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As of right now, there are 947 Star Trek shows streaming, totaling 820 days of viewing time, from Star Trek: The Original Series to Star Trek: Weird New Worlds. There are also 13 theatrical Star Trek movies in circulation, plus one direct-to-streaming movie, which rack up another roughly ]… ]

Does Star Trek Also Need a Franchise in Film? The Eternal Discussion appeared initially on Den of Geek.

Donkey Kong, the titular ape headlining the bank’s 1981 arcade game, helped Nintendo create a popular foothold in the American gaming industry. It wasn’t Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda that were Nintendo‘s breakout titles. Since then Donkey Kong has become a fixture for the business, either as a supporting figure for Mario-led outfit matches or his own collection of starring trophies across Nintendo‘s many household and portable computers. The company’s burgeoning Nintendo Switch 2 period has seen this, with Donkey Kong Bananza the most talked-about name in the Switch 2 build collection.

Donkey Kong has a longstanding record within the video game industry, though the number of activities that he generally stars in aren’t quite as talented as some of his other Nintendo rivals. Having said that, Donkey Kong has appeared in at least one sport on nearly every major Nintendo console and continues to be a key asset to the business. Here are the leading 10 best Donkey Kong game ranked, not counting his supporting figure opera performances.

10. Donkey Kong 64 ( 1999 )

Many people have no poorly demonized the 1999 film Donkey Kong 64 as an stuffed collect-a-thon on the Nintendo 64, so we’re starting off with a somewhat controversial access. To this popular criticism’s funds, the activity does have you record many of the same levels with various characters—something 2004’s Super Mario 64 DS even did without as much backlash—but that overlooks the stage. In fact, Donkey Kong 64 surpassed its contemporaries in the genre, not only catapulting Donkey Kong and his friends into the world of 3D platforming.

There is an under-appreciated depth to Donkey Kong 64, particularly in its rich level design and atmospheric musical score composed by Grant Kirkhope. After the success of Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, slop that many retrospective reviews don’t take into account also, which was a ton of slop that Donkey Kong 64 clearly stood a cut above when it first came out. Certainly not without its flaws, Donkey Kong 64 deserves far more love than it gets these days, or at least a less dubious reputation.

9. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat ( 2004 )

The tradition of quirky peripherals that were present in the Nintendo GameCube at the beginning of the 21st century is still present in the Nintendo home consoles. After introducing the DK Bongos, a bongo drum peripheral for the GameCube and 2003’s Donkey Konga, the peripheral was given more optimized gameplay experience in 2004’s Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. The game moves in a side-scrolling platformer controlled by the drums, continuing the rhythm-based gameplay from Donkey Konga.

One of the most accessible Donkey Kong games in terms of difficulty, Jungle Beat takes the DK Bongos to their logical apex in usage. There is something fundamentally cathartic about pounding on a set of bongos to defeat an intimidating boss, in addition to providing a unique mechanic for moving across the levels. A forgotten entry in the Donkey Kong franchise because of its signature peripheral, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat should receive an update given the possibilities through Nintendo’s continued motion control support.

8. Mario vs. Donkey Kong ( 2004 )

There was a time when Mario and Donkey Kong were bitter rivals, even though they may now be merely pals playing various Nintendo video games like Mario Kart and Mario Party. That antagonistic history is revisited in 2004’s Mario vs. Donkey Kong for the Game Boy Advance, the spiritual successor to 1994’s Donkey Kong on the original Game Boy. Mario owns and runs his own toy factory, which Donkey Kong raids for its well-known line of wind-up Mini-Mario figures, according to the game’s offbeat plot.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong ups the ante from the puzzle-solving gameplay and traversal present in the 1994 Game Boy game, adding a new wrinkle with the presence of the Mini-Marios which have to be navigated to safety. The Nintendo Switch received a surprise remake in 2024, significantly improving the technical presentation and making the controls more user-friendly for the contemporary console. While we’re certainly happy that Mario and Donkey Kong play nice again these days, Mario vs. Donkey Kong is a fresh take on one of gaming’s oldest beefs.

7. Donkey Kong Country Returns ( 2010 )

Developer Retro Studios did the same for Donkey Kong with the Wii’s Donkey Kong Country Returns in 2010 after completely revitalizing the Metroid franchise. Returning to the side-scrolling platforming that made Rare’s original Donkey Kong Country trilogy such a major success on the Super Nintendo, the game has Donkey and Diddy Kong take on a new villain, the Tiki Tak Tribe. In a change from the previous series titles, the game also allows for two-player simultaneous co-op, with the second player controlling Diddy.

Donkey Kong Country Returns is a welcome, hurm, return to form for the franchise, although not without a few bumps in its execution. The Wii revival has a faster pace than the first three games, which highlights how frustrating the console’s motion controls can be. The game received slightly enhanced remasters on the Nintendo 3DS and Switch, upgrading the visual presentation, though its gameplay flaws are still present and these remasters don’t add all that much to the overall experience.

6. Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble! 1996 )

At the twilight of the Super Nintendo’s lifecycle, and after the Nintendo 64 had already launched, Rare released one final Donkey Kong Country game for the SNES: 1996’s Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble! In the same way that Donkey Kong Country 2 removed Donkey Kong himself, its sequel also removes Diddy, making him the new playable character Kiddy Kong. Together, Dixie and Kiddy set out to rescue Donkey and Diddy from Baron K. Rool in a northern region with its geography inspired by Scandinavia and Canada.

Although Donkey Kong Country 3 may be the series ‘ weakest entry, it still manages to be a good one and introduces some interesting additions, most notably an open hub map and vehicles. But the game just doesn’t quite feel as inspired as its two predecessors, even with the protagonist swap to introduce Kiddy. Donkey Kong Country 3 retains the core appeal as it traverses stale territory in Donkey Kong Country 3, a strong but seemingly obligatory coda to the original Donkey Kong Country trilogy.

5. Tropical Freeze ( 2014 ): Donkey Kong Country

Relegated to being a supporting character for years, Cranky Kong makes his playable debut with 2014’s Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for the Wii U, joined by a returning Dixie. The attacking Snowmads, an army of arctic animals plotting to conquer Donkey Kong Island and plunge it into the unending winter, interrupt Donkey Kong’s birthday party. The Kongs battle their way back to the heart of their native island, defeat the Snowmads and defrost their home from its newly icy condition.

Tropical Freeze significantly improves the gameplay mechanics and level design compared to Donkey Kong Country Returns. At the same time, the difficulty remains as high as ever while the overall number of levels is reduced from its predecessor. The definitive Tropical Freeze experience is enhanced by the Nintendo Switch’s improved remaster, which adds Funky Kong as a playable character.

4. Donkey Kong Country ( 1994) )

To anyone who was around and playing video games in 1994, the original Donkey Kong Country was a huge deal when it debuted on the Super Nintendo that year. There was nothing else that looked that good on the console market at the time thanks to its crisp, pre-rendered graphics, which helped orient the industry towards more 3D aesthetics. The game’s story is simple: King K. Rool raids Donkey Kong Island and steals Donkey Kong’s vast stash of bananas, prompting the ape and his nephew Diddy, in his first appearance, to recover their purloined fruit.

We wouldn’t still be talking about Donkey Kong Country 30 years after its launch if it had only had that initial wow factor from its pre-rendered presentation. But more than just its eye-catching visuals, the game completely redefined Donkey Kong down to his character design and reestablished him as a core Nintendo property. This first game brings together impressive technical presentation, an instant-classic score composed primarily by Grant Kirkhope, and an engaging side-scrolling platformer experience that all others combine to create a legacy.

3. Donkey Kong ( 1994 )

Initially 1994’s Donkey Kong on the Game Boy looks and feels like a smoother, more intuitive port of the classic 1981 arcade game of the same name. The 1994 video game turns into a full-on adventure after completing the four levels of the arcade title, which includes 97 more levels in nine different worlds. Joining Donkey Kong in trying to stay one step ahead of Mario is Donkey Kong Jr. while the mustached plumber gains a new set of moves to keep up with the apes.

While ambitiously building upon these foundations, The Game Boy Donkey Kong is a love letter to both the original arcade and its 1982 sequel Donkey Kong Jr. At its core, the game is more of a puzzle-solving experience than a platforming one, with that distinction more evident in the level design as players progress. That provides a fresh take on a well-known premise and a significant improvement over the franchise’s 1994 version of Donkey Kong.

2. Diddy’s Kong Quest, Donkey Kong Country 2, and Donkey Kong Country 2 ( 1995 )

If Donkey Kong Country revolutionized the way we looked at side-scrolling platformers, its 1995 sequel Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest used that as a springboard to make the ultimate side-scrolling Donkey Kong experience. As the title suggests, Diddy steps up as the main character, working with his recently engaged girlfriend Dixie Kong to save Donkey from Kaptain K. Rool. The duo travel to the pirate warlord’s hideout on Crocodile Isle where they each use their unique abilities to traverse 52 levels and rescue Diddy’s uncle.

Donkey Kong Country 2 is one of those situations where bigger does actually mean better, with more secrets, more animal companions to temporarily control, and more enemy types to defeat. The level design is more ambitious and just how differently Diddy and Dixie each play make for a much deeper and richer experience than its predecessor. The sequel stands as the apex of side-scrollers and one of the best games that developer Rare has ever made. It is an overall improvement over the original Donkey Kong Country.

1. Donkey Kong Bananza ( 205 )

Released a full month after the Nintendo Switch 2’s launch, Donkey Kong Bananza became the most buzzed-about game from the console’s library, even over Mario Kart World. Donkey Kong Bananza successfully transformed its heroic ape into a full-fledged 3D platformer experience based on the character’s veritable strength by placing him in destructible environments, earning both praises. The game has Donkey Kong travel to Ingot Isle to harvest Banandium Gems, teaming up with a teenage Pauline against the sinister VoidCo mining company eager to obtain the Banandium Root, no matter the cost to the environment.

Donkey Kong Bananza repositions the marquee Nintendo franchise, starting with the immersive level design, side-scrolling homages straight from the original Donkey Kong Country in a fun and moving tribute, and a redesigned Donkey Kong character with plenty of personality. But for all its celebration of the entire history of all things Donkey Kong, Bananza is just a lot of fun, with its key gameplay mechanic of literally tearing through environments being incredibly cathartic. In this game, players can go crazy and smash everything in their path. A subtle reinvention of what’s possible for a Donkey Kong game, Donkey Kong Bananza is Nintendo’s best 3D platformer since at least 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey, and the most unabashedly fun Donkey Kong game in, well, ever.

On Den of Geek, Donkey Kong video games were first ranked among absolute bananas.

Donkey Kong, the studio’s 1981 arcade game, helped Nintendo become a significant force in the American entertainment sector, rather than Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo’s breakthrough name. Since then Donkey Kong has become a fixture for the business, either as a supporting figure for ]…]

The second post Donkey Kong Video Games Ranked from Fun to Absolute Bananas appeared on Den of Geek.

