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The personalization space is real, between the dream of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong ( like when we encounter “persofails” in the spirit of a company that regularly asks regular people to buy more toilet seats ). 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 rationally.

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

It’s known as prepersonalization.

Behind the audio

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

We’re used to seeing the polished final outcome of a personalization function. 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 hasn’t journey up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve discovered that several budgeted programs foremost needed one or more workshops to join key stakeholders and domestic customers of the technology to justify their continuing investments. Make it count.

We’ve witnessed the same evolution up near with our clients, from big tech to budding 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. Your tech stack is not experiencing a 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 ( such as Spotify’s DJ experience )

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

Set the timer for your kitchen.

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

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

Kickstart: This specifies the terms of engagement as you concentrate on the potential, the readiness and drive of your team, and your leadership.
1. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
2. Work your plan: This stage essentially entails creating a competitive environment in which team members can individually present their own pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept project, its business case, and its operating model.

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

Kickstart: 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. A marketing-automation platform and a content-management system could be used together. It could be a digital-asset manager combined with a customer-data platform.

Create a conversation by mentioning consumer and business-to-business examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions ( such as onboarding sequences or wizards ), notifications, and recommenders. 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 perspective.

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature ( or something similar ). We categorize connected experiences in our cards according to their 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 their focus should be placed for 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 stakeholder attitudes that prevent progress.

Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential obstacles to your progress in the future. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. 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? Good, you’re ready to go on.

Hit that test kitchen

Next, let’s take a look at what you’ll need to create personalization recipes. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. They give you a variety of options for how your organization can conduct its activities because of their broad and potent capabilities. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

The key here is to avoid treating the installed software ( as one of our client executives humorously put it ) like some sort of dream kitchen. 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 from recipes, which have predetermined ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

You’ll ensure that you have everything you need to create your desired interaction ( or that you can determine what needs to be added to your pantry like a good product manager ) and that you have validated 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 among performance indicators and key performance indicators as well.

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

Create a recipe.

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

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

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

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

1. Nurture personalization: When a guest or an unknown visitor interacts with a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it easier for them to encounter a related title they may want to read, saving them time.
2. Welcome automation: An email is sent when a 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.

We’ve also found that cocreating the recipes themselves can sometimes be the most effective way to start brainstorming about what these cards might be for your organization. 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 later stages of the workshop could be characterized as moving from focusing on a cookbook to a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual” cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.

Architecture must be improved to produce better kitchens.

Simplifying a customer experience is a complicated effort for those who are inside delivering it. Beware of anyone who contradicts your advice. With that being said,” Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes“.

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

You can withstand the heat without a doubt.

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

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

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

I’ve been fascinated by shows since I was a child. I loved the figures and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I aspired to be an artist. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on interesting activities. Yet my friends and I had movie ideas to make and sky in. But they never went any farther. However, I did end up in the user experience ( UX) field. 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 favourite film. It more than likely follows a three-act narrative construction: 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. The fight begins in Act 2, which introduces the issue. Here, difficulties grow or get worse. The solution comes in the third and final action. This is where the issues are resolved and the figures learn and change. This structure, in my opinion, is also a fantastic way to think about customer research, and I think it can be particularly useful for explaining consumer research to others.

Use story as a framework 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 consumer study. 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 take a look at the various functions and how they relate to customer research.

Act one: layout

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. Like in the movies, you’re learning about the problems users face, what options are available, and how they are affected by them. To do basic research, you may conduct situational inquiries or journal studies ( or both! ), which may assist you in identifying both challenges and options. It doesn’t need to be a great investment in time or money.

Erika Hall writes about 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 keep yourself and your pursuits out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography”. According to Hall, “[This ] will probably prove quite fascinating. In the very unlikely event that you didn’t learn anything new or helpful, carry on with increased confidence in your way”.

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

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 basic 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 deficiencies. 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 business may lose money because users didn’t finish particular tasks, which may be their love. Or probably they do connect with people ‘ problems. In either case, work one serves as your main strategy for piqueing interest and investment from the participants.

When partners begin to understand the value of basic research, that is open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making approach. And that can help product team become more user-centric. This gains everyone—users, the goods, and partners. It’s similar to winning an Oscar for a film; it frequently results in a favorable reception and success for your item. And this can be an opportunity for participants to repeat this process with different products. 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: issue

Act two is all about digging deeper into the problems that you identified in operate one. This typically involves conducting lateral 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 away. More problems will come up in the process, much like in the second action of a film. It’s here that you learn more about the figures as they grow and develop through this action.

Usability tests should generally consist of five participants, according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can usually identify the majority of the issues:” As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the second user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings regularly but hardly learning much new.”

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

Usability tests have been conducted in person for decades, but you can also do them remotely using software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You might consider in-person usability tests like 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 end as researchers, but this can occasionally help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests add a level of detail that is frequently absent from remote usability tests.

That’s not to say that the “movies” —remote sessions—aren’t a good option. A wider audience can be obtained from remote sessions. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see what’s going on. Additionally, they make access to a much wider user base geographically. 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 conducted 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. Act two is where the excitement is at the heart of the narrative, but there are also potential surprises. This is equally true of usability tests. Sometimes, participants will say unexpected things that alter the way you look at them, which can lead to unexpected turns in the story.

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

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

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

Act three: resolution

The third act is about resolving the issues from the first two acts, 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 all members of the product team, including developers, UX experts, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other parties who have a say in the coming development. It allows the whole team to hear users ‘ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. 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 through 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 provide the stakeholders with their suggestions and direction for developing this vision.

Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. The most effective presenters” set up a conflict that needs to be resolved” using the same methods as great storytellers, Duarte writes. ” 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 and forth.

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

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

Act one: You meet the protagonists ( the users ) and the antagonists ( the problems affecting users ). The plot begins here. 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 presentation decks, storytelling, and digital media in act three. The output of these can be: presentation decks, video clips, audio clips, and pictures.

The researcher performs a number of tasks: they are the producer, the director, and the storyteller. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters ( in the research ). And the audience are the stakeholders. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users ‘ stories through research. 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.

Television viewers have long had a fascination with prison, from Porridge to Prison Break. The effects are generally worse when bars reduce the options for action. A prisoner solid is better than a captive audience, which is one thing. We love to watch how characters behave when their freedom has been taken from them, how they ]… ]

The first article on Den of Geek was The Best Prison-Set Television Series Ranked.

From Porridge to Prison Break, Television people have long had a fascination with prison. The effects are generally worse when bars reduce the options for action. A prisoner solid is better than a captive audience, which is one thing. We adore to see how characters act when their freedom is being taken away from them, how they interact, how they plot avoid, and how they must find the strength to carry on. And we love to know how we’d live under those same circumstances, hoping never to have to turn that abstract notion or vicarious enjoyment into reality.

So, ten of the best prison style examples are presented in ascending order of merit, with our choice for best dog as the result. Feel free to say our options in the feedback, but before you react to clearly please consider this:” We’re never in here with you. You’re in below, along with us,”!

10. Breaking the Captivity

If Prison Break had been a one-and-done restricted set it would have secured a higher positioning on this record. As it stands, each season of the show more tarnished its reputation until it was less popular than the last period of a particular show about dragons may one day get to its fans.

There are few initial conditions of any present that are as powerful, habitual and simply plain enjoyment as Prison Break‘s. The main conceit is a preposterous one: Michael Scofield ( Wentworth Miller ) tattoos the schematics of the prison he helped design and then gets himself incarcerated there to help his wrongly convicted brother Lincoln ( Dominic Purcell ) escape Death Row before being put to death, but it’s delivered with such adrenalin-spiking, fast-paced panache that you simply won’t care. Prison Break also gives us one of TV’s greatest villains, the vile, despicable, and slimy, yet utterly captivating, Theodore’ T-Bag ‘ Bagwell ( Robert Knepper ), a character you’ll both love to hate, and hate to love.

Although William Fichtner’s portrayal of pill-popping, morally questionable FBI agent Alexander Mahone in year two is a delightful addition, and period three’s Panama-based tomfoolery aren’t without their charm, things quickly start to unravel after that frantic second season. Season four, however, marks the time when the movie’s rear broke beneath the weight of its extremely convoluted and absurd story, and season five, the restoration period, represents the nadir of not only the show itself, but quite possibly the entire concept of entertainment itself.

Prison Break must stop any more awful prison from leaving.

9. Worthington

Wentworth is a reimagining of, and quasi-prequel to, the Australian soap-opera Prisoner ( renamed Prisoner Cell Block H in the UK to differentiate it from Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, which can also be found this on list ) that ran from 1979 – 1986.

The main characters are all present and accurate, with the exception of the villainous prison guard Joan” the Freak” Ferguson ( Pamela Rabe ), her compatriots Lizzie Birdsworth ( Celia Ireland ), and newcomer and top-dog-to-be Bea Smith ( Danielle Cormack ), and her compatriots Lizzie Birdsworth ( Nicole de Silva ), but gone are the small budgets and low production values that caused security gates and cell walls to squat as though they The Wentworth jail of the late 2010s is soft and present, and the actions is dark and violent. Although Wondworth probably clings more to the voice of Oz than Orange is the New Black, it is most likely the closest thing of all to the UK’s Bad Women ( which just so sadly missed out on being on this list ).

Whether you prefer Wentworth or its father certainly comes down to personal preference, and quite possibly years.

8. Prisoner Cell Block H

We have to give the Old School on the (cell ) block a leg up in Prisoner Cell Block H because it is to Wentworth what Classic Doctor Who is to NuWho. Well, the pieces were so small and dirty that a battle between two individuals may appear to show up on the Richter scale. Yes, the early 1980s ‘ haircuts were crimes in and of themselves. Yes, the continuous, serialised nature of the genre prevented the show’s writers from exploring themes in any great depth.

