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I’d like you to consider this a “yes … and” piece to complement Joe’s post. Instead of refuting everything he’s saying, I’m pointing out some areas where AI may produce real, positive impacts on people with disabilities. I want to take some time to talk about what’s possible in hope that we’ll get there one day. I’m no saying that there aren’t real challenges or pressing problems with AI that need to be addressed; there are.

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Joe’s article spends a lot of time addressing computer-vision models ‘ ability to create other words. He raises a lot of valid points about the state of the world right now. And while computer-vision concepts continue to improve in the quality and complexity of information in their information, their benefits aren’t wonderful. As he rightly points out, the state of image research is currently very poor, especially for some graphic types, in large part due to the lack of context for which AI systems look at images ( which is a result of having separate “foundation” models for words analysis and picture analysis ). Today’s models aren’t trained to distinguish between images that are contextually relevant ( should probably have descriptions ) and those that are purely decorative ( couldn’t possibly need a description ) either. However, I still think there’s possible in this area.

As Joe points out, human-in-the-loop editing of ctrl text should definitely be a factor. And if AI can intervene to provide a starting place for alt text, even if the swift may say What is this BS? That’s certainly correct at all … Let me try to offer a starting point— I think that’s a win.

If we can specifically teach a design to consider image usage in context, it might be able to help us more swiftly distinguish between images that are likely to be beautiful and those that are more descriptive. That will clarify which situations require image descriptions, and it will increase authors ‘ effectiveness in making their sites more visible.

While complex images—like graphs and charts—are challenging to describe in any sort of succinct way ( even for humans ), the image example shared in the GPT4 announcement points to an interesting opportunity as well. Let’s say you came across a map that was simply the description of the chart’s title and the type of representation it was: Pie map comparing smartphone usage to have phone usage in US households earning under$ 30, 000 annually. ( That would be a pretty bad alt text for a chart because it would frequently leave many unanswered questions about the data, but let’s just assume that that was the description in place. ) If your website knew that that picture was a pie graph ( because an ship model concluded this ), imagine a world where people could ask questions like these about the creative:

• Would more people use smartphones or other types of phones?
• How many more?
• Is there a group of people that don’t fall into either of these pots?
• How many people are that?

For a moment, the chance to learn more about graphics and data in this way could be innovative for people who are blind and low vision as well as for those with different types of color blindness, cognitive impairments, and other issues. Putting aside the challenges of large language model ( LLM) hallucinations. It could also be useful in educational contexts to help people who can see these charts, as is, to understand the data in the charts.

What if you could ask your browser to make a complicated chart simpler? What if you asked it to separate a single line from a line graph? What if you could ask your browser to transpose the colors of the different lines to work better for form of color blindness you have? What if you could ask it to switch colors for patterns? That seems like a possibility given the chat-based interfaces and our current ability to manipulate images in modern AI tools.

Now imagine a purpose-built model that could extract the information from that chart and convert it to another format. Perhaps it could convert that pie chart (or, better yet, a series of pie charts ) into more usable ( and useful ) formats, like spreadsheets, for instance. That would be incredible!

Matching algorithms

When Safiya Umoja Noble chose to call her book Algorithms of Oppression, she hit the nail on the head. Although her book focused on the ways that search engines can foster racism, I believe it to be equally accurate to say that all computer models have the potential to amplify conflict, bias, and intolerance. Whether it’s Twitter always showing you the latest tweet from a bored billionaire, YouTube sending us into a Q-hole, or Instagram warping our ideas of what natural bodies look like, we know that poorly authored and maintained algorithms are incredibly harmful. A large portion of this is attributable to the lack of diversity in those who create and shape them. There is real potential for algorithm development when these platforms are built with inclusive features in, though.

Take Mentra, for example. They serve as a network of employment for people who are neurodivers. They match job seekers with potential employers using an algorithm based on more than 75 data points. On the job-seeker side of things, it considers each candidate’s strengths, their necessary and preferred workplace accommodations, environmental sensitivities, and so on. It takes into account the workplace, the communication environment, and other factors. Mentra made the decision to change the script when it came to traditional employment websites because it was run by neurodivergent people. They use their algorithm to propose available candidates to companies, who can then connect with job seekers that they are interested in, reducing the emotional and physical labor on the job-seeker side of things.

When more people with disabilities are involved in developing algorithms, this can lower the likelihood that these algorithms will harm their communities. Diverse teams are crucial because of this.

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

Other ways that AI can assist people with disabilities

If I weren’t attempting to combine this with other tasks, I’m sure I could go on and on, giving various examples of how AI could be used to assist people with disabilities, but I’m going to make this last section into a bit of a lightning round. In no particular order:

preservation of voice You may be aware of the voice-prescribing options from Microsoft, Acapela, or others, or you may have seen the announcement for VALL-E or Apple’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day. It’s possible to train an AI model to replicate your voice, which can be a tremendous boon for people who have ALS ( Lou Gehrig’s disease ) or motor-neuron disease or other medical conditions that can lead to an inability to talk. This technology can also be used to create audio deepfakes, so it’s something we need to approach responsibly, but the technology has truly transformative potential.
• voice recognition Researchers like those in the Speech Accessibility Project are paying people with disabilities for their help in collecting recordings of people with atypical speech. As I type, they are actively recruiting people with Parkinson’s and related conditions, and they intend to expand this to other conditions as the project develops. More people with disabilities will be able to use voice assistants, dictation software, and voice-response services, as well as to use only their voices to control computers and other devices, according to this research.
• Text transformation. The most recent generation of LLMs is capable of altering already-existing text without giving off hallucinations. This is incredibly empowering for those who have cognitive disabilities and who may benefit from text summaries or simplified versions, or even text that has been prepared for bionic reading.

The importance of diverse teams and data

We must acknowledge the importance of our differences. The intersections of the identities that we exist in have an impact on our lived experiences. These lived experiences—with all their complexities ( and joys and pain ) —are valuable inputs to the software, services, and societies that we shape. Our differences must be reflected in the data we use to develop new models, and those who provide it need to be compensated for doing so. Inclusive data sets produce stronger models that promote more justifiable outcomes.

Want a model that doesn’t demean or patronize or objectify people with disabilities? Make sure that the training data includes information about disabilities written by people with a range of disabilities.

Want a model that uses ableist language without using it? You may be able to use existing data sets to build a filter that can intercept and remediate ableist language before it reaches readers. Despite this, AI models won’t soon replace human copy editors when it comes to sensitivity reading.

Want a copilot for coding that provides recomprehensible recommendations after the jump? Train it on code that you know to be accessible.

