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And that’s another SXSW for the history books. At the same festival that saw a keynote talk given by the CEO trying to bring the Woolly Mammoth back, cinephiles and genre enthusiasts also got a new Babak Anvari banger, the unicorn horror-comedy you never knew you needed, and a reported return to form by Matthew […]

The post Everything We Saw at SXSW 2025  appeared first on Den of Geek.

And that’s another SXSW for the history books. At the same festival that saw a keynote talk given by the CEO trying to bring the Woolly Mammoth back, cinephiles and genre enthusiasts also got a new Babak Anvari banger, the unicorn horror-comedy you never knew you needed, and a reported return to form by Matthew McConaughey after he stepped away from the big screen for the last six years.

It was a lot of fun, a lot of work, and as always over too soon. (Spoiler: McConaughey’s much celebrated The Rivals of the Amaziah King is one of the ones we missed!) Be that as it may, we still saw a whole lot from the Film and TV festival selection during our limited time on the ground. Here’s the round-up to prove it.

#1 Happy Family USA

Animated sitcoms don’t usually make a habit of concluding their first episode with the events of Sept. 11, 2001. But then again not many animated sitcoms are Prime Video’s #1 Happy Family USA. Created by comedy superstar Ramy Youssef and South Park producer Pam Brady, #1 Happy Family USA follows the Husseins—a Muslim family in New Jersey doing their best to project patriotism amid a very dark time in American history. 

While that setup is bleak (and undoubtedly reflects Youssef’s own experiences growing up as a Muslim-American during the turn of the 21st century), the series ends up being quite a cheerful experience. Young Rumi Hussein (Youssef) befriends a talking lamb and tries to bang his teacher (who may or may not have a personal connection to His Airness, Michael Jordan). His dad Hussein Hussein (also Youssef) breaks out into pro-America song numbers routinely. Also, Grandma (Randa Jarrar) appears to have Doc Ock arm attachments.

Each episode of the show, which has already scored a two-season order at Prime, opens with faux MPAA text warning “Rated H for Haram: Allah please forgive mistakes in this program.” Rated H it may be, but that could just as easily stand for “Halal.” – Alec Bojalad

American Sweatshop

Most folks objectively recognize the internet is a terrible and unpleasant place. But most of us also never think about the poor souls who are encouraged (tricked?) into trying to clean it up for lawsuit-fearing tech companies. Director Uta Briesewitz and star/producer Lili Reinhart care though. And maybe they can convince you to put down the doom-scroller in your hand for a while with American Sweatshop.

In the film, written by Matthew Nemeth, Reinhart plays a young person who thinks the gig of a media moderator at the fictional company of Paladin is a foot in the door to tech, but in truth it is an invitation for the most vile and terrible things on the web being seared into her brain. Briesewitz wisely elects to mostly obscure what those things are. But we glimpse them in miniature reflection on Reinhart’s pupils as they burrow into her soul. This acts as the opening to a larger drama with thriller elements as Reinhart’s Daisy demands for more to be done than simply deleting harmful (and possibly murderous) content. She wants revenge. Yet the film is at its best when wallowing in the camaraderie and occasional gallows humor of a young staff that looks increasingly as hollowed out as meat in a frontline’s grinder. – David Crow

The Age of Disclosure

Ready Player One’s producer Dan Farah makes the leap to documentary filmmaking by chronicling decade-spanning observations on UFOs and other alleged non-human organisms with the help of 34 talking heads who were/are U.S. government, military, and intelligence officials. While interesting at first, the documentary spins its wheels over the course of 108 minutes, failing to add any substantial evidence over the subject it highlights, especially since much of its on screen information is readily accessible. – Rendy Jones

Are We Good?

“Are we good?” That phrase began as a verbal tic from comedian Marc Maron as he launched his eventual medium-conquering podcast WTF in 2009. Maron would conclude episodes with that question, often posed to his comedic peers whom he previously was not, in fact, good with. Nowadays Maron is more or less good with everyone, having long ago conquered both his personal demons and professional insecurities. It’s only fitting then that the documentary about him bears that familiar phrase.

Directed by Steven Feinartz, Are We Good? tells the whole story of Maron while honing in on his particularly chaotic 2020s. The doc is rich in pathos, covering the death of Maron’s partner, filmmaker Lynn Shelton, to a non-COVID illness at the outset of the pandemic. It also covers his triumphant 2023 special From Bleak to Dark and his still-fraught but now simpler relationship with his father.