The show has a raw, claustrophobic charm to it, and this is only possible thanks to its dark, threadbare appearance, which gives the lives of the women in Wentworth Prison an air of grit and hollow desperation that the show’s successor could never hope to imitate. The characters, particularly top dogs Bea Smith ( Val Lehman ), Myra Desmond ( Ann Phelan ) and Rita Connors ( Glenda Liscott ), had more time to cement themselves in viewer’s hearts, and thus more power to break those hearts once their stories came to an end.

Prisoner Cell Block H also has a stronger edge in bad guys. Pamela Rabe’s interpretation of the murderously corrupt prison guard Joan ‘ The Freak ‘ Ferguson in Wentworth was deliciously monstrous, but there will only ever be one ‘ Freak’, and that’s the original and best, Maggie Kilpatrick, who carried menace around with her as easily as some people carry mints.

Has there ever been a more achingly fitting or hauntingly beautiful closing theme than” On the Inside”? &nbsp,

7. The Prisoner

There are no bars or guards in the enigmatic village where Patrick McGoohan’s intelligence agent finds himself &#8211, and there are no turrets lining the island’s shores &#8211, but it’s clear that this place is a penal colony.

Patrick McGoohan is the eponymous prisoner, or Number 6 as he’s more commonly – and indeed exclusively – known. We never learn his real name, nor do we ever learn who or why has taken him. We don’t even know who on the island is a prisoner, and who is a part of the conspiracy. We are only aware that the island’s inhabitants, led by those who are designated Number 2, will use every trick in the book to obtain information from Number 6.

Those brave or foolhardy enough to tr escape from the island are pursued by a giant, bouncing, see-through ball known as Rover, that swiftly engulfs and retrieves them. If all of this starts to sound a little mind-numbing, that’s largely because it is. The Prisoner is a head-scratching mind-bender. The audience is never one-hundred percent certain what the hell is going on, which only serves to amplify the paranoia and unease that follow Number 6 around like a giant, bouncing, see-through ball, which is occasionally clever, imaginative, inventive, and absurd.

It doesn’t get more 1960s than this.

6. Escape at Dannemora

The true story of the 2015 break-out by lifers Richard Matt and David Sweat, who were both portrayed by Benicio del Toro and Paul Dano, is revealed in Escape at Dannemora. To achieve their audacious aims, they co-opt the assistance of Tilly Mitchell ( played by Severance stalwart Patricia Arquette – a series that’s also directed by Ben Stiller ) &#8211, the prison worker in charge of the tailor shop &#8211, through means of sex, seduction and flattery. Sweat handles the majority of the labor: the tunneling and the cutting. Matt is the Machiavellian plan-maker, a man who can control other people with ease, but, tragically, not himself.

Tilly appears to be a vulnerable, downtrodden, and unhappy housewife whose only crime was to seek affection and attention from the wrong people at first, especially if you have no knowledge of the real-life escape. But as the narrative unfolds it becomes clear that Tilly is possibly a dastardlier human being than either of her two incarcerated co-conspirators combined.

We are unconcerned about the character of the two men we have been supporting in their fight for freedom because of a flashback sequence in the series ‘ final scene. Their index crimes are brutal and violent, unspeakably so, but whereas their criminality is born of an opportunistic impulsivity, Tilly’s crimes – most of which, beyond the obvious, aren’t crimes in the legal sense – demonstrate a sustained commitment to cruel and callous manipulation, in furtherance of her own selfish and destructive appetites. She earns money from her husband and son. It’s only panic– or perhaps the faint vestiges of a conscience – that saves her from going on the run with Matt and Sweat, an outcome that doubtless would’ve seen her dead instead of in a prison cell.

A tragedy that will haunt audiences for the long run after the end credits have finished, Escape at Dannemora is a well-paced story with skillful acting from Stiller and flawless acting from the cast, especially Arquette.

5. Orange is the New Black.

Orange is the New Black is based on the best-selling autobiographical book by former drug mule Piper Kerman, in which she recounts her time in prison, and the questionable life choices that led her there – especially her exciting yet destructive relationship with charismatic cartel worker Alex Vause ( Laura Prepon ), the woman largely responsible for Piper getting caught. And of course, passions and sparks fly when Alex and Alex end up sharing the same cell block.

Taylor Schilling plays Piper ( surname changed to Chapman for the show ) with a wide-eyed, wet-behind-the-ears intensity, channelling an awkward innocence that occasionally borders on arrogance. Piper doesn’t believe she should be in jail. Not with these’ others’, these criminals, who clearly deserve their fate. However, as she gradually adjusts to life in prison, makes connections, and accepts her fellow prisoners, her fear of her fish-out-of-water scenario gradually diminishes as she gradually adjusts and grows in understanding. She discovers, as we do, that most of the women in Litchfield Prison are as much victims as perpetrators: women who have been failed by familial and societal support systems in ways that most of us would struggle to fathom. &nbsp, &nbsp,

For the first season this is Piper’s story, but as the series expands, so too does its focus and scope. It gradually deviates from its ostensibly comedic premise and allows for deeper themes and darker subtext to enter the narrative without losing its heart or humor. Each of the large and compelling ensemble gets a proper chance to shine (especially Suzanne ‘ Crazy Eyes ‘ Warren, arguably Uzo Aduba’s breakout role ), as the writers drill ever deeper into their fates, hopes, dreams, pasts, and miseries. By the end of the series, we have experienced at least one tragic character death that is as heartbreaking, mind-numbing, and game-changing as Lem’s departure from The Shield, and we have experienced the agonies and triumphs of the majority of them.

4. Black Bird

Welsh actor Taran Egerton is being touted as the next Bruce Willis, largely due to his turn in last year’s airport-based action thriller Carry On. Egerton is not a one-trick pony, though. A strong and versatile set of acting chops sit behind the muscles and bravura, which is plain to see in his acclaimed performances in biopics such as Eddie the Eagle and Rocketman. And in Apple TV’s limited series Black Bird, which is based on a true story, those talents are undoubtedly on display in a breathtaking manner.

Egerton plays Jimmy Keene, a drug-runner with a surfeit of charm, a winsome grin, and a semi-functional moral compass. FBI agent Lauren McCauley ( Sepideh Moafi, who most recently graced our screens as Mia in the excellent sci-fi series Scavengers Reign ) approaches him with a deal: go “undercover” in a maximum security prison to get close to and successfully elicit a confession from suspected serial killer Larry Hall, and we’ll commute your sentence. It’s Jimmy’s love for his ailing father, ( retired cop” Big Jim” Keene, played by Ray Liotta, in his final TV role ), who may not last another year much less ten, that propels him into action.

What comes next is a thrilling, edge-of-the-seat thriller that incorporates elements of Mindhunter. For every prison riot or potentially fatal dilemma Jimmy has to face there’s hours of talking between Jimmy and Larry, each moment of it imbued with tension and horror. You’ll be blown away by Paul Walter Hauser’s unsettlingly creepy and nuanced performance as Larry Hall if you’ve only ever seen him as Stingray in Cobra Kai on Netflix. If you’ve only ever seen Taran Egerton in Carry On, you’ll quickly realise why this talented actor is so much more than an action star.

3. The Night Of

Nasir” Naz” Khan, a Pakistani American student who is forced to make bad decisions, bad luck, and prejudice from the post-9/11 era, is played by Riz Ahmed in The Night of.

After stealing his father’s cab to attend a college party, he meets the troubled and beautiful Andrea ( Sofia Black-D’Elia ), who climbs in his cab as it’s idling. After hitting it off, the two end up hosting a two-person party at her place, complete with rock n’ roll, drugs, and sex. The next morning Naz wakes to find that Andrea has been stabbed to death. Even he isn’t sure if he‘s innocent, and all the evidence points to his guilt.

A more fortuitous instance of happenstance connects Naz with John Stone ( John Turturro ), a scruffy yet dogged attorney – think Columbo meets Monk meets My Cousin Vinny– who represents the best shot Naz has of escaping the humanity-eroding violence of prison and the corrosive clutches of jailhouse top-dog Freddy Knight ( a powerful and sinister turn by the late Kenneth Michael Williams ). &nbsp,

The role of John Stone was originally written for James Gandolfini, then offered to Robert de Niro in the wake of Gandolfini’s tragic death. However, Turturro ( currently on our screens in Apple’s peerless workplace mindbender, Severance ) absolutely does the role his own, to the point where it’s difficult to imagine anyone else – aforementioned Hollywood heavyweights included – doing a better job. However, It’s Riz Ahmed who steals the show with a performance that’s infused with earnestness and humanity and deservedly won him the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series.

2. Time

Few writers can navigate the murky waters of the human soul with as much wit, aplomb, and verisimilitude as Jimmy McGovern, who in Time pits his considerable writing power against the complex and inhumanities of the British penal system.

Series one focuses on the intersecting fates of a newly arrived inmate and a long-serving prison guard at a particularly bleak men’s prison. Former teacher Mark Cobden was imprisoned for killing a man while intoxicated. He tries to keep his head down and do his ‘ time’ quietly, but the other inmates sense his vulnerability and target him. Soon after being entangled in the drug-smuggling ring, he is forced to choose between his own survival and his moral ideals. Prison guard Eric McNally ( Stephen Graham ) faces a near-identical dilemma to Mark’s, though it’s not Eric’s survival, but his freshly incarcerated son’s, that hangs in the balance. Like the best of McGovern’s work, the first season’s conclusion is both unexpected and inevitable, depressing and optimistic, and full of both tears and sighs of hope.

