to the question approach usually reaches the best solutions because designers are generally more comfortable in being given an open space to explore.

The difference between the two can be exemplified with, for the question approach:

When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an” ×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Would it make sense to unify them?

Or, for the request approach:

When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an” ×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same pair of forward and back buttons.

At this point in some situations, it might be useful to integrate with an extra why: why you consider the given suggestion to be better.

When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an” ×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons so that users don’t get confused.

Choosing the question approach or the request approach can also at times be a matter of personal preference. A while ago, I was putting a lot of effort into improving my feedback: I did rounds of anonymous feedback, and I reviewed feedback with other people. After a few rounds of this work and a year later, I got a positive response: my feedback came across as effective and grounded. Until I changed teams. To my shock, my next round of feedback from one specific person wasn’t that great. The reason is that I had previously tried not to be prescriptive in my advice—because the people who I was previously working with preferred the open-ended question format over the request style of suggestions. But now in this other team, there was one person who instead preferred specific guidance. So I adapted my feedback for them to include requests.

One comment that I heard come up a few times is that this kind of feedback is quite long, and it doesn’t seem very efficient. No… but also yes. Let’s explore both sides.

No, this style of feedback is actually efficient because the length here is a byproduct of clarity, and spending time giving this kind of feedback can provide exactly enough information for a good fix. Also if we zoom out, it can reduce future back-and-forth conversations and misunderstandings, improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of collaboration beyond the single comment. Imagine that in the example above the feedback were instead just,” Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons”. The designer receiving this feedback wouldn’t have much to go by, so they might just apply the change. In later iterations, the interface might change or they might introduce new features—and maybe that change might not make sense anymore. Without the why, the designer might imagine that the change is about consistency… but what if it wasn’t? So there could now be an underlying concern that changing the buttons would be perceived as a regression.

Yes, this style of feedback is not always efficient because the points in some comments don’t always need to be exhaustive, sometimes because certain changes may be obvious (” The font used doesn’t follow our guidelines” ) and sometimes because the team may have a lot of internal knowledge such that some of the whys may be implied.

So the equation above isn’t meant to suggest a strict template for feedback but a mnemonic to reflect and improve the practice. Even after years of active work on my critiques, I still from time to time go back to this formula and reflect on whether what I just wrote is effective.

The tone

Well-grounded content is the foundation of feedback, but that’s not really enough. The soft skills of the person who’s providing the critique can multiply the likelihood that the feedback will be well received and understood. Tone alone can make the difference between content that’s rejected or welcomed, and it’s been demonstrated that only positive feedback creates sustained change in people.

Since our goal is to be understood and to have a positive working environment, tone is essential to work on. Over the years, I’ve tried to summarize the required soft skills in a formula that mirrors the one for content: the receptivity equation.

Respectful feedback comes across as grounded, solid, and constructive. It’s the kind of feedback that, whether it’s positive or negative, is perceived as useful and fair.

Timing refers to when the feedback happens. To-the-point feedback doesn’t have much hope of being well received if it’s given at the wrong time. Questioning the entire high-level information architecture of a new feature when it’s about to ship might still be relevant if that questioning highlights a major blocker that nobody saw, but it’s way more likely that those concerns will have to wait for a later rework. So in general, attune your feedback to the stage of the project. Early iteration? Late iteration? Polishing work in progress? These all have different needs. The right timing will make it more likely that your feedback will be well received.

Attitude is the equivalent of intent, and in the context of person-to-person feedback, it can be referred to as radical candor. That means checking before we write to see whether what we have in mind will truly help the person and make the project better overall. This might be a hard reflection at times because maybe we don’t want to admit that we don’t really appreciate that person. Hopefully that’s not the case, but that can happen, and that’s okay. Acknowledging and owning that can help you make up for that: how would I write if I really cared about them? How can I avoid being passive aggressive? How can I be more constructive?

Form is relevant especially in a diverse and cross-cultural work environments because having great content, perfect timing, and the right attitude might not come across if the way that we write creates misunderstandings. There might be many reasons for this: sometimes certain words might trigger specific reactions, sometimes nonnative speakers might not understand all the nuances of some sentences, sometimes our brains might just be different and we might perceive the world differently—neurodiversity must be taken into consideration. Whatever the reason, it’s important to review not just what we write but how.

A few years back, I was asking for some feedback on how I give feedback. I received some good advice but also a comment that surprised me. They pointed out that when I wrote” Oh, ]… ]”, I made them feel stupid. That wasn’t my intent! I felt really bad, and I just realized that I provided feedback to them for months, and every time I might have made them feel stupid. I was horrified … but also thankful. I made a quick fix: I added “oh” in my list of replaced words (your choice between: macOS’s text replacement, aText, TextExpander, or others ) so that when I typed “oh”, it was instantly deleted.

Something to highlight because it’s quite frequent—especially in teams that have a strong group spirit—is that people tend to beat around the bush. It’s important to remember here that a positive attitude doesn’t mean going light on the feedback—it just means that even when you provide hard, difficult, or challenging feedback, you do so in a way that’s respectful and constructive. The nicest thing that you can do for someone is to help them grow.

We have a great advantage in giving feedback in written form: it can be reviewed by another person who isn’t directly involved, which can help to reduce or remove any bias that might be there. I found that the best, most insightful moments for me have happened when I’ve shared a comment and I’ve asked someone who I highly trusted,” How does this sound”?,” How can I do it better”, and even” How would you have written it” ?—and I’ve learned a lot by seeing the two versions side by side.

