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The same holds true for those of us who are currently employed in design and development. 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. Every day we as developers and designers re-enter a routine music, a brand-new concept or technology emerges to shake things up and completely alter 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 development of online 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 language like PHP, Java, and.NET took Perl as the primary back-end computers, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the garbage bin. With these improved server-side software, the first period of internet programs started with content-management methods (especially those used in blogs like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress ) In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened gates for sequential interaction between the front end and back close. Websites now no longer needed to refresh their webpages ‘ content. A grain of Script frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and ruby arose to aid developers develop more credible client-side conversation across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like photo alternative enable the use of fonts by skilled developers and developers. And technology like Flash made it possible to include movies, sports, and even more engagement.

These new methods, requirements, and systems greatly boosted the sector’s growth. Web style flourished as creators and designers explored more different styles and designs. However, we also relied heavily on tricks. 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 ). All kinds of nested floats or absolute positioning ( or both ) were necessary for complicated layouts. Display and photo substitute for specialty styles was a great start toward varying the designs from the big five, but both tricks introduced convenience and efficiency issues. Additionally, JavaScript libraries made it simple for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, even at the expense of double or even quadrupling the download size of basic websites.

The web as software platform

The front-end and back-end symbiosis continued to improve, leading to the development of the modern web application. 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. Along with these tools, there were additional options, such as shared package libraries, build automation, and collaborative version control. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.

Mobile devices increased in their capabilities as well, and they gave us access to the internet in our pockets at the same time. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.

This fusion of potent mobile devices and potent development tools contributed to the growth of social media and other centralized tools for user interaction and consumption. 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 made connections on a global scale, with both positive and negative outcomes.

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

Where we are now

It seems like we’ve reached yet another significant turning point in recent years. 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 create a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all varieties. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other IndieWeb tools can be useful in this regard, but they’re still largely underdeveloped and difficult to use for the less geeky. 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.

Especially with efforts like Interop, browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other standards like web components has increased. New technologies gain support across the board in a fraction of the time that they used to. I frequently find out about a new feature and check its browser support only to discover that its coverage is already over 80 %. 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.

We can prototype almost any idea today with just a few commands and a few lines of code. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. However, as the initial cost of these frameworks may be saved in the beginning, it eventually becomes due as their upkeep and maintenance becomes a component 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 once made it easier to adopt new techniques sooner, have since evolved into obstacles. 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 frequently, when scripts fail ( whether due to poor code, network problems, or other environmental factors ), users are left with blank or broken pages.

Where do we go from here?

Hacks of today help to shape standards for the future. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks —for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we refuse to acknowledge that they are hacks or when we choose not 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 associated with those user-friendly tools. They may make your job a little easier today, but how do they affect everything else? What is the price to the users? To future developers? To adoption of standards? Sometimes the convenience may be worth it. Sometimes it’s just a hack that you’ve gotten used to. And sometimes it’s holding you back from even better options.

Start with the basics. 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 the case with third-party frameworks. Sites built with even the hackiest of HTML from the’ 90s still work just fine today. Even after a few years, the same can’t be said about websites created with frameworks.

Design with care. Consider the effects of each choice, whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes. 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. Use the time saved by modern tools to think more carefully and make decisions with care rather than rushing to “move fast and break things”

Always be learning. If you constantly learn, you also develop. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. Even if you were to concentrate solely on learning standards, you might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year. ( Remember XHTML? ) However, ongoing learning opens up new neural connections, and the techniques you learn in one day may be useful for guiding future experiments.

Play, experiment, and be weird! The ultimate experiment is this web that we’ve created. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be brave and make new friends. Build a playground for ideas. In your own bizarre science lab, perform bizarre experiments. Start your own small business. There has never been a place where we have more room to be creative, take risks, and discover our potential.

Share and amplify. Share what you think has worked for you as you experiment, play, and learn. 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.

Make a move and make it happen.

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 incorporate our values into the products we produce, and let’s improve the world for everyone. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then share it, improve it, re-use it, or create something new. Learn. Make. Share. Grow. Rinse and repeat. Everything will change whenever you believe you have mastered the web.

The personalization space is real, between the dream of getting it right and the worry of it going wrong ( like when we encounter “persofails” similar to a company’s repeated pleas for more toilet seats from regular people ). It’s an particularly confusing place to be a modern professional without a map, a map, or a strategy.

There are no Lonely Planet and some tour guides for those of you who want to personalize because powerful customisation is so dependent on each group’s talent, technology, and market position.

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

There’s a DIY method to increase your chances for victory. You’ll at least at least disarm your boss ‘ irrational exuberance. Before the group you’ll need to properly plan.

We refer to it as prepersonalization.

Behind the audio

Take into account Spotify’s DJ feature, which was introduced last season.

We’re used to seeing the polished final outcome of a personalization have. A personal have had to be developed, budgeted, and given priority before the year-end prize, the making-of-backstory, or the behind-the-scenes success chest. Before any customisation have goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a delay of valuable ideas for expressing consumer experiences more automatically.

How do you decide where to position customisation wagers? How do you design regular interactions that didn’t journey up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve discovered that several budgeted programs second required one or more workshops to join key stakeholders and domestic customers of the technology in order to justify their continuing investments. Make it count.

We’ve closely observed the same evolution with our consumers, from major software to young companies. In our experience with working on small and large personalization work, a program’s best monitor record—and its capacity to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and manage its design and engineering efforts—turns on how successfully these prepersonalization activities play out.

Effective workshops consistently save time, money, and overall well-being by separating successful future endeavors from unsuccessful ones.

A personalization practice involves a multiyear effort of testing and feature development. It’s not a switch-flip 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. These cards are not necessary for you. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.

Set the timer for your kitchen.

How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The evaluation activities that we suggest including can ( and frequently do ) last for weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Here are a summary of our broad approach and information on the most crucial first-day activities.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

Kickstart: This specifies the terms of engagement as you concentrate on the potential, 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 stage consists of making it possible for team members to individually present their own pilots, which each include a proof-of-concept project, business case, and 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: Apt your appetite

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

Give examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike, as examples of consumer and business-to-business examples. 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 list of these in the cards. Here’s a list of 142 different interactions to jog your thinking.

It’s all about setting the tone. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? Here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework for a broader view.

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 ). We break down connected experiences into five categories in our cards: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to draw attention to the benefits of ongoing investment as well as the difference between what you deliver right now 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 crucial because it emphasizes how personalization can affect your own ways of working as well as your external customers. 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 decide where they would like to place your company’s emphasis on your product or service. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. Here, the goal is to show how various departments may view their own benefits from the effort, which can vary from one department 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 filling in the personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will data and privacy protection be a significant challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? ( We’re pretty sure you do; it’s just a matter of recognizing the need’s magnitude and its solution. ) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. For instance, our Detractor card lists six protracted behavior that is harmful to the development of our country.

Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential obstacles to your progress in the future. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. As research has shown, personalization initiatives face a number of common obstacles.

At this point, you’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? Good, you’re all set to go on.

Hit that test kitchen

What will you need next to bring your personalized recipes to life. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. They give you a variety of options for how your organization can conduct its activities because of their broad and potent capabilities. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

The key here is to avoid treating the installed software like some imagined kitchen from a fantasy remodeling project ( as one of our client executives humorously 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.

Over the course of the workshop, the ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together. 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 be made using recipes that have predetermined ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

Like a good product manager, you’ll make sure you have everything you need to make your desired interaction ( or that you can figure out what needs to be added to your pantry ) and that you validate with the right stakeholders present. 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 doesn’t just involve identifying requirements. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team:

1. compare findings to a common strategy for developing features, similar to how artists paint with the same color palette,
2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar,
3. and establish parity among performance indicators and key performance indicators as well.

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.

Create a recipe.

What ingredients are important to you? Consider the construct “what-what-when-why”

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

Five years ago, we developed these cards and card categories for the first time. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And there are still fresh possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

In the cards in the accompanying photo below, you can typically follow along with right to left in three examples of subscription-based reading apps.

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: An email is sent when a newly registered user is a subscriber and is able to highlight the breadth of the content catalog.
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 good preworkshop activity might be to consider a first draft of what these cards might be for your organization, though we’ve also found that cocreating the recipes themselves can sometimes help this process. 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.

The workshop’s later stages could be characterized as shifting from focusing on a cookbook to 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.

Architecture must be improved to produce better kitchens.

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

When a team is overfitting, it’s because they aren’t designing with their best data, which is why personalization turns into a laugh line. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. For instance, your AI’s output quality is in fact impacted 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’t stand the heat, in fact…

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach can achieve the necessary concentration and intention. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, head to the test kitchen to save time, preserve job security, and avoid imagining the creative concepts that come from the doers in your organization. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.

This framework of the workshop gives you a strong chance at long-term success as well as solid ground. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. However, if you use the same cookbook and the same recipe combination, you’ll have solid ground for success. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.

Although there are associated costs associated with purchasing this kind of technology and product design, your time well spent is on sizing up and confronting your unique situation and digital skills. Don’t squander it. The pudding is the proof, as they say.

I’ve been fascinated by shows since I was a child. I loved the figures and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I aspired to be an artist. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting activities. Yet my friends and I had movie ideas to make and sun in. But they never went any farther. However, I did end up working in user experience ( UI). Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer research is story. And you must tell a compelling story to entice stakeholders, such as the product team and decision-makers, to learn more in order to get the most out of consumer research.