Through it all Feinartz summons many of Maron’s peers in the comedy world to explain his unique appeal. “Marc’s having a bad time all day. Then gets on stage and destroys the audience,” John Mulaney offers. Is it good? It sure is. – AB

Ash

Flying Lotus fully embraces his love for creature feature spectacles of the 1980s and ‘70s with this trippy throwback to Ridley Scott and John Carpenter movies so seminal you don’t even need us to name them. The trick about Ash, however, is that the musical artist and filmmaker behind the film synthesizes it in a dreamlike fantasia of psychedelic imagery and some gnarly camera tricks which could only be executed in this century.

Our favorite is when Riya—Eiza Gonzaléz’s heroine who awakens on an abandoned spaceship with her crew dead and her memories erased—is forced to defend herself against a monstrous foe in a fevered first-person oner. The camera catches her arms and legs using scalpels, fire, and some badass choreography before things get really whild. It’s all part and parcel for a drive-in dopamine-hit. Other highs include fantasy dream sequences and an ensemble that includes Aaron Paul and The Raid‘s Iko Uwais. – DC

The Astronaut

Kate Mara knows her way around a spaceship. After all, she helped steer one of the great ones in cinema during Ridley Scott’s The Martian. But in that film, she never really got to come back down to Earth. We see a homecoming in Jess Varley’s The Astronaut, though, and it’s a rough landing when the film opens on the wide, wide sea where a decimated space capsule floats. Apparently it needed emergency deployment after something cracked the hull, and even suit, of Mara’s Capt. Sam Walker.

This proves to be a kinetic and spacious kickoff to what is really a claustrophobic thriller. After being monitored for some time, Sam is sent by NASA and her father (Laurence Fishburne) to finish her quarantine on a glorified farmhouse where something seems to continue to stalk the astronaut. The film is obviously playing with tropes, but Varley seems intent on inverting the often reductive parable about the “mad, crazy woman” in touchstones like Repulsion and Black Swan in favor of something optimistic about a woman’s ability to observe eerie changes in the world around her—and within. – DC

The Ballad of Wallis Island

Music can remind us of a time. Music can remind us of a place. Music puts us in touch with the people we once were. There is something sweet about that. It can also be annoying as hell. James Griffiths’ The Ballad of Wallis Island finds humor in both sentiments with an absolute charmer of a movie. As cozy as a cable-knit sweater by the fire on a cold night, Wallis Island takes place in exactly such an environment when struggling folk singer Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) is induced to visit Wallis Island because he is being offered a lot of money to play for an intimate audience of uber-fans. Actually, as it turns out, there is only one fan: Charles (Tim Key). And he’s also invited Herb’s ex and former songwriting collaborator, Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan).

The Ballad of Wallis Island is an absurd premise that most of the collaborators have spent a lot of time thinking about. Basden and Key in fact wrote it as a short film some 18 years ago, which Griffiths directed. Time has given them space to make a feature that’s a little more wistful and reflective on the ephemeral nature of life—while still being funny enough to convince you that Key’s lonely fanboy is neither a creeper nor a danger to Herb and Nell. Although that doesn’t mean trips down memory lane are ever truly safe. – DC

The Bondsman 

Kevin Bacon has been a regular on episodic television since headlining Fox’s The Following in 2013, with lead roles in Amazon’s I Love Dick and three seasons on the acclaimed Showtime series City on a Hill. His new series for Prime Video, The Bondsman, which premiered at SXSW Film & TV Festival, has all the hallmarks of his preferred workday: covered in blood, sticking a chainsaw into a demon’s face. 

“It was a blast,” Bacon says with a laugh while his showrunner, Erik Olsen reminds him that one particular stunt sees Bacon’s character, Hub Halloran, drown a demonic cheerleader in a pool. Bacon himself was in the pool for the stunt. The Bondsman begins with Hub Halloran’s gruesome death and resurrection, maybe the fastest in television history, and what may seem like a demon-hunting “case of the week” storytelling structure quickly world-builds into a much larger narrative arc across season one. 

One of the most prolific working actors with over 107 credits to his name, Bacon “still loves making movies,” but he’s found a home, for now, in the gritty world of Satanic bounty hunters. 

