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This content appears in the newest problem of DEN OF GEEK publication. You can read all of our newspaper stories below. The secret to writing a cruelly interesting Wednesday Addams joke is to never write a joke. The humor is based on her grisly predilections and interests, as well as the naturally wry performer channeling her on Netflix.

The article Wednesday Season 2: Special Appearance Inside a Darker Danse Macabre with the Addams Family appeared first on Den of Geek.

Michael Holt ( also known as Mr. Terrific, has much been one of the most beautiful, complex, and socially grounded figures in the DC Universe. He’s even been one of its most neglected. He has been reduced to comic relief, history support, or a footnote in someone else’s story for almost three decades thanks to live-action and lively adaptations.

until today.

James Gunn doesn’t redefine Mr. Terrific. He restores him. Allen appears as an equivalent and stare, never a companion, to Superman himself, from the moment he appears. He commands the screen with a calm confidence, moves with the mental clarity that only Black female characters in music storytelling can find, and carries his intellect without being arrogant. He is shown as the total package: natural, proper, ethical, and physically smart. That’s not just a creative choice. This is a previous Gunn character building structure.

Mr. The most recent work by Gunn to date is a heritage of Black characters with subjectivity, company, and layers of mankind. Gunn doesn’t turn Blackness into a trope, from the guarded vulnerability of Idris Elba’s Bloodsport to Leota Adebayo’s ( Danielle Moore ) ethical awakening and the calculated control Viola Davis brought to a second appearance with Amanda Waller to Clemson Murn’s ( Chukwudi Iwuji ) internal conflict. He writes it properly.

He once more demonstrates that Black characters can be fully realized, physically complicated, and descriptively main. So it is that Gunn’s Superman doesn’t only present Mr. Terrific, it positions him exactly where he’s always belonged … at the center with his peers.

Michael Holt: Reclaiming the Profits figure

Michael Holt made his acting debut in John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake’s The Spectre# 54 ( 1997 ). From the beginning, he stood aside. Allen was shaped by decline rather than by retribution or destiny for greatness. He pondered whether his personal life was worthwhile until knowledge, skill, and a strong concern for mankind called him back after his wife and unborn baby died in a car accident. He earned over a hundred PhDs, became an Olympic gold medalist in the hostel, and designed the T-spheres—sophisticated AI-driven systems capable of study, security, surveillance, and another endless possibilities. He therefore enlisted in the Justice Society of America to perform justice and compassion.

Allen was consistently depicted in the comics as a spiritual guardian trusted by gods, leaders, and even the World itself. Yet his on looks not truly reflected that. He was made a context executive by Justice League Unlimited. He was given the name Curtis Holt and a new name as Arrow, who softened his ends into pleasure work. He became appealing, not strong.

Gunn completely reverses that. Mr. Terrific isn’t a note. He’s a strong person. Allen is introduced with intense ability rather than spectacle. He moves beside Superman, no behind him or subordinate to him. He is depicted as a thoroughly developed, academic, principled, and physically grounded hero. The character’s initial DNA is articulated in the most explicit way already.

And for professional Edi Gathegi, it’s more than a position. Getting angry at Mr. Tirefic’s new fame results in his own retribution. After his dramatic and insured return as Darwin in X-Men: First Class, Gathegi suddenly gets a part built for durability and layered with function. It allows the artist to act quietly while the figure is in charge. A place created specifically for them brings together an aristocracy performer and wealthy hero.

Presence as Power: Edi Gathegi’s Terrific Performance

Gathegi doesn’t overact in any of Superman‘s scenes. His efficiency is accurate but calm. When Holt and Lois Lane penetrate Lex Luthor’s off-grid blacksite, the genius of the figure comes by, not depending on exhibition, but in activity. In mid-combat, Holt calculates his firing designs, reprograms his T-spheres, and expertly shields Lois. Every action has a purpose. There is no self manifest. He embodies perseverance, estimate, and confidence.

Allen is not treated as comic relief or excessively power-upped by Gunn. Rather Holt becomes the show’s rarest creation—a Black warrior allowed to remain calm and direct with resolve. His imagination pilots while his solitude speaks. His caution is always mistaken for failure. Yet in scenes where various figures lean into conflict, Holt operates with clarity and thoughtfulness.

How Gunn handles Holt’s title is one of the movie’s most significant decisions. When Guy Gardner makes fun of” Mr. Terrific” as absurd, Holt doesn’t respond. He is not required to. His label is not a hoax. It’s a state and a self-affirmation. Gunn doesn’t use it as a joke. The brand gains weight because Allen does throughout the movie. Where viewers and even the individuals inside of these worlds have accepted the Superman title, Gunn strips aside the last scrap of unexpected quirkiness from Mr. also terrifying. He creates more than just a name. It is an realization of his being.

Gunn has attempted to transcend clichés and stereotypes when creating dark superhero characters.

Bloodsport

When Bloodsport ( Idris Elba )’s poster first appeared in The Suicide Squad, it might have appeared to be a spiritual successor to Deadshot ( Will Smith ), but the writing tells a different story. Deadshot in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad is personable, guilt-ridden, and gets a redemption episode centered on parental love. By contrast, Bloodsport in Gunn’s movie is icy, angry, and physically unbalanced. He’s never a person seeking forgiveness. He’s one trying not to kill in shame.

Gunn doesn’t manage that problems. He prefers to let things happen gradually. When Bloodsport protects Ratcatcher 2 ( Daniela Melchior ), it’s not framed as nobility. It’s a jumbled effort to perform better than he did previously. He wasn’t intended to inspire. He’s written to be understood. That difference is significant. Gunn doesn’t improve Bloodsport by removing his shortcomings. He lets those deficiencies breath. A person who achieves this is the subject of our attention, not by changing into someone else’s great, but by remaining present.

Amanda Waller

Amanda Waller was Viola Davis ‘ primary role in Ayer’s Suicide Squad, where her warm efficiency frequently buried beneath melodic dissonance and storyline chaos. Gunn corrects her course by giving Davis a position that favors quiet, unflinching power, and solitude. In both The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, Waller is terrifying not because she acts fiercely but because she doesn’t have to do so. She represents the method in person. She is absolutely detached from ethics and administrative behavior. She doesn’t think in the nation’s concept of honor.

One of the genre’s most carefully controlled shows is given by Davis. She doesn’t require speeches. Her eyes, position, and stops do the thinking. Gunn has faith in that, and it pays out. Waller pawns her own child in a state trial in one of Peacemaker’s most destructive revelations. There’s no serious songs or scream. Only when maternal love seems to have the potential to overthrow structure, Davis ‘ hands are just given the procedural treachery to deliver.