Think of your favorite film. It more than likely follows a three-act narrative architecture: the installation, the turmoil, and the resolution. The second act shows what exists now, and it helps you get to know the figures and the challenges and problems that they face. The fight begins in Act 2, which introduces the issue. Here, difficulties grow or get worse. The decision comes in the third and final action. This is where the issues are resolved and the figures learn and change. This structure, in my opinion, is also a fantastic way to think about customer research, and I think it can be particularly useful for explaining consumer research to others.

Use story as a framework when conducting study.

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see studies as being inconsequential. Research is frequently one of the first things to go when expenses or deadlines are tight. 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 lead some groups, but that approach can so easily miss the chance to solve clients ‘ real issues. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. Design is enhanced by customer research. It keeps it on record, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of problems with your goods and taking corrective actions can help you be 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 take a look at the various functions and how they relate to consumer research.

Act one: layout

The setup consists entirely in comprehending the history, and that’s where basic research comes in. Basic research ( also called relational, discovery, or preliminary research ) helps you understand people and identify their problems. You’re learning about the problems people face now, what options are available, and how those challenges impact them, just like in the films. To do basic research, you may conduct situational inquiries or journal studies ( or both! ), which can assist you in identifying both prospects and problems. It doesn’t need to be a great investment in time or money.

What is the least sustainable ethnography that Erika Hall can do is spend fifteen minutes with a consumer and say,” Walk me through your day yesterday. That’s it. Provide that one ask. Opened up and listen to them for 15 days. Do everything in your power to protect both your objectives and yourself. Bam, you’re doing ethnography”. Hall predicts that “[This ] will probably prove quite fascinating. In the very unlikely event that you didn’t learn anything new or helpful, carry on with increased confidence in your way”.

This makes sense to me in all its entirety. And I love that this makes consumer research so visible. You can only attract participants and do it! You don’t need to make a lot of documentation. This can offer a wealth of knowledge about your customers, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their life. That’s exactly what work one is all about: understanding where people are coming from.

Maybe Spool talks about the importance of basic research and how it may type the bulk of your research. If you can substitute what you’ve heard in the fundamental research by using more customer information that you can obtain, such as surveys or analytics, or to highlight areas that need more research. Together, all this information creates a clearer picture of the state of things and all its inadequacies. And that’s the start of a gripping tale. It’s the place in the story where you realize that the principal characters—or the people in this case—are facing issues that they need to conquer. This is where you begin to develop compassion for the characters and support their success, much like in films. And maybe partners are now doing the same. Their concern may be with their company, which could be losing money because people are unable to complete specific tasks. Or probably they do connect with people ‘ problems. In either case, work one serves as your main strategy for piqueing interest and investment from the participants.

When partners begin to understand the value of basic research, that is open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making approach. And that can help product teams become more user-centric. This benefits everyone—users, the product, and stakeholders. It’s similar to winning an Oscar in terms of filmmaking because it frequently results in your product receiving good reviews and success. And this can be an incentive for stakeholders to repeat this process with other products. Knowing how to tell a good story is the only way to convince stakeholders to care about doing more research, and storytelling is the key to this process.

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 typically involves conducting directional research, such as usability tests, where you evaluate a potential solution ( such as a design ) to see if it addresses the issues you identified. The issues could include unmet needs or problems with a flow or process that’s tripping users up. More problems will come up in the process, much like in the second act of a film. It’s here that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this act.

According to Jakob Nielsen, five users should be typically in usability tests, which means that this number of users can typically identify the majority of the issues:” You learn less and less as you add more and more users because you will keep seeing the same things over and over again… After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by repeatedly observing the same findings 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. With fewer participants, each user’s struggles will be more easily recalled and shared with other parties when discussing 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.

Usability tests have been conducted in person for decades, but you can also do them remotely using software 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 might consider in-person usability tests like attending a play and remote sessions as more of a movie watching experience. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Usability research in person is a much more valuable learning experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. You also get real-time feedback on what they’re seeing, including surprises, disagreements, and discussions about them. 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 conducting usability testing in the field is like watching a play that is staged and controlled, where any two sessions may 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 conduct your research by meeting users at their locations. 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. You have less control over how these sessions end as researchers, but this can occasionally 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 add a level of detail that is frequently absent from remote usability tests.

That’s not to say that the “movies” —remote sessions—aren’t a good option. A wider audience can be reached through remote sessions. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see what’s going on. Additionally, they make the doors accessible to a much wider range 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.

You can ask real users questions to understand their thoughts and understanding of the solution as a result of usability testing, whether it is done remotely or in person. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. Additionally, you can test your own hypotheses and determine whether your reasoning 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. The excitement centers on Act 2, but there are also potential surprises in that Act. This is equally true of usability tests. Sometimes, participants will say unexpected things that alter the way you look at them, which can lead to unexpected turns in the story.

Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. Usability testing is often the only method of research that some stakeholders believe they ever need, especially in this regard. 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. Because you narrow down the subject matter of your feedback without understanding the needs of the users. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. In the context of a usability test, it’s only feedback on a particular design.

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 demonstrates the value of conducting both directional and foundational 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 encourage stakeholders to take action on the issues raised.

Act three: resolution

The third act is about resolving the issues from the first two acts, while the first two acts are about understanding the background and the tensions that can compel stakeholders to take action. 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 includes all members of the product team, including developers, UX experts, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other parties who have a say in the coming development. It allows the whole team to hear users ‘ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. And it gives the UX design and research teams more time to clarify, suggest alternatives, or provide more context for their choices. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

Voiceover narration of this act is typically used with audience input. 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 offer the stakeholders their suggestions and suggestions for how to create this vision.

Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. The most effective presenters employ the same methods as great storytellers: By reaffirming the status quo and then revealing a better way, they create 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 proof for “what is “—the issues you’ve identified. And “what could be “—your recommendations on how to address them. 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 as visual as quick sketches of a potential solution to a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the session is over when you’ve concluded by bridging the gaps and offering suggestions for improvement. 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 provides stakeholders with the next steps, and hopefully, the motivation to take those steps as well!

While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. The three-act structure of user research contains all the components for a good story:

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

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

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

The researcher performs a number of tasks: they are the producer, the director, and the storyteller. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters ( in the research ). And the audience are the stakeholders. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users ‘ stories through research. In the end, the parties should leave with a goal and an eagerness to fix the product’s flaws.

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. User research is ultimately a win-win situation for everyone, and all you need to do is pique stakeholders ‘ interest in how the story ends.

I’ve lost count of the times when promising ideas go from being useless in a few days to being useless after working as a solution designer for too long to explain.

Financial goods, which is the area of my specialization, are no exception. It’s tempting to put as many features at the ceiling as possible and expect something sticks because people’s true, hard-earned money is on the line, user expectations are high, and crowded market. However, this strategy is a formula for disaster. Why? How’s why:

The fatalities of feature-first growth

It’s simple to get swept up in the enthusiasm of developing innovative features when you start developing a financial product from scratch or are migrating existing client journeys from papers or telephony channels to online bank or mobile apps. They may think,” If I may only add one more thing that solves this particular person problem, they’ll appreciate me”! But what happens if you eventually encounter a roadblock as a result of your security team’s negligence? not like it? When a battle-tested film isn’t as well-known as you anticipated or when it fails due to unforeseen difficulty?

The concept of Minimum Viable Product ( MVP ) comes into play in this area. Even though Jason Fried doesn’t usually refer to it that way, his podcast Rework and his book Getting True frequently address this concept. An MVP is a product that offers only enough value to your users to keep them interested, but not so much that it becomes difficult to keep up. Although it seems like an easy idea, it requires a razor-sharp eye, a ruthless edge, and the courage to stand up for your position because it is easy to fall for” the Columbo Effect” when there is always” just one more thing …” to add.

The issue with most funding apps is that they frequently turn out to be reflections of the company’s internal politics rather than an experience created exclusively for the customer. Instead of offering a distinct value statement that is focused on what people in the real world want, the focus should be on delivering as some features and functionalities as possible to satisfy the needs and wants of competing inside sections. These products may therefore quickly become a muddled mess of confusing, related, and finally unlovable client experiences—a feature salad, you might say.

The significance of the foundation

What is a better strategy, then? How can we create items that are reliable, user-friendly, and most importantly, stick?

The concept of “bedrock” comes into play here. Rock is the main feature of your solution that really matters to customers. It serves as the foundation for the fundamental building block that creates benefit and maintains relevance over time.

The core must be in and around the standard servicing journeys in the retail banking industry, which is where I work. Individuals only look at their existing account once every five minutes, but they also look at it daily. They purchase a credit card every year or two, but they at least once a month assess their stability and pay their bills.

The key is in identifying the main tasks that individuals want to complete and therefore persistently striving to make them simple, reliable, and trustworthy.

But how do you reach the foundation? By focusing on the” MVP” strategy, giving ease precedence, and working iteratively toward a clear value proposition. This entails removing needless functions and putting the emphasis on providing genuine value to your users.

It also requires having some nerve, as your coworkers might not always agree with you immediately. And dubiously, occasionally it can even suggest making it clear to customers that you won’t be coming to their house and making their breakfast. Sometimes you may need to use the sporadic “opinionated user interface design” ( i .e. clunky workaround for edge cases ) to test a concept or to give yourself some room to work on something more crucial stuff.