“I went to television very reluctantly when I first signed up for The Following,” Bacon tells Den of Geek. “It’s hard to imagine that there was a world where if you were a movie actor, you just did not do a series. That was just a thing… and all of a sudden I said ‘Wow! This is so much fun! I’m really digging this.’” – Chris Longo

Bulldozer

In the spirit of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, independent TV pilot Bulldolzer is a single-word titled show about a funny woman whose life is falling apart. Written by and starring Joanna Leeds, and directed by her brother Andrew Leeds, Bulldozer picks up with Jo learning of her partner’s infidelity and reacting… poorly. What follows is a fun and breezy half-hour journey of self destruction with only occasional breaks for growth. 

Both Leeds shine in front of and behind the camera, and are bolstered by an impressive supporting cast that includes Nat Faxon, Harvey Guillen, and most notably, Mary Steenburgen, who according to the Leeds, hand-crafted her own blonde wig to better resemble her onscreen daughter Jo. The many famous faces, sunny California setting, and lead character’s very transparent flaws lend a welcome air of Curb Your Enthusiasm to the proceedings. 

It’s an impressive, personal debut but maybe not that personal, as Joanna Leeds told Den of Geek: “I have the same first name as the lead character but we have different last names so we’re not the same person, right? Maybe the awful characteristics about her, I don’t have them!” – AB

Clown in a Cornfield

It’s been 15 years since director Eli Craig has been in Austin for SXSW. The last time was because he brought future cult classic Tucker and Dale vs. Evil to town. He might have another on his hands with this Shudder-bound horror-comedy, Clown in a Cornfield.

Deliberately modeled after the look of other 1980s slasher movies, Clown in a Cornfield plays with the generation gap between Zoomers like Quinn (Katie Douglas) and Xers like her father (Aaron Abrams) when they move to a dying small town with a local mascot called Friendo the Clown. There are some obvious similarities to Terrifier, however this film, which is based on a YA novel by Adam Cesare, is not after the same splatter cinema highs (not least of all because the kills are a lot less inventive). But there’s some clever social satire at play, especially when we reach the third act and the clown takes things out of the cornfield and into the streets. Suddenly, it’s like if Freddy Krueger had a fanged point to make to “kids these days.” – DC

Dead Lover

Grace Glowicki’s sophomore feature came from a simple starting point: “I wanted to make a comedy with my friends,” she tells us. She assembled a “weird writer’s room” to build ideas and jokes. 

What came out of it was a true midnighter (though it was curiously in the festival’s Visions section) that follows a lonely gravedigger who “stinks of corpses.” When the gravedigger, played by Glowicki, has a whirlwind affair cut short by the tragic passing of her lover (played by her frequent collaborator and off-screen partner Ben Petrie), she defies science to bring him back from the dead with unintended consequences.  

If the logline sounds far too familiar, the final outcome is anything but: the film was shot on 16mm with no monitors on set for playback to “honor a more theatrical process.” Glowicki says the structure “forced us to be spontaneous and trust ourselves.” It worked. We awarded Grace and the Dead Lover cast our only Den of Geek award of the festival, for best (and funniest) accent work. 

Dead Lover is bound to be a buzzy camp hit on the festival circuit for its innovative filmmaking approach. Glowicki’s risk paid off as she took home the NEON Auteur Award for Uncompromising Visionary in the Visions Section. It’s admittedly a much more impressive award than ours, but not nearly as fun. – CL

Death of a Unicorn

In the High Middle Ages, unicorns were embraced by the wealthy and moneyed as a metaphor for the appeal of resurrection and everlasting life. In his first feature, writer-director Alex Scharfman shrewdly estimates not much has changed between then and now for the elite gentry classes, even if we get our highs a little differently—be it by vaping, a la the film’s heroine Ridley (Jenna Ortega), or snorting pure concentrated, ground unicorn horn up our noses, a la Will Poulter’s absolute shit-kicker of a trust fund baby, Shep.

Those prove to be just a few of the appeals of this delightfully weird horror-comedy which marries creature feature aesthetics—including a surprisingly heavy emphasis on emulating the first couple of Steven Spielberg-directed Jurassic Park flicks—with class satire that makes direct allusions between the billionaires of today and the liege lords of the past. Somehow the two impulses make a happy union in large part because of the cast, including the aforementioned Poulter, Paul Rudd, and a scene-stealing Richard E. Grant as the patriarch of a pharmaceutical dynasty who discovers on his deathbed that unicorns are real and they have the power to extend life. Pleasantly, though, any attempt to corner that market turns into an absolute bloodbath. – DC

Descendant 

Peter Cilella’s Descendant kicks into gear when Sean Bruner (Ross Marquand), a school security guard who is haunted by childhood trauma, sees a beam of light in the sky. He then wakes up in a hospital and soon he’s inexplicably drawing beautifully artistic renderings of extraterrestrials and desert landscapes. 