Clemson Murn

In Peacemaker, Clemson Murn ( Chukwudi Iwuji ) attempts to save humanity from itself by using the body of a former mercenary. It’s a ridiculous notion that Gunn’s writing intimately reveals. Murn is haunted, not just by the murder of his host, but by the limits of his own conscience. He operates in privacy, leads with estimate, and gives in to privacy in order.

There is no noble rise or last conversation when he passes away. His death is silent, full of sarcasm, and grounded in a system never entirely his personal. Gunn doesn’t beg us to praise or publish his character to elicit that feeling. He asks how we feel at this particular time. Murn is a paradox made manifest, and that’s what makes him appeal.

Leota Adebayo

Leota Adebayo, portrayed by Danielle Brooks, is the moral map of Peacemaker, and Gunn adheres to that map with dignity. She is never a skilled killer or dried agent. She learns along the way while being uncomfortable and profoundly empathic. She is not weakened because of it. It’s a strong, purposeful contrast to her family, Amanda Waller. It transforms her and makes us wonder what true spiritual strength might look like.

She completely rejects the inherited property of her mother. When she exposes Project Butterfly and her own family’s problem, her decision goes beyond simply courage. It’s the climax of every decision she’s ever had to tell the truth, no matter how much it cost. Her warmth is not intended to be overcome. It’s her mild and the very characteristic that changes the persons around her.

The High Evolutionary

In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the High Evolutionary ( Chukwudi Iwuji ) is not misunderstood. He is abominable. Where others may have tried to personalize him, Gunn goes the other way and reveals that some monsters are simply demons. Under the pretext of progress, the High Biological experiments with intelligent life, manipulates DNA, and uses force.

His pursuit of perfection is violent in nature, which is the true goal of perfectionism that is untrained and devoid of morality. Gunn lets the simile area. The despair is precise and metaphorical when Rocket spits his face out. Under the preoccupation with attempt can be found disfigurement. It’s not simple and it wasn’t meant to be. Gunn won’t let us turn aside from her. Because it mirrors actual violence that frequently hides behind the speech of progress, he forces us to endure the pain.

From Antiheroes to Apex, Gunn’s Blueprint Comes Full Circle

The similarities between Gunn’s depictions of Bloodsport, Amanda Waller, Clemson Murn, Leota Adebayo, and the High Evolutionary are not just their shared identities. It is the way he writes them that are completely dimensional. These figures are no reduced to themes or symbolic templates. They are essential to the history, weak, complex, and physically grounded. Gunn gives them conflicts that distinguish them from their natural counterparts.

However, these characters generally live in the profits of morality. They are systems in discord with themselves, as well as individuals, antagonists, and antiheroes. Their stories are important, but they contain strain and restraint.

They paved the way for Mr. Terrific, who is something completely different.

He is never a hero, archetype, or warning, but rather a villain. He is the pinnacle of Gunn&#8217, s notion of a Black hero written with quality, precision, and unwavering objective. Who can honestly serve as a vessel of leadership under his leadership and innovative standards? In every way, Holt is a clone of Superman. A completely realized hero written without sacrifice, centered without scene, and portrayed with the emotional intelligence narrative usually neglects.

Holt’s Mr. is a film that, in a time when Black characters in internet are still too frequently restricted to stress, tokenism, or social settlement, is. Theific becomes a compelling reminder of who and what we are permitted to feel and be. He demands appearance and proves that Black quality doesn’t require language, only reputation.

Together with Mr. Fantastic, Gunn doesn’t provide a correction. He offers a recovery. one that emphasizes what ought to have been achievable from the beginning.

The title Superman: Mr. Terrific and James Gunn&#8217, s Approach to Black Characters appeared initially on Den of Geek.

This content appears in DEN OF GEEK magazine’s newest matter. You can read all of our newspaper reports below. Stephen King’s second book, The Long Walk, was published in 1979 under the moniker Richard Bachman. It’s an narrative about the Vietnam War and is set in a authoritarian society where in […]…]…

The article The Long Walk Director Shows How to Adapt Stephen King’s Scariest Dystopia for Now appeared first on Den of Geek.

Michael Holt ( also known as Mr. Terrific, has much been one of the most beautiful, complex, and socially grounded DC Universe characters. He’s even been one of its most neglected. He has been rendered comic relief, history support, or a note in someone else’s story for almost three decades by live-action and lively adaptations.

until today.

James Gunn doesn’t recreate Mr. in Superman. Terrific. He restores him. Allen appears as a peer and gaze to Superman himself, not a sidekick. He commands the camera with a calm assurance, moves with the personal quality that is uncommon for Black female characters in music storytelling, and carries his intellect without arrogance. He is shown as the total package: natural, proper, ethical, and physically smart. That’s not just a creative choice. It’s a character-building structure that Gunn has already demonstrated.

Mr. The most recent work by Gunn to date is a heritage of Black characters with sentience, company, and layers of mankind. Gunn doesn’t turn Blackness into a trope, from the guarded vulnerability of Idris Elba’s Bloodsport to Leota Adebayo’s ( Danielle Moore ) ethical awakening, from the calculated control Viola Davis brought to a second appearance with Amanda Waller to Clemson Murn’s ( Chukwudi Iwuji ) internal war. He writes it properly.

He once more demonstrates that Black characters can be fully realized, physically complex, and contextually main. So it’s not really Mr. Superman that Gunn’s Superman introduces. Terrific, it positions him exactly where he’s always belonged … at the center with his peers.

Michael Holt: Reclaiming the Character from the Profits

Michael Holt made his acting debut in John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake’s The Spectre# 54 ( 1997 ). From the beginning, he stood aside. Allen was shaped by decline rather than by resentment or destiny for greatness. He pondered whether his personal life was worthwhile until knowledge, skill, and a strong concern for mankind called him back after his wife and unborn baby died in a car accident. He earned over a hundred PhDs, became an Olympic gold medalist in the hostel, and designed the T-spheres—sophisticated AI-driven systems capable of study, security, surveillance, and another endless possibilities. He therefore enlisted in the Justice Society of America to perform fairness and compassion.

Allen was consistently depicted in the comics as a social guardian who could be trusted by deities, leaders, and even the Universe itself. Yet his on looks not truly reflected that. He was made a background executive by Justice League Unlimited. He was given the name Curtis Holt and a new name as Arrow, who softened his ends into pleasure work. He became appealing, not effective.

Gunn reverses all of that. Mr. Terrific isn’t a note. He’s a strong person. Fowler is introduced with intense ability rather than spectacle. He moves beside Superman, no behind him or submissive to him. He is depicted as a thoroughly developed, academic, principled, and physically grounded hero. It is the character’s original DNA’s most clearly articulated already.