I have no doubts about how dangerous AI will be for people today, tomorrow, and for the rest of the world. However, I also think that we can acknowledge this and make thoughtful, thoughtful, and intentional changes in our approaches to AI that will reduce harm over time as well. Today, tomorrow, and well into the future.

Many thanks to Kartik Sawhney for supporting the development of this article, Ashley Bischoff for providing me with invaluable editorial support, and, of course, Joe Dolson for the prompt.

The same holds true for those of us who are currently employed in design and development. Having worked on the web for about three years at this point, I’ve seen the typical wax and wane of concepts, strategies, and systems. Every day we as developers and designers re-enter the familiar pattern, a brand-new systems or idea emerges to shake things up and completely alter the world.

How we got below

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

the development of online standards

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

Server-side language like PHP, Java, and.NET took Perl as the primary back-end computers, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the garbage bin. The first age of internet programs started with content-management systems (especially those used in blogs like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress ), with these better server-side equipment. In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened gates for sequential interaction between the front end and back close. Pages was now revise their content without having to reload. A grain of Script frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and ruby arose to aid developers develop more credible client-side interaction across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like image replacement enable skilled designers and developers to display fonts of their choosing. And technologies like Flash made it possible to add animations, games, and even more interactivity.

These new methods, standards, and technologies greatly reenergized the sector. Web design flourished as designers and developers explored more diverse styles and layouts. However, we still relied heavily on numerous hacks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes ( such as rounded or angled corners ) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks ). All kinds of nested floats or absolute positioning were required for complicated layouts ( or both ). Flash and image replacement for custom fonts was a great start toward varying the typefaces from the big five, but both hacks introduced accessibility and performance problems. Additionally, JavaScript libraries made it simple to add a dash of interaction to pages without having to spend the money to double or even quadruple the download size for basic websites.

The web as software platform

The balance between the front end and the back end continued to improve, leading to the development of the current web application era. Between expanded server-side programming languages ( which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others ) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Along with these tools, there were additional options, such as shared package libraries, build automation, and collaborative version control. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.

Mobile devices increased in their capabilities as well, and they gave us access to the internet while we were traveling. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.

This fusion of potent mobile devices and potent development tools contributed to the growth of social media and other centralized tools for user interaction and consumption. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media provided connections on a global scale, with both positive and negative outcomes.

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

Where we are now

It seems like we’ve reached yet another significant turning point in recent years. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. There are many different ways to create a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all varieties. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other IndieWeb tools can be useful in this regard, but they’re still largely underdeveloped and difficult to use for the less geeky. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.

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

We can prototype almost any idea today with just a few commands and a few lines of code. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. However, the upfront cost these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes down as the maintenance and upgrading they become a part of our technical debt.

If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks, which previously made it easier to adopt new techniques sooner, have since evolved into obstacles. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And when scripts fail ( whether due to poor code, network issues, or other environmental factors ), there is frequently no other option, leaving users with blank or broken pages.

Where do we go from here?

Hacks of today help to shape standards for tomorrow. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks —for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we refuse to acknowledge that they are hacks or when we refuse to take their place. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?

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

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

Design with care. Consider the effects of each choice, whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes. The convenience of many a modern tool comes at the cost of not always understanding the underlying decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the impact that those decisions can have. Use the time saved by modern tools to think more carefully and make decisions with care rather than rushing to “move fast and break things.”

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

Play, experiment, and be weird! This website we created is the most incredible experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be brave and try something new. Build a playground for ideas. Create absurd experiments in your own crazy science lab. Start your own small business. There has never been a place where we have more room to be creative, take risks, and discover our potential.

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

Go ahead and create a masterpiece.

As designers and developers for the web ( and beyond ), we’re responsible for building the future every day, whether that may take the shape of personal websites, social media tools used by billions, or anything in between. Let’s incorporate our values into the products we produce, and let’s improve the world for everyone. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then share it, improve it, re-use it, or create something new. Learn. Make. Share. Grow. Rinse and repeat. Everything will change whenever you believe you’ve mastered the web.

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

Because successful personalization is so dependent on each group’s skill, technology, and market position, there are no Lonely Planet and some tour guides for those of you who want to personalize.

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

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

We refer to it as prepersonalization.

Behind the song

Take into account Spotify’s DJ element, which debuted this year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set the timer for the kitchen.

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

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

Kickstart: This specifies the terms of engagement as you concentrate on the potential, the readiness and drive of your team, and your leadership.
1. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
2. Work your plan: This stage consists of making it possible for team members to individually pitch their own pilots that each include a proof-of-concept project, business case, and operating model.

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

Kickstart: Apt your appetite

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

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

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

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature ( or something similar ). In our cards, we break down connected experiences into five categories: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to draw attention to both the benefits of ongoing investment and the difference between what you currently offer and what you intend to deliver in the future.

Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is crucial because it emphasizes how personalization can affect your own methods of working as well as your external customers. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Each team member should decide where they would like to place your company’s emphasis on your product or service. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. Here, the goal is to demonstrate how various departments may view their own advantages over the effort, which can be different from one department to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final KickStart activity is about filling in the personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will compliance with data and privacy be a significant challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? It’s just a matter of acknowledging the magnitude of that need and finding a solution ( we’re fairly certain that you do ). In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. For instance, our Detractor card lists six intractable behaviors that prevent progress.

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

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

Hit that test kitchen

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

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

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

The dishes will be made using recipes that have predetermined ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

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

This doesn’t just involve identifying requirements. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team:

1. compare findings to a common method for developing features, similar to how artists paint with the same color palette,
2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar,
3. and establish parity between all important performance indicators and performance metrics.

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

Create a recipe.

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

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

Five years ago, we created these cards and card categories. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And we still come across fresh possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

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

1. Nurture personalization: When a guest or an unknown visitor interacts with a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it easier for them to encounter a related title they may want to read, saving them time.
2. Welcome automation: An email is sent when a new user registers to highlight the breadth of the content catalog and convert them to happy subscribers.
3. Winback automation: Before their subscription lapses or after a recent failed renewal, a user is sent an email that gives them a promotional offer to suggest that they reconsider renewing or to remind them to renew.

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

The workshop’s later stages could be characterized as shifting from focusing on a cookbook to a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual” cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.

Better architecture is required for better kitchens.

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

A team overfitting: they aren’t designing with their best data, is what causes personalization to become a laugh line. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. For instance, your AI’s output quality is in fact impacted by your IA. Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture.

You can’t stand the heat, unquestionably…

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

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

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

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

Think of your favorite film. It more than likely follows a three-act narrative architecture: the installation, the turmoil, and the resolution. The second act shows what exists now, and it helps you get to understand the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two sets the scene for the issue and the action begins. Here, issues grow or get worse. The solution comes in the third and final work. This is where the issues are resolved and the figures learn and change. This architecture, in my opinion, is also a fantastic way to think about consumer research, and it might be particularly useful for introducing user research to others.