Season two &#8211, co-written with Helen Black &#8211, follows the fortunes of three new inmates as they adjust to life in a women’s prison. It’s no less powerful and moving, more heartbreaking in the social obscurity it chronicles, but ended with a more upbeat denouement. Jodie Whittaker, Tamara Lawrance and Bella Ramsey give arguably the performances of their careers across these three episodes as their characters learn hard lessons about motherhood, poverty, addiction, acceptance, retribution, and redemption. &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

1. Oz

Oz isn’t just the best prison series of all time. It’s been made that it’s one of the best dramatic series of all time. It’s certainly one of the most important and seminal, helping to kickstart the second golden age of television, after which TV would start to supplant cinema as the preferred prestige medium of the masses. HBO was at the forefront of this revolution, offering a funding model that freed creatives from the pressures of network interference and advertising, allowing them to put the story first and take more risks.

Oz tells the story of life in” Emerald City”, ad experimental wing in the Oswald State Penitentiary, a place where there’s a perpetual battle between the forces of rehabilitation and restorative justice on one hand, and vote-winning retribution and punishment on the other. It’s a conflict between two ideologies, but ultimately it’s a conflict for the souls of the prisoners. The show is bleak, brutal, and gripping. He’s almost like a cellmate, and death isn’t just a reality on the wing.

Before Oz arrived in 1997 there had never been a show quite like it. It’s a sprawling, Shakesperian tragedy painted in blood and despair over the gloomy underbelly of the waning American dream. Even today, in a televisual landscape that’s packed with death, darkness and destruction, it still packs a powerful and uncompromising punch. the head. To the gut. To the heart.

Oz is a gem of the genre, albeit one that shines very darkly indeed.

The first article on Den of Geek was The Best Prison-Set Television Series Ranked.

The discussion surrounding Assassin’s Creed Shadows was heated prior to its release last month. To put it mildly. Over factual errors that were discovered in the show’s preview content and marketing materials, many fans reacted electronically and infuriated. For example, it’s debated among historians whether the historical figure of Yasuke, who is depicted as]… ]

The article Assassin’s Creed Shadows Is Record Traditional Accuracy Is Underrated appeared initially on Den of Geek.

Television viewers have long had a fascination with prison, from Porridge to Prison Break. With pubs reducing the options for actions, the consequences are often amplified. A prisoner solid is better than a captive audience, which is one thing. We love to see how figures behave when their liberty has been taken from them, how they manage, how they plot exit, how they find the strength to carry on. And we love to know how we’d live under those same circumstances, hoping never to have to turn that abstract notion or vicarious enjoyment into reality.

Ten of the best prison-themed films are listed in ascending order of merit, with our choice as the best dog being the result. Feel free to say our options in the feedback, but before you react to clearly please consider this:” We’re never in here with you. You’re below, and you’re with us.

10. Prison Split

If Prison Break had been a one-and-done restricted set it would have secured a higher positioning on this record. As it stands, each subsequent season of the show further damaged its reputation until it was less popular in its fans ‘ minds than the last season of a particular show about creatures may one day be to its viewers.

There are few initial conditions of any present that are as powerful, habitual and simply plain enjoyment as Prison Break‘s. The main conceit is a preposterous one, with Michael Scofield ( Wentworth Miller ) infusing the schematics of the prison he helped design and then assisting his brother Lincoln ( Dominic Purcell )’s release from Death Row before being hanged, but it’s delivered with such adrenalin-spiking, fast-paced panache that you won’t care. Prison Break also gives us one of TV’s greatest villains, the vile, despicable, and slimy, yet utterly captivating, Theodore’ T-Bag ‘ Bagwell ( Robert Knepper ), a character you’ll both love to hate, and hate to love.

Things immediately fall apart after that hectic first year, though the introduction of William Fichtner as pill-popping, socially affected FBI agent Alexander Mahone in season two is a pleasant one, and season three’s Panama-based hijinks aren’t without their charm. But, Season four marks the time when the movie’s rear broke due to its extremely convoluted and absurd narrative, and Season Five, the renaissance season, represents the lowest point of both the show and, in some cases, the entire concept of entertainment itself.

Prison Break needs to take a permanent split from breaking out of any more crap prison.

9. Howard

Wentworth is a reimagining of, and quasi-prequel to, the Australian soap-opera Prisoner ( renamed Prisoner Cell Block H in the UK to differentiate it from Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, which can also be found this on list ) that ran from 1979 – 1986.

The main characters are all present and accurate, with the exception of the villainous prison guard Joan” the Freak” Ferguson ( Pamela Rabe ), her compatriots Lizzie Birdsworth ( Celia Ireland ), and protagonist and top-dog-to-be Bea Smith ( Danielle Cormack ), but gone are the small budgets and low production values that caused security gates and cell walls to squat as though they were made of cardboard, which they most likely were. The Wentworth jail of the late 2010s is soft and present, and the actions is dark and violent. Although Wondworth probably has a voice that is more reminiscent of Oz than Orange is the New Black, it is most likely the UK’s Terrible Women ( which just so sadly didn’t make this list ) closest to that which is closest.

Whether you prefer Wentworth or its father certainly comes down to personal preference, and quite possibly years.

8. H1 mobile stop for prisoners

Prisoner Cell Block H is to Wentworth what Classic Doctor Who is to NuWho, and we’ve got to give the edge here to the old kid on the (cell ) block. Well, the sets were so subdued and disorganized that a battle between two prisoners might have appeared on a Richter scale. Well, the hairstyles of the first 1980s were acts in and of themselves. Well, the constant, serialised character of the music prevented the movie’s writers from exploring themes in any great degree.

The show has a raw, claustrophobic charm that the show’s successor couldn’t hope to emulate, especially given its dark, threadbare appearance, which gives the lives of the women who live in Wentworth Prison an air of grit and hollow desperation. The characters, particularly top dogs Bea Smith ( Val Lehman ), Myra Desmond ( Ann Phelan ) and Rita Connors ( Glenda Liscott ), had more time to cement themselves in viewer’s hearts, and thus more power to break those hearts once their stories came to an end.

Prisoner Cell Block H also has a stronger grip on villainy. Pamela Rabe’s interpretation of the murderously corrupt prison guard Joan ‘ The Freak ‘ Ferguson in Wentworth was deliciously monstrous, but there will only ever be one ‘ Freak’, and that’s the original and best, Maggie Kilpatrick, who carried menace around with her as easily as some people carry mints.

On a closing note: has there ever been a more hauntingly beautiful or achingly apt closing theme than” On the Inside”? &nbsp,

7. The Prisoner

There are no bars or guards in the mysterious village in which Patrick McGoohan’s intelligence agent wakes to find himself &#8211, no turrets lining the shore of the island on which the village sits &#8211, but there’s no mistaking what this place is: a penal colony.

Patrick McGoohan is the eponymous prisoner, or Number 6 as he’s more commonly – and indeed exclusively – known. We never learn his real name, nor do we ever learn who or why has taken him. We don’t even know who on the island is a prisoner, and who is a part of the conspiracy. We are only aware that the island’s inhabitants, led by those who are designated Number 2, will use every trick in the book to obtain information from Number 6.

Those brave or foolhardy enough to tr escape from the island are pursued by a giant, bouncing, see-through ball known as Rover, that swiftly engulfs and retrieves them. If this is all starting to sound a bit mental, then that’s very much because it is. The Prisoner is a mind-bending film. At turns clever, imaginative, inventive and absurd, the audience is never actually one-hundred per cent certain what the hell is going on, which only serves to amplify the mood of paranoia and unease that follows Number 6 around like a… well, like a giant, bouncing, see-through ball.

This is the only 1960s film that can be compared.

6. Escape at Dannemora

The true story of Richard Matt and David Sweat’s 2015 break-out from Clinton Correctional Facility in New York State is portrayed by Paul Dano and Benicio del Toro in the film Escape at Dannemora. To achieve their audacious aims, they co-opt the assistance of Tilly Mitchell ( played by Severance stalwart Patricia Arquette – a series that’s also directed by Ben Stiller ) &#8211, the prison worker in charge of the tailor shop &#8211, through means of sex, seduction and flattery. The cutting and tunneling are the main tasks that sweat does. Matt is the Machiavellian plan-maker, a man who can control other people with ease, but, tragically, not himself.

At first, and especially if you have no knowledge of the real-life escape, Tilly seems like a vulnerable, downtrodden, and unhappy housewife whose only crime was to seek affection and attention from the wrong people. However, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that Tilly may be a more reckless person than either of her two incarcerated co-conspirators combined.

A flashback sequence late in the series leaves us in no doubt as to the natures of the two men we have been cheering on in their bid for liberty. Although their criminality is the product of an opportunistic impulsivity, Tilly’s crimes, the majority of which aren’t crimes in the legal sense, demonstrate a persistent commitment to cruel and callous manipulation in order to advance her own selfish and destructive appetites. She makes living ciphers of her son and husbands. It’s only panic– or perhaps the faint vestiges of a conscience – that saves her from going on the run with Matt and Sweat, an outcome that doubtless would’ve seen her dead instead of in a prison cell.

A tragedy that will haunt audiences for the long after the end credits have rolled, Escape at Dannemora is a well-paced tale, skillfully directed by Stiller and flawlessly performed by the cast, especially Arquette.

5. Orange is considered to be the New Black.

Orange is the New Black is based on the best-selling autobiographical book by former drug mule Piper Kerman, in which she recounts her time in prison, and the questionable life choices that led her there – especially her exciting yet destructive relationship with charismatic cartel worker Alex Vause ( Laura Prepon ), the woman largely responsible for Piper getting caught. And, of course, when Alex ends up sharing the same cell block sparks, and passions, fly.