And for professional Edi Gathegi, it’s more than a position. Getting angry at Mr. He receives his own rehabilitation despite his new fame. After his dramatic and insured return as Darwin in X-Men: First Class, Gathegi suddenly gets a part built for durability and layered with function. It allows the artist to act quietly while the figure is in charge. A room created specifically for them brings together an aristocracy performer and wealthy hero.

Presence as Power: Edi Gathegi’s Terrific Performance

Gathegi doesn’t overact in a single image of Superman. His efficiency is accurate but calm. When Holt and Lois Lane penetrate Lex Luthor’s off-grid blacksite, the genius of the figure comes by, not depending on exhibition, but in activity. Holt creates his T-spheres in the middle of combat, calculates firing patterns, and guards Lois with scientific precision. Every action has a purpose. There is no self manifest. He embodies perseverance, estimate, and confidence.

Gunn doesn’t portray Holt as comic relief or overreact with inflated stature or power sets. Rather Holt becomes the show’s rarest creation—a Black warrior allowed to remain calm and direct with resolve. His imagination pilots while his solitude speaks. His caution is always mistaken for weakness. Yet in scenes where various figures lean into conflict, Holt operates with clarity and thoughtfulness.

How Gunn handles Holt’s brand is one of the most important decisions in the movie. When Guy Gardner makes fun of” Mr. Terrific” as absurd, Holt doesn’t relate. He doesn’t need to. His label is not a hoax. It’s a state and a self-affirmation. Gunn doesn’t use it as a joke. The brand gains weight because Allen does throughout the movie. Where people and even the individuals inside of these worlds have accepted the Superman title, Gunn strips away the last scrap of unexpected quirkiness from Mr. also terrifying. He creates more than just a title. It is an actualization of his being.

It is not the first time Gunn has attempted to transcend clichés and stereotypes while creating Black characters in the realm of superheroes.

Bloodsport

When Bloodsport ( Idris Elba )’s poster for The Suicide Squad first appeared, the writing tells a different story. At first glance, the poster might have appeared to be a spiritual successor to Deadshot ( Will Smith ). Deadshot in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad is charismatic, guilt-ridden, and gets a redemption arc centered on paternal love. By contrast, Bloodsport in Gunn’s movie is icy, angry, and emotionally unbalanced. He’s not a man seeking redemption. He’s one trying not to drown in shame.

Gunn doesn’t manage that pain. He prefers to let things happen slowly. When Bloodsport protects Ratcatcher 2 ( Daniela Melchior ), it’s not framed as nobility. It’s a jumbled effort to succeed where he failed to. He wasn’t intended to inspire. He’s written to be understood. That distinction is important. Gunn doesn’t remove Bloodsport’s flaws by elevating him. He lets those flaws breathe. The end result is a man who retains our attention by remaining present rather than by becoming perfect.

Amanda Waller

Amanda Waller was Viola Davis ‘ first acting role in Ayer’s Suicide Squad, where her cold efficiency frequently buried beneath tonal dissonance and narrative chaos. Gunn corrects her course by giving Davis a role that favors quiet, unflinching power, and silence. In both The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, Waller is terrifying not because she acts violently but because she doesn’t have to do so. She represents the entire system. She is completely detached from morality and bureaucratic behavior. She doesn’t believe in the world’s definition of honor.

One of the genre’s most carefully controlled performances is given by Davis. She doesn’t require monologues. Her eyes, posture, and pauses do the talking. Gunn has faith in that, and it works. In one of Peacemaker’s most revealing revelations, Waller uses her own daughter to pawn a government experiment. There’s no dramatic music or scream. Just when maternal love seems to have the potential to overthrow structure, Davis ‘ hands are only given the procedural betrayal to deliver.

Clemson Murn

In Peacemaker, Clemson Murn ( Chukwudi Iwuji ) uses the body of a former mercenary to try to save humanity from itself. Gunn’s writing gives the absurd premise a personal touch. Murn is haunted, not just by the violence of his host, but by the limits of his own morality. He operates in secrecy, leads with calculation, and gives in to comfort in order.

There is neither a heroic swell nor a final address when he passes away. His death is quiet, full of irony, and grounded in a body never fully his own. Gunn doesn’t explicitly request cheer or write his character to evoke that sentiment. He asks how we feel at this particular moment. Murn is a contradiction made manifest, and that’s what makes him resonate.

Leota Adebayo

Leota Adebayo, portrayed by Danielle Brooks, is the moral compass of Peacemaker, and Gunn adheres to that compass with dignity. She is not a trained assassin or hardened operative. She learns as she goes, is awkward, and is incredibly sensitive. She is not made weak by it. It’s a sharp, intentional contrast to her mother, Amanda Waller. She becomes transformed, and it makes us wonder what true moral strength entails.

She categorically rejects her mother’s heirship. When she exposes Project Butterfly and her own mother’s corruption, her choice goes beyond just bravery. It is the culmination of her every choice, no matter how much money she makes to tell the truth. Her softness is not intended to be overcome. It’s her light and the very trait that changes the people around her.

The High Evolutionary

In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the High Evolutionary ( Chukwudi Iwuji ) is not misunderstood. He is abominable. Where others may have tried to humanize him, Gunn goes the other way and reveals that some monsters are just monsters. The High Evolutionary uses DNA manipulation and power abuses to the detriment of progress while conducting experiments on sentient life.

His pursuit of perfection is cruel in nature, which is the real goal of perfectionism that is untrained and devoid of morality. Gunn lets the metaphor land. When Rocket spits his face off, the horror is metaphorical and literal. Disfigurement lurks beneath the obsession with order. It’s not subtle and it wasn’t meant to be. Gunn won’t let us turn away. Because it mirrors actual cruelty that frequently hides behind the language of progress, he forces us to endure the discomfort.

From Antiheroes to Apex, Gunn’s Blueprint Comes Full Circle

Not just their shared identity, Gunn’s portrayals of Bloodsport, Amanda Waller, Clemson Murn, Leota Adebayo, and the High Evolutionary are similar. He writes them in a completely different way. These characters are not reduced to tropes or symbolic placeholders. They are essential to the story, flawed, complex, and emotionally grounded. Gunn gives them contradictions that distinguish them from their natural counterparts.

Still, these characters mostly live in the margins of morality. They are systems in conflict with themselves, survivors, antagonists, antiheroes, and systems in conflict with themselves. Their stories are interesting, but tension and limitations exist.

They paved the way for Mr. Who is fantastic, who is something entirely different.

He is not a hero, antihero, or cautionary, but rather a villain. He is the culmination of Gunn&#8217, s idea of a Black superhero written with clarity, precision, and unwavering purpose. Who can realistically serve as a vessel of leadership under his leadership and new standards? In every way, Holt is a clone of Superman. A fully realized superhero written without compromise, centered without spectacle, and portrayed with the emotional intelligence storytelling often neglects.