Nintendo‘s breakthrough name was never Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda, but somewhat Donkey Kong, with the eponymous monkey headlining the agency’s 1981 arcade game that helped Nintendo create a prominent hold in the American gambling industry. Donkey Kong has since grown a device for the business, whether playing in Mario-led opera games or his own collection of starring games for Nintendo‘s numerous portable and home consoles. This has continued into the bank’s budding Nintendo Switch 2 time, with the game’s Donkey Kong Bananza the most favourably buzzed-about name from the Switch 2’s start library.

Although Donkey Kong’s number of games he primarily stars in aren’t quite as prolific as some of his other Nintendo counterparts, he has a long history in the video game industry. With that said, Donkey Kong has starred in at least one game on virtually every major Nintendo system and remains a cornerstone property for the company. Not including his supporting character ensemble appearances, these are the top 10 best Donkey Kong games ever ranked.

10. Donkey Kong 64 ( 1999 )

We’re starting off this list with a relatively divisive entry, as many have not inaccurately derided 1999’s Donkey Kong 64 as an overstuffed collect-a-thon on the Nintendo 64. To the credit of many critics, the game does allow you to replay many of the same levels with different characters, which the 2004 Super Mario 64 DS also did without much controversy, but that overlooks the point. Indeed, not only catapulting Donkey Kong and his friends into the world of 3D platforming, Donkey Kong 64 rose above its contemporaries in the genre.

Donkey Kong 64 has an underappreciated depth, notably in its rich level design and atmospheric musical score, which was composed by Grant Kirkhope. What a lot of retrospective reviews also don’t take into account is that there was a ton of 3D platforming slop flooding the market after the success of Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, slop that Donkey Kong 64 clearly stood a cut above during its release. Donkey Kong 64 deserves far more love than it receives these days, or at least a less dubious reputation, despite its many flaws.

9. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat ( 2005 )

Nintendo home consoles have a longstanding legacy of quirky peripherals, a tradition that was continued by the Nintendo GameCube at the dawn of the 21st century. In Donkey Kong Jungle Beat in 2004, the peripheral received more optimized gameplay experience after the release of the GameCube’s DK Bongos and the GameCube’s Bongo Drum Periphery in 2003. The game continues the rhythm-based gameplay from Donkey Konga, albeit within a side-scrolling platformer controlled by the drums.

Jungle Beat is one of the most playable Donkey Kong games in terms of difficulty and places the DK Bongos at their highest point of use. More than just providing a unique mechanic in moving across the levels, there is something fundamentally cathartic about pounding on a set of bongos to pummel an imposing boss. Given the possibilities presented by Nintendo’s continued motion control support, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, a forgotten Donkey Kong entry due to its signature peripheral, should receive an update.

8. Donkey Kong vs. Mario vs.

While Mario and Donkey Kong may be nominal buddies now, palling around throughout various Nintendo sports titles, Mario Kart, and Mario Party, there was a time when they were bitter rivals. The spiritual follow-up to 1994’s Donkey Kong on the original Game Boy, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, takes on that antagonistic past in 2004. The game’s offbeat story has Mario own and run his own toy factory, which is raided by Donkey Kong for the factory’s popular line of wind-up Mini-Mario figures.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong raises the bar from the traversal and puzzle-solving gameplay from the 1994 Game Boy game, adding a fresh dimension with the presence of the Mini-Marios that must be navigated safely. The game received a surprise remake on the Nintendo Switch in 2024, making the controls more intuitive to the modern console while significantly upping the technical presentation. While we’re certainly happy that Donkey Kong and Mario once again play nice, Mario vs. Donkey Kong is a fresh take on one of video game’s oldest conflicts.

7. ( 2010 ), Donkey Kong Country Returns

After completely revitalizing the Metroid franchise, developer Retro Studios did the same for Donkey Kong with 2010’s Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii. Returning to the side-scrolling platforming that made Rare’s original Donkey Kong Country trilogy such a big hit on the Super Nintendo, the game features Donkey and Diddy Kong taking on a brand-new Tiki Tak Tribe. In a change-up from previous titles in the series, the game also allows for two-player simultaneous co-op, with the second player controlling Diddy.

Donkey Kong Country Returns is a good, hurm, franchise hurm, though its execution has some flaws. Boasting a faster pace than the original trilogy, the Wii revival is markedly more difficult than many games in the series, something that highlights how frustrating the console’s motion controls can be. The game’s visual presentation was slightly improved thanks to slightly improved remasters on the Nintendo 3DS and Switch, despite the game’s persistent gameplay flaws, and these remasters don’t significantly improve the overall experience.

6. Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble in Donkey Kong Country 3! ( 1996 )

One final Donkey Kong Country game for the SNES was released in 1996’s Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble, which was released at the tail end of the Super Nintendo’s lifecycle and after the Nintendo 64 had already been released. Just as Donkey Kong Country 2 ditched Donkey Kong himself, its sequel also discards Diddy, replacing him with the new playable character Kiddy Kong. In a northern region with its geography inspired by Scandinavia and Canada, Dixie and Kiddy set out to save Donkey and Diddy from Baron K. Rool.

Though Donkey Kong Country 3 may be the weakest entry of the original trilogy, it is by no means a bad game and brings some fresh changes to the series, specifically, an open hub map and vehicles. Even with the protagonist swap to introduce Kiddy, the game just doesn’t feel as inspired as its two predecessors. A solid if seemingly obligatory coda to the original Donkey Kong Country trilogy, Donkey Kong Country 3 retains the core appeal as it goes through well-worn territory.

5. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze ( 2014 )

Cranky Kong, who has been relegated to serving as a supporting character for years, makes his Wii U playable debut in Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze in 2014. The game has Donkey Kong’s birthday party interrupted by the attacking Snowmads, an army of arctic animals plotting to conquer Donkey Kong Island and plunge it into endless winter. The Kongs fight their way back to the island’s center, overthrow the Snowmads, and defrost their home from its slushy condition.

Tropical Freeze is an all-around improvement over Donkey Kong Country Returns, significantly refining the gameplay mechanics and level design. The difficulty is unchanged at the same time as it was before, and there are fewer levels overall. A solid addition to the series, the definitive Tropical Freeze experience is its enhanced remaster on the Nintendo Switch, adding Funky Kong as a playable character.

4. Donkey Kong Country ( 1994 )

The original Donkey Kong Country was a huge deal when it debuted on the Super Nintendo that year to anyone who was present and playing video games in 1994. With its crisp, pre-rendered graphics, there was nothing else that looked that good on the console market at the time, helping steer the industry towards more 3D aesthetics. The plot of the video game is straightforward: King K. Rool storms Donkey Kong Island and plunders the enormous stash of bananas, prompting the ape and his nephew Diddy to retrieve their purloined fruit.

If it was just about that initial wow factor from its pre-rendered presentation, we wouldn’t still be talking about Donkey Kong Country over 30 years after its launch. Beyond just its stunning visuals, the game completely redefined Donkey Kong and established him as a key Nintendo trademark. That legacy stems from a combination of impressive technical presentation, an instant-classic score composed primarily by Grant Kirkhope, and an engaging side-scrolling platformer experience that this first game all brings to the table.

3. Donkey Kong ( 1994 )

Donkey Kong on the Game Boy, which was released in 1994, appears to be a smoother, more intuitive adaptation of the popular 1981 arcade game of the same name. However, after completing the four levels from the arcade title, the 1994 game expands into a full-on adventure as Donkey Kong kidnaps Mario’s girlfriend Pauline again and hightails it across 97 additional levels in nine-themed worlds. Donkey Kong Jr. and the mustached plumber acquire a new set of moves to keep up with the apes while battling to stay one step ahead of Mario.

The Game Boy Donkey Kong is a love letter to both the original arcade and its 1982 sequel Donkey Kong Jr. while ambitiously building upon these foundations. The game’s fundamentals are more of a puzzle-solving experience than a platforming one, with the level design demonstrating this more as players advance. That helps elevate 1994’s Donkey Kong tremendously from similar games in the franchise and a refreshing twist on a familiar premise.

2. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest ( 1995 )

If Donkey Kong Country had radically altered the way we thought of side-scrolling platformers, its 1995 follow-up Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest used that as a starting point for the creation of the ultimate side-scrolling Donkey Kong experience. As the title suggests, Diddy steps up as the protagonist, teaming up with his newly introduced girlfriend Dixie Kong to rescue Donkey from Kaptain K. Rool. The pair uses their unique abilities to cross 52 levels and rescue Diddy’s uncle on Crocodile Isle before heading to the pirate warlord’s hideout on Crocodile Isle.

Donkey Kong Country 2 is one of those cases where bigger does actually mean better, with more secrets, more animal buddies to temporarily control, and more enemy types to take down. More ambitious levels are being created, and how differently Diddy and Dixie each play affect one another creates a much richer and deeper experience than its predecessor. An all-around improvement over the original Donkey Kong Country, the sequel stands as the apex of side-scrollers and one of the best games that developer Rare ever made.

1. Donkey Kong Bananza ( 2025 )

Donkey Kong Bananza, which was released a full month after the Nintendo Switch 2’s launch, outperformed Mario Kart World in terms of gameplay. This praise is well-earned, with Donkey Kong Bananza successfully catapulting its heroic ape into a full-on 3D platformer experience built around the character’s notable strength by placing him in destructible environments. No matter how much money the environment costs, Donkey Kong and a teenage Pauline battle the evil VoidCo mining company, which is attempting to extract Banandium Gems from Ingot Isle.

From its immersive level design, side-scrolling detours straight out of the original Donkey Kong Country in a fun and emotional tribute, and a redesigned Donkey Kong character design with plenty of personality, Donkey Kong Bananza repositions DKas a marquee Nintendo franchise. Bananza is just a lot of fun despite its celebration of the entire history of Donkey Kong, with its key gameplay mechanic of literally tearing through environments acting incredibly therapeutic. This game lets players go nuts and bash and smash everything around them. Donkey Kong Bananza is Nintendo’s best 3D platformer since at least Super Mario Odyssey and the most unashamedly enjoyable Donkey Kong game ever, a subtle rehash of what can be done for a Donkey Kong game.

The second post Donkey Kong Video Games Ranked from Fun to Absolute Bananas appeared on Den of Geek.

The announcement that basketball star Travis Kelce and music image Taylor Swift are engaged to be married is a geological event for a specific segment of the populace. How else could you explain the combination of such gigantic numbers? It’s old news for some people, at least when they enjoy watching hero movies. After all, those of]… ]

The first article on Den of Geek: The Best Power Partners Weddings in Comics History appeared second.

Nintendo‘s breakthrough name was never Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda, but somewhat Donkey Kong, with the eponymous monkey headlining the agency’s 1981 arcade game that helped Nintendo create a prominent hold in the American gambling industry. Donkey Kong has since grown a device for the company, whether playing in Mario-led outfit games or his own collection of starring games for Nintendo‘s numerous portable and home consoles. This has continued into the bank’s budding Nintendo Switch 2 time, with the game’s Donkey Kong Bananza the most favourably buzzed-about name from the Switch 2’s start library.

Although Donkey Kong’s number of games he primarily stars in aren’t as many as some of his other Nintendo counterparts, he has a long history in the video game industry. With that said, Donkey Kong has starred in at least one game on virtually every major Nintendo system and remains a cornerstone property for the company. Without including his supporting character ensemble appearances, these are the top ten Donkey Kong games.