Use story as a framework for conducting analysis

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see studies as being dispensable. Research is typically one of the first things to go when finances or deadlines are tight. Instead of investing in study, some goods professionals rely on manufacturers or—worse—their personal judgment to make the “right” options for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get groups a little bit out of the way, but that approach is therefore easily miss out on resolving people ‘ real issues. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. Design is enhanced by customer research. It keeps it on record, pointing to problems and opportunities. You can keep back of your competition by being aware of the problems with your goods and fixing them.

In the three-act structure, each action corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is important to telling the whole story. Let’s examine the various functions and how they relate to consumer analysis.

Act one: installation

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

Erika Hall discusses the most effective anthropology, which can be as straightforward as spending 15 hours with a customer and asking them to” Walk me through your morning yesterday.” That’s it. Provide that one ask. Opened up and listen to them for 15 days. Do everything in your power to protect both your objectives and yourself. Bam, you’re doing ethnography”. According to Hall, “[This ] will definitely prove quite fascinating. In the very unlikely event that you didn’t learn anything new or helpful, carry on with increased confidence in your way”.

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

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

When partners begin to understand the value of basic research, that is open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making approach. And that can influence product team ‘ focus on improving. This gains everyone—users, the goods, and partners. It’s similar to winning an Oscar for a film because it frequently results in a favorable and successful outcome for your item. And this can be an opportunity for participants to repeat this process with different items. Knowing how to show a good story is the only way to convince partners to worry about doing more research, and story is the key to this method.

This brings us to work two, where you incrementally examine a design or idea to see whether it addresses the problems.

Act two: fight

Act two is all about digging deeper into the issues that you identified in operate one. This typically involves conducting vertical study, such as accessibility tests, where you evaluate a potential solution ( such as a design ) to see if it addresses the problems you identified. The issues may include unfulfilled needs or problems with a circulation or procedure that’s tripping users off. More issues may come up in the process, much like in act two of a movie. It’s ok that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this work.

According to Jakob Nielsen, five users should be normally in usability tests, which means that this number of users can generally identify the majority of the issues:” You learn less and less as you add more and more users because you will keep seeing the same things over and over again… After the second user, you are wasting your time by constantly observing the similar findings but no learning much new.”

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

Usability tests have been conducted in person for decades, but you can also do them remotely using software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You might consider in-person usability tests like watching a movie as opposed to remote testing like attending a play. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Usability research in person is a much more valuable learning experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. Additionally, you get real-time reactions, including surprises, disagreements, and discussions about what they’re seeing. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors ‘ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.

If conducting usability testing in the field is like watching a play that is staged and controlled, where any two sessions may be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can meet users at their location to conduct your research. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that wouldn’t have in a lab environment—and conversion can shift in entirely different directions. You have less control over how these sessions run as researchers, but this can occasionally improve your understanding of users. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests add a level of detail that remote usability tests frequently lack.

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

You can ask real users questions to understand their thoughts and understanding of the solution as a result of usability testing, whether it is done remotely or in person. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. You can also test your own ideas and determine whether they are true. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. The excitement centers on Act 2, but there are also potential surprises in that Act. This is equally true of usability tests. Unexpected things that participants say frequently alter the way you look at things, and these unexpected revelations can lead to unexpected turns in the narrative.

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

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

In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can encourage stakeholders to take action on the issues raised.

Act three: resolution

The third act is about resolving the issues from the first two acts, whereas the first two acts are about understanding the context and the tensions that can compel stakeholders to act. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That includes the entire product team, including developers, UX experts, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other interested parties who have a say in the coming development. It allows the whole team to hear users ‘ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. Additionally, it enables the UX design and research teams to clarify, suggest alternatives, or provide more context for their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

This act is primarily told in voiceover with some audience participation. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They offer the stakeholders their suggestions and suggestions for how to create this vision.

Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. The most effective presenters employ the same methods as great storytellers: they create a conflict that needs to be settled by reminding people of the status quo and then revealing a better way, according to Duarte. ” That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently”.

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

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be as visual as quick sketches of a potential solution to a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the session is over when you’ve concluded everything by summarizing the key points and offering suggestions for a solution. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. This stage provides stakeholders with the next steps, and hopefully, the motivation to take those steps as well!

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

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

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

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

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

So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. In the end, user research is beneficial to everyone, and all parties must be interested in the conclusion.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve watched promising thoughts go from zero to warrior in a few days before failing to deliver within weeks as a product developer for very long.

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

The fatalities of feature-first growth

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

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

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

The significance of the foundation

What is a better strategy, then? How may we create products that are user-friendly, firm, and, most importantly, stick?

The concept of “bedrock” comes into play in this context. The mainstay of your product is really important to people, and Bedrock is that. It serves as the foundation for the fundamental building block that creates price and maintains relevance over time.

The rock has to be in and around the standard servicing journeys in the world of retail bank, which is where I work. People only look at their existing account once every blue moon, but they do so daily. They purchase a credit card every year or two, but they at least once a month assess their stability and pay their bills.

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

How can you reach the foundation, though? By focusing on the” MVP” strategy, giving convenience precedence, and working incrementally toward a clear value proposition. This entails removing unneeded functions and putting the emphasis on providing genuine value to your users.

It also requires some fortitude, as your coworkers might not always agree on your vision at first. And in some cases, it might even mean making it clear to clients that you won’t be coming over to their home and prepare their meal. Sometimes you need to use the sporadic “opinionated user interface design” ( i .e. clunky workaround for edge cases ) to test a concept or to give yourself some more time to work on something more crucial.

Functional methods for creating reliable economic items

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

1. What trouble are you trying to solve first, and make a distinct “why”? For whom? Before beginning any project, make sure your vision is completely clear. Make certain it also complies with the goals of your business.
2. Avoid the temptation to put too many features at once and focus on getting that right first. Choose one that actually adds price, and work from that.
3. Give clarity the precedence it deserves over difficulty when it comes to financial products. Eliminate unwanted details and concentrate on what matters most.
4. Accept constant iteration as Bedrock is a powerful process rather than a set destination. Continuously collect customer opinions, make product improvements, and advance in that direction.
5. Cease, look, and listen: You don’t just have to test your product during the delivery process; you must also test it consistently in the field. Use it for yourself. A/B tests are run. User opinions on Gear. Speak to users and make adjustments accordingly.