With a wide-eyed, wet-behind-the-ears intensity and awkward innocence that occasionally borders on arrogance, Taylor Schilling portrays Piper ( surname changed to Chapman for the show ). Piper doesn’t feel that she belongs in prison. Not with these “others,” these criminals, who blatantly deserve their fate. But as she adjusts to life in prison, makes connections and gets to know ( and be accepted by ) her fellow inmates, the fear of her fish-out-of-water scenario gradually gives way to empathy and understanding. She discovers, as we do, that most of the women in Litchfield Prison are as much victims as perpetrators: women who have been failed by familial and societal support systems in ways that most of us would struggle to fathom. &nbsp, &nbsp,

For the first season this is Piper’s story, but as the series expands, so too does its focus and scope. It gradually deviates from its ostensibly comedic premise and allows greater issues and darker tones to permeate the narrative without losing its heart or humor. Each of the large and compelling ensemble gets a proper chance to shine (especially Suzanne ‘ Crazy Eyes ‘ Warren, arguably Uzo Aduba’s breakout role ), as the writers drill ever deeper into their fates, hopes, dreams, pasts, and miseries. By the time the series ends we’ve felt the agonies and victories of most of them and experienced at least one tragic character death that’s as sad, numbing and game-changing as Lem’s exit from The Shield.

4. Black Bird

Welsh actor Taran Egerton is praised as the next Bruce Willis largely because of his role in Carry On, an action thriller based in the airport, last year. But Egerton is no one-trick pony. A strong and versatile set of acting chops sit behind the muscles and bravura, which is plain to see in his acclaimed performances in biopics such as Eddie the Eagle and Rocketman. And in Apple TV’s limited series Black Bird, which is based on a true story, those talents are undoubtedly on display in a breathtaking manner.

Egerton plays Jimmy Keene, a drug-runner with a surfeit of charm, a winsome grin, and a semi-functional moral compass. FBI agent Lauren McCauley ( Sepideh Moafi, who most recently graced our screens as Mia in the excellent sci-fi series Scavengers Reign ) approaches him with a deal: go “undercover” in a maximum security prison to get close to and successfully elicit a confession from suspected serial killer Larry Hall, and we’ll commute your sentence. It’s Jimmy’s love for his ailing father, ( retired cop” Big Jim” Keene, played by Ray Liotta, in his final TV role ), who may not last another year much less ten, that propels him into action.

What follows is an exciting, edge-of-the-seat thriller that incorporates elements of Mindhunter into the mix. There are hours of conversation between Jimmy and Larry, each one of which is filled with tension and horror. For every prison riot or potentially fatal dilemma Jimmy must face, If you’ve only ever seen Paul Walter Hauser as Stingray in Netflix’s Cobra Kai, you’ll be blown away by his unsettlingly creepy and nuanced performance as Larry Hall. You’ll soon realize why this talented actor is so much more than just an action star if you’ve only ever seen Taran Egerton in Carry On.

3. The Night Of

In The Night of, Riz Ahmed portrays Nasir” Naz” Khan, a Pakistani American student who is forced to make bad decisions, bad luck, and prejudice from the post-9/11 era.

After stealing his father’s cab to attend a college party, he meets the troubled and beautiful Andrea ( Sofia Black-D’Elia ), who climbs in his cab as it’s idling. The pair exchanged blows, and the result is a two-person party at her place with sex, drugs, and rock n roll. The next morning Naz wakes to find that Andrea has been stabbed to death. All signs point to his guilt, and even he isn’t sure if he‘s innocent.

Naz and John Stone ( John Turturro ), a scruffy yet determined attorney ( think Columbo meets Monk meets My Cousin Vinny ), who are the best chance Naz has of escaping the corrosive clutches of jailhouse top-dog Freddy Knight ( a powerful and sinister turn by the late Kenneth Michael Williams ) in a more fortuitous instance of coincidence. &nbsp,

In the wake of Gandolfini’s tragic passing, Robert de Niro was given the role of John Stone after it was originally written for James Gandolfini. But Turturro ( currently on our screens in Apple’s peerless workplace mindbender, Severance ) absolutely makes the role his own, to the point where it’s hard to imagine anyone else – aforementioned Hollywood heavyweights included – doing a better job. However, It’s Riz Ahmed who steals the show with a performance that’s infused with earnestness and humanity and deservedly won him the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series.

2. Time

Few writers can navigate the murky waters of the human soul with as much wit, aplomb, and verisimilitude as Jimmy McGovern, who in Time pits his considerable writing power against the complexity and inhumanities of the British penal system.

Series one focuses on the intersecting fates of a newly arrived inmate and a long-serving prison guard at a particularly bleak men’s prison. Mark Cobden ( Sean Bean ), a former teacher, is jailed for vehicular manslaughter &#8211, killing a man whilst drunk. He tries to keep his head down and pass his “time” quietly, but the other prisoners notice his vulnerability and take aim at him. Before long he finds himself inveigled into the prison’s drug-smuggling ring, and he’s forced to make a choice between his survival and his moral principles. Eric McNally ( Stephen Graham ), a prison guard, has a nearly identical dilemma to Mark’s, even though it’s not Eric’s survival but his recently incarcerated son’s that hangs in the balance. The conclusion to the first season is at once surprising and inevitable, depressing and hopeful, eliciting sighs of despair alongside tears of hope, like the best of McGovern’s work.

Season two &#8211, co-written with Helen Black &#8211, follows the fortunes of three new inmates as they adjust to life in a women’s prison. It’s more harrowing in the social obscurity it chronicles, but it ends with a more upbeat denouement, making it no less powerful and moving. Jodie Whittaker, Tamara Lawrance and Bella Ramsey give arguably the performances of their careers across these three episodes as their characters learn hard lessons about motherhood, poverty, addiction, acceptance, retribution, and redemption. &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

1. Oz

The best prison drama of all time is not just Oz. There’s an argument to be made that it’s one of the best dramatic series of all time. It is undoubtedly one of the most significant and significant, which helped to ignite the second golden age of television, when it would become the preferred prestige medium of the masses. HBO was at the forefront of this revolution, providing a funding model that removed creatives from the burdens of advertising and network interference, allowing them to put the story first, and to take more risks.

Oz tells the story of life in” Emerald City”, ad experimental wing in the Oswald State Penitentiary, a place where there’s a perpetual battle between the forces of rehabilitation and restorative justice on one hand, and vote-winning retribution and punishment on the other. It’s a battle between two ideologies, but ultimately it’s a battle for the souls of the prisoners. The show is bleak, brutal, and gripping. He’s almost like a cellmate, and death isn’t just a reality on the wing.

Before Oz arrived in 1997 there had never been a show quite like it. It’s a sprawling, Shakesperian tragedy painted in blood and despair over the dark underbelly of the dying American dream. It still packs a powerful and unwavering punch even today in a televised landscape full of destruction, death, and darkness. To the head. To the gut. To the heart.

Oz is a gem of the genre, albeit one that shines very darkly indeed.

The first episode of Den of Geek‘s The Best Prison-Set TV Series Ranked was a result of this post.

Given Robert Pattinson’s portrayal of Bruce Wayne in The Batman and Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock in Daredevil: Born Once, it might be understandable why Ben Affleck just announced he was done with the hero style. Affleck’s two vacations in the world of socks and scarves, in 2003’s Daredevil]… ]

On Den of Geek, a comment made it clear Ben Affleck previously got a hero part that did justice to his skill.

From Porridge to Prison Break, Television people have long had a fascination with prison. With pubs reducing the options for actions, the consequences are often amplified. A hostage put is preferable, whereas a captive market is one. We love to see how figures behave when their liberty has been taken from them, how they manage, how they plot exit, how they find the strength to carry on. And we adore imagining how we would manage those similar circumstances, hoping never to have to turn that abstract notion or vicarious thrill into action.

These, then, are ten of the finest example of the prison music, listed in ascending order of merit, and culminating in our pick for best dog. Feel free to say our options in the feedback, but before you react to clearly please consider this:” We’re never in here with you. You’re below, and you’re with us.

10. Prison Split

A higher spot on this checklist would have been provided if Prison Break had been a one-and-done limited set. As it stands, each succeeding season of the show after its first more sullied its status until it was lower in its fans ‘ estimations than the last year of a certain present about dragons may one day get to its admirers.

There are few initial conditions of any present that are as powerful, habitual and simply plain enjoyment as Prison Break‘s. The main conceit is a preposterous one, with Michael Scofield ( Wentworth Miller ) infusing the schematics of the prison he helped design and then assisting his brother Lincoln ( Dominic Purcell )’s release from Death Row before being hanged, but it’s delivered with such adrenalin-spiking, fast-paced panache that you won’t care. Prison Break also gives us one of TV’s greatest villains, the vile, despicable, and slimy, yet utterly captivating, Theodore’ T-Bag ‘ Bagwell ( Robert Knepper ), a character you’ll both love to hate, and hate to love.

Things start to unravel after that tumultuous second season, though William Fichtner’s portrayal of pill-popping, morally questionable FBI agent Alexander Mahone in year two is a delightful addition, and season three’s Panama-based tomfoolery aren’t without their charm. Season four, however, marks the time when the movie’s rear broke beneath the weight of its extremely convoluted and absurd story, and season five, the restoration season, represents the nadir of not only the show itself, but quite possibly the entire concept of entertainment itself.

Prison Break needs to take a permanent break from breaking out of any more damn prisons.

9. Wentworth

Wentworth is a remake of Prisoner, which was a quasi-prequel to Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, which ran from 1979 to 1986, and was a quasi-prequel to it.

The major characters are all present and correct, albeit with new faces and in some cases tweaked backstories – protagonist and top-dog-to-be Bea Smith ( Danielle Cormack ), her compatriots Lizzie Birdsworth ( Celia Ireland ) and Franky Doyle ( Nicole de Silva ), villainous prison guard Joan ‘ the Freak ‘ Ferguson ( Pamela Rabe )– but gone are the small budgets and low production values that saw security gates and cell walls alike wobble as though they were made of cardboard– which in some cases they probably were. The Wentworth prison of the late 2010s is slick and modern, and the action is gritty and violent. Although Wondworth probably clings more to the tone of Oz than Orange is the New Black, it is most likely the closest thing of all to the UK’s Bad Girls ( which just so sadly missed out on being on this list ).