10. Donkey Kong 64 ( 1999 )

We’re starting off this list with a relatively divisive entry, as many have not inaccurately derided 1999’s Donkey Kong 64 as an overstuffed collect-a-thon on the Nintendo 64. The game does, to the credit of many critics, allow you to replay many of the same levels with different characters, which was also done without the same amount of backlash in Super Mario 64 DS‘s 2004 version, but that ignores the point. Indeed, not only catapulting Donkey Kong and his friends into the world of 3D platforming, Donkey Kong 64 rose above its contemporaries in the genre.

Donkey Kong 64 has an underappreciated depth, notably in its rich level design and atmospheric musical score, which was composed by Grant Kirkhope. What a lot of retrospective reviews also don’t take into account is that there was a ton of 3D platforming slop flooding the market after the success of Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, slop that Donkey Kong 64 clearly stood a cut above during its release. Donkey Kong 64 deserves far more love than it receives these days, or at least a less dubious reputation, despite its many flaws.

9. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat ( 2005 )

Nintendo home consoles have a longstanding legacy of quirky peripherals, a tradition that was continued by the Nintendo GameCube at the dawn of the 21st century. In 2004’s Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, the peripheral was given a more optimized gameplay experience after introducing the DK Bongos, a bongo drum peripheral for the GameCube and 2003’s Donkey Konga. The game continues the rhythm-based gameplay from Donkey Konga, albeit within a side-scrolling platformer controlled by the drums.

Jungle Beat is one of the most playable Donkey Kong games ever in terms of difficulty and logical usage. More than just providing a unique mechanic in moving across the levels, there is something fundamentally cathartic about pounding on a set of bongos to pummel an imposing boss. Given the possibilities presented by Nintendo’s continued motion control support, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, a forgotten Donkey Kong entry due to its signature peripheral, should receive an update.

8. Donkey Kong vs. Mario ( 2004 )

While Mario and Donkey Kong may be nominal buddies now, palling around throughout various Nintendo sports titles, Mario Kart, and Mario Party, there was a time when they were bitter rivals. The spiritual follow-up to 1994’s Donkey Kong on the original Game Boy, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, takes on that antagonistic past in 2004. The game’s offbeat story has Mario own and run his own toy factory, which is raided by Donkey Kong for the factory’s popular line of wind-up Mini-Mario figures.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong raises the bar from the traversal and puzzle-solving gameplay from the 1994 Game Boy game, adding a fresh dimension with the presence of the Mini-Marios that must be navigated safely. The game received a surprise remake on the Nintendo Switch in 2024, making the controls more intuitive to the modern console while significantly upping the technical presentation. While we’re certainly happy that Donkey Kong and Mario once again play nice, Mario vs. Donkey Kong is a fresh take on one of video game’s oldest conflicts.

7. Donkey Kong Country Returns ( 2010 )

After completely revitalizing the Metroid franchise, developer Retro Studios did the same for Donkey Kong with 2010’s Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii. The game features Donkey and Diddy Kong confronting a new villain, the Tiki Tak Tribe, who is returning to the side-scrolling platforming that made Rare’s original Donkey Kong Country trilogy so popular on the Super Nintendo. In a change-up from previous titles in the series, the game also allows for two-player simultaneous co-op, with the second player controlling Diddy.

Donkey Kong Country Returns is a welcome, hurm, return to form for the franchise, though there are some flaws in its execution. Boasting a faster pace than the original trilogy, the Wii revival is markedly more difficult than many games in the series, something that highlights how frustrating the console’s motion controls can be. The game’s visual presentation was slightly improved thanks to slightly improved remasters on the Nintendo 3DS and Switch, even though its gameplay flaws are still present, and these remasters don’t really improve the overall experience.

6. Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble in Donkey Kong Country 3! ( 1996 )

In the twilight of the Super Nintendo’s lifecycle and after the Nintendo 64 had already launched, Rare released one more Donkey Kong Country game for the SNES: Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble! Just as Donkey Kong Country 2 ditched Donkey Kong himself, its sequel also discards Diddy, replacing him with the new playable character Kiddy Kong. In a northern region with its geography inspired by Scandinavia and Canada, Dixie and Kiddy set out to save Donkey and Diddy from Baron K. Rool.

Though Donkey Kong Country 3 may be the weakest entry of the original trilogy, it is by no means a bad game and brings some fresh changes to the series, specifically, an open hub map and vehicles. Even with the protagonist swapping to introduce Kiddy, the game just doesn’t feel as inspired as its two predecessors. A solid if seemingly obligatory coda to the original Donkey Kong Country trilogy, Donkey Kong Country 3 retains the core appeal as it goes through well-worn territory.

5. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze ( 2014 )

Cranky Kong, who has been relegated to being a supporting character for years, makes his playable debut in 2014’s Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for the Wii U, joined by a returning Dixie. The game has Donkey Kong’s birthday party interrupted by the attacking Snowmads, an army of arctic animals plotting to conquer Donkey Kong Island and plunge it into endless winter. The Kongs fight their way back to the center of their home island, defeat the Snowmads, and defrost their home from its recently icy condition.

Tropical Freeze is an all-around improvement over Donkey Kong Country Returns, significantly refining the gameplay mechanics and level design. The difficulty is unchanged at the same time as it was before, and there are fewer levels overall. A solid addition to the series, the definitive Tropical Freeze experience is its enhanced remaster on the Nintendo Switch, adding Funky Kong as a playable character.

4. Donkey Kong Country ( 1994 )

The debut of Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo in 1994 was a huge deal to anyone who was present and playing video games that year. With its crisp, pre-rendered graphics, there was nothing else that looked that good on the console market at the time, helping steer the industry towards more 3D aesthetics. The plot of the video game is straightforward: King K. Rool storms Donkey Kong Island and plunders the enormous stash of bananas, prompting the ape and his nephew Diddy to retrieve their purloined fruit in his first appearance.

If it was just about that initial wow factor from its pre-rendered presentation, we wouldn’t still be talking about Donkey Kong Country over 30 years after its launch. Beyond its stunning visuals, the game completely redefined Donkey Kong and made him a core Nintendo trademark. That legacy stems from a combination of impressive technical presentation, an instant-classic score composed primarily by Grant Kirkhope, and an engaging side-scrolling platformer experience that this first game all brings to the table.

3. Donkey Kong ( 1994 )

Donkey Kong on the Game Boy, which was released in 1994, appears to be a smoother, more intuitive adaptation of the popular 1981 arcade game of the same name. However, after completing the four levels from the arcade title, the 1994 game expands into a full-on adventure as Donkey Kong kidnaps Mario’s girlfriend Pauline again and hightails it across 97 additional levels in nine-themed worlds. Donkey Kong Jr. joins Donkey Kong in attempting to stay one step ahead of Mario while the mustached plumber learns a new set of moves to keep up with the apes.

The Game Boy Donkey Kong is a love letter to both the original arcade and its 1982 sequel Donkey Kong Jr. while ambitiously building upon these foundations. The game’s underlying structure is more of a puzzle-solving experience than a platforming one, with the level design demonstrating this more as players advance. That helps elevate 1994’s Donkey Kong tremendously from similar games in the franchise and a refreshing twist on a familiar premise.

2. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest ( 1995 )

If Donkey Kong Country had changed the way we thought of side-scrolling platformers, its 1995 sequel Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest used that as a starting point for the ultimate side-scrolling Donkey Kong experience. As the title suggests, Diddy steps up as the protagonist, teaming up with his newly introduced girlfriend Dixie Kong to rescue Donkey from Kaptain K. Rool. The duo travels to the hideout of the pirate warlord on Crocodile Isle where they each use their distinctive abilities to cross 52 levels and save Diddy’s uncle.

Donkey Kong Country 2 is one of those cases where bigger does actually mean better, with more secrets, more animal buddies to temporarily control, and more enemy types to take down. More ambitious levels are being created, and how differently Diddy and Dixie each play affect one another creates a much richer and deeper experience than its predecessor. An all-around improvement over the original Donkey Kong Country, the sequel stands as the apex of side-scrollers and one of the best games that developer Rare ever made.

1. Donkey Kong Bananza ( 2025 )

Donkey Kong Bananza, which was released a full month after the Nintendo Switch 2’s launch, rose to the top of the console’s game list, even surpassing Mario Kart World. This praise is well-earned, with Donkey Kong Bananza successfully catapulting its heroic ape into a full-on 3D platformer experience built around the character’s notable strength by placing him in destructible environments. No matter how much money the environment costs, Donkey Kong and a teenage Pauline battle the evil VoidCo mining company, which is attempting to extract Banandium Gems from Ingot Isle.

From its immersive level design, side-scrolling detours straight out of the original Donkey Kong Country in a fun and emotional tribute, and a redesigned Donkey Kong character design with plenty of personality, Donkey Kong Bananza repositions DKas a marquee Nintendo franchise. Bananza is just a lot of fun despite its celebration of the entire history of Donkey Kong, with its key gameplay mechanic of literally tearing through environments being incredibly cathartic. This game lets players go nuts and bash and smash everything around them. Donkey Kong Bananza is Nintendo’s best 3D platformer since at least 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey, and it is the most unashamedly enjoyable Donkey Kong game ever. It is a subtle rehash of what is possible for a Donkey Kong game.

The post Donkey Kong Video Games Ranked from Fun to Absolute Bananas appeared first on Den of Geek.

Episode 4 of Alien: Earth has clues in this article. For the past 46 ages, the Alien company has been immortalized by the catchphrase,” In area, no one can notice you scream”. Just four episodes in, Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth makes it abundantly clear that the mantra doesn’t apply to [ …] […]

The article Alien: World May Be Making Feel of the Alien Timetable After All appeared primary on Den of Geek.

Donkey Kong, the titular ape that dominated the 1981 arcade game that helped Nintendo firmly establish a foothold in the British entertainment sector, was Nintendo‘s breakthrough name rather than Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda. Since then Donkey Kong has become a fixture for the business, either as a supporting figure for Mario-led outfit matches or his own collection of starring trophies across Nintendo‘s many household and portable computers. The company’s burgeoning Nintendo Switch 2 period has seen this, with Donkey Kong Bananza the most talked-about name in the Switch 2 build collection.

Donkey Kong has a longstanding record within the video game industry, though the number of activities that he generally stars in aren’t quite as talented as some of his other Nintendo rivals. Despite all of that, Donkey Kong has appeared in at least one sport on almost every major Nintendo console. He has also remained a fundamental possession. Here are the leading 10 best Donkey Kong game ranked, not counting his supporting figure opera performances.

10. Donkey Kong 64 ( 1999 )

Many people have not inaccurately derided 1999’s Donkey Kong 64 as an overstuffed collect-a-thon on the Nintendo 64, so we’re starting off this list with a relatively divisive entry. To this common criticism’s credit, the game does have you replay many of the same levels with different characters—something 2004’s Super Mario 64 DS also did without as much backlash—but that overlooks the point. In fact, Donkey Kong 64 surpassed its contemporaries in the genre, not only catapulting Donkey Kong and his friends into the world of 3D platforming.