The foundational dilemma

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

How do you begin your quest for rock, then? Get it gradually. Start by identifying the underlying factors that your customers actually care about. Concentrate on developing and improving a second, potent function that delivers real value. And most importantly, check constantly because, whatever you think, Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker are all in the same boat! The best way to foretell the future is to make it, he said.

The Last of Us winter 2 show 4 has clues in this review. The Last of Us has hit the middle point of time 2 without any kind of collapse in view. As Ellie ( Bella Ramsey ) and Dina ( Isabela Merced ) explore, Episode 4 picks up the pace from the” The Path” mourning period.

On Den of Geek, Dina and Ellie Get On Seattle: The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 4 Review appeared second.

On Sunday night, U. S. President Donald Trump declared the British film industry as dying on his Truth Social accounts and announced that he is beginning the process of implementing what he described as a 100 percent tax on “any and All videos coming into our State that are produced in Foreign Lands”. The president also referred to this as a matter of national security, claiming that the tax breaks various governments have used to encourage Hollywood film production abroad constituted” a conscious effort by another Nations” to manage messaging and create advertising.

The specifics and details ( as with so many other polices created by late-night social media blasts from the commander-in-chief ) are alarmingly vague, starting off with whether movies themselves can be taxed or if they legally qualify as services or remedies, as claimed by California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday morning. However, just exactly who may qualify for this tariff—and how it would be applied—is at present a complete unknown.

Is there a tariff or tax on international movies that are released at American separate cinemas? Or is it meant only for American performances that picture abroad, yet if they are edited and finished in post-production stateside? Do this apply to Hollywood films that are already, at least partially, filming elsewhere? Shows like Warner Brothers ‘ Supergirl, The Iliad by Christopher Nolan, and Avengers: Doomsday by Disney and Marvel? Even does this simply apply to theatrical releases or to streaming videos as well? Because of the Directors of their firms, say Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, who have bent the knee and who have secured tens of millions of dollars for Melania Trump through donations or video offers, that will be a significant glitch for the international directories of, say, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, which have received tens of millions of dollars in the last six months.

Also, despite the fact that the movie is soon scheduled to premiere in Rome, does Trump actually desire his friend and Hollywood ally Mel Gibson to film his upcoming biblical spectacular, The Resurrection of the Christ, in Georgia or Louisiana ideal now?

As with so much more about the latest National president’s fluctuating desires and declarations, it all seems loose and improvisational, an off-the-cuff solution for what is a genuine problem in the U. S. —in this case the decline of American film production (keep in mind that for over a decade, Marvel shot almost everything in Atlanta until July’s upcoming The Fantastic Four: First Steps ) —that seems designed to cultivate maximum confusion and chaos. Then, his administration and staff must interpret the destabilizing executive decree and come up with a plausible explanation.

Needless to say, it &#8217 is a shame that Trump seems so apprehensive about foreign-made movies because many of them would appeal to him in his second term and appeal to his senses and aesthetics. And if I could be so kind as to recommend just one foreign-ish film he ought to give a try, let it be… Fred Zinnemann’s big screen adaptation of A Man for All Seasons from 1966.

A Man for All Seasons, a movie that was released at the age of 20, is technically an American movie. Zinnemann, a naturalized American citizen, produced and directed it, and Columbia Pictures, an American studio, distributed it. However, it was based on a 1960 play of the same name by Robert Bolt, an English playwright, and furthermore dealt specifically with the crisis of conscience experienced by 16th century English statesman and social philosopher Sir Thomas More, who much to his later grief was the elevated friend of King Henry VIII, as well as Henry’s Lord High Chancellor when Henry decided he’d rather be married to Anne Boleyn instead of his wife of the past 22 years, Catherine of Aragon.

Therefore, Zinnemann and his studio chose to shoot A Man for All Seasons in Burbank or Culver City instead of Hollywood’s backlot.

I don’t believe Trump would enjoy the movie because of any of that, though. Nay, the reason he could appreciate A Man for All Seasons is the kingliness of it all and the film’s depiction of an absolute monarchy bending institutions to its will despite lamentations over ethics or morality from sad sacks like main character Thomas More ( played in the film by Paul Schofield, who won an Oscar for the job ). Robert Shaw as King Henry VIII is someone Trump would adore.

This middle-aged Henry is played by Shaw midway between his early breakout roles in genre fare like From Russia with Love and his most well-known role a decade later as Quint in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. He is dressed head to toe in gold regalia, an affectation Trump also shares with many real historical autocrats. Yet Henry plays to Shaw’s strengths in speech craft as well as physicality ( Shaw was also a playwright ). His Henry is a strong and physically dominant presence that, when he wasn’t wearing a proverbial crown, would still dominate the scene due to his big-kid-bullying energy.

Shaw’s English king is depicted as” surprising” Sir Thomas and the chancellor’s family in his first scene of the film by stepping aboard a royal barge on the Thames in a scripted improvisation. In that head-to-toe gold, Henry cuts a formidable frame as he gleefully leaps from the landing boat… and discovers his shiny golden shoes have been submerged in unexpected mud.

Every courtier on his boat breaks into a obscenely awkward, deadly silence. Who will bear the brunt of this humiliation? Fortunately for the hangers-on, Shaw’s Henry predicts Joe Pesci’s more famous attempts at menacing self-effacement in Goodfellas and just laughs off the mishap. Every single one of his Yes Men nods heads and laughs along as they each happily dump their feet into the same murky bank and tore up their shoes, as their king so clearly intended!

Although this arrangement is intended to represent Henry VIII’s entire reign, it can also be used to represent almost any autocratic leader. He literally makes a very public and perhaps humiliating misstep, and pretends it was all according to plan. His sycophants and supplicants then act as though they are already, even debasing and harming themselves to keep their alleged infallibility from their king.

Every contemporary televised Cabinet meeting where a U.S. attorney general claims that her president saved the lives of 75 percent of Americans at the border in the past 100 days has this resounding voice in the audience. Or perhaps more crucially for the world, how economic policy is currently bending in the U. S. government to argue that a tariff-led trade war will benefit the American economy in billions, despite the last time the U. S. tried something similar nearly a hundred years ago, it only deepened what is remembered as the Great Depression.

Trump would love Henry, but that scene is not. What follows as the king approaches his dear, dear friend Sir Thomas More and makes attempts to flatter, woo, and eventually threaten him with consenting to the king’s divorce attempt. When asked why he demands More’s approval on the matter, Henry answers,” There are those like Norfolk that follow me because I wear the crown. Some people follow me because they are jackals with sharp teeth and I’m their tiger, just like Master Cromwell. Because it moves in a mass, it follows me. And then there’s you”.