Cilella drew inspiration from Jeff Nichols 2011 apocalyptic thriller Take Shelter, which he lauded because of the performances and character development. With Descendant, he knew the genre elements resonate only if he landed the relationship between Marquand’s Sean and Sarah Bolger’s Andrea, who is quickly approaching her baby’s due date.

For Bolger, the slightest hint of extraterrestrial life had her from the jump. “First of all, I’m obsessed with aliens. We’re very knowledgeable about this [topic], UAPs. We’re all in.” On a deeper level, Bolger was excited about exploring the film’s familial themes through the science fiction lens. “If you look at the alien metaphor, it makes people feel isolated or removes them from reality,” she says. “There’s this beautiful thing of fate and identity that’s such a big part of Descendant: who are you as a person? And what changes you? Those factors are wonderful when you can merge them with something science fiction or ethereal or alien.” – CL

Drop

When a studio brings a genre movie to an Austin festival, it usually means they have the goods for winning over a movie-loving crowd. And Christopher Landon (Freaky, Happy Death Day) knows nothing if not how to put audiences on his side, which he does with glee in this Blumhouse original that hews closer to Hitchcockian suspense than straight horror.

The stakes are high, too, even before the genre stuff is introduced, because this film marks the first date of Violet (Meghann Fahy) and Henry (Brandon Sklenar), an immediately adorable would-be couple with enough chemistry to intoxicate the entire posh restaurant with a view where they rendezvous. Unfortunately, one stranger in the back doesn’t want to imbibe. Instead they send increasingly cryptic and threatening AirDrop messages to Violet, slowly urging her to prepare to murder Henry for no apparent reason—or they promise they’ll kill her son at home.

With massive font lettering marking every hideous message on Violet’s phone, and ultra-glossy studio set design and cinematography, this is unapologetic popcorn-programming, and it is absolutely a blast in that lane. There is a more ambitious version of this story that could have been told, but somehow we suspect this is the one you really want if you’re looking for a date night out at the multiplex.  – DC

Fantasy Life

There’s a very deliberate choice made by actor-turned-director Matthew Shear in his first feature. He never shows the moment when his two main characters, who both suffer from differing forms of anxiety, panic. We know they have such attacks, or that they endure dark moments while alone, but those bits are left just ever off-screen. Instead we are asked to deal with the aftermath of the proverbial pyrotechnics. We are asked to deal with what it means to be human.

Casting himself as one of those humans, and relying on a wonderful performance by Amanda Peet for the other, Sheer’s Fantasy Life favors a story of connections (and performance), even when it comes down to a genuinely odd pairing. What Sam (Shear) and Dianne (Peet) have isn’t romantic—per se—but it is nonetheless profound when a thirtysomething failed paralegal becomes the unlikely nanny of Dianne’s three children. It’s messy, sometimes tragicomic, and ultimately sweet. It also features a terrific performance by Alessandro Nivola as David, Dianne’s rock star husband who might want to be home more often. – DC

Fucktoys

Writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram’s idea for Fucktoys started with a phone call from a psychic, who told her to break up with her then boyfriend to avoid further illness and any roadblocks to her career. 

Sriram impulsively obliged and within weeks she had a script for her debut feature, described perfectly in the logline as a “lush 16mm fever dream that reimagines The Fool’s Journey of the Tarot through the story of AP – a sanguine young woman seeking salvation from a curse.” With Fucktoys, the psychic’s prophecy has come true.

The campy fantastical comedy is grotesque, sexy, smutty, and surprisingly poignant when tapping into themes of exploitation and class. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny with standout performances from its leads in Sriram and Sadie Scott, as well as supporting roles from Brandon Flynn, Damian Young, Big Freedia, and François Arnaud. 