There is an under-appreciated depth to Donkey Kong 64, particularly in its rich level design and atmospheric musical score composed by Grant Kirkhope. Following the success of Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, slop that Donkey Kong 64 clearly stood a cut above its peers was something that many retrospective reviews also fail to consider. Certainly not without its flaws, Donkey Kong 64 deserves far more love than it gets these days, or at least a less dubious reputation.

9. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat ( 2004 )

The Nintendo GameCube continued a tradition that existed with the Nintendo Home console at the start of the 21st century, which has a long history of eccentric peripherals. After introducing the DK Bongos, a bongo drum peripheral for the GameCube and 2003’s Donkey Konga, the peripheral was given more optimized gameplay experience in 2004’s Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. The game moves in a side-scrolling platformer controlled by the drums, continuing the rhythm-based gameplay from Donkey Konga.

One of the most accessible Donkey Kong games in terms of difficulty, Jungle Beat takes the DK Bongos to their logical apex in usage. There is something fundamentally cathartic about pounding on a set of bongos to pummel an intimidating boss, but more than just providing a unique mechanic in moving across the levels. A forgotten entry in the Donkey Kong franchise because of its signature peripheral, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat should receive an update given the possibilities through Nintendo’s continued motion control support.

8. Mario vs. Donkey Kong ( 2004 )

There was a time when Mario and Donkey Kong were bitter rivals, even though they may now be merely pals playing various Nintendo video games like Mario Kart and Mario Party. That antagonistic history is revisited in 2004’s Mario vs. Donkey Kong for the Game Boy Advance, the spiritual successor to 1994’s Donkey Kong on the original Game Boy. Mario owns and runs his own toy factory, which Donkey Kong raids for its well-known line of wind-up Mini-Mario figures, according to the game’s offbeat plot.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong ups the ante from the puzzle-solving gameplay and traversal present in the 1994 Game Boy game, adding a new wrinkle with the presence of the Mini-Marios which have to be navigated to safety. The Nintendo Switch received a surprise remake in 2024, significantly improving the technical presentation and making the controls more user-friendly for the contemporary console. While we’re certainly happy that Mario and Donkey Kong play nice again these days, Mario vs. Donkey Kong is a fresh take on one of gaming’s oldest beefs.

7. Donkey Kong Country Returns ( 2010 )

Developer Retro Studios did the same for Donkey Kong with the Wii’s Donkey Kong Country Returns in 2010 after completely revitalizing the Metroid franchise. Returning to the side-scrolling platforming that made Rare’s original Donkey Kong Country trilogy such a major success on the Super Nintendo, the game has Donkey and Diddy Kong take on a new villain, the Tiki Tak Tribe. In a change from the previous series titles, the game also allows for two-player simultaneous co-op, with the second player controlling Diddy.

Donkey Kong Country Returns is a welcome, hurm, return to form for the franchise, although not without a few bumps in its execution. The Wii revival, which has a faster pace than the first three games in the series, is markedly more challenging than many of the previous ones, which highlights how frustrating the motion controls on the console can be. The game received slightly enhanced remasters on the Nintendo 3DS and Switch, upgrading the visual presentation, though its gameplay flaws are still present and these remasters don’t add all that much to the overall experience.

6. Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble! 1996 )

At the twilight of the Super Nintendo’s lifecycle, and after the Nintendo 64 had already launched, Rare released one final Donkey Kong Country game for the SNES: 1996’s Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble! Diddy is replaced by the new playable character Kiddy Kong in the same way that Donkey Kong Country 2 did Donkey Kong himself. Together, Dixie and Kiddy set out to rescue Donkey and Diddy from Baron K. Rool in a northern region with its geography inspired by Scandinavia and Canada.

Although Donkey Kong Country 3 may be the series ‘ weakest entry, it still manages to be a good one and introduces some interesting additions, most notably an open hub map and vehicles. But the game just doesn’t quite feel as inspired as its two predecessors, even with the protagonist swap to introduce Kiddy. Donkey Kong Country 3 retains the core appeal as it traverses stale territory in a strong but seemingly obligatory coda to the original Donkey Kong Country trilogy.

5. Tropical Freeze ( 2014 ): Donkey Kong Country

Relegated to being a supporting character for years, Cranky Kong makes his playable debut with 2014’s Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for the Wii U, joined by a returning Dixie. The attacking Snowmads, an army of arctic animals plotting to conquer Donkey Kong Island and plunge it into an endless winter, interrupt Donkey Kong’s birthday party. The Kongs battle their way back to the heart of their native island, defeat the Snowmads and defrost their home from its newly icy condition.

Tropical Freeze significantly improves the gameplay mechanics and level design compared to Donkey Kong Country Returns. At the same time, the difficulty remains as high as ever while the overall number of levels is reduced from its predecessor. The definitive Tropical Freeze experience is enhanced by the Nintendo Switch’s improved remaster, which adds Funky Kong as a playable character.

4. Donkey Kong Country ( 1994 )

To anyone who was around and playing video games in 1994, the original Donkey Kong Country was a huge deal when it debuted on the Super Nintendo that year. There was nothing else on the console market at the time that looked that good, thanks to its crisp, pre-rendered graphics, which helped orient the industry towards more 3D aesthetics. The game’s story is simple: King K. Rool raids Donkey Kong Island and steals Donkey Kong’s vast stash of bananas, prompting the ape and his nephew Diddy, in his first appearance, to recover their purloined fruit.

We wouldn’t still be talking about Donkey Kong Country 30 years after its launch if it had only had that initial wow factor from its pre-rendered presentation. But more than just its eye-catching visuals, the game completely redefined Donkey Kong down to his character design and reestablished him as a core Nintendo property. This first game brings together impressive technical presentation, an instant-classic score composed primarily by Grant Kirkhope, and an engaging side-scrolling platformer experience that all others combine to create a legacy.

3. Donkey Kong ( 1994 )

Initially 1994’s Donkey Kong on the Game Boy looks and feels like a smoother, more intuitive port of the classic 1981 arcade game of the same name. The 1994 video game turns into a full-on adventure after completing the four levels of the arcade title, which includes 97 more levels in nine different worlds. Joining Donkey Kong in trying to stay one step ahead of Mario is Donkey Kong Jr. while the mustached plumber gains a new set of moves to keep up with the apes.

While ambitiously building on these foundations, The Game Boy Donkey Kong is a love letter to both the 1982 sequel to Donkey Kong Jr. and the original arcade. At its core, the game is more of a puzzle-solving experience than a platforming one, with that distinction more evident in the level design as players progress. That significantly enhances the 1994 film Donkey Kong from earlier installments of the franchise and adds a fresh spin to a well-known premise.

2. Diddy’s Kong Quest, Donkey Kong Country 2, and 1995

If Donkey Kong Country revolutionized the way we looked at side-scrolling platformers, its 1995 sequel Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest used that as a springboard to make the ultimate side-scrolling Donkey Kong experience. As the title suggests, Diddy steps up to the role of the protagonist and teams up with his recently engaged girlfriend Dixie Kong to save Donkey from Kaptain K. Rool. The duo travel to the pirate warlord’s hideout on Crocodile Isle where they each use their unique abilities to traverse 52 levels and rescue Diddy’s uncle.

With more secrets, more animal companions to temporarily control, and more enemy types to defeat, Donkey Kong Country 2 is one of those situations where bigger does actually mean better. The level design is more ambitious and just how differently Diddy and Dixie each play make for a much deeper and richer experience than its predecessor. The sequel is a major improvement over the first Donkey Kong Country and arguably one of the best games ever created by developer Rare.

1. Bananza of Donkey Kong ( 2025 )

Released a full month after the Nintendo Switch 2’s launch, Donkey Kong Bananza became the most buzzed-about game from the console’s library, even over Mario Kart World. Donkey Kong Bananza successfully catapulted its heroic ape into a full-on 3D platformer experience built around the character’s notoriety by placing him in destructible environments is a well-earned accolade. The game has Donkey Kong travel to Ingot Isle to harvest Banandium Gems, teaming up with a teenage Pauline against the sinister VoidCo mining company eager to obtain the Banandium Root, no matter the cost to the environment.

Donkey Kong Bananza repositions DKas a marquee Nintendo franchise with immersive level design, side-scrolling detours straight from the original Donkey Kong Country in a fun and emotional tribute, and a redesigned Donkey Kong character design with plenty of personality. But for all its celebration of the entire history of all things Donkey Kong, Bananza is just a lot of fun, with its key gameplay mechanic of literally tearing through environments being incredibly cathartic. This game enables players to go crazy and smash everything in their path. A subtle reinvention of what’s possible for a Donkey Kong game, Donkey Kong Bananza is Nintendo’s best 3D platformer since at least 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey, and the most unabashedly fun Donkey Kong game in, well, ever.

The first post Donkey Kong Video Games Ranked from Fun to Absolute Bananas appeared on Den of Geek.

One of the most successful soft knowledge we have at our disposal is the ability to work together to improve our patterns while developing our own abilities and opinions, in whatever form it takes, and whatever it may be called.

Feedback is also one of the most underestimated equipment, and generally by assuming that we’re now great at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a skill that can be trained, grown, and improved. Bad comments can lead to conflict in projects, lower confidence, and long-term, undermine trust and teamwork. Quality comments can be a revolutionary force.

Practicing our knowledge is absolutely a good way to enhance, but the learning gets yet faster when it’s paired with a good base that programs and focuses the exercise. What are some fundamental components of providing effective opinions? And how can input be adjusted for isolated and distributed function settings?

We can find a long history of sequential opinions on the web: code was written and discussed on mailing lists since the beginning of open source. Currently, engineers engage on pull calls, developers post in their favourite design tools, project managers and sprint masters exchange ideas on tickets, and so on.

Design analysis is often the label used for a type of input that’s provided to make our job better, jointly. It generally shares many of the concepts with comments, but it also has some differences.

The material

The content of the feedback serves as the foundation for every effective analysis, so we need to start there. There are many versions that you can use to design your information. The one that I personally like best—because it’s obvious and actionable—is this one from Lara Hogan.

This formula is typically used to provide feedback to people, but it also fits really well in a design criticism because it finally addresses one of the main inquiries that we work on: What? Where? Why? How? Imagine that you’re giving some comments about some pattern function that spans several screens, like an onboard movement: there are some pages shown, a movement blueprint, and an outline of the decisions made. You notice something that needs to be improved. If you keep the three elements of the equation in mind, you’ll have a mental model that can help you be more precise and effective.

Here is a comment that could be included in some feedback, and it might appear reasonable at first glance because it appears to merely fit the equation. But does it?

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

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

I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons.

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

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

The question approach is meant to provide open guidance by eliciting the critical thinking in the designer receiving the feedback. Notably, in Lara’s equation she provides a second approach: request, which instead provides guidance toward a specific solution. While that’s a viable option for general feedback, in my experience, going back to the question approach typically leads to the best solutions because designers are generally more at ease with having an open space to experiment with.

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

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

Or, for the request approach:

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

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

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

Choosing the question approach or the request approach can also at times be a matter of personal preference. I did rounds of anonymous feedback and I reviewed feedback with other people a while back when I was putting a lot of effort into improving my feedback. After a few rounds of this work and a year later, I got a positive response: my feedback came across as effective and grounded. Until I changed teams. Surprise surprise, one particular person gave me a lot of negative feedback. The reason is that I had previously tried not to be prescriptive in my advice—because the people who I was previously working with preferred the open-ended question format over the request style of suggestions. However, there was a person in this other team who had always preferred specific guidance. So I adapted my feedback for them to include requests.