He desires authority and credibility from More. He wants to convert a man who has principles into a different” Yes,” because that would, in turn, indicate that the king has principles, yes? Admittedly, Trump is past this point in his political career, but it certainly echoes a first term where men like U. S. Marine Corps General John Kelly were raised up to the rank of White House Chief of Staff … only to eventually be divorced from the once and future president with maximum acrimony after failing to bend far enough. ( Today, Trump refers to Kelly as a “dumb lowlife. )

The irony is that Henry VIII also transcended the conflicts and breakups of more famous men. In fact, A Man for All Seasons isn’t just about More’s crisis of conscience, but also how in our earthly, dirty world, morality and doing what is right will not save you. More is ultimately beheaded by Henry because he criticised his opposition to marrying Anne Boleyn. And if you know your history, Anne eventually makes it to the cutting block after disguising Henry and assassinating her on suspicion of allegedly treason and adultery against her notoriously unfaithful husband.

It’s all hinted at, too, in one of Henry’s big scenes in A Man for All Seasons where Shaw’s smiling camraderie turns vitriolic with the incalcitrant More.

Henry begins to seethe and says,” I don’t take it kindly and I’ll have no opposition.” The bishops will oppose me, I see how it will go. The full-fed ‘ Princes of the Church,’ hypocrites! All slanderers! I’m sure they don’t take you in, Thomas. I have no queen! Catherine is not my spouse! No priest is able to control her! They who say she is my wife are not only liars but traitors! Yes, TRAITORS! That I won’t accept right now. Treachery, treachery, treachery”!

Here’s the catch: Henry didn’t accept what he thought was treachery in his own life. More people died as a result of not acknowledging Anne Boleyn as queen. Anne Boleyn died because she failed to produce Henry a son. After essentially arrangering a bad date for ol ‘ Henry when he was on wife number four, another wife was later executed for actually having an extramarital affair ( they married when Henry was 49 and Katherine Howard was 16 ). Thomas Cromwell, the courtier who most frequently plotted against More, also faced a brutal execution in the Tower of London.

In his lifetime, nothing about it made any difference. Henry outlived all of his critics and perceived enemies, and died at the age of 55 of natural causes. Although he is perhaps better remembered today because his eventual successor ( the daughter he did not want from Boleyn ) resurrected his chaotic rule and ushered in a golden age, he is perhaps better remembered today. So perhaps there is some solace in that as well.

In other words, A Man for All Seasons is a “foreign land” movie for all Americans when you think about it. &nbsp,

Donald Trump should love a movie from “external countries,” according to the post Den of Geek.

Thunderbolts* is a good movie. Full stop. It is refreshing to be able to write that about an MCU effort considering the equivocations, debates, and second-guessing that has circled many recent Marvel projects like Captain America: Brave New World, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and The Marvels. By comparison, Jake Schreier’s Thundebolts* mostly stands on […]

The post Thunderbolts* Box Office Leaves Marvel in Ambiguous Position appeared first on Den of Geek.

On Sunday evening, U.S. President Donald Trump declared the American movie industry as dying on his Truth Social account and announced that he is beginning the process of implementing what he described as a 100 percent tariff on “any and All movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” In addition to erroneous capitalizations, the president described this as a matter of national security, suggesting that the tax breaks other governments have used to incentivize Hollywood film production outside the U.S. amounted to “a concerted effort by other Nations” to control messaging and create propaganda.

As with so many other polices shaped by late night social media blasts from the commander-in-chief, the specifics and details (and the possible devils within) remain alarmingly vague, beginning of course with whether films themselves can be taxed or if they legally qualify as services or remedies, as asserted by California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday morning. Furthermore, just exactly who would qualify for this tariff—and how it would be applied—is at present a complete mystery.

Is this a tariff, or tax, on foreign films produced overseas and released at independent cinemas in the U.S.? Or is it meant just for American productions that film overseas, even if they are edited and finished in post-production stateside? Would this apply to Hollywood movies currently already filming at least partially on location overseas? Movies like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Disney and Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday, and Warner Brothers’ Supergirl? Also does this only apply to theatrical releases or to streaming films as well? Because that will be quite the hiccup for the international catalogs of, say, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video after their companies’ CEOs bent the knee and through donation or documentary deals for Melania Trump, gave the president and his organizations tens of millions of dollars in the last six months.

… Also does Trump really want his buddy and Hollywood liaison Mel Gibson to shoot his next Biblical epic, The Resurrection of the Christ, in Georgia or Louisiana right now, even as the film is expected to shortly go before cameras in Rome?

As with so much else about the current American president’s fluctuating whims and declarations, it all seems loose and improvisational, an off-the-cuff solution for what is a genuine problem in the U.S.—in this case the decline of American film production (keep in mind that for over a decade, Marvel shot almost everything in Atlanta until July’s upcoming The Fantastic Four: First Steps)—that seems designed to cultivate maximum uncertainty and chaos. It is then up to his administration and staff to make sense of it and attempt a plausible rationalization for the day’s destabilizing executive decree.

All of which is to say that it’s a shame Trump seems so suspicious of films shot in foreign lands, because there are many that would appeal to his sensibility and aesthetic after 100 days into his second term. And if I could be so kind as to recommend just one foreign-ish film he ought to give a try, let it be… Fred Zinnemann’s big screen adaptation of A Man for All Seasons from 1966.

Released when Trump was 20 years old, A Man for All Seasons is technically an American film. It was produced and directed by naturalized American citizen Zinnemann and distributed by American studio Columbia Pictures. However, it was based on a 1960 play of the same name by Robert Bolt, an English playwright, and furthermore dealt specifically with the crisis of conscience experienced by 16th century English statesman and social philosopher Sir Thomas More, who much to his later grief was the elevated friend of King Henry VIII, as well as Henry’s Lord High Chancellor when Henry decided he’d rather be married to Anne Boleyn instead of his wife of the past 22 years, Catherine of Aragon.

… So Zinnemann and his studio made the decision to primarily shoot A Man for All Seasons in merry old England instead of a Hollywood backlot in Burbank or Culver City.

But none of that is why I think Trump would get a kick out of the film. Nay, the reason he could appreciate A Man for All Seasons is the kingliness of it all and the film’s depiction of an absolute monarchy bending institutions to its will despite lamentations over ethics or morality from sad sacks like main character Thomas More (played in the film by Paul Schofield, who won an Oscar for the job). Who Trump would adore is Robert Shaw as King Henry VIII.

Decked head to toe in gold regalia—an affectation Trump also shares with plenty of real historical autocrats—this middle-aged Henry is played by Shaw midway between early breakout work in genre fare like From Russia with Love and his most famous role a decade later as Quint in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Yet Henry plays to Shaw’s strengths in speech craft as well as physicality (Shaw was also a playwright). His Henry is a robust and physically domineering presence that through sheer big-kid-bullying energy would dominate the scene even if he wasn’t wearing a proverbial crown.