Whether you prefer Wentworth or its predecessor undoubtedly comes down to personal taste, and quite possibly age.

8. Prisoner Cell Block H

Prisoner Cell Block H is to Wentworth what Classic Doctor Who is to NuWho, and we’ve got to give the edge here to the old kid on the (cell ) block. Yes, a fight between two prisoners might have appeared on the Richter scale because the sets were so tiny and shabby. Yes, the haircuts of the early 1980s were crimes in and of themselves. Yes, the show’s writers were unable to go into any particularly deep depth because of the genre’s continual, serialized nature.

But there’s a raw, claustrophobic charm to the show, precisely because of its dark, threadbare appearance, that lends the lives of the women of Wentworth Prison an air of grit and hollow desperation that the show’s successor could never hope to replicate. The characters, particularly top dogs Bea Smith ( Val Lehman ), Myra Desmond ( Ann Phelan ) and Rita Connors ( Glenda Liscott ), had more time to cement themselves in viewer’s hearts, and thus more power to break those hearts once their stories came to an end.

In terms of villainy, Prisoner Cell Block H has an edge. Pamela Rabe’s interpretation of the murderously corrupt prison guard Joan ‘ The Freak ‘ Ferguson in Wentworth was deliciously monstrous, but there will only ever be one ‘ Freak’, and that’s the original and best, Maggie Kilpatrick, who carried menace around with her as easily as some people carry mints.

Has there ever been a more achingly fitting or hauntingly beautiful closing theme than” On the Inside”? &nbsp,

7. The Prisoner

There are no bars or guards in the mysterious village in which Patrick McGoohan’s intelligence agent wakes to find himself &#8211, no turrets lining the shore of the island on which the village sits &#8211, but there’s no mistaking what this place is: a penal colony.

The eponymous prisoner, or Number 6, as he’s more commonly known, and indeed exclusively, is Patrick McGoohan. We never learn his real name, nor do we ever discover who has captured him, and why. We don’t even know who on the island is a prisoner, and who is a part of the conspiracy. We are only aware that the island’s inhabitants, led by those who are designated Number 2, will use every trick in the book to obtain information from Number 6.

Those brave or foolhardy enough to tr escape from the island are pursued by a giant, bouncing, see-through ball known as Rover, that swiftly engulfs and retrieves them. If all of this starts to sound a little mind-numbing, that’s because it is. The Prisoner is a head-scratching mind-bender. At turns clever, imaginative, inventive and absurd, the audience is never actually one-hundred per cent certain what the hell is going on, which only serves to amplify the mood of paranoia and unease that follows Number 6 around like a… well, like a giant, bouncing, see-through ball.

This is the only 1960s film that can be compared.

6. Dannemora’s Escape

Escape at Dannemora tells the true story of the 2015 break-out from Clinton Correctional Facility in New York State by lifers Richard Matt and David Sweat, played by Benicio del Toro and Paul Dano respectively. To achieve their audacious aims, they co-opt the assistance of Tilly Mitchell ( played by Severance stalwart Patricia Arquette – a series that’s also directed by Ben Stiller ) &#8211, the prison worker in charge of the tailor shop &#8211, through means of sex, seduction and flattery. The cutting and tunneling are mostly done by sweat. Matt is the Machiavellian plan-maker, a man who can control other people with ease, but, tragically, not himself.

Tilly appears to be a vulnerable, downtrodden, and unhappy housewife who’s only crime was to seek attention and affection from the wrong people at first, especially if you have no idea how to escape the real world. But as the narrative unfolds it becomes clear that Tilly is possibly a dastardlier human being than either of her two incarcerated co-conspirators combined.

A flashback sequence late in the series leaves us in no doubt as to the natures of the two men we have been cheering on in their bid for liberty. Although their criminality is the product of an opportunistic impulsivity, Tilly’s crimes, the majority of which aren’t crimes in the legal sense, demonstrate a persistent commitment to cruel and callous manipulation in furtherance of her own selfish and destructive appetites. She makes living ciphers of her son and husbands. She is only saved from going on the run with Matt and Sweat, which is undoubtedly what would have left her in a prison cell, and only suffers from panic.

Escape at Dannemora is a well-paced tale, deftly directed by Stiller and immaculately acted by the cast (especially Arquette ), a tragedy that will resonate long after the end credits have rolled.

5. Orange is considered to be the New Black.

Orange is the New Black is based on the best-selling autobiographical book by former drug mule Piper Kerman, in which she recounts her time in prison, and the questionable life choices that led her there – especially her exciting yet destructive relationship with charismatic cartel worker Alex Vause ( Laura Prepon ), the woman largely responsible for Piper getting caught. And of course, when Alex ends up sharing the same cell block, passions and sparks fly.

Taylor Schilling plays Piper ( surname changed to Chapman for the show ) with a wide-eyed, wet-behind-the-ears intensity, channelling an awkward innocence that occasionally borders on arrogance. Piper doesn’t feel that she belongs in prison. Not with these “others,” these criminals, who blatantly deserve their fate. But as she adjusts to life in prison, makes connections and gets to know ( and be accepted by ) her fellow inmates, the fear of her fish-out-of-water scenario gradually gives way to empathy and understanding. She discovers, as we do, that the majority of the women in Litchfield Prison are victims as they are perpetrators: they have been let down by our families and societal support systems in ways that the majority of us struggle to comprehend. &nbsp, &nbsp,

For the first season this is Piper’s story, but as the series expands, so too does its focus and scope. It gradually deviates from its ostensibly comedic premise and allows for deeper themes and darker subtext to enter the narrative without losing its heart or humor. Each of the large and compelling ensemble gets a proper chance to shine (especially Suzanne ‘ Crazy Eyes ‘ Warren, arguably Uzo Aduba’s breakout role ), as the writers drill ever deeper into their fates, hopes, dreams, pasts, and miseries. By the end of the series, we have experienced at least one tragic character death that is as heartbreaking, mind-numbing, and game-changing as Lem’s departure from The Shield, and we have experienced the agonies and triumphs of the majority of them.

4. Black Bird

Welsh actor Taran Egerton is praised as the next Bruce Willis largely because of his role in Carry On, an action thriller based in the airport, last year. But Egerton is no one-trick pony. Behind the muscles and bravura are a strong and versatile set of acting chops, which are evident in his acclaimed performances in biopics like Eddie the Eagle and Rocketman. And those chops are certainly on display, to breath-taking effect, in Apple TV’s limited series Black Bird ( which, like Escape at Dannemora, is based on a true story ).

Egerton plays Jimmy Keene, a drug-runner with a surfeit of charm, a winsome grin, and a semi-functional moral compass. FBI agent Lauren McCauley ( Sepideh Moafi, who most recently graced our screens as Mia in the excellent sci-fi series Scavengers Reign ) approaches him with a deal: go “undercover” in a maximum security prison to get close to and successfully elicit a confession from suspected serial killer Larry Hall, and we’ll commute your sentence. It’s Jimmy’s love for his ailing father, ( retired cop” Big Jim” Keene, played by Ray Liotta, in his final TV role ), who may not last another year much less ten, that propels him into action.

What follows is a thrilling, edge-of-your-seat thriller that incorporates Mindhunter‘s elements. For every prison riot or potentially fatal dilemma Jimmy has to face there’s hours of talking between Jimmy and Larry, each moment of it imbued with tension and horror. If you’ve only ever seen Paul Walter Hauser as Stingray in Netflix’s Cobra Kai, you’ll be blown away by his unsettlingly creepy and nuanced performance as Larry Hall. You’ll quickly come to the realization that Taran Egerton is so much more than just an action star if you’ve only ever seen him in Carry On.

3. The Night Of

Riz Ahmed shines in The Night Of as Nasir ‘ Naz ‘ Khan, a Pakistani American student who finds himself stuck on the wrong side of the criminal justice system thanks to a combination of bad choices, bad luck, and post-9/11 prejudice.

After stealing his father’s cab to attend a college party, he meets the troubled and beautiful Andrea ( Sofia Black-D’Elia ), who climbs in his cab as it’s idling. After hitting it off, the two end up hosting a two-person party at her place, complete with rock n’ roll, drugs, and sex. The next morning Naz wakes to find that Andrea has been stabbed to death. Even he isn’t sure if he‘s innocent, and all the evidence points to his guilt.

A more fortuitous instance of happenstance connects Naz with John Stone ( John Turturro ), a scruffy yet dogged attorney – think Columbo meets Monk meets My Cousin Vinny– who represents the best shot Naz has of escaping the humanity-eroding violence of prison and the corrosive clutches of jailhouse top-dog Freddy Knight ( a powerful and sinister turn by the late Kenneth Michael Williams ). &nbsp,

In the wake of Gandolfini’s tragic passing, Robert de Niro was given the role of John Stone after James Gandolfini’s tragic death was originally written for him. But Turturro ( currently on our screens in Apple’s peerless workplace mindbender, Severance ) absolutely makes the role his own, to the point where it’s hard to imagine anyone else – aforementioned Hollywood heavyweights included – doing a better job. Riz Ahmed, however, is the star of the show with a sincere and sincere performance that merited an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series.

2. Time

Few writers can navigate the darker waters of the human soul with as much lucidity, aplomb, and verisimilitude as Jimmy McGovern, who in Time pits his considerable writing power against the complex and inhumanities of the British penal system.