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

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

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

Therefore, the above equation serves as a mnemonic to reflect and enhance the practice rather than a strict template for feedback. Even after years of active work on my critiques, I still from time to time go back to this formula and reflect on whether what I just wrote is effective.

The atmosphere

Well-grounded content is the foundation of feedback, but that’s not really enough. The soft skills of the person who’s providing the critique can multiply the likelihood that the feedback will be well received and understood. It has been demonstrated that only positive feedback can lead to sustained change in people. It can be determined by tone alone whether content is rejected or welcomed.

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

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

The time when feedback occurs is known as timing. To-the-point feedback doesn’t have much hope of being well received if it’s given at the wrong time. When a new feature’s entire high-level information architecture is about to go live, it might still be relevant if the questioning raises a significant blocker that no one saw, but those concerns are much more likely to have to wait for a later revision. So in general, attune your feedback to the stage of the project. Early iteration? Iteration later? Polishing work in progress? Each of these needs a different one. The right timing will make it more likely that your feedback will be well received.

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

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

A few years back, I was asking for some feedback on how I give feedback. I was given some sound advice, but I also got a surprise comment. They pointed out that when I wrote” Oh, ]… ]”, I made them feel stupid. That’s not what I meant to say! I felt really bad, and I just realized that I provided feedback to them for months, and every time I might have made them feel stupid. I was horrified … but also thankful. I quickly changed my situation by adding “oh” to my list of replaced words (your choice between aText, TextExpander, or others ) so that when I typed “oh,” it was immediately deleted.

Something to highlight because it’s quite frequent—especially in teams that have a strong group spirit—is that people tend to beat around the bush. A positive attitude doesn’t necessarily mean giving in to criticism; it just means that you give it in a respectful and constructive manner, whether it be in the form of criticism or criticism. The nicest thing that you can do for someone is to help them grow.

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

The format

Asynchronous feedback also has a significant inherent benefit: it allows us to spend more time making sure that the suggestions ‘ clarity and actionability meet two main objectives.

Let’s imagine that someone shared a design iteration for a project. You are reviewing it and leaving a comment. There are many ways to accomplish this, and context is of course important, but let’s try to think about some things that might be worthwhile to take into account.

In terms of clarity, start by grounding the critique that you’re about to give by providing context. This includes specifically describing where you’re coming from: do you have a thorough understanding of the project, or is this your first encounter with it? Are you coming from a high-level perspective, or are you figuring out the details? Are there regressions? Which user’s point of view are you addressing when offering your feedback? Is the design iteration at a point where it would be okay to ship this, or are there major things that need to be addressed first?

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

We frequently concentrate on the negatives and attempt to list all the things that could be improved. That’s of course important, but it’s just as important—if not more—to focus on the positives, especially if you saw progress from the previous iteration. Although this may seem superfluous, it’s important to keep in mind that design is a field with hundreds of possible solutions for each problem. So pointing out that the design solution that was chosen is good and explaining why it’s good has two major benefits: it confirms that the approach taken was solid, and it helps to ground your negative feedback. In the longer term, sharing positive feedback can help prevent regressions on things that are going well because those things will have been highlighted as important. Positive feedback can also help to lessen impostor syndrome as an added bonus.

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

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

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

One approach that I’ve personally used effectively in some contexts is to enhance the bullet points with four markers using emojis. A red square indicates that it is something I consider blocking, a yellow diamond indicates that it needs to be changed, and a green circle provides a thorough, positive confirmation. I also use a blue spiral � � for either something that I’m not sure about, an exploration, an open alternative, or just a note. However, I’d only use this strategy on teams where I’ve already established a high level of trust because the impact could be quite demoralizing if I had to deliver a lot of red squares, and I’d change how I’d communicate that a little.

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

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

What about giving feedback directly in Figma or another design tool that allows in-place feedback? These are generally difficult to use because they conceal discussions and are harder to follow, but in the right setting, they can be very effective. Just make sure that each of the comments is separate so that it’s easier to match each discussion to a single task, similar to the idea of splitting mentioned above.

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

Asynchronous feedback also has the benefit of automatically guiding decisions, according to writing. Especially in large projects,” Why did we do this”? There’s nothing better than open, transparent discussions that can be reviewed at any time, and this could be a question that arises from time to time. For this reason, I recommend using software that saves these discussions, without hiding them once they are resolved.

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

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

” Any opinion”? is perhaps one of the worst ways to ask for suggestions. It’s obscure and unfocused, and it doesn’t give a clear picture of what we’re looking for. Getting good opinions starts sooner than we might hope: it starts with the demand.

Starting the process of receiving feedback with a question may seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense if we consider that receiving feedback can be considered a form of pattern research. In the same way that we wouldn’t perform any studies without the correct questions to get the insight that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to build strong issues.

Design analysis is not a one-time procedure. Sure, any great comments process continues until the project is finished, but this is especially true for layout because architecture work continues iteration after iteration, from a high level to the finest details. Each stage requires its unique set of questions.

And suddenly, as with any great research, we need to examine what we got up, get to the base of its perspectives, and take action. Iteration, evaluation, and issue. This look at each of those.

The query

Being available to input is important, but we need to be specific about what we’re looking for. Any comments,” What do you think,” or” I’d love to hear your mind” at the end of a presentation are likely to garner a lot of different ideas, or worse, to make people follow the lead of the first speaker. And next… we get frustrated because vague issues like those you turn a high-level moves review into folks rather commenting on the borders of buttons. Which topic may be a wholesome one, so it might be difficult to get the team to switch to the subject you wanted to concentrate on.

But how do we get into this scenario? It’s a combination of various components. One is that we don’t often consider asking as a part of the input method. Another is how healthy it is to keep the issue open and assume that everyone else will agree. Another is that in nonprofessional conversations, there’s usually no need to be that exact. In summary, we tend to undervalue the value of the issues, and we don’t work to improve them.

The work of asking good questions guidelines and focuses the criticism. It’s even a form of acceptance because it specifies what kind of opinions you’d like to receive and how you’re open to them. It puts people in the right emotional state, especially in situations when they weren’t expecting to give opinions.

There isn’t a second best way to ask for opinions. It simply needs to be certain, and sensitivity can take several shapes. The period than depth model for design critique has been a particularly helpful tool for my coaching.

” Stage” refers to each of the steps of the process—in our event, the design process. The kind of feedback changes as the person research moves forward to the final design. But within a single stage, one might also examine whether some assumptions are correct and whether there’s been a suitable language of the amassed input into updated designs as the job has evolved. The layers of user experience could serve as a starting point for potential questions. What do you want to know: Project objectives? User requirements? Functionality? the content Interaction design? Information architecture UI design? design of navigation Visual design? branding?

Here’re a few example questions that are precise and to the point that refer to different layers:

• Functionality: Is it desirable to automate account creation?
• Interaction design: Take a look through the updated flow and let me know whether you see any steps or error states that I might’ve missed.
• Information architecture: This page contains two competing pieces of information. Is the structure effective in communicating them both?
• User interface design: What do you think about the top-most error counter, which ensures that you can see the next error even when the error is outside the viewport?
• Navigation design: From research, we identified these second-level navigation items, but once you’re on the page, the list feels too long and hard to navigate. Do you have any suggestions for how to handle this?
• Visual design: Are the sticky notifications in the bottom-right corner visible enough?

The other axis of specificity is determined by how far you would like to go with the presentation. For example, we might have introduced a new end-to-end flow, but there was a specific view that you found particularly challenging and you’d like a detailed review of that. This can be especially helpful from one iteration to the next when it’s crucial to highlight the areas that have changed.

There are other things that we can consider when we want to achieve more specific—and more effective—questions.

A quick fix is to get rid of the generic qualifiers from questions like “good”, “well,” “nice,” “bad,” “okay,” and” cool.” For example, asking,” When the block opens and the buttons appear, is this interaction good”? is possible to appear specific, but the “good” qualifier can be found in an even better question,” When the block opens and the buttons appear, is it clear what the next action is?”

Sometimes we actually do want broad feedback. Although that is uncommon, it is possible. In that sense, you might still make it explicit that you’re looking for a wide range of opinions, whether at a high level or with details. Or perhaps you should just say,” At first glance, what do you think”? so that it’s clear that what you’re asking is open ended but focused on someone’s impression after their first five seconds of looking at it.

Sometimes the project is particularly broad, and some areas may have already been thoroughly explored. In these situations, it might be useful to explicitly say that some parts are already locked in and aren’t open to feedback. Although it’s not something I’d recommend in general, I’ve found it helpful in avoiding getting back into rabbit holes like those that could lead to further refinement but aren’t currently what matters most.

Asking specific questions can completely change the quality of the feedback that you receive. People who have less refined critique abilities will now be able to provide more useful feedback, and even experienced designers will appreciate the clarity and effectiveness gained from concentrating solely on what is required. It can save a lot of time and frustration.

The iteration

Design iterations are probably the most visible part of the design work, and they provide a natural checkpoint for feedback. Many design tools have inline commenting, but many of them only display changes as a single fluid stream in the same file. In addition, these kinds of design tools automatically update shared UI components, make conversations disappear and require designs to always display the most recent version, unless these would-be useful features were manually disabled. The implied goal that these design tools seem to have is to arrive at just one final copy with all discussions closed, probably because they inherited patterns from how written documents are collaboratively edited. That approach to design critiques is probably not the best approach, but some teams might benefit from it even if I don’t want to be too prescriptive.

The asynchronous design-critique approach that I find most effective is to create explicit checkpoints for discussion. I’m going to use the term iteration post for this. It refers to a write-up or presentation of the design iteration followed by a discussion thread of some kind. Any platform that can accommodate this type of structure can use this. By the way, when I refer to a “write-up or presentation“, I’m including video recordings or other media too: as long as it’s asynchronous, it works.

Using iteration posts has a number of benefits:

• It creates a rhythm in the design work so that the designer can review feedback from each iteration and prepare for the next.
• It makes decisions accessible for upcoming review, and conversed conversations are also always available.
• It creates a record of how the design changed over time.
• It might also make it simpler to collect and act on feedback depending on the tool.

These posts of course don’t mean that no other feedback approach should be used, just that iteration posts could be the primary rhythm for a remote design team to use. And from there, there can develop additional feedback techniques ( such as live critique, pair designing, or inline comments ).

I don’t think there’s a standard format for iteration posts. However, there are a few high-level components that make sense to include as a baseline:

1. The goal
2. The layout
3. The list of changes
4. The querys

Each project is likely to have a goal, and hopefully it’s something that’s already been summarized in a single sentence somewhere else, such as the client brief, the product manager’s outline, or the project owner’s request. In other words, I would copy and paste this into every iteration post to make it work. The idea is to provide context and to repeat what’s essential to make each iteration post complete so that there’s no need to find information spread across multiple posts. The most recent iteration post will have everything I need if I want to know about the most recent design.