The film is set in Trashtown, which Sriram described as “a neglected Americana yesteryear landscape. Trashtown is a term of endearment. We love Trashtown.” Sriram’s singular vision for Trashtown earned her the festival’s Special Jury Award for a Multi-Hyphenate. It was well-deserved for pushing forward a bold, darkly funny sensibility unlike any film we screened at the festival, a new genre the cast described as “neo-camp.” Long live Trashtown. – CL

Good Boy

Writer-director Ben Leonberg and producer Kari Fischer might have stumbled on one of the best setups for an original horror movie we’ve heard in years. Ever notice how your dog or cat stares off into the darkness of empty rooms? Has it ever creeped you out to ponder what it is they’re getting so worked up about after midnight? Well, Good Boy has the answers, and they’re provided through a dog’s perspective.

What could be a gimmick ultimately works as a bit of inspired, if rough-around-the-edges, genre moviemaking. As Leonberg’s feature debut, Good Boy was shot largely like a documentary with Leonberg and Fischer’s own pup, Indy, standing in as the poor dog in a house haunted with secrets and despair, and an unseen owner who is not particularly warm and cuddly. The effect is a definite low-budget indie, but one with a lot of style and atmosphere that manipulates the audience into investing in one dog’s seeming plight. Owing a bit to silent movies as well, Indy proves a compelling lead while turning the corner and seeing what goes bump in the night. – DC

Government Cheese

How far can magical thinking take you? In Government Cheese, Hampton Chambers (David Oyelowo) will endeavor to find out. Fresh out of prison in 1969 Los Angeles, this convicted burglar turned man of faith is putting his family’s financial well-being in the hands of his latest radical doo-hicky—a self-sharpening drill called a “Bit Magician.” Will that be enough to realize the American dream? Hell, will it be enough to pay off the debts Hampton unknowingly incurred from the dangerous Prevost brothers? Guess we’ll find out!

Government Cheese is a stylish 10-episode series from Apple TV+ that combines the timeless story of Black family life in California with some magical realism. Show creator Paul Hunter (previously known for his revolutionary work in commercial campaigns and music videos) cites his own father as inspiration for Hampton Chambers—a man powered by ambition and that titular government food product that helped fuel working class families. – AB

Happy Face

Ever sit back and think about how many pop songs have the word “Happy” in the title? Paramount+ true crime series Happy Killer certainly has and it puts those cheery tunes to ironic good use in this dark serial killer drama. Adapted from the 2018 podcast of the same name, Happy Face follows Melissa Moore (Annaleigh Ashford), a woman who deals with the fallout of discovering that her father (Dennis Quaid) is a prolific serial killer known as Happy Face. 

While that may sound like a stranger-than-fiction premise, not only is Melissa Moore’s experience real, she serves as an executive producer on this project. Moore’s involvement gives the proceedings an added element of realism, even as the show indulges in some by-the-numbers true crime pop storytelling. – AB

Hallow Road

The best horror movie we saw while in Austin, Babak Anvari’s Hallow Road is a nearly-perfect exercise in descent. It begins with a plunge into the worst nightmare of any parent: that call in the middle of the night from a child whose life has been forever changed. In the case of Maddie and Frank (Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys), that comes after their daughter Alice (voiced by Megan McDonnell) has hit a stranger in the middle of the night while driving alone on Hallow Road in the deep woods of Wales. Now she wants Mom and Dad to come fix it for her.

What starts as one type of nightmare quickly cascades into something far more slippery and sinister. Hallow Road is a dark fable as grim as the fairy stories of yore, and as unforgiving as an Old Testament deity. Maddie and Frank have differing views of parenting and of their daughter, and both are put to the extreme test in a taut 80 minutes that mostly take place inside of their car as they drive from their suburban home deep into the wilderness. Often as much about how they listen to the pleas and fears of their daughter over the phone as it is how they try to guide her, Anvari’s camera stalks and shadows the lines of their faces until even their countenances become haunted things and they discover what lies at the end of their surreal journey into dark. It’s a relentless triumph. Stay for the credits. – DC

Holland

Mimi Cave’s first feature was the seductively twisted horror-comedy Fresh. Her second seeks to similarly beguile its audience into thinking they’re getting one type of movie only to discover another as we enter the world of Holland, Michigan—a real Midwestern town with an affinity for things so Dutch that it verges on fetishistic.

It is there that Nancy Vandergroot (Nicole Kidman) lives with her perfect husband Fred (Matthew Macfadyen) and tween son Harry (Jude Hill). Theirs is such an idyllic existence that Nancy seemingly wants to create a sense of danger to spice up her life, or at least find an excuse to hang out with a fellow teacher named Dave (Gael Garcia Bernal) who clearly is carrying a torch for her in the instructor’s lounge.