In his first scene in the movie, Shaw’s English king is depicted as “surprising” Sir Thomas and the chancellor’s family by arriving in a scripted improvisation by royal barge on the river Thames. In that head-to-toe gold, Henry cuts a formidable frame as he gleefully leaps from the landing boat… and discovers his shiny golden shoes have been submerged in unexpected mud.

Every single courtier on his boat enters an awkward deadly silence. Who will be blamed for this embarrassment? Fortunately for the hangers-on, Shaw’s Henry predicts Joe Pesci’s more famous attempts at menacing self-effacement in Goodfellas and just laughs off the mishap. Immediately all of his Yes Men nod their heads and laugh along, each in turn happily diving their feet into the same muddy bank and ruining their shoes just as their king so clearly intended!

This sequence is obviously a metaphor for the real Henry VIII’s entire reign but can be applied to almost any leader with autocratic tendencies. He literally makes a very public and perhaps humiliating misstep, and pretends it was all according to plan. His sycophants and supplicants then pretend right along—even debasing and harming themselves in order to allow their king’s alleged infallibility to continue.

One can see echoes of this in every modern televised Cabinet meeting where a U.S. attorney general might assert her president saved the lives of 75 percent of Americans at the border in the last hundred days and everyone nods along. Or perhaps more crucially for the world, how economic policy is currently bending in the U.S. government to argue that a tariff-led trade war will benefit the American economy in billions, despite the last time the U.S. tried something similar nearly a hundred years ago, it only deepened what is remembered as the Great Depression.

Yet that scene isn’t why Trump would love Henry. It is what comes after as the king approaches his dear, dear friend Sir Thomas More and attempts to cajole, flatter, and finally threaten him into signing off on the king’s attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon. When asked why he demands More’s approval on the matter, Henry answers, “There are those like Norfolk that follow me because I wear the crown. There are those like Master Cromwell who follow me because they’re jackals with sharp teeth and I’m their tiger. There’s a mass that follows me because it follows anything that moves. And then there’s you.”

He craves More’s credibility and authority. He wants to turn a man with principles into another “Yes,” because it would by extension mean the king has principles, yes? Admittedly, Trump is past this point in his political career, but it certainly echoes a first term where men like U.S. Marine Corps General John Kelly were raised up to the rank of White House Chief of Staff… only to eventually be divorced from the once and future president with maximum acrimony after failing to bend far enough. (Nowadays Trump refers to Kelly as a “dumb lowlife.”)

Here’s the kicker though: Henry VIII also outlived the doubts and estrangements of men like More. In fact, A Man for All Seasons isn’t just about More’s crisis of conscience, but also how in our earthly, dirty world, morality and doing what is right will not save you. More is ultimately beheaded by Henry for speaking out against his marriage to Anne Boleyn. And if you know your history, Anne also eventually finds her way to the chopping block after displeasing Henry—she is even murdered due to an appalling miscarriage of justice with egregiously trumped up charges of supposed infidelity and incest against her notoriously unfaithful husband.

It’s all hinted at, too, in one of Henry’s big scenes in A Man for All Seasons where Shaw’s smiling camraderie turns vitriolic with the incalcitrant More.

“I don’t take it kindly and I’ll have no opposition,” Henry begins to seethe. “I see how it will be: the bishops will oppose me. The full-fed ‘Princes of the Church,’ hypocrites! All hypocrites! Mind you they don’t take you in, Thomas…. I have no queen! Catherine’s not my wife! No priest can make her so! They who say she is my wife are not only liars but traitors! Yes, TRAITORS! That I will not brook now. Treachery, treachery, treachery!”

And here’s the kicker… Henry didn’t brook what he assumed was treachery in his own life. More died for not recognizing Anne Boleyn as queen. Anne Boleyn died because she failed to produce Henry a son. Another wife was later executed for actually having an extramarital affair (they married when Henry was 49 and Katherine Howard was 16), and Thomas Cromwell, the courtier who most rivaled and plotted against More, also faced a brutal execution in the Tower of London after essentially arranging a bad date for ol’ Henry when he was on wife number four.

None of it mattered in his lifetime. Henry outlived all of his critics and perceived enemies, and died at the age of 55 of natural causes. He lived a life free of consequences—although is perhaps better remembered today because his eventual successor (the daughter he did not want from Boleyn) cleaned up his chaotic reign and ushered in a golden age. So maybe there’s solace in that too.

In other words, A Man for All Seasons is a “foreign land” movie for all Americans when you think about it. 

The post A Movie from ‘Foreign Lands’ Donald Trump Should Love appeared first on Den of Geek.

On Sunday evening, U.S. President Donald Trump declared the American movie industry as dying on his Truth Social account and announced that he is beginning the process of implementing what he described as a 100 percent tariff on “any and All movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” In addition to […]

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On Sunday evening, U.S. President Donald Trump declared the American movie industry as dying on his Truth Social account and announced that he is beginning the process of implementing what he described as a 100 percent tariff on “any and All movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” In addition to erroneous capitalizations, the president described this as a matter of national security, suggesting that the tax breaks other governments have used to incentivize Hollywood film production outside the U.S. amounted to “a concerted effort by other Nations” to control messaging and create propaganda.

As with so many other polices shaped by late night social media blasts from the commander-in-chief, the specifics and details (and the possible devils within) remain alarmingly vague, beginning of course with whether films themselves can be taxed or if they legally qualify as services or remedies, as asserted by California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday morning. Furthermore, just exactly who would qualify for this tariff—and how it would be applied—is at present a complete mystery.

Is this a tariff, or tax, on foreign films produced overseas and released at independent cinemas in the U.S.? Or is it meant just for American productions that film overseas, even if they are edited and finished in post-production stateside? Would this apply to Hollywood movies currently already filming at least partially on location overseas? Movies like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Disney and Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday, and Warner Brothers’ Supergirl? Also does this only apply to theatrical releases or to streaming films as well? Because that will be quite the hiccup for the international catalogs of, say, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video after their companies’ CEOs bent the knee and through donation or documentary deals for Melania Trump, gave the president and his organizations tens of millions of dollars in the last six months.

… Also does Trump really want his buddy and Hollywood liaison Mel Gibson to shoot his next Biblical epic, The Resurrection of the Christ, in Georgia or Louisiana right now, even as the film is expected to shortly go before cameras in Rome?