This copy-and-paste part introduces another relevant concept: alignment comes from repetition. Therefore, repeating information in posts is actually very effective at ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

The design is then the actual series of information-architecture outlines, diagrams, flows, maps, wireframes, screens, visuals, and any other kind of design work that’s been done. It’s any design artifact, in essence. For the final stages of work, I prefer the term blueprint to emphasize that I’ll be showing full flows instead of individual screens to make it easier to understand the bigger picture.

It might also be helpful to have clear names on the artifacts so that it is easier to refer to them. Write the post in a way that helps people understand the work. It’s not much different from creating a strong live presentation.

For an efficient discussion, you should also include a bullet list of the changes from the previous iteration to let people focus on what’s new, which can be especially useful for larger pieces of work where keeping track, iteration after iteration, could become a challenge.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, a list of the questions must be included in order to help you guide the design critique in the desired direction. Doing this as a numbered list can also help make it easier to refer to each question by its number.

Not every iteration is the same. Earlier iterations don’t need to be as tightly focused—they can be more exploratory and experimental, maybe even breaking some of the design-language guidelines to see what’s possible. Then, later, the iterations begin coming to a decision and improving it until the design process is complete and the feature is ready.

I want to highlight that even if these iteration posts are written and conceived as checkpoints, by no means do they need to be exhaustive. A post might be a draft, just a concept to start a discussion, or it might be a cumulative list of all the features that have been added over the course of each iteration until the full picture is achieved.

Over time, I also started using specific labels for incremental iterations: i1, i2, i3, and so on. Although this may seem like a minor labeling tip, it can be useful in many ways:

• Unique—It’s a clear unique marker. Everyone knows where to go to review things, and it’s simple to say” This was discussed in i4″ with each project.
• Unassuming—It works like versions ( such as v1, v2, and v3 ) but in contrast, versions create the impression of something that’s big, exhaustive, and complete. Attempts must be exploratory, incomplete, or partial.
• Future proof—It resolves the “final” naming problem that you can run into with versions. No more files with the title “final final complete no-really-its-done” Within each project, the largest number always represents the latest iteration.

The wording release candidate (RC ) could be used to indicate when a design is finished enough to be worked on, even if there are some areas that still need improvement and, in turn, require more iterations, such as” with i8 we reached RC” or “i12 is an RC” to indicate when it is finished.

The review

What typically occurs during a design critique is an open discussion, with a back and forth between parties that can be very productive. This approach is particularly effective during live, synchronous feedback. However, when we work asynchronously, it is more effective to adopt a different strategy: we can adopt a user-research mindset. Written feedback from teammates, stakeholders, or others can be treated as if it were the result of user interviews and surveys, and we can analyze it accordingly.

Asynchronous feedback is particularly effective around these friction points because of this shift’s significant benefits:

1. It removes the pressure to reply to everyone.
2. It lessens the annoyance caused by swoop-by comments.
3. It lessens our personal stake.

The first friction is being forced to respond to every comment. Sometimes we write the iteration post, and we get replies from our team. It’s simple, straightforward, and doesn’t cause any issues. But other times, some solutions might require more in-depth discussions, and the amount of replies can quickly increase, which can create a tension between trying to be a good team player by replying to everyone and doing the next design iteration. This might be especially true if the respondent is a stakeholder or someone directly involved in the project who we feel we need to speak with. We need to accept that this pressure is absolutely normal, and it’s human nature to try to accommodate people who we care about. Responding to all comments at times can be effective, but when we consider a design critique more like user research, we realize that we don’t need to respond to every comment, and there are alternatives in asynchronous spaces:

One is to let the next iteration speak for itself. When the design changes and we publish a follow-up iteration, that’s the response. You might tag all the people who were involved in the previous discussion, but even that’s a choice, not a requirement.
• Another option is to respond politely to acknowledge each comment, such as” Understood. Thank you”,” Good points— I’ll review”, or” Thanks. These will be included in the upcoming iteration. In some cases, this could also be just a single top-level comment along the lines of” Thanks for all the feedback everyone—the next iteration is coming soon”!
• One more thing is to quickly summarize the comments before proceeding. Depending on your workflow, this can be particularly useful as it can provide a simplified checklist that you can then use for the next iteration.

The swoop-by comment, which is the kind of feedback that comes from a member of a team or non-project who might not be aware of the context, restrictions, decisions, or requirements, or of the discussions from earlier iterations, is the second friction point. On their side, there’s something that one can hope that they might learn: they could start to acknowledge that they’re doing this and they could be more conscious in outlining where they’re coming from. It can be annoying to have to repeat the same response repeatedly in swoop-by comments.

Let’s begin by acknowledging again that there’s no need to reply to every comment. However, if responding to a previously litigated point is useful, a brief response with a link to the previous discussion for additional information is typically sufficient. Remember, alignment comes from repetition, so it’s okay to repeat things sometimes!

Swoop-by commenting can still be useful for two reasons: first, they might point out something that isn’t clear, and second, they might have the power to represent a user’s first impression of the design. Sure, you’ll still be frustrated, but that might at least help in dealing with it.

The personal stake we might have in relation to the design could be the third friction point, which might cause us to feel defensive if the review turned out to be more of a discussion. Treating feedback as user research helps us create a healthy distance between the people giving us feedback and our ego ( because yes, even if we don’t want to admit it, it’s there ). In the end, putting everything in aggregate form helps us to prioritize our work more.

Always remember that while you need to listen to stakeholders, project owners, and specific advice, you don’t have to accept every piece of feedback. You must examine it and come up with a rationale for your choice, but sometimes “no” is the best choice.

As the designer leading the project, you’re in charge of that decision. In the end, everyone has their area of expertise, and as a designer, you are the one with the most background and knowledge to make the right choice. And by listening to the feedback that you’ve received, you’re making sure that it’s also the best and most balanced decision.

Thanks to Mike Shelton and Brie Anne Demkiw for their contributions to the initial draft of this article.

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 products 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 started by making a structure for a 960px canvas that I would later add willing to. The growth phase was about attaining pixel-perfect precision using set widths, fixed levels, and absolute setting.

All of this was altered by Ethan Marcotte’s speak at An Event Apart and the subsequent article in A Checklist Off in 2010. I was sold on reactive style 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. You can’t really put responsiveness at the end of a job, which I learned the hard way. 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 premium:

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

Media questions

The next ingredient for flexible design is press queries. Without them, content would shrink to fit the available space, regardless of whether it remained readable ( The exact opposite issue resulted from the development of a mobile-first approach ).

Media questions 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 washable 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 questions 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. Workarounds for JavaScript exist, 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 having strong cross-browser support for them, it’s difficult to say for certain whether container queries will be a success story. Responsive component libraries would definitely evolve how we design and would improve the possibilities for reuse and design at scale. However, we might need to modify these elements in order 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;}

The biggest benefit of all of this is that you don’t have to wrap elements in container rows. 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. The above code can be implemented behind an @supports feature query even though Firefox is the only browser that supports subgrid at the time of writing.

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 used 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 never make it smaller than the content that is inside.”

—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 the requirement of 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 without relying on container queries using an intrinsic approach.

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 might be that I now work for a sizable company, which is significantly 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 having a selection of units is a hindrance when creating layout templates, intrinsic design and frameworks do not work together 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 show how the site would appear throughout our careers at some point.

How do you do that now, with each component responding to content and layouts flexing as and when they need to? Personally, I’m a big fan of this kind of design in the browser.

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 changes in content, like in our earlier Subgrid card illustration, which allowed the cards to modify both their own content and that of their sibling components.

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.

This is not the same as previous markup hacks like this.

 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 properties.

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 making plans for unanticipated changes in language or direction, we can begin to future-proof 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 lot different to design for someone using a mobile phone and walking through a crowded street in glaring sunshine than it is for someone 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.

Choice is so crucial because of this. 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 is important.

” 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, in the real world, 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 questions 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 as of 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 questions 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 the same way we have 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 need to make sure our goods are usable when people need them, whenever and wherever that may be. 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 we begun to write our discussions, and only recently have we outsourced them to the system, a system that exhibits a significantly higher affection for written letter 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 commit to recording and keeping usages long after they are no longer relevant in spoken communication ( for example, the salutation” 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.

Spoken language is not a luxury in this regard. Besides the nonverbal cues that decorate conversations with emphasis and emotional context, there are also verbal cues and vocal behaviors that modulate conversation in nuanced ways: how something is said, not what. Our spoken language conveys much more than the written word could ever contain, whether it be rapid-fire, low-pitched, or high-decibel, sarcastic, stilted, or sighing. So when it comes to voice interfaces—the machines we conduct spoken conversations with—we face exciting challenges as designers and content strategists.

Voice-to-text interactions

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 seek knowledge of something ( some kind of information ), or
• we are social beings and want someone to talk to ( conversation for conversation’s sake ).

These three categories, which I refer to as transactional, informational, and prosocial, also apply to essentially every voice interaction: a single conversation that starts with the voice interface’s first greeting and ends with the user leaving the interface. 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 may not always be 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. Users are also debating whether or not they prefer the kind of organic human conversation that starts with a prosocial voiceover and progresses seamlessly into 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 ( ).

A voice interface can also have two types of conversations we can have with one another that are both transactional and informational, each learning 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 ).

Alison: Hey, how are things going?

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?

Large, Alison.

Burhan: Anything else?

Alison: No, that’s it.

Burhan: Something to drink?

Alison, I’ll have a bottle of Coke.

Burhan: You got it. It will cost about$ 15 and take fifteen minutes to complete.

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. Transactional conversations exhibit a few key characteristics: they’re direct, to the point, and economical. 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.

Alison: Hey, how are things going?

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, without a problem. 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 entirely different. Here, the goal is to get a certain set of facts. Informational conversations are research expeditions that seek the truth through information gathering. 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 to ensure that the customer understands the main ideas.

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. These systems, which are commonplace in the corporate world, were primarily intended as metaphorical switchboards to direct customers to real phone agents (” Say Reservations to book a flight or check an itinerary” ), and it is likely that when you call an airline or hotel conglomerate, you will have the opportunity to have a conversation with 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 conversations than we’re used to in real life ( or even in science fiction ), despite being extremely repetitive and monotonous.

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 disliked the operation of Screen Readers from the beginning. Why are they designed the way they are? It makes no sense to present information visually and then only to have that information translated into audio. 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 popular subset of voice interfaces found in living rooms, smart homes, and offices with the film A Space Odyssey or with Majel Barrett’s voice as the omniscient computer from 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 is a significant variation in how programmable and customizable some voice assistants are compared to others due to the sheer number 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 constrained by the limitations of Siri and Cortana are increasingly using programmable voice assistants that are extensibable and customizable. 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 today have the option to choose from among the thousands of custom-built skills available in the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa ecosystems.

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, like Google’s Dialogflow, now support omnichannel features, allowing 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 movements?

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 extending like microfilm viewers of 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], the arrival and departure times for an airplane flight, 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 transcends 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. The best way to learn how to stretch your content to the limits of its potential is through microcontent, which will inform both established and new delivery methods.

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.

Some members of the elite running group were beginning to think it was impossible to run a hour in less than four hours in the 1950s. Riders had been attempting it since the later 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body just wasn’t built for the job.