Series one focuses on the intersecting fates of a newly arrived inmate and a long-serving prison guard at a particularly bleak men’s prison. Former teacher Mark Cobden ( Sean Bean ) is in jail for vehicular manslaughter, in which he killed a man while intoxicated. He tries to keep his head down and do his ‘ time’ quietly, but the other inmates sense his vulnerability and target him. Before long he finds himself inveigled into the prison’s drug-smuggling ring, and he’s forced to make a choice between his survival and his moral principles. Eric McNally ( Stephen Graham ), a prison guard, has a nearly identical dilemma to Mark’s, even though it’s not Eric’s survival but his recently incarcerated son’s that hangs in the balance. The conclusion to the first season is at once surprising and inevitable, depressing and hopeful, eliciting sighs of despair alongside tears of hope, like the best of McGovern’s work.

Three new inmates ‘ transitions to life in a women’s prison are followed by Season 2 of &#8211, co-written with Helen Black &#8211. It’s no less powerful and affecting, more harrowing in the social oblivion it chronicles but bookended with a more hopeful denouement. Jodie Whittaker, Tamara Lawrance and Bella Ramsey give arguably the performances of their careers across these three episodes as their characters learn hard lessons about motherhood, poverty, addiction, acceptance, retribution, and redemption. &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

1. Oz

Oz isn’t just the best prison series of all time. There’s an argument to be made that it’s one of the best dramatic series of all time. It is undoubtedly one of the most significant and significant, launching the second golden age of television, when it would replace film as the preferred prestige medium of the masses. HBO was at the forefront of this revolution, providing a funding model that removed creatives from the burdens of advertising and network interference, allowing them to put the story first, and to take more risks.

Oz tells the story of life in” Emerald City,” an experimental wing of the Oswald State Penitentiary, a place where there is a perpetual conflict between the forces of restorative justice and, on the one hand, vote-winning retribution and punishment. It’s a battle between two ideologies, but, ultimately, it’s a battle for the inmates ‘ souls. The show is bleak, brutal, and gripping. He’s almost like a cellmate, and death isn’t just a reality on the wing.

Before Oz arrived in 1997 there had never been a show quite like it. It’s a sprawling, Shakesperian tragedy painted over the gloomy underbelly of the waning American dream. Even today, in a televisual landscape that’s packed with death, darkness and destruction, it still packs a powerful and uncompromising punch. To the head. to the gut. To the heart.

Oz is a true gem of the genre, albeit one with a very dark shine.

The post The Best Prison-Set TV Series Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

We agree: the computer-generated heads could be a great fit for personas—but not for the purpose you might think. Ironically, the website highlights the core issue of this very common design method: the person ( a ) does not exist. Personas are deliberately created, just like in the pictures. Data is taken out of natural environment and recombined into an isolated preview that’s detached from reality.

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

Personas: A action up

Most manufacturers have created, used, or come across personalities at least once in their job. The Interaction Design Foundation defines profile as “fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the various consumer types that might use your company, product, page, or brand” in their article” Personas- A Simple Introduction.” In their most complete expression, personas typically consist of a name, profile picture, quotes, demographics, goals, needs, behavior in relation to a certain service/product, emotions, and motivations ( for example, see Creative Companion’s Persona Core Poster ). According to design firm Designit, the goal of personas is to “make the research relateable, ]and ] easy to communicate, digest, reference, and apply to product and service development.”

The decontextualization of personalities

Personas are common because they make “dry” research information more realistic, more people. However, this approach places a cap on the study’s data research, making it impossible for the investigated users to be excluded from their particular contexts. As a result, personalities don’t describe important factors that make you realize their decision-making method or allow you to connect to users ‘ thoughts and behavior, they lack stories. You are aware of the persona’s actions, but you lack the knowledge to know why. You end up with images of people that are really less people.

This “decontextualization” we see in identities happens in four way, which we’ll discuss below.

People are assumed to be dynamic, according to people.

Although many companies still try to box in their employees and customers with outdated personality tests ( referring to you, Myers-Briggs ), here’s a painfully obvious truth: people are not a fixed set of features. Depending on how you feel, how you act, think, and think, you go about doing things. You appear distinct to different people, you may act pleasant to some, tough to others. And you change your mind all the time about choices you’ve taken.

Modern psychology agree that while people typically act in accordance with specific patterns, how they act and make decisions is influenced by a combination of both their environment and background. The context—the atmosphere, the effect of other people, your feelings, the whole story that led up to a situation—determines the kind of person you are in each particular time.

Personas provide a consumer as a predetermined set of features in an effort to simplify reality, but do so without taking this variability into account. Like character tests, personas seize people away from real life. Even worse, individuals are reduced to a brand and categorized as” that kind of guy” with no means to practice their inherent flexibility. This behavior lowers variety, reinforces stereotypes, and doesn’t indicate reality.

Personas rely on people, not the setting

In the real world, you’re creating content for a situation, no an entity. Each individual lives in a community, a group, an habitat, where there are environmental, social, and cultural factors you need to consider. A pattern is not meant for a single customer. Instead, you create a layout for one or more specific situations where a certain product might be used by a large number of people. Personas, yet, show the customer alone rather than explain how the consumer relates to the environment.

Would you choose the exact course of action over and over again? Maybe you’re a dedicated vegan but also decide to buy some meats when your family are coming across. As they depend on various situations and characteristics, your decisions—and behavior, thoughts, and comments —are no absolute but extremely contextual. Because it doesn’t explain the grounds of your decisions, the persona that “represents” you doesn’t take into account this interdependence. It doesn’t provide a rationale of why you act the way you do. People practice the well-known attribution error, which states that they too often attribute others ‘ behavior to their personalities and not to the circumstances.

As mentioned by the Interaction Design Foundation, identities are often placed in a situation that’s a” specific environment with a problem they want to or have to solve “—does that mean environment actually is considered? However, what frequently happens is that you take a hypothetical figure and based on that fiction decide how this character may deal with a particular situation. How could you possibly comprehend how someone you want to represent behave in new circumstances given that you haven’t even fully investigated and understood the current context of the people you want to represent?

Personas are meaningless averages

A persona is depicted as a specific person but is not a real person, as stated in Shlomo Goltz’s introduction article on Smashing Magazine; rather, it is synthesized from observations of many people. A well-known critique to this aspect of personas is that the average person does not exist, as per the famous example of the USA Air Force designing planes based on the average of 140 of their pilots ‘ physical dimensions and not a single pilot actually fitting within that average seat.

The same limitation applies to mental aspects of people. Have you ever heard a famous person say something was taken out of context? They used my words, but I didn’t mean it like that”. Although the celebrity’s statement was literally reported, the reporter failed to explain the context of the statement and to explain the non-verbal expressions. As a result, the intended meaning was lost. You do the same when you create personas: you collect somebody’s statement ( or goal, or need, or emotion ), of which the meaning can only be understood if you provide its own specific context, yet report it as an isolated finding.

However, personas go one step further, combining a decontextualized finding with another decontextualized finding from another. The resulting set of findings often does not make sense: it’s unclear, or even contrasting, because it lacks the underlying reasons on why and how that finding has arisen. It lacks any significance. And the persona doesn’t give you the full background of the person ( s ) to uncover this meaning: you would need to dive into the raw data for each single persona item to find it. What, then, is the usefulness of the persona?

The validity of personas is deceiving.

To a certain extent, designers realize that a persona is a lifeless average. To combat this, designers create and add “relatable” details to personas to make them appear to be real people. Nothing captures the absurdity of this better than a sentence by the Interaction Design Foundation:” Add a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character”. In other words, you add non-realism in an attempt to create more realism. Wouldn’t it be much more responsible to emphasize that John is only an abstraction while deliberately obscuring the fact that” John Doe” is an abstract representation of research findings? If something is artificial, let’s present it as such.

After accepting that people’s personalities are fixed, dismissed the importance of their environment, and added hidden meaning by joining isolated, non-generalizable findings, designers create new context to create ( their own ) meaning. In doing so, as with everything they create, they introduce a host of biases. As phrased by Designit, as designers we can” contextualize]the persona ] based on our reality and experience. We make connections that are well-known to us. This practice reinforces stereotypes, doesn’t reflect real-world diversity, and gets further away from people’s actual reality with every detail added.

To conduct effective design research, we must report the actual situation and make it relatable for our audience, so that everyone can use their own empathy and develop their own interpretation and emotional response.

Dynamic Selves: The alternative to personas

If we shouldn’t use personas, what should we do instead?

Designit suggested utilizing mindsets rather than personas. Each Mindset is a” spectrum of attitudes and emotional responses that different people have within the same context or life experience”. It challenges designers to avoid becoming fixated on just one person’s way of life. Unfortunately, while being a step in the right direction, this proposal doesn’t take into account that people are part of an environment that determines their personality, their behavior, and, yes, their mindset. Therefore, Mindsets are also not absolute but change in regard to the situation. What determines a certain Mindset, remains to be seen.

Another alternative comes from Margaret P., author of the article” Kill Your Personas“, who has argued for replacing personas with persona spectrums that consist of a range of user abilities. For instance, a visual impairment could be permanent ( blindness ), temporary ( recovery from eye surgery ), or situational (screen glare ). Persona spectrums are highly useful for more inclusive and context-based design, as they’re based on the understanding that the context is the pattern, not the personality. Their limitation, however, is that they have a very functional take on users that misses the relatability of a real person taken from within a spectrum.

We want to change the traditional design process to be context-based by creating an alternative to personas. Contexts are generalizable and have patterns that we can identify, just like we tried to do previously with people. How can we identify these patterns, then? How do we ensure truly context-based design?

Understand real individuals in multiple contexts

Nothing can be more relatable and inspiring than reality. Therefore, we have to understand real individuals in their multi-faceted contexts, and use this understanding to fuel our design. This approach is known as Dynamic Selves.

Let’s take a look at what the approach looks like, based on an example of how one of us applied it in a recent project that researched habits of Italians around energy consumption. We drafted a design research plan aimed at investigating people’s attitudes toward energy consumption and sustainable behavior, with a focus on smart thermostats.