Functional methods for creating financially successful items

What are the main learnings I’ve made from my own research and knowledge, then?

1. What issue are you attempting to resolve first, and why? Who is it for? Before beginning any project, make sure your goal is completely clear. Make certain it also aligns with the goals of your business.
2. Avoid the temptation to put too many characteristics at once by focusing on one, key feature and focusing on getting that right before moving on to something else. Choose one that actually adds price, and work from that.
3. When it comes to financial goods, clarity is often over difficulty. Eliminate unwanted details and concentrate solely on what matters most.
4. Accept constant iteration as Bedrock is a powerful process rather than a set destination. Continuously collect customer feedback, improve your product, and work toward that foundational state.
5. Cease, look, and listen: You don’t just have to test your product during the delivery process; you must also test it consistently in the field. Use it for yourself. A/B tests are run. User opinions on Gatter. Speak to those who use it, and change things up correctly.

The “bedrock dilemma”

This is an intriguing conundrum: sacrificing some of the potential for short-term progress in favor of long-term stability is at play. But the reward is worthwhile: products built with a focus on rock will outlive and surpass their rivals over time and provide users with long-term value.

How do you begin your quest to rock, then? Taking it one step at a time. Start by identifying the underlying factors that your customers actually care about. Focus on developing and improving a second, potent function that delivers real value. And most importantly, make an obsessive effort because, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker ( whew! The best way to foretell the future is to build it, he said.

Imagine this: Two people are conversing in what appears to be the same style issue in a conference room at your software company. One is talking about whether the staff has the right abilities to handle it. The various examines whether the answer really addresses the user’s issue. Similar place, the same issue, and entirely different perspectives.

This is the lovely, sometimes messy fact of having both a Design Manager and a Guide Designer on the same group. And you’re asking the right question if you’re wondering how to make this job without creating confusion, coincide, or the feared” to some cooks” situation.

The conventional solution has been to create a table with clear lines. The Design Manager handles persons, the Lead Designer handles art. Problem solved, is that straight? Except that clear nonprofit charts are fantasy. In fact, both roles care greatly about crew health, style quality, and shipping great work.

When you start thinking of your style organization as a style organism, the magic happens when you embrace the coincide rather than fighting it.

The biology of a good design team

Here’s what I’ve learned from years of being on both flanks of this formula: think of your design team as a living organism. The layout manager is guided by the group dynamics, emotional security, and career growth. The Lead Designer concentrates on the body ( the handiwork, the design standards, the hands-on projects that are delivered to users ).

But just like mind and body aren’t totally separate systems, but, also, do these tasks overlap in significant ways. Without working in harmony with one person, you can’t have a good man. The technique is to recognize those overlaps and how to manage them gently.

When we look at how good team really function, three critical devices emerge. Each role must coexist, but one must assume primary responsibility for maintaining a solid structure.

The Nervous System: Citizens & Psychology

Major caretaker: Design Manager
Supporting duties: Direct Artist

The anxious system is all about mental health, comments, and signals. When this technique is good, information flows easily, people feel safe to take risks, and the staff may react quickly to new problems.

The main caregiver is around, the Design Manager. They are keeping track of the team’s emotional state, making sure feedback loops are good, and creating the environment for growth. They’re hosting job meetings, managing task, and making sure no single burns out.

However, a significant enabling role is played by the Lead Designer. They’re offering visual feedback on build development needs, identifying stagnant design skills in someone, and pointing out potential growth opportunities that the Design Manager might overlook.

Design Manager tends to:

• development planning and job conversations
• emotional stability and dynamics of the group
• Job management and resource planning
• Systematic evaluations and opinions
• Providing learning options

Direct Custom supports by:

• Giving craft-specific evaluation of team member creation
• identifying opportunities for growth and style ability gaps
• Providing style mentorship and assistance
• indicating when a group is prepared for more challenging tasks.

The Muscular System: Design, Design, and Execution

Major caretaker: Lead Designer
Design Manager supporting part

Power, cooperation, and skill development are the hallmarks of the skeletal system. When this technique is healthy, the team can do complicated design work with precision, maintain regular quality, and adjust their craft to fresh challenges.

The Lead Designer is in charge of everything here. They oversee the creation of quality standards, provide craft instruction, and set design standards. They’re the ones who can tell you if a design decision is sound or if we’re solving the right problem.

However, the Design Manager has a significant supporting role. They are making sure the team has the resources and support they need to perform their best work, including ensuring that an athlete receives adequate nutrition and time for recovery.

Lead Designer tends to:

• Definition of system usage and design standards
• Feedback on design work that meets the required standards
• Experience direction for the product
• Design choices and product-wide alignment are at stake.
• advancement of craft and innovation

Design Manager supports by:

• ensuring that all members of the team are aware of and adopting design standards
• Confirming that the right course of action is being taken
• Supporting practices and systems that scale without bottlenecking
• facilitating design alignment among all teams
• Providing resources and removing obstacles to outstanding craft work

The Circulatory System: Strategy &amp, Flow

Both the lead designer and the design manager were caretakers.

The circulatory system is about how decisions, energy, and information flow through the team. When this system is healthy, strategic direction is clear, priorities are aligned, and the team can respond quickly to new opportunities or challenges.

True partnership occurs in this context. Although both roles are responsible for maintaining the circulation, they both have unique perspectives to offer.

Lead Designer contributes:

• The product fulfills the user’s needs.
• overall experience and product quality
• Strategic design initiatives
• User needs for each initiative are based on research.

Contributes the design manager:

• Communication to team and stakeholders
• Management of stakeholders and alignment
• Team accountability across all levels
• Strategic business initiatives

Both parties work together on:

• Co-creation of strategy and leadership
• Team goals and prioritization approach
• organizational structure decisions
• Success frameworks and measures

Keeping the Organism Healthy

Understanding that all three systems must work together is the key to making this partnership sing. A team with excellent craftmanship but poor psychological protection will eventually burn out. A team with great culture but weak craft execution will ship mediocre work. A team that has both but poor strategic planning will concentrate on the wrong things.

Be Specific About the System You’re Defending.

When you’re in a meeting about a design problem, it helps to acknowledge which system you’re primarily focused on. Everyone has context for their input.” I’m thinking about this from a team capacity perspective” ( nervous system ) or” I’m looking at this through the lens of user needs” ( muscular system ).

This is not about staying in your path. It’s about being transparent as to which lens you’re using, so the other person knows how to best add their perspective.

Create Positive Feedback Loops

The partnerships that I’ve seen have the most effective partnerships that create clear feedback loops between the systems:

Nervous system signals to muscular system:” The team is struggling with confidence in their design skills” → Lead Designer provides more craft coaching and clearer standards.

Nervous system receives the message” The team’s craft skills are improving more quickly than their project complexity.”

We’re seeing patterns in team health and craft development that suggest we need to adjust our strategic priorities, both systems say to the circulatory system.

Handle Handoffs Gracefully

When something switches from one system to another, this partnership’s pivotal moment is. This might occur when a design standard ( muscular system ) needs to be implemented across the team ( nervous system ) or when a tactical initiative ( circulatory system ) requires a particular craft system ( muscular system ) rollout.

Make these transitions explicit. The new component standards have been defined. Can you give me some ideas on how to get the team up to speed? or” We’ve agreed on this strategic direction. From here, I’ll concentrate on the specific user experience approach.

Stay curious and not territorial.

The Design Manager who never thinks about craft, or the Lead Designer who never considers team dynamics, is like a doctor who only looks at one body system. Even when they aren’t the primary caretaker, great design leadership requires both people to be as concerned with the entire organism.

This entails asking questions rather than making assumptions. ” What do you think about the team’s craft development in this area”? or” How do you think this is affecting team morale and workload”? keeps both viewpoints present in every choice.

When the Organism Gets Sick

This partnership can go wrong even with clear roles. Which failure modes are the most prevalent in my experience:

System Isolation

The Design Manager ignores craft development and only concentrates on the nervous system. The Lead Designer ignores team dynamics and concentrates solely on the muscular system. Both people retreat to their comfort zones and stop collaborating.

The signs: Mixed messages are sent to team members, poor morale is attained, and there are negative things.

Reconnect around common goals in the treatment. What are you both trying to achieve? It’s typically excellent design work that arrives on time from a capable team. Discover how both systems accomplish that goal.

Poor Circulation

There is no clear strategic direction, shifting priorities, or accepting responsibility for keeping information flowing.

The signs: Team members are unsure of their priorities, work is duplicated or dropped, and deadlines are missed.

The treatment: Explicitly assign responsibility for circulation. Who is communicating with whom? How frequently? What’s the feedback loop?

Autoimmune Response

One person feels threatened by the expertise of the other. The Design Manager thinks the Lead Designer is undermining their authority. The Design Manager is allegedly misunderstanding the craft, according to the Lead Designer.

The symptoms: defensive behavior, territorial disputes, middle-class teammates, etc.

The treatment: Remember that you’re both caretakers of the same organism. When one system fails, the entire team suffers. The team thrives when both systems are healthy.

The Payoff

Yes, there is more communication required with this model. Yes, it requires that both parties be confident enough to assume full responsibility for team health. But the payoff is worth it: better decisions, stronger teams, and design work that’s both excellent and sustainable.

When both roles are well-balanced and functioning well together, you get the best of both worlds: strong people leadership and deep craft knowledge. One person can help keep the team’s health when one is sick, on vacation, or overjoyed. When a decision requires both the people perspective and the craft perspective, you’ve got both right there in the room.