But Roger Bannister surprised all on May 6, 1956. It was a cold, damp morning in Oxford, England—conditions no one expected to give themselves to record-setting—and but Bannister did really that, running a mile in 3: 59.4 and becoming the first people in the history books to run a mile in under four hours.

The world then knew that the four-minute hour was possible thanks to this change in the standard. Bannister’s history lasted just forty-six days, when it was snatched aside by American sprinter John Landy. Finally, a year later, three runners all managed to cross the four-minute challenge in the same competition. Since therefore, over 1, 400 walkers have actually run a mile in under four days, the current document is 3: 43.13, held by Moroccan performer Hicham El Guerrouj.

We can do a lot more with what we think is possible, and we can only do it if we see that someone else has already done it. As with individual running speed, there are also hard limits on how a website can accomplish.

Establishing requirements for a green website

The key indicators of climate performance in most big sectors are pretty well established, such as power per square metre for homes and miles per gallon for cars. The tools and methods for calculating those measures are standardized as well, which keeps everyone on the same site when doing economic evaluations. But, we are not required to follow any specific environmental standards in the world of websites and apps, and we have only recently developed the tools and methods to do so.

The main objective in green web layout is to reduce carbon emissions. However, it’s nearly impossible to accurately assess the amount of CO₂ that a website merchandise produces. We can’t measure the pollutants coming out of the exhaust valves on our devices. The pollution coming from power plants that burn coal and oil are far apart, out of sight, and out of mind. We have no way to track the particles from a website or app up to the power station where the light is being generated and really know the exact amount of house oil produced. What then do we do?

If we can‘t measure the actual carbon emissions, then we need to get what we can estimate. The following are the main elements that could be used as measures of coal pollutants:

1. Transfer of data
2. Electricity’s carbon power

Let’s take a look at how we can use these indicators to calculate the energy use, and in turn the carbon footprint, of the sites and web applications we create.

Transfer of data

Most researchers use kilowatt-hours per gigabyte (k Wh/GB ) as a metric of energy efficiency when measuring the amount of data transferred over the internet when a website or application is used. This serves as a reliable indicator of how much power is being consumed and how much carbon is being released. As a rule of thumb, the more files transferred, the more electricity used in the data center, telecoms systems, and end users products.

The most accurate way to calculate data transfer for a single visit for web pages is to measure the page weight, which is the first time a user visits the page in kilobytes. It’s fairly easy to measure using the developer tools in any modern web browser. Frequently, the statistics for the total data transfer of any web application are included in your web hosting account ( Fig. 2.1 ).

The nice thing about page weight as a metric is that it allows us to compare the efficiency of web pages on a level playing field without confusing the issue with constantly changing traffic volumes.

A large scope is required to reduce page weight. By early 2020, the median page weight was 1.97 MB for setups the HTTP Archive classifies as “desktop” and 1.77 MB for “mobile”, with desktop increasing 36 percent since January 2016 and mobile page weights nearly doubling in the same period ( Fig 2.2 ). Image files account for roughly half of this data transfer, making them the single biggest contributor to carbon emissions on a typical website.

History clearly shows us that our web pages can be smaller, if only we set our minds to it. While the majority of technologies, including the underlying technology of the web like data centers and transmission networks, become more and more energy efficient, websites themselves become less effective as time goes on.

You may be aware of the idea of performance budgeting as a method for directing a project team to deliver faster user experiences. For example, we might specify that the website must load in a maximum of one second on a broadband connection and three seconds on a 3G connection. Performance budgets are upper limits rather than vague suggestions, much like speed limits while driving, so the goal should always be to come in within budget.

Designing for fast performance does often lead to reduced data transfer and emissions, but it isn’t always the case. Page weight and transfer size are more objective and reliable benchmarks for sustainable web design, but web performance is frequently more about the subjective perception of load times than it is about the underlying system’s true efficiency.

We can set a page weight budget in reference to a benchmark of industry averages, using data from sources like HTTP Archive. We can also use the page weight to compare it to competitors or the outdated website we’re replacing. For example, we might set a maximum page weight budget as equal to our most efficient competitor, or we could set the benchmark lower to guarantee we are best in class.

If we want to take it to the next level, we could start looking at how much more popular our web pages are when people visit them frequently. Although page weight for the first time someone visits is the easiest thing to measure, and easy to compare on a like-for-like basis, we can learn even more if we start looking at transfer size in other scenarios too. For instance, repeat users who load the same page frequently will likely have a high percentage of the files cached in their browser, which means they won’t need to move all of the files back on subsequent visits. Likewise, a visitor who navigates to new pages on the same website will likely not need to load the full page each time, as some global assets from areas like the header and footer may already be cached in their browser. We can learn even more about how to optimize efficiency for users who regularly visit our pages by measuring transfer size at this next level of detail, which will also enable us to establish page weight budgets for situations that extend beyond the initial visit.

Page weight budgets are easy to track throughout a design and development process. Although they don’t directly disclose their data on energy consumption and carbon emissions, they do provide a clear indicator of efficiency in comparison to other websites. And as transfer size is an effective analog for energy consumption, we can actually use it to estimate energy consumption too.

In summary, less data transfer leads to more energy efficiency, which is a crucial component of reducing web product carbon emissions. The more efficient our products, the less electricity they use, and the less fossil fuels need to be burned to produce the electricity to power them. However, as we’ll see next, it’s important to take into account the source of that electricity because all web products require some.

Electricity’s carbon power

Regardless of energy efficiency, the level of pollution caused by digital products depends on the carbon intensity of the energy being used to power them. The term” carbon intensity” (gCO₂/k Wh ) is used to describe how much carbon dioxide is produced for each kilowatt-hour of electricity produced. This varies widely, with renewable energy sources and nuclear having an extremely low carbon intensity of less than 10 gCO₂/k Wh ( even when factoring in their construction ), whereas fossil fuels have very high carbon intensity of approximately ₂00–400 gCO₂/k Wh.

The majority of electricity is produced by national or state grids, which combine energy from a variety of sources with different carbon intensity levels. The distributed nature of the internet means that a single user of a website or app might be using energy from multiple different grids simultaneously, a website user in Paris uses electricity from the French national grid to power their home internet and devices, but the website’s data center could be in Dallas, USA, pulling electricity from the Texas grid, while the telecoms networks use energy from everywhere between Dallas and Paris.

Although we have some control over where our projects are hosted, we do not have complete control over the energy supply of web services. With a data center using a significant proportion of the energy of any website, locating the data center in an area with low carbon energy will tangibly reduce its carbon emissions. This user-provided data is reported and mapped by Danish startup Tomorrow, and a look at their map demonstrates how, for instance, choosing a data center in France will result in significantly lower carbon emissions than choosing a data center in the Netherlands ( Fig. 2.3 ).

However, we don’t want to move our servers too far away from our users because it requires energy to transmit data through the telecom’s networks, and the more energy is used. Just like food miles, we can think of the distance from the data center to the website’s core user base as “megabyte miles” —and we want it to be as small as possible.

We can use website analytics to determine the country, state, or even city where our core user group is located and determine the distance between that location and the data center that our hosting company uses as a benchmark. This will be a somewhat fuzzy metric as we don’t know the precise center of mass of our users or the exact location of a data center, but we can at least get a rough idea.

For instance, if a website is hosted in London but the main audience is on the United States ‘ West Coast, we could look up the travel distance between London and San Francisco, which is 5,300 miles. That’s a long way! We can see how hosting it somewhere in North America, ideally on the West Coast, would significantly lessen the distance and the amount of energy required to transmit the data. In addition, locating our servers closer to our visitors helps reduce latency and delivers better user experience, so it’s a win-win.

Reverting it to carbon emissions

If we combine carbon intensity with a calculation for energy consumption, we can calculate the carbon emissions of our websites and apps. A tool my team created accomplishes this by measuring the data transfer over the wire when a web page is loaded, calculating the associated electricity consumption, and then converting that data into a CO₂ figure ( Fig. ₂.4). It also factors in whether or not the web hosting is powered by renewable energy.

The Energy and Emissions Worksheet that comes with this book teaches you how to take it to the next level and tailor the data more accurately to the individual aspects of your project.

We could even expand our page weight budget by establishing carbon budgets as well with the ability to calculate carbon emissions for our projects. CO₂ is not a metric commonly used in web projects, we’re more familiar with kilobytes and megabytes, and can fairly easily look at design options and files to assess how big they are. Although translating that into carbon adds an air of abstraction, carbon budgets do focus our minds on the main issue we’re trying to reduce, which also supports the main goal of sustainable web design: reducing carbon emissions.

Browser Energy

Transfer of data might be the simplest and most complete analog for energy consumption in our digital projects, but by giving us one number to represent the energy used in the data center, the telecoms networks, and the end user’s devices, it can’t offer us insights into the efficiency in any specific part of the system.

One part of the system we can look at in more detail is the energy used by end users ‘ devices. The computational burden is increasingly shifting from the data center to the users ‘ devices, whether they are phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or even smart TVs, as front-end web technologies advance. Modern web browsers allow us to implement more complex styling and animation on the fly using CSS and JavaScript. Additionally, JavaScript libraries like Angular and React make it possible to create applications where the” thinking” process is performed partially or completely in the browser.

All of these advances are exciting and open up new possibilities for what the web can do to serve society and create positive experiences. However, more computation in a web browser requires more energy to be used by the user’s devices. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a lot of processing power on a user’s device unintentionally make them use older, slower devices and make their phones and laptops ‘ batteries discharge more quickly. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. This not only harms the environment, but it places a disproportionate financial burden on the poorest members of society.

In part because the tools are limited, and partly because there are so many different models of devices, it’s difficult to measure website energy consumption on end users ‘ devices. The Energy Impact monitor inside the developer console of the Safari browser is one of the tools we currently have ( Fig. 2.5 ).

You know when your computer’s cooling fans start spinning so frantically that you suspect it might take off when you load a website? That’s essentially what this tool is measuring.

It uses these figures to create an energy impact rating based on the percentage of CPU used and how long it took the web page to load. It doesn’t give us precise data for the amount of electricity used in kilowatts, but the information it does provide can be used to benchmark how efficiently your websites use energy and set targets for improvement.

This book will provide you with that plan of action. It covers how to incorporate safety principles into your design work in order to make tech that’s secure, how to persuade your stakeholders that this work is important, and how to respond to the critique that what we really need is more diversity. ( Spoiler: we do, but diversity alone is not the solution to fixing unethical, unsafe technology. )

The procedure for diverse safety

Your objectives when designing for protection are to:

• determine way your product can be used for misuse,
• style ways to prevent the maltreatment, and
• offer assistance for harmed people to regain control and power.

The Process for Inclusive Safety is a tool to help you reach those goals ( Fig 5.1 ). It’s a method I developed in 2018 to better understand the different methods I used to create products that were designed with safety in mind. Whether you are creating an entirely new product or adding to an existing element, the Process can help you produce your product secure and diverse. The Process includes five public areas of action:

• conducting exploration
• Creating themes
• Pondering issues
• Designing options
• Testing for security

It is intended to be flexible, so teams might not want to utilize every action in all circumstances. Use the parts that are related to your special function and environment, this is meant to be something you can put into your existing style process.