As with so much else about the current American president’s fluctuating whims and declarations, it all seems loose and improvisational, an off-the-cuff solution for what is a genuine problem in the U.S.—in this case the decline of American film production (keep in mind that for over a decade, Marvel shot almost everything in Atlanta until July’s upcoming The Fantastic Four: First Steps)—that seems designed to cultivate maximum uncertainty and chaos. It is then up to his administration and staff to make sense of it and attempt a plausible rationalization for the day’s destabilizing executive decree.

All of which is to say that it’s a shame Trump seems so suspicious of films shot in foreign lands, because there are many that would appeal to his sensibility and aesthetic after 100 days into his second term. And if I could be so kind as to recommend just one foreign-ish film he ought to give a try, let it be… Fred Zinnemann’s big screen adaptation of A Man for All Seasons from 1966.

Released when Trump was 20 years old, A Man for All Seasons is technically an American film. It was produced and directed by naturalized American citizen Zinnemann and distributed by American studio Columbia Pictures. However, it was based on a 1960 play of the same name by Robert Bolt, an English playwright, and furthermore dealt specifically with the crisis of conscience experienced by 16th century English statesman and social philosopher Sir Thomas More, who much to his later grief was the elevated friend of King Henry VIII, as well as Henry’s Lord High Chancellor when Henry decided he’d rather be married to Anne Boleyn instead of his wife of the past 22 years, Catherine of Aragon.

… So Zinnemann and his studio made the decision to primarily shoot A Man for All Seasons in merry old England instead of a Hollywood backlot in Burbank or Culver City.

But none of that is why I think Trump would get a kick out of the film. Nay, the reason he could appreciate A Man for All Seasons is the kingliness of it all and the film’s depiction of an absolute monarchy bending institutions to its will despite lamentations over ethics or morality from sad sacks like main character Thomas More (played in the film by Paul Schofield, who won an Oscar for the job). Who Trump would adore is Robert Shaw as King Henry VIII.

Decked head to toe in gold regalia—an affectation Trump also shares with plenty of real historical autocrats—this middle-aged Henry is played by Shaw midway between early breakout work in genre fare like From Russia with Love and his most famous role a decade later as Quint in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Yet Henry plays to Shaw’s strengths in speech craft as well as physicality (Shaw was also a playwright). His Henry is a robust and physically domineering presence that through sheer big-kid-bullying energy would dominate the scene even if he wasn’t wearing a proverbial crown.

In his first scene in the movie, Shaw’s English king is depicted as “surprising” Sir Thomas and the chancellor’s family by arriving in a scripted improvisation by royal barge on the river Thames. In that head-to-toe gold, Henry cuts a formidable frame as he gleefully leaps from the landing boat… and discovers his shiny golden shoes have been submerged in unexpected mud.

Every single courtier on his boat enters an awkward deadly silence. Who will be blamed for this embarrassment? Fortunately for the hangers-on, Shaw’s Henry predicts Joe Pesci’s more famous attempts at menacing self-effacement in Goodfellas and just laughs off the mishap. Immediately all of his Yes Men nod their heads and laugh along, each in turn happily diving their feet into the same muddy bank and ruining their shoes just as their king so clearly intended!

This sequence is obviously a metaphor for the real Henry VIII’s entire reign but can be applied to almost any leader with autocratic tendencies. He literally makes a very public and perhaps humiliating misstep, and pretends it was all according to plan. His sycophants and supplicants then pretend right along—even debasing and harming themselves in order to allow their king’s alleged infallibility to continue.

One can see echoes of this in every modern televised Cabinet meeting where a U.S. attorney general might assert her president saved the lives of 75 percent of Americans at the border in the last hundred days and everyone nods along. Or perhaps more crucially for the world, how economic policy is currently bending in the U.S. government to argue that a tariff-led trade war will benefit the American economy in billions, despite the last time the U.S. tried something similar nearly a hundred years ago, it only deepened what is remembered as the Great Depression.

Yet that scene isn’t why Trump would love Henry. It is what comes after as the king approaches his dear, dear friend Sir Thomas More and attempts to cajole, flatter, and finally threaten him into signing off on the king’s attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon. When asked why he demands More’s approval on the matter, Henry answers, “There are those like Norfolk that follow me because I wear the crown. There are those like Master Cromwell who follow me because they’re jackals with sharp teeth and I’m their tiger. There’s a mass that follows me because it follows anything that moves. And then there’s you.”

He craves More’s credibility and authority. He wants to turn a man with principles into another “Yes,” because it would by extension mean the king has principles, yes? Admittedly, Trump is past this point in his political career, but it certainly echoes a first term where men like U.S. Marine Corps General John Kelly were raised up to the rank of White House Chief of Staff… only to eventually be divorced from the once and future president with maximum acrimony after failing to bend far enough. (Nowadays Trump refers to Kelly as a “dumb lowlife.”)

Here’s the kicker though: Henry VIII also outlived the doubts and estrangements of men like More. In fact, A Man for All Seasons isn’t just about More’s crisis of conscience, but also how in our earthly, dirty world, morality and doing what is right will not save you. More is ultimately beheaded by Henry for speaking out against his marriage to Anne Boleyn. And if you know your history, Anne also eventually finds her way to the chopping block after displeasing Henry—she is even murdered due to an appalling miscarriage of justice with egregiously trumped up charges of supposed infidelity and incest against her notoriously unfaithful husband.

It’s all hinted at, too, in one of Henry’s big scenes in A Man for All Seasons where Shaw’s smiling camraderie turns vitriolic with the incalcitrant More.

“I don’t take it kindly and I’ll have no opposition,” Henry begins to seethe. “I see how it will be: the bishops will oppose me. The full-fed ‘Princes of the Church,’ hypocrites! All hypocrites! Mind you they don’t take you in, Thomas…. I have no queen! Catherine’s not my wife! No priest can make her so! They who say she is my wife are not only liars but traitors! Yes, TRAITORS! That I will not brook now. Treachery, treachery, treachery!”

And here’s the kicker… Henry didn’t brook what he assumed was treachery in his own life. More died for not recognizing Anne Boleyn as queen. Anne Boleyn died because she failed to produce Henry a son. Another wife was later executed for actually having an extramarital affair (they married when Henry was 49 and Katherine Howard was 16), and Thomas Cromwell, the courtier who most rivaled and plotted against More, also faced a brutal execution in the Tower of London after essentially arranging a bad date for ol’ Henry when he was on wife number four.

None of it mattered in his lifetime. Henry outlived all of his critics and perceived enemies, and died at the age of 55 of natural causes. He lived a life free of consequences—although is perhaps better remembered today because his eventual successor (the daughter he did not want from Boleyn) cleaned up his chaotic reign and ushered in a golden age. So maybe there’s solace in that too.

In other words, A Man for All Seasons is a “foreign land” movie for all Americans when you think about it. 