Most importantly, the framework is flexible. As your team expands, you can use the same system thinking to new problems. Need to launch a design system? Both the muscular system and the nervous system are more prevalent in the work environment and communication, and the design manager is more focused on the implementation and change management.

Bottom Line

The relationship between a Design Manager and Lead Designer isn’t about dividing territories. It’s about multiplying impact. Magic occurs when both roles are aware that they are promoting various aspects of a healthy organism.

The mind and body work together. The team receives both the required craft excellence and strategic thinking. And most importantly, the work that is distributed to users benefits both sides.

So the next time you’re in that meeting room, wondering why two people are talking about the same problem from different angles, remember: you’re watching shared leadership in action. And if it’s functioning well, your design team’s mind and body are both strengthening.

The internet has tones. Our pattern processes may also.

Designing methods as living language

Design systems are living languages, not portion libraries. The elements are phrases, the patterns are phrases, the designs are sentences, and the tokens are phonemes. The conversations we have with people are what shape the stories that our goods represent.

But let’s remember that voices increase as a speech gets more fluent without losing its meaning. English in Sydney and English in Scotland are clearly different, but both are identical. The terminology adapts to the situation while maintaining its fundamental meaning. As a Brazilian Portuguese speech who grew up in Sydney and learned English with an American accent, this was even more apparent to me.

Our pattern processes may operate similarly. A rigorous adhesion to physical conventions results in brittle techniques that disintegrate under pressure from the outside. Fluidic techniques can bend without bridging.

Consistent behavior turns into a captivity

Design systems had a promise that was easy: regular components would speed up development and bring together experiences. But as methods evolved and products developed more sophisticated, that claim has grown to the point of being a prison. Team submit hundreds of “exception” demands. Alternatively of system parts, products release with solutions. Designers devote more time defending persistence than resolving customer issues.

Our design techniques must acquire the ability to communicate dialects.

A pattern pronunciation is a comprehensive adaptation of a design system that maintains its core values while creating novel patterns for particular situations. Languages maintain the state’s necessary language while expanding its vocabulary to fit various people, settings, or constraints, in contrast to one-off customizations or product themes.

When Perfect Consistency Is A Problem

I at Booking.com learned this lesson the hard way. Everything we A/B tested was color, version, key, and logo colors. I found this stunning as a specialist with a background in graphic design and practice creating brand style manuals. While people adored Airbnb’s flawless design program, Booking grew into a giant without ever taking into account physical consistency.

The panic taught me things that persistence is not ROI, but rather solved problems are.

At Shopify. Our crown jewel was Polyris ( ), a mature design language that worked well for laptop manufacturers. We were expected to follow Polaris as-is as a product staff. Therefore my accomplishment group slammed” Oh, Ship”! momentous as we had to create an app for inventory pickers using our program on shared, battered Android scanners in dark aisles, wearing heavy gloves, scanning dozens of items per second, some with only minimal English comprehension.

Polaris ‘ standard completion rate is 0 %.

Every aspect that worked flawlessly for merchants entirely failed to satisfy pickers. Bright backgrounds produced brightness. Click targets for 44px were hidden behind covered fingers. Sentence-case names took too long to interpret. Multi-step flows confused non-native listeners.

We had to choose whether to completely reject Polaris or learn to speak inventory.

The Dialect’s Delivery

We favored development over trend. We developed what we now refer to as a pattern dialect by adhering to Polaris’s key principles of clarity, efficiency, consistency.

Results: Task completion increased from 0 % to 100 %. From three days to a single shift, onboard time has been decreased.

This was a dialect, not a modification or theming; it was a systematic translation that preserved Polaris ‘ fundamental grammar while creating new words for a particular context. Polis hadn’t failed; it had picked up the language inventory.

The Flexibility Framework

Working on the Jira platform, which is a component of the larger Atlassian structure, I advocated for formalizing this understanding at Atlassian. We needed comprehensive flexibility because dozens of products shared a design language across various codebases, but we built our methods of working directly into our own. The outdated model, which required exception requests and unique approvals, was failing at scale.

To help creators determine how flexible their elements should remain, we created the Flexibility Framework.

We tied every component during a transportation redesign. World research and logo remain constant. Breadcrumbs and cultural activities evolved into Flexible. Product teams could quickly identify areas where development was advantageous and where consistency was important.

The Decision Ladder

Freedom requires limitations. We built a straightforward rope to determine when regulations may be broken:

Good: Include system parts that already exist. Quick, reliable, and reliable.

Better: somewhat bend a part. Document the shift. Bring system improvements again for everyone to use.

Best: First, create the ideal practice. Update the program to allow for customer testing to verify the profit.

Which choice allows users to achieve the quickest?

Laws are tools, not replicas.

Unity defeats consistency

Email, Drive, and Maps all speak with their own accent, but they are clearly Google. They are united by common guidelines, not by copied parts. About$ 30K in engineer time is spent on one additional month of box color debate.

Competency is a result of using, not a manufacturer. Edge the customer when the two conflict.

Gates ‘ Gates’ Law:

How can dialects be enabled while maintaining cohesion? Treat your body like a life diction:

Document every change, such as dialects or warehouses. director with explanations for the photos and reasoning.

Promote shared patterns, which are when three teams freely adopt a slang and evaluate it for primary inclusion.

Retire old idioms using flags and migration notes; this is never a big-bang cleanse. Degrade with context.

Better than a freezing code, a living vocabulary weights.

Your First Dialect: Start Small

Are you ready to start introducing accents? Begin with a bad practice:

Find a user flow this week where great consistency prevents tasks from being completed. Users who use wireless devices might have issues with desktop-sized components or convenience issues that their traditional patterns do not address.

What causes normal patterns to fail here? Document the context: climate restrictions customer capabilities Task necessity?

Design one consistent change: Place more emphasis on behaviour than aesthetics. If gloves are the issue, bigger targets are actually serving the customer rather than “broken the method.” Create the adjustments and incorporate them into your life.

Test and determine: Does the shift make tasks more effective? production at its peak? customer fulfillment

Present the benefits: Fluency has paid for itself if that pronunciation frees perhaps half a jump.

Beyond the Component Library

We’re cultivating style languages, never managing design systems anymore. language that develop along with their listeners. tones without losing any significance in spoken language. language that prioritize the needs of people over visual ideals.

Our buttons breaking the style guide didn’t matter to the warehouse workers who went from 0 % to 100 % on their jobs. They emphasized the success of the switches.

Your people share your opinion. Offer your program permission to speak their speech.

The website of today is not always a welcoming area. Websites greet you with a popover that requires assent to their muffin coverage, and leave you with Taboola advertising promising” One Crazy Trick”! to treat your problems. Social media sites are tuned for wedding, and some things are more interesting than a duel. I’ve witnessed fire war among birders now, and it seems like everyone wants to get into a fight.

These conflicts are often at conflict with a site’s objectives. We don’t like those customers to get into fights with one another if we are offering customer support and advice. If we offer information about the latest study, we want visitors to feel at ease, if we promote approaching marches, we want our core followers to feel comfortable and we want interested newcomers to experience welcome.

I looked at the origins of computer science in Vienna ( 1928-1934 ) for a case study on the significance of amiability and the disastrous effects of its demise during a conference on the History of the Web. That story has interesting implications for web environments that promote amiable interaction among disparate, difficult ( and sometimes disagreeable ) people.

The Vienna Circle

Though people had been thinking about calculating engines and thinking machines from antiquity, Computing really got going in Depression-era Vienna. The people who developed the theory had no desire to construct machines; instead, they wanted to unravel the limits of reason in the absence of divine authority. If we could not rely on God or Aristotle to tell us how to think, could we instead build arguments that were self-contained and demonstrably correct? Can we be certain that math is accurate? Are there things that are true but that cannot be expressed in language?

The main points were uncovered during the group’s weekly meetings ( Thursdays at 6 ) known as the Vienna Circle. They got together in the office of Professor Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna to discuss problems in philosophy, math, and language. This Vienna department’s focus on the intersection of physics and philosophy had long been on them, and their work had elevated them to a position among the global leaders. Schlick’s colleague Hans Hahn was a central participant, and by 1928 Hahn brought along his graduate students Karl Menger and Kurt Gödel. Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, the architect and physicist, and Otto Neurath, the inventor of infographics, were among the other prominent participants. Out-of-town visitors often joined, including the young Johnny von Neumann, Alfred Tarski, and the irascible Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Participants adjourned to a nearby café for additional discussion with an even larger group of participants when Schlick’s office became too dim. This convivial circle was far from unique. The Austrian School of free-market economics was founded by an intersecting circle: Neurath, von Mises, and Oskar Morgenstern. There were theatrical circles ( Peter Lorre, Hedy Lamarr, Max Reinhardt ), and literary circles. Things actually happened in the café.

The interdisciplinarity of the group posed real challenges of temperament and understanding. Personality issues were frequently present. Gödel was convinced people were trying to poison him. Josef Frank, an architect, relied on contracts for public housing, which Mises criticized as wasteful. Wittgenstein’s temper had lost him his job as a secondary school teacher, and for some of these years he maintained a detailed list of whom he was willing to meet. Neutrakh would yell” Metaphysics” to interrupt a speaker as he was eager to find muddled thinking! The continuing amity of these meetings was facilitated by the personality of their leader, Moritz Schlick, who would be remembered as notably adept in keeping disagreements from becoming quarrels.