1. Choose the right sample

We frequently get slammed for saying,” Where are you going to find a single person that encapsulates all the information from one of these advanced personas ]” when we debate personas. The answer is simple: you don’t have to. You don’t need to have information about many people for your insights to be deep and meaningful.

Quantity is key to qualitative research, but sampling accuracy is key to its validity. You select the people that best represent the “population” you’re designing for. If you select the right sample and have a deep understanding of the sampled people, you can infer how the rest of the population thinks and acts. There’s no need to study seven Susans and five Yuriys, one of each will do.

Similarly, you don’t need to understand Susan in fifteen different contexts. Once you’ve seen her in a few different settings, you’ve come to understand how Susan responds to various circumstances. Not Susan as an atomic being but Susan in relation to the surrounding environment: how she might act, feel, and think in different situations.

It becomes clear why each person should be portrayed as an individual because each already represents an abstraction of a larger group of people in similar circumstances because each person is representative of a portion of the total population you’re researching. You don’t want abstractions of abstractions! These selected people need to be understood and shown in their full expression, remaining in their microcosmos—and if you want to identify patterns you can focus on identifying patterns in contexts.

However, the question persists: how do you choose a sample representative? First of all, you have to consider what’s the target audience of the product or service you are designing: it might be useful to look at the company’s goals and strategy, the current customer base, and/or a possible future target audience.

We were creating an application for those who already have smart thermostats in our example project. In the future, everyone could have a smart thermostat in their house. Right now, though, only early adopters own one. We had to understand the causes behind these early adopters ‘ development in order to create a sizable sample. We therefore recruited by asking people why they had a smart thermostat and how they got it. There were those who had made the decision to purchase it, those who had been influenced by others to do so, and those who had located it in their homes. So we selected representatives of these three situations, from different age groups and geographical locations, with an equal balance of tech savvy and non-tech savvy participants.

2. Conduct your research

After having chosen and recruited your sample, conduct your research using ethnographic methodologies. This will give you more examples and anecdotes to enrich your qualitative data. In our example project, given COVID-19 restrictions, we converted an in-house ethnographic research effort into remote family interviews, conducted from home and accompanied by diary studies.

To gain an in-depth understanding of attitudes and decision-making trade-offs, the research focus was not limited to the interviewee alone but deliberately included the whole family. Each interviewee would provide a story that would later become much more interesting and precise with the additions made by their spouses, partners, kids, or occasionally even pets. We also focused on the relationships with other meaningful people ( such as colleagues or distant family ) and all the behaviors that resulted from those relationships. This extensive field of study gave us the ability to create a vivid mental image of dynamic situations involving multiple actors.

It’s essential that the scope of the research remains broad enough to be able to include all possible actors. Therefore, it normally works best to define broad research areas with macro questions. Interviews should be conducted in a semi-structured manner, with follow-up questions delve into subjects that the interviewee has blatantly mentioned. This open-minded “plan to be surprised” will yield the most insightful findings. One of our participants responded,” My wife has not installed the thermostat’s app; she uses WhatsApp instead,” when we asked how his family controlled the house temperature. If she wants to turn on the heater and she is not home, she will text me. I am her thermostat”.

3. Analysis: Create the Dynamic Selves

You begin to represent each individual with several Dynamic Selves, each” Self” representing one of the circumstances you have examined throughout the research analysis. The core of each Dynamic Self is a quote, which comes supported by a photo and a few relevant demographics that illustrate the wider context. The research findings themselves will show which demographics are relevant to show. The key demographics were family type, number and type of homes owned, economic status, and technological maturity in our case because our research focused on families and their way of life to understand their needs for thermal regulation. ( We also included the individual’s name and age, but they’re optional—we included them to ease the stakeholders ‘ transition from personas and be able to connect multiple actions and contexts to the same person ).

Interviews must be video-recorded in order to capture precise quotes, and notes must be as much as possible taken verbatim. This is essential to the truthfulness of the several Selves of each participant. In the case of real-life ethnographic research, photos of the context and anonymized actors are essential to build realistic Selves. As long as these photos are realistic and depict meaningful actions that you associate with your participants, they should be taken directly from field research, but an evocative and representative image can also work. For example, one of our interviewees told us about his mountain home where he used to spend every weekend with his family. We depicted him hiking with his young daughter as a result.

At the end of the research analysis, we displayed all of the Selves ‘” cards” on a single canvas, categorized by activities. Each card displayed a situation, represented by a quote and a unique photo. All participants had several cards about themselves.

4. Identify potential design challenges

Once you have collected all main quotes from the interview transcripts and diaries, and laid them all down as Self cards, you will see patterns emerge. These patterns will highlight the opportunity areas for new product creation, new functionalities, and new services—for new design.

There was a particularly intriguing insight around the concept of humidity in our example project. We realized that people don’t know what humidity is and why it is important to monitor it for health: an environment that’s too dry or too wet can cause respiratory problems or worsen existing ones. This made clear that our client had a significant opportunity to train users about the concept and work as a health advisor.

Benefits of Dynamic Selves

When you use the Dynamic Selves approach in your research, you start to notice unique social relations, peculiar situations real people face and the actions that follow, and that people are surrounded by changing environments. One of the participants in our thermostat project, Davide, is described as a boyfriend, dog lover, and tech nut.

Davide is an individual we might have once reduced to a persona called “tech enthusiast”. However, there are also those who love technology who have families or are single, who are wealthy or poor. Their motivations and priorities when deciding to purchase a new thermostat can be opposite according to these different frames.

Once you have understood Davide in multiple situations, and for each situation have understood in sufficient depth the underlying reasons for his behavior, you’re able to generalize how he would act in another situation. You can infer what he would think and do in the circumstances ( or scenarios ) you design for using your understanding of him.

The Dynamic Selves approach aims to dismiss the conflicted dual purpose of personas—to summarize and empathize at the same time—by separating your research summary from the people you’re seeking to empathize with. This is crucial because scale affects how we feel empathy for people and how difficult it is to do so with other people. We feel the strongest empathy for individuals we can personally relate to.

If you take a real person as inspiration for your design, you no longer need to create an artificial character. No more creating new plot devices to “realize” the character, no more implausible bias. It’s simply how this person is in real life. In fact, as we all know, personas quickly turn into nothing more than a name in our priority guides and prototype screens because we all know these characters don’t really exist.

Another powerful benefit of the Dynamic Selves approach is that it raises the stakes of your work: if you mess up your design, someone real, a person you and the team know and have met, is going to feel the consequences. It might stop you from taking shortcuts and will remind you to conduct daily checks on your designs.

Finally, real people in their specific contexts provide a better foundation for anecdotal storytelling and are thus more persuasive. Documentation of real research is essential in achieving this result. The circumstances of your design proposals resound in your mind when you encounter Alessandra. Noise, bad ergonomics, lack of light, you name it. If we go for this functionality, I’m afraid we’re going to add complexity to her life”.

Conclusion

Designit stated in their article on Mindsets that “design thinking tools offer a shortcut to deal with reality’s complexities, but this process of simplification can occasionally flatten out people’s lives into a few general characteristics.” Unfortunately, personas have been culprits in a crime of oversimplification. They fail to account for the complex nature of our users ‘ decision-making processes and don’t take into account the fact that people are immersed in contexts.

Design needs simplification but not generalization. You have to look at the research elements that stand out: the sentences that captured your attention, the images that struck you, the sounds that linger. Use those as metaphors for the person in all of their contexts. Both insights and people come with a context, they cannot be cut from that context because it would remove meaning.

It’s high time for design to break away from fiction and use reality as our guide and inspiration, in its messy, surprising, and unquantifiable beauty.

But what on earth is a passionate burnout?

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

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

She immediately KNOWS what she must would! She may DO MORE.

This is a painful and dangerous period. Know the reasons. Because when she doesn’t end that new purpose, that storyline will get worse. She immediately starts failing. She isn’t doing much. SHE is not enough. She’ll discover more she may do because she might neglect, or perhaps her home. She doesn’t nap as much, proceed because much, all in the attempts to do more. caught in this pattern of attempting to prove herself to herself without ever succeeding. Always feeling “enough”.

But, yeah, that’s what zealous burnout looks like for me. It doesn’t develop immediately in a great gesture; it develops gradually over the course of several weeks and months. My burning out procedure looks like speeding up, not a man losing focus. I move quickly and steadily, but I really quit.

I am the one who had

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

Growing up, I didn’t feel shame when my mom gave me food passports; in fact, I would have likely sparked debates about the subject, orally eviscerating anyone who dared to criticize the disabled person who was attempting to ensure all of our needs were met with so little. As a child, I watched the way the worry of not making those ends meet impacted persons I love. As the non-disabled people in my home, I did take on many of the real things because I was” the one who was” make our lives a little easier. I soon realized that I had to put more of myself into it because I am the one who does. I learned first that when something frightens me, I can double down and work harder to make it better. I am in charge of the problem. When people have seen this in me as an child, I’ve been told I seem brave, but make no mistake, I’m not. If I seem courageous, it’s because this behavior was forged from another people’s worries.

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

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

Why the long story, then? You see, stress is a volatile thing. Over the years, I’ve read and heard a bit about stress. Stress is true. Particularly today, with COVID, many of us are balancing more than we ever have before—all at once! It’s challenging, and so many wonderful experts are affected by the mitigation, the shutting down, and the procrastination. There are critical posts that relate to what I imagine must be the majority of people out there, but not me. No at the time of my fatigue, though.

The harmful darkness of passionate burnout

A lot of labor conditions see the more time, more energy, and general focused responsibility as an asset ( and sometimes that’s all it is ). They see someone attempting to overcome obstacles, not a person who is ensnared in fear. Many well-meaning organizations have safeguards in place to protect their teams from burnout. However, in situations like this, those alarms don’t always go off, and some organization members are surprised and depressed when the inevitable stop occurs. 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. Many of us have watched endless streaming episodes of COVID to see how challenging the female protagonist is, 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 be told, countless people are hidden in tears or doom-scrolling to escape. We know that the media is a lie to amuse us, but often the perception that it’s what we should strive for has penetrated much of society.