Holt’s Mr. is a film that, in a time when Black characters in media are still too frequently restricted to trauma, tokenism, or moral compromise, is. Theific becomes a compelling reminder of who we are and what we believe in. He demands presence and proves that Black excellence doesn’t need translation, just recognition.

with Mr. Fantastic, Gunn doesn’t provide a revision. He offers a restoration. one that affirms what ought to have been possible from the beginning.

The title Superman: Mr. Terrific and James Gunn&#8217, s Approach to Black Characters appeared first on Den of Geek.

But what on earth is a zealous stress?

Imagine a person determined to do it all. She is homeschooling two wonderful children while her father, who works remotely, is furthermore working remotely. She has a demanding customer fill at work—all of whom she loves. She wakes up early to get some movement in ( or frequently catch up on work ), prepares dinner while the kids are having breakfast, and works while positioning herself near the end of her “fourth grade” to watch as she balances clients, tasks, and budgets. Sound like a bit? Yet with a supportive group both at home and at work, it is.

Sounds like this person needs self-care and has too much on her disk. But no, she doesn’t have occasion for that. In reality, she begins to feel as though she’s dropping balloons. No accomplishing much. There’s not enough of her to be here and that, she is trying to divide her head in two all the time, all day, every day. She begins to question herself. And as those thoughts creep in more and more, her domestic tale becomes more and more important.

She immediately KNOWS what she must do! She really Would MORE.

This is a challenging and dangerous period. Know the reasons? Because when she doesn’t end that new purpose, that storyline will get worse. She instantly starts failing. She isn’t doing much. SHE is not enough. She does fail, she might refuse her family, but she’ll discover more to do. She doesn’t nap as much, proceed because much, all in the attempts to do more. Trying to prove herself to herself, but not succeeding in any endeavor. Not feeling “enough”.

But, yeah, that’s what zealous burnout looks like for me. It doesn’t develop overnight in some grand gesture, but it does rather develop gradually over the course of several weeks and months. My burning out process looks like speeding up, hardly a man losing focus. I move up and up and up, and therefore I simply quit.

I am the one who was

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

When my mother gave me food stamps as a child, I didn’t think shame; rather, I would have good started any debates about the subject, orally eviscerating anyone who dared to criticize the handicapped girl who was attempting to ensure all of our needs were met with so little. As a child, I watched the way the worry of not making those begins meet impacted people I love. As the non-disabled people in my home, I did take on many of the real things because I was” the one who was” make our lives a little easier. I soon realized that putting more of myself into it was linked to fears or confusion; I am the one who does. I learned first that when something frightens me, I can double down and work harder to make it better. I am in charge of the problem. When individuals have seen this in me as an adult, I’ve been told I seem courageous, but make no mistake, I’m not. If I seem courageous, it’s because this behavior was forged from another people’s worries.

And here I am, more than 30 years afterward, despite the overwhelming pressures that come with putting my mind to work on them when I have many things to do and that I may. I find myself driven to prove that I may make things happen if I work longer hours, take on more duty, and do more.

I don’t see people who struggle economically as problems because I have seen how powerful that sea can be; it pulls you along the way. I really get that I have been privileged to be able to prevent many of the problems that were current in my children. That said, I am also” the one who can” who feels she does, but if I were faced with not having much to make ends meet for my own home, I do see myself as having failed. Despite my best efforts and education, the majority of this is due to great wealth. I will, yet, permit myself the pride of saying I have been cautious with my options to have encouraged that success. I believe I am” the one who can,” so I feel compelled to do the most because of this. I can choose to halt, and with some pretty precise warm water splashed in my experience, I’ve made the choice to previously. But that choosing to stop is not my go-to, I move forward, driven by a concern that is so a part of me that I hardly notice it’s it until I’m feeling extremely worn away.

So why all the story? You see, stress is a volatile thing. Over the years, I’ve read and heard a bunch about stress. Stress is genuine. Especially today, with COVID, many of us are balancing more than we ever have before—all at again! It’s challenging, and so many wonderful experts are affected by the evasion, the shutting down, and the procrastination. There are significant articles that relate to what I imagine must get the majority of people out there, but not me. That’s not how I look at stress.

The harmful darkness of passionate burnout

A lot of labor conditions see the more time, more energy, and general focused responsibility as an asset ( and sometimes that’s all it is ). They see a person attempting to overcome obstacles, never a person trapped in fear. Some well-meaning companies have safeguards in place to protect their clubs from stress. However, in situations like this, those alarms don’t always go off, and some business members are surprised and depressed when the inevitable prevent occurs. And maybe even actually betrayed.

Parents—more but mother, mathematically speaking—are praised as being so on bottom of it all when they can work, get involved in the after-school activities, exercise self-care in the form of diet and exercise, and also meet friends for coffee or wine. Many of us watched endless streaming COVID episodes to see how challenging the female protagonist is, but she is strong, funny, and capable of doing it. It’s a “very special episode” when she breaks down, cries in the bathroom, woefully admits she needs help, and just stops for a bit. Truth be told, countless people are hidden in tears or doom-scrolling to escape. We know that the media is a lie to amuse us, but often the perception that it’s what we should strive for has penetrated much of society.

Women and burnout

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

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

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

According to what I’ve read, this connection between work stress and health is more dangerous for women than it is for their non-female counterparts.

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

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

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

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

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

Are you using justifications? Many of us try to disregard feelings of burnout. Over and over I have heard,” It’s just crunch time”,” As soon as I do this one thing, it will all be better”, and” Well I should be able to handle this, so I’ll figure it out”. And it might actually be crunch time, a single objective, and/or a set of skills you need to master. That happens—life happens. Be open to yourself if this continues to happen. If you’ve worked more 50-hour weeks since January than not, maybe it’s not crunch time—maybe it’s a bad situation that you’re burning out from.

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

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

So now what?

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

• Get enough sleep.
• Eat healthy.
• Work out.
• Leave the house.
• Take a break.
• Practice self-care in general.

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

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

I have come up with a few things that I do when I start to feel like I’m going into a zealous burnout to help me remember the airline attendant advice to put the mask on yourself first.

Cook an elaborate meal for someone!

Okay, since I’m a “food-focused” person, I’ve always been a fan. There are countless tales in my home of someone walking into the kitchen and turning right around and walking out when they noticed I was” chopping angrily”. But it’s more than that, and you should give it a try. Seriously. It’s the perfect go-to if you don’t feel worthy of taking time for yourself—do it for someone else. Because the majority of us work in a digital world, cooking can pique all of your senses and make you feel present in the moment in all your ways of seeing the world. It can break you out of your head and help you gain a better perspective. In my house, I’ve been known to pick a place on the map and cook food that comes from wherever that is ( thank you, Pinterest ). I enjoy making Indian food because the smells are warm, the bread needs just enough kneading to keep my hands engaged, and the process requires real attention for me because it’s not what I was raised making. And in the end, we all win!