In the Café

The Viennese café of this era was long remembered as a particularly good place to argue with your friends, to read, and to write. The cafés were built to serve an imperial capital, but now that the Empire has ended, they have too much space and fewer customers. There was no need to turn tables: a café could only survive by coaxing customers to linger. They might order another cup of coffee, or perhaps a friend might stop by. One could play chess, or billiards, or read newspapers from abroad. In a time when most water was still considered unsafe to drink, coffee was frequently served with a glass of pure spring water. That water glass would be refilled indefinitely.

Jura Soyfer, the poet behind” The End Of The World,” a musical comedy about Professor Peep discovering a comet that is heading for Earth, was performed in one café’s basement.

Prof. Peep: The comet is going to destroy everybody!

Hitler: I have no business destroying anyone.

Of course, coffee can be prepared in many ways, and the Viennese café developed a broad vocabulary to represent precisely how one preferred to drink it: melange, Einspänner, Brauner, Schwarzer, Kapuziner. The café was transformed into a warm and personal third space, a neutral ground in which anyone who could afford a cup of coffee would be welcome. This extensive customization, with correspondingly esoteric conventions of service, resulted in its extensive customization. Viennese of this era were fastidious in their use of personal titles, of which an abundance were in common use. Café waiters also gave regular customers titles, but they were careful to address their customers with titles a notch or two more than they deserved. A graduate student would be Doktor, an unpaid postdoc Professor. Due to the fact that Carnap and Gödel from Wuppertal, von Neumann from Budapest, and many other Viennese people also came from elsewhere, this assurance was even more important. No one was going to make fun of your clothes, mannerisms, or accent. The pram in the hall wouldn’t bother your friends. Everyone shared a Germanic Austrian literary and philosophical culture, not least those whose ancestors had been Eastern European Jews who knew that culture well, having read all about it in books.

The café circle’s openness increased its friendliness. Because the circle sometimes extended to architects and actors, people could feel less constrained to admit shortfalls in their understanding. As an improvised and accessible blackboard, it was soon discovered that marble tabletops were useful for pencil sketches.

Comedies like” The End Of The World” and fictional newspaper sketches or feuilletons of writers like Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig served as a second defense against disagreeable or churlish behavior. It was certainly helped Professor Schlick stay on top of things when she was aware that a parody of one’s remarks might soon appear in Neue Freie Presse.

The End Of Red Vienna

Vienna’s city council had been Socialist, focused on user-centered design, and supported ambitious programs of public outreach and adult education, even though Austria’s government had veered to the right after the war. In 1934 the Socialists lost a local election, and this era soon came to its end as the new administration focused on the imagined threat of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Von Neumann to Princeton, Neurath to Holland and Oxford, Popper to New Zealand, and Carnap to Chicago were the Circle’s most frequent members who left in less than a month. Prof. Schlick was murdered on the steps of the University by a student outraged by his former association with Jews. The End of the World author, Julie Soyfer, passed away in Buchenwald.

In 1939, von Neumann finally convinced Gödel to accept a job in Princeton. Gödel was required to emigrate after paying large fines. The officer in charge of these fees would look back on this as the best posting of his career, his name was Eichmann.

Design for Amiability

An impressive literature recounts those discussions and the environment that facilitated the development of computing. How can we create a comfortable environment? This is not just a matter of choosing rounded typefaces and a cheerful pastel palette. I think we might find eight distinct design constraints that go in a lot of useful ways.

Seriousness: The Vienna Circle was wrestling with a notoriously difficult book—Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico-Philosophicus—and a catalog of outstanding open questions in mathematics. They were concerned with long-term issues rather than just generating debate points. Constant reminders that the questions you are considering matter—not only that they are consequential or that those opposing you are scoundrels —help promote amity.

Empiricism: The Vienna Circle’s distinctive approach required that all knowledge be grounded in either direct observation or rigorous reasoning. Disagreement, when it arose, could be settled by observation or by proof. The dispute couldn’t be resolved if neither appeared ready to take the situation. On these terms, one can seldom if ever demolish an opposing argument, and trolling is pointless.

Abstraction: When losing a debate results in lost face or jobs, the disputes get worse. The Vienna Circle’s focus on theory—the limits of mathematics, the capability of language—promoted amity. Abstraction could have been purely academic without seriousness, but it was obvious that mathematics had bounds with reason and consistency.

Formality: The punctilious demeanor of waiters and the elaborated rituals of coffee service helped to establish orderly attitudes amongst the argumentative participants. This contrasts favorably with the contemptuous sneer that currently dominates social media.

Schlamperei: Members of the Vienna Circle maintained a global correspondence, and they knew their work was at the frontier of research. However, this was Vienna, at the edge of Europe: it was dated, frumpy, and dingy. Many participants came from even more obscure backwaters. A tinge of the absurd and a lingering sense of the absurd helped to control tempers among the majority or all. The director of” The End Of The World” had to pass the hat for money to purchase a moon for the set, and thought it was funny enough to write up for publication.

Openness: Anyone could join in the discussion. There were many different kinds of people. Each week would bring different participants. Fluidic borders reduce conflict and open up new areas for discussion and discussion. Low entrance friction was characteristic of the café: anyone could come, and if you came twice you were virtually a regular. Vienna’s cafés had a large number of humorists, and permeable boundaries and café culture made it easier for moderating influences to draw in raconteurs and storytellers to ease up awkward situations. Openness counteracts the suspicion that promoters of amiability are exerting censorship.

Parody: The University of Chicago and its café were unmistakably public areas. There were writers about, some of them renowned humorists. The possibility of having one’s bad behavior or taste be derided in print kept discussion in check. The sanction of public humiliation, however, was itself made mild by the veneer of fiction, even if you got a little carried away and a character based on you made a splash in some newspaper fiction, it wasn’t the end of the world.

Engagement: Although the subject matter was significant to the participants, it was esoteric: neither their mothers nor their siblings were particularly interested in it. A small stumble or a minor humiliation could be shrugged off in ways that major media confrontations cannot.

I think it is noteworthy that this setting was created to promote amiability through a variety of voices. The café waiter flattered each newcomer and served everyone, and also kept out local pickpockets and drunks who would be mere disruptions. Schickel and other regulars kept the conversation moving and moving. The fiction writers and raconteurs—perhaps the most peripheral of the participants—kept people in a good mood and reminded them that bad behavior could make anyone ridiculous. You could understand why each of these voices was human, naturally speaking. Algorithmic or AI moderators, however clever, are seldom perceived as reasonable. No Moderator or central authority was present in the café circles, allowing everyone’s anger to be focused on her. Even after the disaster of 1934, what people remembered were those cheerful arguments.

This essay contains significant Bugonia clues. Here is our spoiler-free evaluation. You are aware of what they say about destroyed watches? Turns out it also applies to psychotic conspiracy theorists. Michelle Fuller, played by Emma Stone, whispers” Jesus Christ” to herself on [ …] despite anyone who has ever interacted with a fringe internet personality feeling it in their bones.

The second article on Den of Geek was Bugonia Ending Explained.

Although I’m not sure when I first heard this statement, it has stuck with me over the centuries. How do you generate solutions for scenarios you can’t think? Or create materials that are functional on products that have not yet been created?

Flash, Photoshop, and flexible pattern

When I first started designing sites, my go-to technology was Photoshop. I set about making a layout that I would eventually decline content into a 960px cloth. The growth phase was about attaining pixel-perfect precision using set widths, fixed levels, and absolute placement.

All of this was altered by Ethan Marcotte’s 2010 content in A List Off entitled” Responsive Web Design.” I was sold on responsive pattern as soon as I heard about it, but I was even terrified. The pixel-perfect models full of special figures that I had formerly prided myself on producing were no longer good enough.

My first encounter with reactive style didn’t help my fear. My second project was to get an active fixed-width website and make it reactive. What I discovered the hard manner was that you can’t really put sensitivity at the end of a job. To make smooth design, you need to prepare throughout the style phase.

A new way to style

Making flexible or smooth websites has always been about removing restrictions and creating content that can be viewed on any system. It relies on the use of percentage-based design, which I immediately achieved with local CSS and power groups:

.column-span-6 { width: 49%; float: left; margin-right: 0.5%; margin-left: 0.5%;}.column-span-4 { width: 32%; float: left; margin-right: 0.5%; margin-left: 0.5%;}.column-span-3 { width: 24%; float: left; margin-right: 0.5%; margin-left: 0.5%;}

Therefore with Sass but that I could use @includes to re-use repeated blocks of code and transition to more semantic html:

.logo { @include colSpan(6);}.search { @include colSpan(3);}.social-share { @include colSpan(3);}

Media answers

The next ingredient for flexible design is press queries. Without them, regardless of whether the information was still readable, may reduce to fit the available space.

Media answers prevented this by allowing us to add breakpoints where the design could adapt. Like most people, I started out with three breakpoints: one for desktop, one for tablets, and one for mobile. Over the years, I added more and more for phablets, wide screens, and so on. 

For years, I happily worked this way and improved both my design and front-end skills in the process. The only problem I encountered was making changes to content, since with our Sass grid system in place, there was no way for the site owners to add content without amending the markup—something a small business owner might struggle with. This is because each row in the grid was defined using a div as a container. Adding content meant creating new row markup, which requires a level of HTML knowledge.