The post A Movie from ‘Foreign Lands’ Donald Trump Should Love appeared first on Den of Geek.

Are you like me, reading about people fading away as they burn out, and feeling unable to relate? Do you feel like your feelings are invisible to the world because you’re experiencing burnout differently? When burnout starts to push down on us, our core comes through more. Beautiful, peaceful souls get quieter and fade into that distant and distracted burnout we’ve all read about. But some of us, those with fires always burning on the edges of our core, get hotter. In my heart I am fire. When I face burnout I double down, triple down, burning hotter and hotter to try to best the challenge. I don’t fade—I am engulfed in a zealous burnout. 

So what on earth is a zealous burnout?

Imagine a woman determined to do it all. She has two amazing children whom she, along with her husband who is also working remotely, is homeschooling during a pandemic. She has a demanding client load at work—all of whom she loves. She gets up early to get some movement in (or often catch up on work), does dinner prep as the kids are eating breakfast, and gets to work while positioning herself near “fourth grade” to listen in as she juggles clients, tasks, and budgets. Sound like a lot? Even with a supportive team both at home and at work, it is. 

Sounds like this woman has too much on her plate and needs self-care. But no, she doesn’t have time for that. In fact, she starts to feel like she’s dropping balls. Not accomplishing enough. There’s not enough of her to be here and there; she is trying to divide her mind in two all the time, all day, every day. She starts to doubt herself. And as those feelings creep in more and more, her internal narrative becomes more and more critical.

Suddenly she KNOWS what she needs to do! She should DO MORE. 

This is a hard and dangerous cycle. Know why? Because once she doesn’t finish that new goal, that narrative will get worse. Suddenly she’s failing. She isn’t doing enough. SHE is not enough. She might fail, she might fail her family…so she’ll find more she should do. She doesn’t sleep as much, move as much, all in the efforts to do more. Caught in this cycle of trying to prove herself to herself, never reaching any goal. Never feeling “enough.” 

So, yeah, that’s what zealous burnout looks like for me. It doesn’t happen overnight in some grand gesture but instead slowly builds over weeks and months. My burning out process looks like speeding up, not a person losing focus. I speed up and up and up…and then I just stop.

I am the one who could

It’s funny the things that shape us. Through the lens of childhood, I viewed the fears, struggles, and sacrifices of someone who had to make it all work without having enough. I was lucky that my mother was so resourceful and my father supportive; I never went without and even got an extra here or there. 

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

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

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

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

The dangerous invisibility of zealous burnout

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

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

Women and burnout

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So now what?

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

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

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

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

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

Cook an elaborate meal for someone! 

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

Vent like a foul-mouthed fool

Be careful with this one! 

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

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

Pick up a book! 

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

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

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

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

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

Forgive yourself 

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

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

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

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

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

Does this sound familiar? 

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

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

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

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

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

Feedback is also one of the most underestimated equipment, and generally by assuming that we’re now great at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a skill that can be trained, grown, and improved. Bad comments can lead to conflict on 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 comments be adjusted for isolated and distributed job settings?

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

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

The information

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

This formula is typically used to provide feedback to people, but it also fits really well in a pattern criticism because it finally addresses one of the main inquiries that we work on: What? Where? Why? How? Imagine that you’re giving some comments about some pattern function that spans several screens, like an onboard movement: there are some pages shown, a 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 you alter them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, for the request approach:

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

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

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

Choosing the question approach or the request approach can also at times be a matter of personal preference. I did rounds of anonymous feedback and I reviewed feedback with other people a while back when I was putting a lot of effort into improving my feedback. After a few rounds of this work and a year later, I got a positive response: my feedback came across as effective and grounded. Until I changed teams. Quite unexpected, my next round of criticism from one particular 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 one person in this other team who now 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 no. Let’s explore both sides.

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

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

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

The tone

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

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

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

Timing refers to the moment when the feedback occurs. 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 needs a different one. The right timing will make it more likely that your feedback will be well received.

Attitude is the equivalent of intent, and in the context of person-to-person feedback, it can be referred to as radical candor. Before writing, it’s important to make sure the person we’re writing will actually benefit them and improve the overall project. 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? How can I be more helpful?

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 the way I typed “oh” into my list of replaced words (your choice between aText, TextExpander, or others ), so that it was instantly deleted when I typed “oh.”

Something to highlight because it’s quite frequent—especially in teams that have a strong group spirit—is that people tend to beat around the bush. It’s important to keep in mind that having a positive attitude doesn’t necessarily mean passing judgment on the feedback; rather, it simply means that even when you give difficult, or difficult feedback, you do so in a way that’s respectful and constructive. The nicest thing that you can do for someone is to help them grow.

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

The format

Asynchronous feedback also has a significant inherent benefit: we can devote more time to making sure that the suggestions ‘ clarity of communication and actionability fulfill two main objectives.

Let’s imagine that someone shared a design iteration for a project. You are reviewing it and leaving a comment. Let’s try to think about some factors that might be helpful to consider, as there are many ways to accomplish this, and context is of course a factor.

In terms of clarity, start by grounding the critique that you’re about to give by providing context. This includes specifically describing where you’re coming from: do you have a thorough understanding of the project, or is this your first time seeing it? Are you coming from a high-level perspective, or are you figuring out the details? Are there regressions? Which user’s point of view 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 background information on the project, 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 keep in mind that design is a field with hundreds of possible solutions for each problem. So pointing out that the design solution that was chosen is good and explaining why it’s good has two major benefits: it confirms that the approach taken was solid, and it helps to ground your negative feedback. In the longer term, sharing positive feedback can help prevent regressions on things that are going well because those things will have been highlighted as important. Positive feedback can also help, 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. This is powerful because there is a big difference between a critique of a design that is already in good shape and one that is critiqued for a design that isn’t quite there yet.

Another way that you can improve your feedback is to depersonalize the feedback: the comments should always be about the work, never about the person who made it. It’s” This button isn’t well aligned” versus” You haven’t aligned this button well”. Just before sending, review your writing to make changes to this.

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—When I see these two buttons, I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons so that users don’t get confused.
• � � Overall— I think the page is solid, and this is good enough to be our release candidate for a version 1.0.
• � � Metrics—Good improvement in the buttons on the metrics area, the improved contrast and new focus style make them more accessible.
• Button Style: Using the green accent in this context gives the impression that it’s a positive action because green is typically seen as a confirmation color. Do we need to explore a different color?
• Considering 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 of 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.

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

Content, tone, and format. Although each of these subjects offers a useful model, focusing on improving eight of the subjects ‘ focus points, including observation, impact, question, timing, attitude, form, clarity, and actionability, is a lot of work to complete 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 third, 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.