Vent like a sniveling jerk.

Be careful with this one!

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

When that is required, turn to a trusted friend and give yourself some pure verbal diarrhea by expressing all your concerns. You need to trust this friend not to judge, to see your pain, and, most importantly, to tell you to remove your cranium from your own rectal cavity. Seriously, it’s about getting a reality check here! One of the things that I admire most about my husband is how he can simplify things down to the simplest of terms, even though sometimes after the fact. ” We’re spending our lives together, of course you’re going to disappoint me from time to time, so get over it” has been his way of speaking his dedication, love, and acceptance of me—and I could not be more grateful. Of course, it required that I remove my head from that rectal cavity. So, again, usually those moments are appreciated in hindsight.

Pick up a book!

There are many books out there that are more like you sharing their stories and how they’ve come to find greater balance than they are self-help. Maybe you’ll find something that speaks to you. Among the titles that have stood out to me are:

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

Or, if I love to read or listen to a book that doesn’t have anything to do with my work-life balance, I can use another tactic. I’ve read the following books and found they helped balance me out because my mind was pondering their interesting topics instead of running in circles:

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

If you’re not into reading, pick up a topic on YouTube or choose a podcast to subscribe to. I’ve watched countless permaculture and gardening topics in addition to how to raise chickens and ducks. For the record, I don’t currently have a particularly large food garden or raise any kind of livestock. I just find the topic interesting, and it has nothing to do with any aspect of my life that needs anything from me.

Give yourself a break.

You are never going to be perfect—hell, it would be boring if you were. It’s OK to be broken and flawed. Being tired, depressed, and worried is human nature. It’s OK to not do it all. You can’t be brave without being imperfect, which is terrifying.

This last one is the most important: allow yourself permission to NOT do it all. You never promised to be everything to everyone at all times. Our fears determine our strength, not ours.

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

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

Look, I get that none of these ideas will “fix it”, and that’s not their purpose. Only how we react to the things around us is what we control. These suggestions are to help stop the spiral effect so that you are empowered to address the underlying issues and choose your response. They are the things that largely work for me. Maybe they’ll work for you.

Does this sound familiar?

If something sounds familiar, you are not alone. Don’t let your negative self-talk tell you that you “even burn out wrong”. It is not improper. Even if rooted in fear like my own drivers, I believe that this need to do more comes from a place of love, determination, motivation, and other wonderful attributes that make you the amazing person you are. We’re going to be OK, ya know. The lives that come before us might never appear to be the same as the one we’re picturing, or that we’re looking for, but that’s okay because the only way to judge us is in the mirror when we stop and look around.

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

We are resourceful and aware that we can push ourselves when we are needed, even when we are exhausted to the core or have a ton of clutter in our room. None of us has to be afraid, as we can manage any obstacle put in front of us. And maybe that means we need to redefine success in order to make room for comfort for being uncomfortable human, but that doesn’t really sound that bad either.

So, wherever you are right now, please breathe. Do what you need to do to get out of your head. Give thanks and be considerate.

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 already good at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a talent that can be trained, grown, and improved. Bad feedback can lead to conflict in projects, lower confidence, and long-term, undermine trust and teamwork. Quality opinions 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?

On the web, we may find a long history of sequential comments: 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. So it generally adheres to many of the concepts with suggestions, but it also has some differences.

The information

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

Although this formula is typically used to provide feedback to individuals, it likewise fits really well in a style criticism because it finally addresses some 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 stream 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 they be altered?

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? 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 feedback in general, in my experience, going back to the question approach typically leads to the best solutions because designers are generally more at ease in being given an open space to explore.

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 reviewed feedback with other people before putting a lot of effort into improving it a while ago. 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, my next round of criticism from a specific person wasn’t very positive. 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. Yes, but also no. Let’s explore both sides.

No, this kind of feedback is actually 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”. Since the designer receiving this feedback wouldn’t have much to go by, 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. The designer might assume that the change is about consistency without the explanation, 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 equation above is intended to serve 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 that of the content 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. If a new feature’s entire high-level information architecture is about to go live when it’s about to be released, it might still be relevant if that 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 that was later? Polishing work in progress? Each of these has unique needs. The right timing will make it more likely that your feedback will be well received.

Attitude is the equivalent of intent, and in the context of person-to-person feedback, it can be referred to as radical candor. That entails checking whether what we have in mind will actually help the person and improve the overall project before writing. This might be a hard reflection at times because maybe we don’t want to admit that we don’t really appreciate that person. Although it’s possible, and that’s okay, it’s hoped not to be the case. 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 wasn’t my intention at all! 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 know the project well, or do you just see it for the first time? Are you coming from a high-level perspective, or are you figuring out the details? Are there regressions? Which user’s point of view do you consider when providing 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 every possible improvement. 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 remember that design has a number of possible solutions to 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, as an added bonus, prevent impostor syndrome.

There’s one powerful approach that combines both context and a focus on the positives: frame how the design is better than the status quo ( compared to a previous iteration, competitors, or benchmarks ) and why, and then on that foundation, you can add what could be improved. There is a significant difference between a critique of a design that is already in good shape and one 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 should be changed, and a green circle indicates that it is fully confirmed. 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 it might turn out to be quite demoralizing if I deliver a lot of red squares and change how I communicate that.

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 that it is a positive action because green is typically seen as a confirmation color. Do we need to explore a different color?
• Given the number of items on the page and the overall page hierarchy, it seems to me that the tiles should use Subtitle 2 instead of Subtitle 1. 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, which 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 post” you might have? 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.

When we realize that receiving input can be seen as a form of pattern study, it might seem counterintuitive to begin the process with a question. 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 criticism is never 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 problem. 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 opinion” at the conclusion of a presentation are likely to generate a lot of divergent 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? A number of elements are involved. One is that we don’t often consider asking as a part of the input method. Another is how healthy it is to leave the question open and assume that everyone else will agree. Another is that in nonprofessional debate, 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 also serves as a form of acceptance, outlining your willingness to make comments and the types of comments you want to receive. It puts people in the right emotional position, 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 precision may 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 actions of the process—in our event, the design process. The kind of feedback changes as the consumer 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 comments 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? Content? Interaction design? a system of information architecture UI design? navigation planning 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: On this page, we have two competing pieces of information. Is the structure effective in communicating them both?
• User interface design: What do you think about the top-of-the-page error counter, which makes sure 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?

How much of a presentation’s depth would be on the other axis of specificity. 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 it possible to look specific, but you can spot the “good” qualifier and make the question” When the block opens and the buttons appear, is it clear what the next action is” look like?