String premium was a mainstay of early flexible design, present in all the frequently used systems like Bootstrap and Skeleton.

 
1 of 7
 
2 of 7
 
3 of 7
 
4 of 7
 
5 of 7
 
6 of 7
 
7 of 7

Another difficulty arose as I moved from a design firm building websites for little- to medium-sized companies, to larger in-house teams where I worked across a collection of related sites. In those positions, I began to work more frequently with recyclable parts.

Our rely on multimedia queries resulted in parts that were tied to frequent screen sizes. If the goal of part libraries is modify, then this is a real problem because you can just use these components if the devices you’re designing for correspond to the viewport sizes used in the pattern library—in the process never really hitting that “devices that don’t already occur” goal.

Then there’s the problem of space. Media answers allow components to adapt based on the viewport size, but what if I put a component into a sidebar, like in the figure below?

Container queries: our savior or a false dawn?

Container queries have long been touted as an improvement upon media queries, but at the time of writing are unsupported in most browsers. There are workarounds for JavaScript, but they can lead to dependencies and compatibility issues. The basic theory underlying container queries is that elements should change based on the size of their parent container and not the viewport width, as seen in the following illustrations.

One of the biggest arguments in favor of container queries is that they help us create components or design patterns that are truly reusable because they can be picked up and placed anywhere in a layout. This is an important step in moving toward a form of component-based design that works at any size on any device.

In other words, responsive layouts are to be replaced by responsive components.

Container queries will help us move from designing pages that respond to the browser or device size to designing components that can be placed in a sidebar or in the main content, and respond accordingly.

My issue is that layout is still used to determine when a design needs to adapt. This approach will always be restrictive, as we will still need pre-defined breakpoints. For this reason, my main question with container queries is, How would we decide when to change the CSS used by a component?

A component library that is disconnected from context and real content is probably not the best place to make that choice.

As the diagrams below illustrate, we can use container queries to create designs for specific container widths, but what if I want to change the design based on the image size or ratio?

In this example, the dimensions of the container are not what should dictate the design, rather, the image is.

Without reliable cross-browser support for them, it’s difficult to say for certain whether container queries will be successful. Responsive component libraries would definitely evolve how we design and would improve the possibilities for reuse and design at scale. However, we might always need to modify these elements to fit our content.

CSS is changing

Whilst the container query debate rumbles on, there have been numerous advances in CSS that change the way we think about design. The days of fixed-width elements measured in pixels and floated div elements used to cobble layouts together are long gone, consigned to history along with table layouts. Flexbox and CSS Grid have revolutionized layouts for the web. We can now create elements that wrap onto new rows when they run out of space, not when the device changes.

.wrapper { display: grid; grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, 450px); gap: 10px;}

The repeat() function paired with auto-fit or auto-fill allows us to specify how much space each column should use while leaving it up to the browser to decide when to spill the columns onto a new line. Similar things can be achieved with Flexbox, as elements can wrap over multiple rows and “flex” to fill available space. 

.wrapper { display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; justify-content: space-between;}.child { flex-basis: 32%; margin-bottom: 20px;}

You don’t need to wrap elements in container rows, which is the biggest benefit of all of this. Without rows, content isn’t tied to page markup in quite the same way, allowing for removals or additions of content without additional development.

This is a big step forward when it comes to creating designs that allow for evolving content, but the real game changer for flexible designs is CSS Subgrid.

Remember the days of crafting perfectly aligned interfaces, only for the customer to add an unbelievably long header almost as soon as they’re given CMS access, like the illustration below?

Subgrid allows elements to respond to adjustments in their own content and in the content of sibling elements, helping us create designs more resilient to change.

.wrapper { display: grid; grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(150px, 1fr)); grid-template-rows: auto 1fr auto; gap: 10px;}.sub-grid { display: grid; grid-row: span 3; grid-template-rows: subgrid; /* sets rows to parent grid */}

CSS Grid allows us to separate layout and content, thereby enabling flexible designs. Meanwhile, Subgrid allows us to create designs that can adapt in order to suit morphing content. Subgrid is only supported in Firefox at the time of writing, but the above code can be implemented behind an @supports feature query.

Intrinsic layouts

I’d be remiss not to mention intrinsic layouts, a term used by Jen Simmons to describe a mix of contemporary and traditional CSS features to create layouts that respond to available space.

Responsive layouts have flexible columns using percentages. Intrinsic layouts, on the other hand, use the fr unit to create flexible columns that won’t ever shrink so much that they render the content illegible.

frunits is a statement that says,” I want you to distribute the extra space in this way, but… don’t ever make it smaller than the content that is inside of it.”

—Jen Simmons,” Designing Intrinsic Layouts”

Intrinsic layouts can also make use of a mix of fixed and flexible units, letting the content choose how much space it occupies.

What makes intrinsic design stand out is that it not only creates designs that can withstand future devices but also helps scale design without losing flexibility. Without having the same breakpoints or the same amount of content as in the previous implementation, components and patterns can be lifted and reused.

We can now create designs that adapt to the space they have, the content within them, and the content around them. We can create responsive components using an intrinsic approach without relying on container queries.

Another 2010 moment?

This intrinsic approach should in my view be every bit as groundbreaking as responsive web design was ten years ago. It’s another “everything changed” moment for me.

But it doesn’t seem to be moving quite as fast, I haven’t yet had that same career-changing moment I had with responsive design, despite the widely shared and brilliant talk that brought it to my attention.

One possible explanation for that is that I now work for a sizable company, which is quite different from the role I held as a design agency in 2010! In my agency days, every new project was a clean slate, a chance to try something new. Nowadays, projects use existing tools and frameworks and are often improvements to existing websites with an existing codebase.

Another possibility is that right now I feel more prepared for change. In 2010 I was new to design in general, the shift was frightening and required a lot of learning. Additionally, an intrinsic approach isn’t exactly new; it’s about applying existing skills and CSS knowledge in a unique way.

You can’t framework your way out of a content problem

Another reason for the slightly slower adoption of intrinsic design could be the lack of quick-fix framework solutions available to kick-start the change.

Ten years ago, responsive grid systems were everywhere. With a framework like Bootstrap or Skeleton, you had a responsive design template at your fingertips.

Because the benefit of having a selection of units is a hindrance when it comes to creating layout templates, intrinsic design and frameworks do not go hand in hand quite as well. The beauty of intrinsic design is combining different units and experimenting with techniques to get the best for your content.

And then there are design tools. We probably all used Photoshop templates for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices to drop designs into and demonstrate how the site would look at all three stages at some point in our careers.

How do you do that now, with each component responding to content and layouts flexing as and when they need to? This kind of design must take place in the browser, which is something I’m very fond of.

The debate about “whether designers should code” is another that has rumbled on for years. When designing a digital product, we should, at the very least, design for a best- and worst-case scenario when it comes to content. It’s not ideal to do this in a graphics-based software package. In code, we can add longer sentences, more radio buttons, and extra tabs, and watch in real time as the design adapts. Does it continue to function? Is the design too reliant on the current content?

Personally, I look forward to the day intrinsic design is the standard for design, when a design component can be truly flexible and adapt to both its space and content with no reliance on device or container dimensions.

First, the content

Content is not constant. After all, to design for the unanticipated or unexpected, we must take into account content modifications, such as the earlier Subgrid card example, which allowed the cards to adjust both their own content and that of their sibling elements.

Thankfully, there’s more to CSS than layout, and plenty of properties and values can help us put content first. Subgrid and pseudo-elements like ::first-line and ::first-letter help to separate design from markup so we can create designs that allow for changes.

Instead of the dated markup tricks below,

 First line of text with different styling...

—we can target content based on where it appears.

.element::first-line { font-size: 1.4em;}.element::first-letter { color: red;}

Much bigger additions to CSS include logical properties, which change the way we construct designs using logical dimensions (start and end) instead of physical ones (left and right), something CSS Grid also does with functions like min(), max(), and clamp().

This flexibility allows for directional changes according to content, a common requirement when we need to present content in multiple languages. In the past, this was often achieved with Sass mixins but was often limited to switching from left-to-right to right-to-left orientation.

Directional variables must be set in the Sass version.

$direction: rtl;$opposite-direction: ltr;$start-direction: right;$end-direction: left;

These variables can be used as values—

body { direction: $direction; text-align: $start-direction;}

—or as real estate.

margin-#{$end-direction}: 10px;padding-#{$start-direction}: 10px;

However, now we have native logical properties, removing the reliance on both Sass ( or a similar tool ) and pre-planning that necessitated using variables throughout a codebase. These properties also start to break apart the tight coupling between a design and strict physical dimensions, creating more flexibility for changes in language and in direction.

margin-block-end: 10px;padding-block-start: 10px;

There are also native start and end values for properties like text-align, which means we can replace text-align: right with text-align: start.

Like the earlier examples, these properties help to build out designs that aren’t constrained to one language, the design will reflect the content’s needs.

Fluid and fixed

We briefly covered the power of combining fixed widths with fluid widths with intrinsic layouts. The min() and max() functions are a similar concept, allowing you to specify a fixed value with a flexible alternative. 

For min() this means setting a fluid minimum value and a maximum fixed value.

.element { width: min(50%, 300px);}

The element in the figure above will be 50 % of its container as long as the element’s width doesn’t exceed 300px.

For max() we can set a flexible max value and a minimum fixed value.