Look, there’s obviously something ominous occurring beneath the surface, and Holland takes its time getting there. But truthfully, when the revelation finally comes, it feels ultimately in service to a sum lesser than its parts. But it does give Kidman a juicy role to play as a Midwestern mom who kind of stumbles her way into a genuine thriller, which is likely why such an unsatisfying screenplay got made.

LifeHack

Producer Timur Bekmambetov has spent about a decade making screenlife movies like Searching and Unfriended. Some have been clever genre inversions and others tacky high-concepts. All, however, have felt largely like an older generation trying to imagine what Zoomers’ online life might be. LifeHack, by contrast, is actually made by youts’, which might be why it amounts to a dazzling, fast-moving plunge into a digital lifestyle that is all things at once: coming of age melodrama, high-stakes heist escapism, and finally an expression that the “kids are all right” even when scrolling endlessly through Minecraft group chats.

Directed by Ronan Corrigan and featuring a cast that includes both a Wednesday player (Georgie Farmer) and an honest-to-goodness YouTuber (James Scholz), there is indie gumption and rebellious zeal to the film that is infectious. It also taps into the modern zeitgeist of eating the rich since this teenaged, keyboard-ratpack is off to snatch a crypto bro’s BitCoin reserves. It’s all flash and a lot of fun. – DC

Mix Tape

“You never forget the boy who makes you your first mix tape.” So says Allison (Teresa Palmer) near the conclusion of Mix Tape’s first episode. The four-episode series, an Irish-Australian joint production, then goes on to reveal just how right she is.

Mix Tape is a decades-spanning romantic saga, picking up with a young Daniel (Rory Walton-Smith) and Allison (Florence Hunt) at a house party in 1989 Sheffield house party before jetting off to a future where the pair (now played by Palmer and Jim Sturgess) is set to reconnect over their shared love of music. Mix Tape is a lowkey, yet affecting sonic journey. – AB

New Jack City

Boy, I’ve been itching for a new silly Blaxploitation tribute romp for some time. The gap left by Michael Jai White’s Black Dynamite is a void that I thought couldn’t have been filled. Lanfia Wal’s New Jack Fury isn’t quite there, but it delivers via its sheer silliness and charm. If Black Dynamite was a throwback to the ‘70s, New Jack Fury is for the ‘80s nerds who grew up playing Double Dragon and clips of Michael Jackson’s moon walk.

Drenched with ‘80s retro color and captivating green screen backgrounds—more impressive art direction than most recent blockbusters I’d say—the film follows Dylan Gamble (Andre Hall), a former cop trying to rescue his girlfriend Tanisha (Ally Renee) from evil kingpin Silkwaan Styles (Page Kennedy). He enlists two street-smart associates Hendrix Moon (Paul Wheeler) and rival Leslie Kindall (Michael Trapson) to help him find her, and nothing goes the way they expect. The movie is one hilarious over the top gag after the next with the hit ratio being extremely high. It’s cartoonish in the best way possible. Furthermore, its narrative is framed like an after school special, as every act-break is accompanied by a hilarious 1980s-styled commercial that’s as stupid and funny as the main movie. The film is a straight silliness and irresistible romp with so much passion worn on its sleeves that I had a blast. – RJ

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie

In 2017, Matt Johnson came by himself to SXSW to screen three episodes of his webseries turned TV series, Nivanna The Band The Show. “I had never seen a crowd in my life react the way they did to the TV show,” he tells us of the reception in Austin. 

Johnson returned home to Canada and the screening became a legend within the show’s creative and production team. It became the goal of Johnson and co-creator and co-star Jay McCarrol to bring a feature length version of the show and premiere it at SXSW. They submitted an unfinished cut and still made the festival. For SXSW it was worth the risk. For Johnson and McCarrol it was well worth the wait. 

We don’t time festival ovations with a stopwatch here like other outlets, but it comfortably felt like the audience reception to Nirvanna The Band the Show The Movie was the longest at SXSW 2025. The data backs up our claim: Nirvanna won the 2025 audience award for the midnighters section. The film sees Johnson and McCarrol reprise their roles as bandmates who attempt to scheme their way to a gig at Toronto’s Rivoli nightclub, to no success. In their most elaborate plan yet, they Back to the Future their way to 2008. Using clever editing techniques to splice present day and archival footage, and featuring daring stunts on the unsuspecting public in downtown Toronto, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie earned every bit of the riotous energy at the ZACH Theatre.