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 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. Even experienced designers will appreciate the clarity and efficiency gained from concentrating solely on what is required, and those with less refined critique skills will now be able to offer more actionable feedback. 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. These types of design tools cause conversations to end after they are resolved, update shared UI components automatically, and require designers 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’s probably not the most effective way to go about designing critiques, but even if I don’t want to be too prescriptive, it might work for some teams.

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.

There are many benefits to using iteration posts:

• It creates a rhythm in the design work so that the designer can review feedback from each iteration and prepare for the next.
• Decisions are made immediately available for future review, and 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 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. Therefore, I would repeat this in every iteration post, literally copy and pasting it. 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 provide all I need 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 helps to ensure 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 object, to put it briefly. 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, it’s crucial that you include a list of the questions 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 just a concept to start a conversation, or it might be a cumulative list of all the features that have been added gradually 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. Exploratory, incomplete, or partial should be the definition of an argument.
• 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 describe a design as complete enough to be worked on, even if there might be some bits that still need more attention and in turn, more iterations would be required, 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 that can be very productive between two people. 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.

This shift has some significant advantages, making asynchronous feedback particularly effective, especially around these friction points:

1. It removes the pressure to reply to everyone.
2. It lessens the annoyance of snoop-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 just a few of them, it’s simple, and there isn’t much of a problem with it. 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. If the respondent is a stakeholder or a person directly involved in the project, this might be especially true. 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. That is the response when the design changes and we publish a follow-up iteration. 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”!
• Another option is to provide a quick summary of the comments before moving on. 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. Swoop-by comments frequently prompt the simple thought,” We’ve already discussed this,” and it can be frustrating to have to keep saying the same thing over and over.

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 has two benefits: first, they might point out something that isn’t clear, and second, they might serve as a reference point for someone who is first viewing 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, presenting everything in aggregated 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 initial review 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 items that are functional on products that have not yet been created?

Flash, Photoshop, and flexible style

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 placement.

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 responsive pattern as soon as I heard about it, but I was even terrified. The pixel-perfect models full of special figures that I had formerly prided myself on producing were no longer good enough.

My first encounter with flexible 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

Removing restrictions and creating content that can be viewed on any system has always been the goal of designing responsive or smooth websites. 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 using Sass to re-use repeated slabs of code and transition to more semantic premium:

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

Media answers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Container queries: our savior or a false dawn?

Container queries have long been touted as an improvement upon media queries, but at the time of writing are unsupported in most browsers. Although there are JavaScript workarounds, they can lead to dependability 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?

The best place to make that choice is probably a component library that is disconnected from context and real content.

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

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

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

CSS is changing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intrinsic layouts

I’d be remiss not to mention intrinsic layouts, a term used by Jen Simmons to describe a mix of contemporary and traditional CSS features 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… don’t ever make it smaller than the content that is inside of it.”

—Jen Simmons,” Designing Intrinsic Layouts”

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

What makes intrinsic design stand out is that it not only creates designs that can withstand future devices but also helps scale design without losing flexibility. Without 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 using an intrinsic approach without relying on container queries.

Another 2010 moment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because 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 at some point in our careers to drop designs in and demonstrate how the site would look at each of the three stages.

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 content modifications, such as the earlier Subgrid card example, which allowed the cards to adjust both their own content and that of their sibling elements.

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

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 specified in the Sass version.

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

These variables can be used as values—

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

—or as real estate.

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

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

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

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

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

Fluid and fixed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This time, the element’s width will be 50 % ( the preferred value ) of its container, 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 situation

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”?

Rather than someone using a mobile phone and moving through a crowded street in glaring sunshine, it’s a very different design to be done 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.

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

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

Responsible design

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

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

Chris Ashton

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

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

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

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

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

So how can we put users in control?

The media queries are returning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expect the unexpected

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

We can design for content, but we can’t do it 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 are still many more things we can do to adopt a more intrinsic approach, from responsive to fluid and fixed. 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 conversations, and only recently have we outsourced them to the system, a system that exhibits a far greater affection for written communications than for the vernacular rigors of spoken speech.

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

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

Spoken speech lacks this pleasure. Besides the visual cues that mark conversations with emphasis and personal context, there are also linguistic cues and outspoken behaviors that mimic conversation in complex ways: how something is said, never what. Our spoken language reaches far beyond what the written word can ever deliver, whether it’s rapid-fire, low-pitched, high-decibel, satirical, awkward, or moaning. But when it comes to words interfaces—the devices we conduct spoken discussions with—we experience exciting difficulties as designers and content strategists.

Voice-to-voice relations

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

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

A second talk from beginning to end that achieves some goal for the consumer, starting with the words interface’s initial greeting and ending with the user exiting the interface, also fits into these three categories, which I refer to as interpersonal, technical, and prosocial. Note here that a conversation in our human sense—a chat between people that leads to some result and lasts an arbitrary length of time—could encompass multiple transactional, informational, and prosocial voice interactions in succession. In other words, a voice interaction is a conversation, but it 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 ( ).

That leaves two different types of conversations we can have with one another that a voice interface can also have easily, such as one that focuses on a transactional voice interaction ( buying iced tea ) and another on 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?

Alison: Can I get a pizza from Hawaii with extra pineapple.

Burhan: Sure, what size?

Large, Alison.

Burhan: Anything else?

Alison: No, that’s it.

Burhan: Something to drink?

I’ll have a bottle of Coke, Alison.

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

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

Informational voice interactions

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

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. Anything else I can answer for you?

Alison: That’s it for the moment. Good to know. Thank you!

Burhan: Anytime, come back soon!

This dialogue is radically 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. In order for the customer to understand the key takeaways, responses are typically longer, more in-depth, and carefully communicated.

Voice Interfaces

Voice interfaces, in essence, use speech 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 with pure voice interfaces, which depend entirely on spoken conversation and lack any visual component, making multimodal voice interfaces much more nuanced and challenging to deal with because they can lean on visual components like screens as crutches.

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 to without having to deal with overburdened customer service representatives as a result of the development of interactive voice response ( IVR ) systems.

IVR systems allowed organizations to reduce their reliance on call centers but soon became notorious for their clunkiness. Similar to the corporate world, these systems were primarily created as metaphorical switchboards to direct customers to a real phone agent (” Say Reservations to book a flight or check an itinerary” ), and chances are you’ll have a conversation with one when you call an airline or hotel conglomerate. 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 screen reader, a program that converts visual information into synthesized speech, was a development that accompanied the development of IVR systems. 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 ( ). In the same year, Jim Thatcher created the first IBM Screen Reader for text-based computers, which was later reworked for computers 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” ( ).