.element { width: max(50%, 300px);}

Now the element will be 50 % of its container as long as the element’s width is at least 300px. This means we can set limits but allow content to react to the available space.

The clamp() function builds on this by allowing us to set a preferred value with a third parameter. Now we can allow the element to shrink or grow if it needs to without getting to a point where it becomes unusable.

.element { width: clamp(300px, 50%, 600px);}

This time, the element’s width will be 50 % of its container’s preferred value, with no exceptions for 300px and 600px.

With these techniques, we have a content-first approach to responsive design. We can separate content from markup, meaning the changes users make will not affect the design. By anticipating unforeseen language or direction changes, we can begin creating future-proofing designs. And we can increase flexibility by setting desired dimensions alongside flexible alternatives, allowing for more or less content to be displayed correctly.

First, the circumstances

Thanks to what we’ve discussed so far, we can cover device flexibility by changing our approach, designing around content and space instead of catering to devices. But what about that last bit of Jeffrey Zeldman’s quote,”… situations you haven’t imagined”?

It’s a completely different design process for someone using a mobile phone and moving through a crowded street in glaring sunshine from a person using a desktop computer. Situations and environments are hard to plan for or predict because they change as people react to their own unique challenges and tasks.

This is why making a choice is so crucial. One size never fits all, so we need to design for multiple scenarios to create equal experiences for all our users.

Thankfully, there is a lot we can do to provide choice.

Responsible design

” There are parts of the world where mobile data is prohibitively expensive, and where there is little or no broadband infrastructure”.

” I Used the Web for a Day on a 50 MB Budget“

Chris Ashton

One of the biggest assumptions we make is that people interacting with our designs have a good wifi connection and a wide screen monitor. However, our users may be commuters using smaller mobile devices that may experience drops in connectivity while traveling on trains or other modes of transportation. There is nothing more frustrating than a web page that won’t load, but there are ways we can help users use less data or deal with sporadic connectivity.

The srcset attribute allows the browser to decide which image to serve. This means we can create smaller ‘cropped’ images to display on mobile devices in turn using less bandwidth and less data.

The preload attribute can also help us to think about how and when media is downloaded. It can be used to tell a browser about any critical assets that need to be downloaded with high priority, improving perceived performance and the user experience. 

There’s also native lazy loading, which indicates assets that should only be downloaded when they are needed.

With srcset, preload, and lazy loading, we can start to tailor a user’s experience based on the situation they find themselves in. What none of this does, however, is allow the user themselves to decide what they want downloaded, as the decision is usually the browser’s to make. 

So how can we put users in control?

The media queries are returning.

Media answers have always been about much more than device sizes. They allow content to adapt to different situations, with screen size being just one of them.

We’ve long been able to check for media types like print and speech and features such as hover, resolution, and color. These checks allow us to provide options that suit more than one scenario, it’s less about one-size-fits-all and more about serving adaptable content.

The Level 5 spec for Media Queries is still being developed at this writing. It introduces some really exciting queries that in the future will help us design for multiple other unexpected situations.

For instance, a light-level feature allows you to alter a user’s style when they are in the sun or in the dark. Paired with custom properties, these features allow us to quickly create designs or themes for specific environments.

@media (light-level: normal) { --background-color: #fff; --text-color: #0b0c0c; }@media (light-level: dim) { --background-color: #efd226; --text-color: #0b0c0c;}

Another key feature of the Level 5 spec is personalization. Instead of creating designs that are the same for everyone, users can choose what works for them. This is achieved by using features like prefers-reduced-data, prefers-color-scheme, and prefers-reduced-motion, the latter two of which already enjoy broad browser support. These features tap into preferences set via the operating system or browser so people don’t have to spend time making each site they visit more usable. 

Media answers like this go beyond choices made by a browser to grant more control to the user.

Expect the unexpected

In the end, we should always anticipate that things will change. Devices in particular change faster than we can keep up, with foldable screens already on the market.

We can design for content, but we can’t do it for this constantly changing landscape. By putting content first and allowing that content to adapt to whatever space surrounds it, we can create more robust, flexible designs that increase the longevity of our products.

A lot of the CSS discussed here is about moving away from layouts and putting content at the heart of design. There is a lot more we can do to adopt a more intrinsic approach, from responsive components to fixed and fluid units. Even better, we can test these techniques during the design phase by designing in-browser and watching how our designs adapt in real-time.

When it comes to unexpected circumstances, we must make sure our goods are accessible whenever and wherever needed. We can move closer to achieving this by involving users in our design decisions, by creating choice via browsers, and by giving control to our users with user-preference-based media queries.

Good design for the unexpected should allow for change, provide choice, and give control to those we serve: our users themselves.

We’ve been conversing for a long time. Whether to present information, perform transactions, or just to check in on one another, people have yammered aside, chattering and gesticulating, through spoken discussion for many generations. Only recently have conversations started to be written, and only recently have we outsourced them to the system, a device that exhibits a significantly higher affinity for written communications than for the vernacular rigors of spoken language.

Laptops have trouble because between spoken and written speech, talk is more primitive. Machines must wrestle with the complexity of human statement, including the pauses and pauses, the gestures and brain speech, and the word selection and spoken dialect variations that can impede even the most skillfully crafted human-computer interaction. In the human-to-human situation, spoken language also has the opportunity of face-to-face call, where we can easily interpret visual interpersonal cues.

In contrast, written language develops its own fossil record of dated terms and phrases as we report it and retain utilization long after they are no longer relevant in spoken communication ( for example, the welcome” To whom it may concern” ). Because it tends to be more consistent, smooth, and proper, written word is necessarily far easier for devices to interpret and know.

This pleasure is not available in spoken speech. Besides the visual cues that mark conversations with emphasis and personal context, there are also linguistic cues and outspoken behaviors that mimic conversation in complex ways: how something is said, never what. Our spoken language conveys much more than the published word can actually contain, whether it’s rapid-fire, low-pitched, high-decibel, sarcastic, stiff, or groaning. But when it comes to words interfaces—the devices we conduct spoken discussions with—we experience exciting difficulties as designers and content strategists.

Voice-to-text relations

We interact with voice interfaces for a variety of reasons, but according to Michael McTear, Zoraida Callejas, and David Griol in The Conversational Interface, those motivations by and large mirror the reasons we initiate conversations with other people, too ( ). We typically strike up a discussion in the following ways:

• we need something done ( such as a transaction ),
• we want to hear something, some kind of knowledge, or
• we are social people and want someone to talk to ( conversation for conversation’s pleasure ).

A second talk from beginning to end that achieves some goal for the consumer, starting with the voice interface’s initial greeting and ending with the user exiting the interface, also fits into these three categories, which I refer to as interpersonal, technical, and prosocial. Note here that a conversation in our human sense—a chat between people that leads to some result and lasts an arbitrary length of time—could encompass multiple transactional, informational, and prosocial voice interactions in succession. In other words, a voice interaction is a conversation, but it is not always just one voice interaction.

Purely prosocial conversations are more gimmicky than captivating in most voice interfaces, because machines don’t yet have the capacity to really want to know how we’re doing and to do the sort of glad-handing humans crave. Additionally, there is a debate about whether users actually prefer organic human conversations that start with prosocial voiceovers and then seamlessly transition to other types. In fact, in Voice User Interface Design, Michael Cohen, James Giangola, and Jennifer Balogh recommend sticking to users ‘ expectations by mimicking how they interact with other voice interfaces rather than trying too hard to be human—potentially alienating them in the process ( ).

That leaves two different types of conversations we can have with one another that a voice interface can also have easily, including one that is transactional and one that is informational, teaching us something new ( “discuss a musical” ).

Transactional voice interactions

When you order a Hawaiian pizza with extra pineapple, you’re typically having a conversation and a voice interaction when you’re tapping buttons on a food delivery app. Even when we walk up to the counter and place an order, the conversation quickly pivots from an initial smattering of neighborly small talk to the real mission at hand: ordering a pizza ( generously topped with pineapple, as it should be ).

How are things going, Alison?

Burhan: Hi, welcome to Crust Deluxe! It’s chilly outside. How can I help you?

Can I get a Hawaiian pizza with extra pineapple, Alison?

Burhan: Sure, what size?

Alison: Big.

Burhan: Anything else?

Alison: No, that’s it.

Burhan: Something to drink?

I’ll have a bottle of Coke, Alison.

Burhan: You got it. That will cost$ 13.55 and take about fifteen minutes.

Each progressive disclosure in this transactional conversation reveals more and more of the desired outcome of the transaction: a service rendered or a product delivered. Conversations that are transactional have certain characteristics: they are direct, concise, and cost-effective. They quickly dispense with pleasantries.

Informational voice interactions

Meanwhile, some conversations are primarily about obtaining information. Alison might visit Crust Deluxe with the sole intention of placing an order, but she might not want to leave with a pizza at all. She might be just as interested in whether they serve halal or kosher dishes, gluten-free options, or something else. Even though we have a prosocial mini-conversation once more at the beginning to practice politeness, we are after much more.

How are things going, Alison?

Burhan: Hi, welcome to Crust Deluxe! It’s chilly outside. How can I help you?

Alison: Can I ask a few questions?

Burhan: Of course! Go right ahead.

Do you have any halal options on the menu, Alison?

Burhan: Absolutely! On request, we can make any pie halal. We also have lots of vegetarian, ovo-lacto, and vegan options. Do you have any other dietary restrictions in mind?