Women and burnout

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you using justifications? Many of us try to disregard feelings of burnout. Over and over I have heard,” It’s just crunch time”,” As soon as I do this one thing, it will all be better”, and” Well I should be able to handle this, so I’ll figure it out”. And it might actually be crunch time, a single objective, or a set of skills you need to master. That happens—life happens. BE CRUD if this doesn’t stop. 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 only temporary and you have to push through, it has an exit route and a reward system.
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 has 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.
• Go outside.
• Take a break.
• Practice self-care in general.

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

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

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

Cook an elaborate meal for someone!

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

Vent like a sniveling jerk.

Be careful with this one!

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

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

Pick up a book!

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

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

Or, a tactic I enjoy using is to read or listen to a book that is NOT related to 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
• Darin Olien’s Superlife
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford
• Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden is available.

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

Give yourself a break.

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

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

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

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

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

Does this sound familiar?

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

Do you remember that Winnie the Pooh sketch that had Pooh eat so much at Rabbit’s house that his buttocks couldn’t fit through the door? Well, I already have a strong connection to Rabbit, so it was surprising when he unexpectedly 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 aware that we can push ourselves if necessary, even when we are exhausted or have a ton of 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 need to redefine success in order to make room for comfort for being uncomfortable human, but that doesn’t really sound that bad either.

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

One of the most successful soft skills we have at our disposal is opinions, in whatever form it takes, and whatever it may be called. It helps us collaborate to improve our designs while developing our own abilities and perspectives.

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

The material

The content of the feedback is the bedrock of every effective analysis, so where do we need to begin? 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.

Although this equation is typically used to provide feedback to individuals, it likewise fits really well in a style criticism because it finally addresses some of the main inquiries that we work on: What? Where? Why? How? Imagine that you’re giving some comments about some pattern function that spans several screens, like an onboard movement: there are some pages shown, a stream blueprint, and an outline of the decisions made. You notice a flaw in the situation. If you keep the three components of the equation in mind, you’ll have a mental unit that can help you become more precise and effective.

A comment that appears to be acceptable at first glance could be included in some feedback, as it only appears to partially fulfill the requirements. But does it?

Not confident about the keys ‘ patterns and hierarchy—it feels off. Does you alter them?

Observation for style feedback doesn’t really mean pointing out which part of the software your input refers to, but it also refers to offering a viewpoint 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 reviewed feedback with other people before putting a lot of effort into improving it a while ago. After a few rounds of this work and a year later, I got a positive response: my feedback came across as effective and grounded. Until I changed teams. 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 also no. Let’s explore both sides.

No, this kind of feedback is effective because the length is a byproduct of clarity, and giving this kind of feedback can provide precisely enough information for a sound fix. Also if we zoom out, it can reduce future back-and-forth conversations and misunderstandings, improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of collaboration beyond the single comment. Imagine that in the example above the feedback were instead just,” Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons”. Since the designer receiving this feedback wouldn’t have much to go by, they might just make 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 equation above is intended to serve as a mnemonic to reflect and enhance the practice rather than a strict template for feedback. Even after years of active work on my critiques, I still from time to time go back to this formula and reflect on whether what I just wrote is effective.

The atmosphere

Well-grounded content is the foundation of feedback, but that’s not really enough. The soft skills of the person who’s providing the critique can multiply the likelihood that the feedback will be well received and understood. It has been demonstrated that only positive feedback can lead to sustained change in people, 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. Over the years, I’ve tried to summarize the necessary soft skills in a formula that resembles the one for content: the receptivity equation.

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

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

Attitude is the equivalent of intent, and in the context of person-to-person feedback, it can be referred to as radical candor. 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. Hopefully that’s not the case, but it can happen, which is fine. Acknowledging and owning that can help you make up for that: how would I write if I really cared about them? How can I avoid being passive aggressive? 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 my spelling mistake by adding “oh” to my list of replaced words (your choice between aText, TextExpander, or others ) so that when I typed “oh,” it was immediately deleted.

Something to highlight because it’s quite frequent—especially in teams that have a strong group spirit—is that people tend to beat around the bush. 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 you give it constructive and respectful feedback, whether it be difficult or positive. 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: it allows us to spend more time making sure that the suggestions ‘ clarity and actionability meet two main objectives.

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

In terms of clarity, start by grounding the critique that you’re about to give by providing context. This includes specifically describing where you’re coming from: do you have a thorough understanding of the project, or is this your first 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 project information, providing context is helpful. And context is absolutely essential when giving cross-team feedback. If I were to review a design that might be indirectly related to my work, and if I had no knowledge about how the project arrived at that point, I would say so, highlighting my take as external.

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

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

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

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

One approach that I’ve personally used effectively in some contexts is to enhance the bullet points with four markers using emojis. A red square indicates that it is something I consider blocking, a yellow diamond indicates that it needs to be changed, and a green circle provides a thorough, positive confirmation. I also use a blue spiral � � for either something that I’m not sure about, an exploration, an open alternative, or just a note. However, I’d only use this strategy on teams where I’ve already established a high level of trust because 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, which conveys 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 they can be very useful in the right context. Just make sure that each of the comments is separate so that it’s easier to match each discussion to a single task, similar to the idea of splitting mentioned above.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design criticism is never a one-time procedure. Sure, any great comments process continues until the project is finished, but this is especially true for layout because architecture work continues iteration after iteration, from a high level to the finest details. Each stage requires its unique set of questions.

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

The query

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

But how do we get into this scenario? A number of elements are involved. One is that we don’t often consider asking as a part of the input approach. Another is how healthy it is to leave the question open and assume that everyone else will agree. Another is that in nonprofessional debate, there’s usually no need to be that exact. In summary, we tend to undervalue the value of the concerns, so we don’t work to make them better.

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

There isn’t a second best way to ask for opinions. It simply needs to be certain, and sensitivity can take several shapes. The one of stage than level is a design for design criticism that I’ve found to be particularly helpful in my coaching.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asking specific questions can completely change the quality of the feedback that you receive. People with less refined criticism will now be able to provide more actionable feedback, and even expert designers will appreciate the clarity and effectiveness gained from concentrating solely on what’s needed. It can save a lot of time and frustration.

The iteration

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

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

Using iteration posts has a number of benefits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, as mentioned earlier, it’s crucial that you include a list of the questions to help you guide the design critique in the desired direction. Doing this as a numbered list can also help make it easier to refer to each question by its number.

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

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

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

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

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

The review

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

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

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

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

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

The swoop-by comment, which is the kind of feedback that comes from a member of a team or non-project who might not be aware of the context, restrictions, decisions, or requirements, or of the discussions from earlier iterations, is the second friction point. On their side, there’s something that one can hope that they might learn: they could start to acknowledge that they’re doing this and they could be more conscious in outlining where they’re coming from. Swoop-by comments frequently prompt the simple thought,” We’ve already discussed this,” and it can be frustrating to have to keep saying the same thing over and over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flash, Photoshop, and flexible style

When I first started designing sites, my go-to technology was Photoshop. I created a design for a 960px paint that I would eventually add willing to. The growth phase was about attaining pixel-perfect precision using set widths, fixed levels, and absolute setting.

All of this was altered by Ethan Marcotte’s speak at An Event Apart and the subsequent article in A Checklist Off in 2010. I was sold on responsive pattern as soon as I heard about it, but I was even terrified. The pixel-perfect models full of special figures that I had formerly prided myself on producing were no longer good enough.

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

A new way to style

Removing restrictions and creating content that can be viewed on any device has always been the goal of designing responsive or liquid websites. It relies on the use of percentage-based design, which I immediately achieved with local CSS and power groups:

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

Therefore using Sass to re-use repeated slabs of code and transition to more semantic premium:

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

Media answers

The next ingredient for reactive design is press queries. Without them, regardless of whether the content remained readable, would shrink to fit the available space. ( The exact opposite issue developed with the introduction of a mobile-first approach. )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Container queries: our savior or a false dawn?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CSS is changing

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

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

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

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

The biggest benefit of all of this is that you don’t need to wrap any containers in rows. Without rows, content isn’t tied to page markup in quite the same way, allowing for removals or additions of content without additional development.

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

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

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

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

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

Intrinsic layouts

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

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

frunits is a statement that says I want you to distribute the extra space in this manner, but never that it should be smaller than the content inside.

—Jen Simmons,” Designing Intrinsic Layouts”

Additionally, intrinsic layouts can mix and match both fixed and flexible units, letting the content choose how much space is taken up.

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

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

Another 2010 moment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content should come first

Content is not constant. After all, to design for the unanticipated or unexpected, we must take into account changes in content, like in our earlier Subgrid card illustration, which allowed the cards to modify both their own content and that of their sibling components.

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

Instead of dated markup tricks like this —

 First line of text with different styling...

—we can target content based on where it appears.

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

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

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

Directional variables must be set in the Sass version.

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

These variables can be used as values—

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

—or as real estate.

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

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

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

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

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

Fluid and fixed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, the situation

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

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

Choice is so crucial because of this. One size never fits all, so we need to design for multiple scenarios to create equal experiences for all our users.

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

Responsible design

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

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

Chris Ashton

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

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

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

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

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

So how can we put users in control?

The media queries are now being returned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expect the unexpected

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

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

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

When it comes to unexpected circumstances, we need to make sure our goods are usable when people need them, whenever and wherever that may be. We can move closer to achieving this by involving users in our design decisions, by creating choice via browsers, and by giving control to our users with user-preference-based media queries.

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