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

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

I hated the way Screen Readers operated from the beginning. Why are they designed the way they are? It makes no sense to present information visually 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 without worrying about it. 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 Star Trek or with Majel Barrett’s voice as the omniscient computer. Voice assistants are akin to personal concierges that can answer questions, schedule appointments, conduct searches, and perform other common day-to-day tasks. And because of their assistive potential, they are quickly gaining more and more attention from accessibility advocates.

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

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

At the opposite end of the spectrum, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home offer a core foundation on which developers can build custom voice interfaces. For this reason, developers who feel stifled by the limitations of Siri and Cortana are increasingly using programmable voice assistants that are capable of customization and extensibility. Amazon offers the Alexa Skills Kit, a developer framework for building custom voice interfaces for Amazon Alexa, while Google Home offers the ability to program arbitrary Google Assistant skills. Users 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 dominate their markets, they are also selling and open-sourcing an unmatched range of tools and frameworks for designers and developers, aiming to make creating voice interfaces as simple as possible, even without the use of any code.

Often by necessity, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa tend to be monochannel—they’re tightly coupled to a device and can’t be accessed on a computer or smartphone instead. In contrast, many development platforms, such as Google’s Dialogflow, have omnichannel capabilities that allow users to create a single conversational interface that then manifests as 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, organic, contextless, and concise in order 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 audiobook content being delivered as a requirement rather than an option.

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], an airplane flight’s arrival and departure times, an abstract from a lengthy publication, or a single instant message. __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I would update Dash’s definition of microcontent to include all instances of bite-sized content that goes beyond written communiqués. After all, today we encounter microcontent in interfaces where a small snippet of copy is displayed alone, unmoored from the browser, like a textbot confirmation of a restaurant reservation. 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 look at a digital sign for an instant and be informed when the next train is coming, but voice interfaces keep our attention captive for so long that we can’t quickly evade or skip, a feature that screen reader users are all too familiar with.

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.

However, on May 6, 1956, Roger Bannister caught people by surprise. 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 because of this change in the standard. Bannister’s history lasted just forty-six days, when it was snatched aside by American sprinter John Landy. Therefore, in the same race, three athletes managed to cross the four-minute challenge together. 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 people running speed, there are also hard limits on how a website can accomplish.

Establishing requirements for a lasting web

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. Our websites ‘ emissions are far away, out of mind, and out of sight when fuel and oil are burned in power plants. 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 carbon pollution gauges:

1. Transfer of data
2. Coal content of light

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 wonderful example of how much energy is consumed and how much carbon is 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 easiest way to calculate data transfer for a second visit for web pages is to measure the site weight, which is the page’s transfer size in kilobytes when someone first visits the page. It’s very easy to measure using the engineer equipment in any modern internet browser. Statistics for the total data transfer of any web application are frequently included in your web hosting account ( Fig. 2.1 ).

The great thing about website weight as a parameter is that it allows us to compare the effectiveness of web pages on a level playing field without confusing the issue with frequently 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 hazy ideas, much like speed limits while driving. As a result, the goal should always be to stay 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, whereas web performance often depends more on the user’s perception of load times than it does on how effective the underlying system is.

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 competitor page weights and the website’s current layout to compare it to. 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. Moving beyond the first visit and measuring page weight budgets for scenarios beyond this level of detail can help us learn even more about how to optimize efficiency for users who regularly visit our pages.

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, 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 power.

Coal content of light

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 ). 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, where energy from a variety of sources is combined with various levels of carbon intensity. 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. Danish startup Tomorrow reports and maps the user-provided data, 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 measure the distance from that location to the data center used by our hosting company by using the distance itself 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 calculate the distance between San Francisco and London, 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. The method my team developed converts the amount of electricity transferred when loading a web page into a CO₂ figure ( Fig. ₂.4), and then converts that data into a figure for the tool. 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.

With the ability to calculate carbon emissions for our projects, we could actually expand our page weight budget and establish carbon budgets as well. 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 a layer of abstraction that isn’t as intuitive, carbon budgets do focus our minds on the main thing we’re trying to reduce, which 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 energy is used by the user’s devices as a result of the user’s web browser’s increased computation. 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. The poorest members of society are also under disproportionate financial burdens due to this, which is not just bad for the environment.

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 Safari browser’s developer console ( Fig. 2.5 ) is one of the tools we currently use.

You know what happens 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:

• discover ways your solution can be used for abuse,
• style ways to prevent the maltreatment, and
• offer assistance for users who are prone to regain control and power.

The Process for Inclusive Safety is a tool to help you reach those goals ( Fig 5.1 ). I developed this strategy in 2018 to better understand the various 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 answers
• Testing for security

The Process is meant to be flexible; in some situations, it didn’t make sense for groups to employ every step. 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 apply 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 analysis

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, be aware of 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 gain a better understanding of the subject and avoid retraumatizing survivors, you should first interview those who work in the area of your research. 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 important 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 specifically: 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 what this group requires. Personas typically represent real users and include many details, while archetypes are broader and can be more generalized.

The abuser archetype is defined as 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. These suggestions will be used later when creating solutions to assist your survivor archetypes in achieving 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 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.

Step 3: Remind yourself of your 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 end up having a good deal of fun when I’ve led Black Mirror brainstorms ( which I think 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.

After identifying as many opportunities for abuse as you can, you may still not feel confident that you have found every potential source of harm. 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, then? 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, but instead of aiming for 100 %, acknowledge that you’ve done it and will continue to prioritize safety 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 addition to existing areas of your design process where you’re making recommendations for 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?

In some products, it’s possible to proactively detect harm that is occurring. 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 an hour discussing whether any kind of user activity would indicate harm or abuse and how your product could help them in a secure manner.

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.

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 to do.

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 in an effort 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. You’d make every effort to track down another user’s location who has their privacy settings turned on with this in mind. 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.

Testing for Survivors

Testing for Survivors involves identifying how to give information and power to the survivor. It might not always make sense based on the product or context. Thwarting the attempt of an abuser archetype to stalk someone also satisfies the goal of the survivor archetype to not be stalked, so separate testing wouldn’t be needed 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. Your test would involve trying to figure out how to do this: are there instructions on how to remove and change the password, and are they simple to locate? 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 happy people are frequently anxious, stressed, unhappy, or even tragic. 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.

However, how can a content management system ( CMS ) be set up to reach your audience both now and in the future? I learned the hard way that creating a content model—a concept of information types, attributes, and relationships that let people and systems understand content—with my more comfortable design-system wondering would collapse my patient’s holistic information strategy. By developing glad versions that are conceptual and that also connect related information, you can avoid that result.

A Fortune 500 company recently tapped me to guide the CMS application. The customer was excited by the benefits of an holistic information plan, including material modify, multichannel marketing, and robot delivery—designing content to be comprehensible to bots, Google knowledge panels, snippets, and voice user interfaces.