Alison: What about gluten-free pizzas?

Burhan: For both our deep-dish and thin-crust pizzas, we can definitely make a gluten-free crust for you. Anything else I can answer for you?

Alison: That’s it for now. Good to know. Thank you.

Burhan: Anytime, come back soon!

This dialogue is a lot different. Here, the goal is to get a certain set of facts. Informational conversations are research expeditions to gather data, news, or facts in search of the truth. Voice interactions that are informational might be more long-winded than transactional conversations by necessity. Responses are typically longer, more in-depth, and carefully communicated so that the customer is aware of the important lessons.

Voice Interfaces

Voice-based user interfaces use speech at the core to assist users in accomplishing their objectives. But simply because an interface has a voice component doesn’t mean that every user interaction with it is mediated through voice. We’re most concerned in this book with pure voice interfaces because multimodal voice interfaces can lean on visual components like screens as crutches, which are completely dependent on spoken conversation and lack any visual component, making them much more nuanced and challenging to deal with.

Though voice interfaces have long been integral to the imagined future of humanity in science fiction, only recently have those lofty visions become fully realized in genuine voice interfaces.

IVR ( interactive voice response ) systems

Though written conversational interfaces have been fixtures of computing for many decades, voice interfaces first emerged in the early 1990s with text-to-speech ( TTS ) dictation programs that recited written text aloud, as well as speech-enabled in-car systems that gave directions to a user-provided address. We became familiar with the first real voice interfaces that could actually be spoken with the help of interactive voice response ( IVR ) systems, which were developed as an alternative to overburdened customer service representatives.

IVR systems allowed organizations to reduce their reliance on call centers but soon became notorious for their clunkiness. When you call an airline or hotel company, which is a common practice in the corporate world, these systems were primarily intended as metaphorical switchboards to direct customers to a real phone agent (” Say Reservations to book a flight or check an itinerary” ), which are more likely to happen when you call one. Despite their functional issues and users ‘ frustration with their inability to speak to an actual human right away, IVR systems proliferated in the early 1990s across a variety of industries (, PDF).

IVR systems have a reputation for having less scintillating conversation than we’re used to in real life ( or even in science fiction ), but they are great for highly repetitive, monotonous conversations that typically don’t veer from a single format.

Screen readers

The invention of the screen reader, a tool that converts visual content into synthesized speech, was a development of IVR systems in parallel. For Blind or visually impaired website users, it’s the predominant method of interacting with text, multimedia, or form elements. Perhaps the closest thing we have today to an out-of-the-box implementation of content delivered through voice is represented by screen readers.

Among the first screen readers known by that moniker was the Screen Reader for the BBC Micro and NEEC Portable developed by the Research Centre for the Education of the Visually Handicapped (RCEVH) at the University of Birmingham in 1986 ( ). The first IBM Screen Reader for text-based computers was created by Jim Thatcher in the same year, which was later recreated for a computer with graphical user interfaces ( GUIs ) ( ).

With the rapid growth of the web in the 1990s, the demand for accessible tools for websites exploded. Screen readers started facilitating quick interactions with web pages that ostensibly allow disabled users to traverse the page as an aural and temporal space rather than a visual and physical one with the introduction of semantic HTML and especially ARIA roles in 2008, enabling speedy interactions with the pages. In other words, screen readers for the web “provide mechanisms that translate visual design constructs—proximity, proportion, etc. in A List Apart, writes Aaron Gustafson, “into useful information.” ” At least they do when documents are authored thoughtfully” ( ).

There is a big draw for screen readers: they’re challenging to use and relentlessly verbose, despite being incredibly instructive for voice interface designers. The visual structures of websites and web navigation don’t translate well to screen readers, sometimes resulting in unwieldy pronouncements that name every manipulable HTML element and announce every formatting change. Working with web-based interfaces is a cognitive burden for many screen reader users.

In Wired, accessibility advocate and voice engineer Chris Maury considers why the screen reader experience is ill-suited to users relying on voice:

I hated the way Screen Readers operated from the beginning. Why are they designed the way they are? It makes no sense to present information visually before converting it to audio only after that. All of the time and energy that goes into creating the perfect user experience for an app is wasted, or even worse, adversely impacting the experience for blind users. ( ) _ _ _

In many cases, well-designed voice interfaces can speed users to their destination better than long-winded screen reader monologues. After all, users of the visual interface have the advantage of freely scurrying around the viewport to find information, ignoring areas that are unimportant to them. Blind users, meanwhile, are obligated to listen to every utterance synthesized into speech and therefore prize brevity and efficiency. Users with disabilities who have long had no choice but to use clumsy screen readers might find that voice interfaces, especially more contemporary voice assistants, provide a more streamlined experience.

Voice assistants

Many of us immediately associate voice assistants with the subset of voice interfaces that are now commonplace in living rooms, smart homes, and offices with the film HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey or Majel Barrett’s voice as the omniscient computer in Star Trek. Voice assistants are akin to personal concierges that can answer questions, schedule appointments, conduct searches, and perform other common day-to-day tasks. And because of their assistive potential, they are quickly gaining more and more attention from accessibility advocates.

Before the earliest IVR systems found success in the enterprise, Apple published a demonstration video in 1987 depicting the Knowledge Navigator, a voice assistant that could transcribe spoken words and recognize human speech to a great degree of accuracy. Then, in 2001, Tim Berners-Lee and others created their vision for a” semantic web agent” that would carry out routine tasks like” checking calendars, making appointments, and finding locations” ( hinter paywall ). It wasn’t until 2011 that Apple’s Siri finally entered the picture, making voice assistants a tangible reality for consumers.

There are a lot of variations in the programmability and customization of some voice assistants compared to others ( Fig. 1 ). As a result of the breadth of voice assistants available today ( Fig. 1 ). At one extreme, everything except vendor-provided features is locked down, for example, at the time of their release, the core functionality of Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana couldn’t be extended beyond their existing capabilities. There are no other means by which developers can interact with Siri at a low level, aside from predefined categories of tasks like sending messages, hailing rideshares, making restaurant reservations, and other things, so even now it isn’t possible to program Siri to perform arbitrary functions.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home offer a core foundation on which developers can build custom voice interfaces. For this reason, developers who feel stifled by the limitations of Siri and Cortana are increasingly using programmable voice assistants that allow for customization and extensibility. Amazon offers the Alexa Skills Kit, a developer framework for building custom voice interfaces for Amazon Alexa, while Google Home offers the ability to program arbitrary Google Assistant skills. Users of the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant ecosystems can choose from among the thousands of custom-built skills available today.

As businesses like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google continue to occupy their positions, they’re also selling and open-sourcing an unheard array of tools and frameworks for designers and developers that aim to make creating voice interfaces as simple as possible, even without code.

Often by necessity, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa tend to be monochannel—they’re tightly coupled to a device and can’t be accessed on a computer or smartphone instead. In contrast, many development platforms, such as Google’s Dialogflow, have omnichannel capabilities that allow users to create a single conversational interface that then becomes a voice interface, textual chatbot, and IVR system upon deployment. I don’t prescribe any specific implementation approaches in this design-focused book, but in Chapter 4 we’ll get into some of the implications these variables might have on the way you build out your design artifacts.

Voice content

Simply put, voice content is content delivered through voice. Voice content must be free-flowing and organic, contextless and concise—everything written content isn’t enough to preserve what makes human conversation so compelling in the first place.

Our world is replete with voice content in various forms: screen readers reciting website content, voice assistants rattling off a weather forecast, and automated phone hotline responses governed by IVR systems. We’re most concerned with the content in this book being delivered auditorically, not as an option but as a necessity.

For many of us, our first foray into informational voice interfaces will be to deliver content to users. One issue is that any content we already have isn’t in any way suitable for this new environment. So how do we make the content trapped on our websites more conversational? And how do we create fresh copy that works with voice-recognition?

Lately, we’ve begun slicing and dicing our content in unprecedented ways. Websites are, in many ways, massive vaults of what I call macrocontent: lengthy prose that can last for miles in a browser window while being viewed in microfilm format in newspaper archives. Back in 2002, well before the present-day ubiquity of voice assistants, technologist Anil Dash defined microcontent as permalinked pieces of content that stay legible regardless of environment, such as email or text messages:

An example of microcontent can be a day’s weather forecast [sic], an airplane flight’s arrival and departure times, an abstract from a lengthy publication, or a single instant message. ( ) _ _ _

I would update Dash’s definition of microcontent to include all instances of bite-sized content that goes beyond written communiqués. After all, today we encounter microcontent in interfaces where a small snippet of copy is displayed alone, unmoored from the browser, like a textbot confirmation of a restaurant reservation. Informing delivery channels both established and novel, Microcontent provides the best opportunity to find out how your content can be stretched to the limits of its potential.

As microcontent, voice content is unique because it’s an example of how content is experienced in time rather than in space. We can instantly see when the next train is coming from a digital sign underground, but voice interfaces keep our attention occupied for so long that screen reader users are all too familiar.

Because microcontent is fundamentally made up of isolated blobs with no relation to the channels where they’ll eventually end up, we need to ensure that our microcontent truly performs well as voice content—and that means focusing on the two most important traits of robust voice content: voice content legibility and voice content discoverability.

Our voice content’s legibility and discoverability in general both depend on how it manifests in terms of perceived space and time.