The format

Asynchronous feedback also has a major inherent advantage: we can take more time to refine what we’ve written to make sure that it fulfills two main goals: the clarity of communication and the actionability of the suggestions.

Let’s imagine that someone shared a design iteration for a project. You are reviewing it and leaving a comment. There are many ways to do this, and of course context matters, but let’s try to think about some elements that may be useful to consider.

In terms of clarity, start by grounding the critique that you’re about to give by providing context. Specifically, this means describing where you’re coming from: do you have a deep knowledge of the project, or is this the first time that you’re seeing it? Are you coming from a high-level perspective, or are you figuring out the details? Are there regressions? Which user’s perspective are you taking when providing your feedback? Is the design iteration at a point where it would be okay to ship this, or are there major things that need to be addressed first?

Providing context is helpful even if you’re sharing feedback within a team that already has some information on the project. And context is absolutely essential when giving cross-team feedback. If I were to review a design that might be indirectly related to my work, and if I had no knowledge about how the project arrived at that point, I would say so, highlighting my take as external.

We often focus on the negatives, trying to outline all the things that could be done better. That’s of course important, but it’s just as important—if not more—to focus on the positives, especially if you saw progress from the previous iteration. This might seem superfluous, but it’s important to keep in mind that design is a discipline where there are hundreds of possible solutions for every problem. So pointing out that the design solution that was chosen is good and explaining why it’s good has two major benefits: it confirms that the approach taken was solid, and it helps to ground your negative feedback. In the longer term, sharing positive feedback can help prevent regressions on things that are going well because those things will have been highlighted as important. As a bonus, positive feedback can also help reduce impostor syndrome.

There’s one powerful approach that combines both context and a focus on the positives: frame how the design is better than the status quo ( compared to a previous iteration, competitors, or benchmarks ) and why, and then on that foundation, you can add what could be improved. This is powerful because there’s a big difference between a critique that’s for a design that’s already in good shape and a critique that’s for a design that isn’t quite there yet.

Another way that you can improve your feedback is to depersonalize the feedback: the comments should always be about the work, never about the person who made it. It’s” This button isn’t well aligned” versus” You haven’t aligned this button well”. This is very easy to change in your writing by reviewing it just before sending.

In terms of actionability, one of the best approaches to help the designer who’s reading through your feedback is to split it into bullet points or paragraphs, which are easier to review and analyze one by one. For longer pieces of feedback, you might also consider splitting it into sections or even across multiple comments. Of course, adding screenshots or signifying markers of the specific part of the interface you’re referring to can also be especially useful.

One approach that I’ve personally used effectively in some contexts is to enhance the bullet points with four markers using emojis. So a red square � � means that it’s something that I consider blocking, a yellow diamond � � is something that I can be convinced otherwise, but it seems to me that it should be changed, and a green circle � � is a detailed, positive confirmation. I also use a blue spiral � � for either something that I’m not sure about, an exploration, an open alternative, or just a note. But I’d use this approach only on teams where I’ve already established a good level of trust because if it happens that I have to deliver a lot of red squares, the impact could be quite demoralizing, and I’d reframe how I’d communicate that a bit.

Let’s see how this would work by reusing the example that we used earlier as the first bullet point in this list:

• 🔶 Navigation—When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an” ×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons so that users don’t get confused.
• � � Overall— I think the page is solid, and this is good enough to be our release candidate for a version 1.0.
• � � Metrics—Good improvement in the buttons on the metrics area, the improved contrast and new focus style make them more accessible.
• � � Button Style—Using the green accent in this context creates the impression that it’s a positive action because green is usually perceived as a confirmation color. Do we need to explore a different color?
• 🔶Tiles—Given the number of items on the page, and the overall page hierarchy, it seems to me that the tiles shouldn’t be using the Subtitle 1 style but the Subtitle 2 style. This will keep the visual hierarchy more consistent.
• � � Background—Using a light texture works well, but I wonder whether it adds too much noise in this kind of page. What is the thinking in using that?

What about giving feedback directly in Figma or another design tool that allows in-place feedback? In general, I find these difficult to use because they hide discussions and they’re harder to track, but in the right context, they can be very effective. Just make sure that each of the comments is separate so that it’s easier to match each discussion to a single task, similar to the idea of splitting mentioned above.

One final note: say the obvious. Sometimes we might feel that something is obviously good or obviously wrong, and so we don’t say it. Or sometimes we might have a doubt that we don’t express because the question might sound stupid. Say it—that’s okay. You might have to reword it a little bit to make the reader feel more comfortable, but don’t hold it back. Good feedback is transparent, even when it may be obvious.

There’s another advantage of asynchronous feedback: written feedback automatically tracks decisions. Especially in large projects,” Why did we do this”? could be a question that pops up from time to time, and there’s nothing better than open, transparent discussions that can be reviewed at any time. For this reason, I recommend using software that saves these discussions, without hiding them once they are resolved.

Content, tone, and format. Each one of these subjects provides a useful model, but working to improve eight areas—observation, impact, question, timing, attitude, form, clarity, and actionability—is a lot of work to put in all at once. One effective approach is to take them one by one: first identify the area that you lack the most (either from your perspective or from feedback from others ) and start there. Then the second, then the third, and so on. At first you’ll have to put in extra time for every piece of feedback that you give, but after a while, it’ll become second nature, and your impact on the work will multiply.

Thanks to Brie Anne Demkiw and Mike Shelton for reviewing the first draft of this article.