And once you use it, if you have an idea for making it better or simply want to give perspective of how it helped your group, please get in touch with me. It’s a living document, which I hope engineers may use as a practical and useful tool throughout their day-to-day tasks.

If you’re working on a product especially for a resilient team or survivors of some form of injury, such as an application for survivors of domestic violence, sexual abuse, or drug addiction, be sure to read Section 7, which covers that position directly and should be handled a bit different. The purpose of this design is to prioritize safety when creating a more general product with a broad user base ( which, as we already know from statistics, will include some groups who need to be protected from harm ). Chapter 7 is focused on products that are specifically for vulnerable groups and people who have experienced trauma.

Step 1: Conduct research

A thorough analysis of how your technology might be used for abuse as well as specialized insights into the experiences of those who have witnessed and perpetrated that kind of abuse should be included in design research. At this stage, you and your team will investigate issues of interpersonal harm and abuse, and explore any other safety, security, or inclusivity issues that might be a concern for your product or service, like data security, racist algorithms, and harassment.

broad-based research

Your project should begin with broad, general research into similar products and issues around safety and ethical concerns that have already been reported. For example, a team building a smart home device would do well to understand the multitude of ways that existing smart home devices have been used as tools of abuse. If your product involves artificial intelligence, make sure to learn about the potential for racism and other issues that have been reported in other AI products. Nearly all types of technology have some kind of potential or actual harm that’s been reported on in the news or written about by academics. Google Scholar is a useful resource for locating these studies.

Specific research: Survivors

When possible and appropriate, include direct research ( surveys and interviews ) with people who are experts in the forms of harm you have uncovered. In order to have a better understanding of the subject and be better positioned to prevent retraumatize survivors, you should interview advocates working in the area of your research first. If you’ve uncovered possible domestic violence issues, for example, the experts you’ll want to speak with are survivors themselves, as well as workers at domestic violence hotlines, shelters, other related nonprofits, and lawyers.

It is crucial to pay people for their knowledge and lived experiences, especially when interviewing survivors of any kind of trauma. Don’t ask survivors to share their trauma for free, as this is exploitative. While some survivors may not want to be paid, you should always make the offer in the initial ask. Donating to a cause that combated the kind of violence the interviewee experienced is an alternative to paying for. We’ll talk more about how to appropriately interview survivors in Chapter 6.

Abusers specific research

It’s unlikely that teams aiming to design for safety will be able to interview self-proclaimed abusers or people who have broken laws around things like hacking. Don’t make this a goal, rather, try to get at this angle in your general research. Attempt to understand how abusers or bad actors use technology to harm others, how they use it against others, and how they justify or explain the abuse.

Step 2: Create archetypes

Use your research’s findings to create the archetypes of abuser and survivor once you’ve finished your research. Archetypes are not personas, as they’re not based on real people that you interviewed and surveyed. Instead, they’re based on your research into likely safety issues, much like when we design for accessibility: we don’t need to have found a group of blind or low-vision users in our interview pool to create a design that’s inclusive of them. Instead, we base those designs on existing research and the requirements of this group. Personas typically represent real users and include many details, while archetypes are broader and can be more generalized.

The abuser archetype is someone who views a product as a means of harm ( Fig. 5.2 ). They may be trying to harm someone they don’t know through surveillance or anonymous harassment, or they may be trying to control, monitor, abuse, or torment someone they know personally.

The survivor archetype refers to a person who is being abused with the product. There are various situations to consider in terms of the archetype’s understanding of the abuse and how to put an end to it: Do they need proof of abuse they already suspect is happening, or are they unaware they’ve been targeted in the first place and need to be alerted ( Fig 5.3 )?

You may want to make multiple survivor archetypes to capture a range of different experiences. They may be aware of the abuse is occurring but not be able to stop it, such as when a stalker keeps figuring out where they are from ( Fig 5.4), or they may be aware that it is happening but not know how ( for example, when an abuser locks them out of IoT devices ). Include as many of these scenarios as you need to in your survivor archetype. You’ll use these later when you create solutions to help your survivor archetypes achieve their objectives of preventing and ending abuse.

It may be useful for you to create persona-like artifacts for your archetypes, such as the three examples shown. Focus on their objectives rather than the demographic details we frequently see in personas. The goals of the abuser will be to carry out the specific abuse you’ve identified, while the goals of the survivor will be to prevent abuse, understand that abuse is happening, make ongoing abuse stop, or regain control over the technology that’s being used for abuse. Later, you’ll think about how to help the survivor’s goals and prevent the abuser’s goals.

And while the “abuser/survivor” model fits most cases, it doesn’t fit all, so modify it as you need to. For example, if you uncovered an issue with security, such as the ability for someone to hack into a home camera system and talk to children, the malicious hacker would get the abuser archetype and the child’s parents would get survivor archetype.

3. Brainstorming issues

After creating archetypes, brainstorm novel abuse cases and safety issues. You’re trying to identify entirely new safety issues that are unique to your product or service by using the term” Novel” in terms of things that are not discovered in your research. The goal with this step is to exhaust every effort of identifying harms your product could cause. You aren’t worrying about how to prevent the harm yet—that comes in the next step.

How else could your product be used for any kind of abuse besides what you’ve already found in your research? I recommend setting aside at least a few hours with your team for this process.

Try conducting a Black Mirror brainstorming session if you want to start somewhere. This exercise is based on the show Black Mirror, which features stories about the dark possibilities of technology. Try to figure out how your product would be used in an episode of the show—the most wild, awful, out-of-control ways it could be used for harm. Participants typically have a lot of fun when I lead Black Mirror brainstorms ( which is great because having fun when designing for safety! ). I recommend time-boxing a Black Mirror brainstorm to half an hour, and then dialing it back and using the rest of the time thinking of more realistic forms of harm.

You may still not feel confident that you have found every potential source of harm after identifying as many opportunities for abuse as you can. A healthy amount of anxiety is normal when you’re doing this kind of work. It’s common for teams designing for safety to worry,” Have we really identified every possible harm? What if something is missing? If you’ve spent at least four hours coming up with ways your product could be used for harm and have run out of ideas, go to the next step.

It’s impossible to say 100 % assurance that you’ve done everything right, but instead of aiming for 100 % assurance, acknowledge that you’ve taken this step and have done everything you can, and pledge to keep putting safety first in the future. Once your product is released, your users may identify new issues that you missed, aim to receive that feedback graciously and course-correct quickly.

Step 4: Design solutions

You should now be able to identify potential harm-causing uses for your product as well as survivor and abuser archetypes describing opposing user objectives. The next step is to identify ways to design against the identified abuser’s goals and to support the survivor’s goals. This is a good idea to include this one alongside other areas of your design process where you’re offering solutions to the various issues your research has identified.

Some questions to ask yourself to help prevent harm and support your archetypes include:

• Can you design your product in such a way that the identified harm cannot happen in the first place? If not, what barriers can you place to stop the harm from occurring?
• How can you make the victim aware that abuse is happening through your product?
• How can you assist the victim in understanding what they need to do to stop the problem?
• Can you identify any types of user activity that would indicate some form of harm or abuse? Could your product help the user access support?

It’s possible to anticipate harm from occurring in some products. For example, a pregnancy app might be modified to allow the user to report that they were the victim of an assault, which could trigger an offer to receive resources for local and national organizations. Although it’s not always possible to be this proactive, it’s worthwhile to spend a half hour talking about how your product could help the user receive help in a safe manner if any kind of user activity would indicate some form of harm or abuse.

That said, use caution: you don’t want to do anything that could put a user in harm’s way if their devices are being monitored. If you do offer some kind of proactive help, always make it voluntary, and think through other safety issues, such as the need to keep the user in-app in case an abuser is checking their search history. In the next chapter, we’ll walk through a good illustration of this.

Step 5: Test for safety

The final step is to evaluate the prototypes against the perspectives of your archetypes, who wants to harm the product or the victim of the harm who needs to regain control of the technology. Just like any other kind of product testing, at this point you’ll aim to rigorously test out your safety solutions so that you can identify gaps and correct them, validate that your designs will help keep your users safe, and feel more confident releasing your product into the world.

Ideally, safety testing happens along with usability testing. If you work for a company that doesn’t conduct usability testing, you might be able to use safety testing to deftly perform both. A user who uses your design while trying to use it against someone else can also be encouraged to point out interactions or other design details that don’t make sense to them.

You’ll want to conduct safety testing on either your final prototype or the actual product if it’s already been released. It’s okay to test an existing product that wasn’t created with safety goals in mind right away; “etrofitting” it for safety is a good thing.

Remember that testing for safety involves testing from the perspective of both an abuser and a survivor, though it may not make sense for you to do both. Alternatively, if you made multiple survivor archetypes to capture multiple scenarios, you’ll want to test from the perspective of each one.

You as the designer are most likely too closely connected to the product and its design by this point to be a valuable tester, you know the product too well, as with other forms of usability testing. Instead of doing it yourself, set up testing as you would with other usability testing: find someone who is not familiar with the product and its design, set the scene, give them a task, encourage them to think out loud, and observe how they attempt to complete it.

Abuse testing

The goal of this testing is to understand how easy it is for someone to weaponize your product for harm. Unlike with usability testing, you want to make it impossible, or at least difficult, for them to achieve their goal. Use your product to try to accomplish the objectives in the abuser archetype you created earlier.

For example, for a fitness app with GPS-enabled location features, we can imagine that the abuser archetype would have the goal of figuring out where his ex-girlfriend now lives. With this in mind, you’d make every effort to discover the location of a different user who has their privacy settings turned on. You might try to see her running routes, view any available information on her profile, view anything available about her location ( which she has set to private ), and investigate the profiles of any other users somehow connected with her account, such as her followers.

If by the end of this you’ve managed to uncover some of her location data, despite her having set her profile to private, you know now that your product enables stalking. Reverting to step 4 and figuring out how to stop this from occurring is your next step. You may need to repeat the process of designing solutions and testing them more than once.

Survivor testing

Survivor testing involves identifying how to give information and power to the survivor. It might not always make sense based on the product or context. The survivor archetype’s goal of not being stalked is satisfied by preventing an attempt by an abuser archetype to stalk someone, so separate testing wouldn’t be required from the survivor’s perspective.

However, there are cases where it makes sense. For instance, a survivor archetype’s goal would be to discover who or what causes the temperature to change when they aren’t altering it themselves. You could test this by looking for the thermostat’s history log and checking for usernames, actions, and times, if you couldn’t find that information, you would have more work to do in step 4.

Another goal might be regaining control of the thermostat once the survivor realizes the abuser is remotely changing its settings. Are there any instructions that explain how to remove a user and change the password, and are they simple to locate? For your test, this would involve trying to figure out how to do this. This might again reveal that more work is needed to make it clear to the user how they can regain control of the device or account.

Stress testing

To make your product more inclusive and compassionate, consider adding stress testing. This concept comes from Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher. The authors noted that personas typically focus on happy people, but that happy people are frequently anxious, stressed out, unhappy, or even go through a bad day. These are called” stress cases”, and testing your products for users in stress-case situations can help you identify places where your design lacks compassion. More information about how to incorporate stress cases into your design can be found in Design for Real Life, as well as in many other effective methods for compassionate design.