A content type is essential to an omnichannel content strategy, and it required conceptual types to be given names that don’t depend on how the content is presented. Our aim was to allow artists to create original content and use it where necessary. But as the job proceeded, I realized that supporting material utilize at the range that my client needed required the whole group to identify a new pattern.

Despite our best efforts, we remained influenced by design systems, which we were more comfortable with. An holistic content strategy cannot rely on WYSIWYG design and layout tools, unlike web-focused willing strategies. Our tendency to approach the material model with our common design-system thinking frequently led us to veer away from one of the main purposes of a material model: delivering content to audiences on various marketing channels.

Two fundamental tenets govern a successful content model

We had to explain to our designers, developers, and stakeholders that their previous web projects had taught them that content should be treated as visual building blocks that fit into layouts. The previous approach was not only more familiar but also more intuitive—at least at first—because it made the designs feel more tangible. We discovered two guiding principles that helped the team understand how a content model and the design processes we were familiar with were:

1. Instead of layout, semantics must be used by content models.
2. And content models should connect content that belongs together.

Semantic content models

A semantic content model uses type and attribute names that reflect the content’s intended purpose and not how it will be displayed. For example, in a nonsemantic model, teams might create types like teasers, media blocks, and cards. Although these types might make it simple to present content, they don’t aid in understanding the meaning of the content, which would have opened the door to the content presented in each marketing channel. In contrast, a semantic content model uses type names like “product,”” service,” and “testimonial” to allow for each delivery channel to interpret and use the content as it sees fit.

When you’re creating a semantic content model, a great place to start is to look over the types and properties defined by Schema. a community-driven resource for type definitions that are understandable on platforms like Google search.

A semantic content model has a number of advantages:

Even if your team doesn’t care about omnichannel content, a semantic content model decouples content from its presentation so that teams can evolve the website’s design without needing to refactor its content. Content can withstand obtrusive website redesigns in this way.
• A semantic content model also gives you a competitive advantage. By adding structured data based on Schema. Using its types and properties, a website can provide hints to help Google understand the content, display it in search snippets or knowledge panels, and use it to respond to voice-interface user questions. Potential customers could access your content without ever visiting your website.
• Beyond those practical benefits, you’ll also need a semantic content model if you want to deliver omnichannel content. Delivery channels must be able to understand the same content in order to use it across multiple marketing channels. For instance, if your content model provided a list of questions and answers, it could be easily displayed on a frequently asked questions ( FAQ ) page as well, but it could also be used by a bot that answers frequently asked questions.

For example, using a semantic content model for articles, events, people, and locations lets A List Apart provide cleanly structured data for search engines so that users can read the content on the website, in Google knowledge panels, and even with hypothetical voice interfaces in the future.

connective content models

Instead of slicing up related content across disparate content components, I’ve come to the realization that the best models are those that are semantic and also connect related content components ( such as a FAQ item’s question and answer pair ). A good content model connects content that should remain together so that multiple delivery channels can use it without needing to first put those pieces back together.

Consider creating an essay or article. The meaning and usefulness of an article depend on how well its components are kept together. Would one of the headings or paragraphs be meaningful on their own without the context of the full article? Our well-known design-system thinking on our project frequently led us to want to develop content models that would divide content into distinct chunks to fit the web-centric layout. This had a similar effect to an article that had had its headline removed. Because we were slicing content into standalone pieces based on layout, content that belonged together became difficult to manage and nearly impossible for multiple delivery channels to understand.

Let’s take a look at how connecting related content works in a real-world setting to illustrate. The client’s design team created a challenging layout for a software product page that included numerous tabs and sections. Our instincts were to follow suit with the content model. Shouldn’t we make adding any number of tabs in the future as simple and flexible as possible?

Because our design-system instincts were so well-known, it appeared that we needed a “tab section” content type so that multiple tab sections could be added to a page. Each tab section would display various types of content. The software’s overview or specifications might be available in one tab. A list of resources might be found under another tab.

Our inclination to break down the content model into “tab section” pieces would have led to an unnecessarily complex model and a cumbersome editing experience, and it would have also created content that couldn’t have been understood by additional delivery channels. How would a different system have been able to determine which “tab section” referred to a product’s specifications or resource list, for instance? Would that system have had to have used tab sections and content blocks to calculate these terms? This would have prevented the tabs from ever being rearranged, and it would have required adding logic to each other delivery channel to interpret the layout of the design system. Furthermore, if the customer were to have no longer wanted to display this content in a tab layout, it would have been tedious to migrate to a new content model to reflect the new page redesign.

Our customer had a breakthrough when we realized that for each tab, their customer had a specific purpose in mind: it would reveal specific information like the software product’s overview, specifications, related resources, and pricing. Once implementation began, our inclination to focus on what’s visual and familiar had obscured the intent of the designs. It wasn’t long after a little digging that the content model didn’t like the idea of tabs. What was important was the meaning of the content they were planning to display in the tabs.

In fact, the customer could have decided to display this content in a different way—without tabs—somewhere else. In response to this realization, we decided to create content types for the software product based on the meaningful qualities the client wanted to display on the web. There were rich attributes like screenshots, software requirements, and feature lists as well as obvious semantic attributes like name and description. The software’s product information stayed together because it wasn’t sliced across separate components like “tab sections” that were derived from the content’s presentation. This content could be understood and presented by any delivery channel, including those that come up in the future.

Conclusion

In this omnichannel marketing project, we discovered that the best way to keep our content model on track was to ensure that it was semantic ( with type and attribute names that reflected the meaning of the content ) and that it kept content together that belonged together ( instead of fragmenting it ). These two ideas made it easier for us to decide what to do with the content model based on the design. Remember: If you’re developing a content model to support an omnichannel content strategy, or even if you just want to make sure Google and other interfaces understand your content, keep in mind:

• A design system isn’t a content model. Team members may be persuaded to combine them and have their content model resemble their design system, so you should guard the semantic and contextual integrity of the content strategy throughout the entire implementation process. Without the use of a magic decoder ring, every delivery channel will be able to consume the content.
• If your team is struggling to make this transition, you can still reap some of the benefits by using Schema. Your website uses structured data from org. The benefit of search engine optimization is a compelling argument on its own, even if additional delivery channels aren’t on the horizon at this time.
• Additionally, remind the team that decoupling the content model from the design will let them update the designs more easily because they won’t be held back by the cost of content migrations. They’ll be able to create new designs without compromising the compatibility between the content and the design, and they’ll be prepared for the upcoming big thing.

You’ll help your team understand these principles by firmly defending them in their efforts to give content the attention it deserves as both your most valuable resource and your most effective way to engage with your audience.