It’s been 17 years since the original Nirvanna webseries was released. Since then, the project ran for two seasons as a full-fledged TV show on the ill-fated Viceland, Johnson had a hit feature film with 2023 SXSW darling Blackberry (on which McCarroll did the music), and they’ve already filmed a third season. They’re hopeful a positive reception to the feature film will help find a U.S. distributor for the film and a new home for season three. Until then, the Canadians are happy to bask in a warm, if not red hot reception way south of the Toronto border. “It felt like a gift that we gave to all the fans who stuck with us,” McCarrol says. – CL

O’Dessa

Eight years after knocking Austin’s socks off with Patti Cake$, Geremy Jasper returns with O’Dessa, a niche fairytale that will appeal to a very specific kind of nerd. Did you grow up loving post-apocalyptic or dystopian wasteland movies with dilapidated mega-cities? These would be your Blade Runners and Tim Burton Batmans, but also Dark Citys and Streets of Fires? Do you know all the words to “Science Fiction Double Feature” and Meatloaf’s big moment in Rocky Horror Picture Show? If that Venn Diagram crossed over and found you smiling at both prospects, then O’Dessa’s rock opera silliness is for you.

It certainly was for me during an opening credits crawl that looked as if it had been panned and scanned for VHS in another century. This sets the stage for a parable about a farmgirl (Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink) with dreams about being a musician and wanderer (or rambler) in the big city, even as that city is ruled by a despot (Murray Bartlett). There she might find love, or at least a partner in crime opposite a fabulous Kelvin Harrison Jr., and a reality show where contestants sing to the death. It’s bizarre, fleeting, and yet filled with the kind aspirational power of rock that makes movies worth seeing. In another era, it would be a cult favorite at the video store waiting to be discovered by hopeless nerd romantics. Hopefully today, it still finds the descendents of that on Hulu at the end of the month.  – DC

Sally

Science Fair director Cristina Costantini returns with an unflinching, deeply emotional portrait of astronaut Sally Ride, and her 27-year relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy that was kept from the public spotlight until Ride’s passing in 2012.  In third grade, Costantini painted a life-sized mural of Sally Ride in her jumpsuit and by the time she was ready for high school she was inspired to find a career in science in part because of Ride’s story.

“I was struck by this feeling of disbelief that she could have went through something like that,” Costantini tells us of her motivation to put the story on film. “NASA was barely ready for a woman at that time. The idea that she was also queer and closeted at such a homophobic time, it was illegal to be gay in Texas at that time.”

Sally uses a mix of original audio interviews  from Ride, as well as recreations of Sally and Tam’s time together to supplement a lack of documentation of their relationship. The film dives into women and LGBTQ+ rights through interviews with Billie Jean King, members of the Ride family, and astronauts from Sally Ride’s NASA class of 1978: Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, John Fabian, and Steve Hawley, Sally’s ex-husband. Ultimately Tam’s journey provides a gut-wrenching look into Ride’s life and the power dynamics and pressure that come with fame.

“Tam is an incredible gift to a documentary filmmaker,” Costantini says. “She is an amazing storyteller. She has an incredible memory. But more than anything she is willing to be vulnerable to tell the story of what it was like to fall in love in this secret relationship.”  – CL

Slanted

Slanted was the big winner at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, taking home the Grand Jury Award in the Narrative Feature Competition. And to that we say… good on ya, South By! This comedy-drama from Australian filmmaker Amy Wang is an entertaining and affecting coming-of-age story with a clever supernatural bent.

Shirley Chen stars as Joan Huang, a second-generation Chinese-American high school student who just wants to be prom queen. To make that dream a reality she undergoes a controversial “ethnic modification” procedure and comes out the other side as Ghostbusters: Afterlife star Mckenna Grace. Okay, Shirley doesn’t become literally Mckenna Grace, but Grace does take over the role as the now white-passing Shirley.

Slanted has as much fun with that premise as you’d hope while also never losing sight of the complicated racial dynamics and youthful insecurities at play. Call it The Substance for the YA crowd: smart, silly, and satisfyingly gross. – AB

Stars Diner

We have but one simple rule at Den of Geek’s TV section: if you open your indie comedy pilot with a jaunty ‘80s sitcom theme song, you get included in the festival roundup. Three cheers to Stars Diner creators Fidel Ruiz-Healy, Tyler Walker, and Mary Neely for making it happen.

Stars Diner is a whacky pastiche of laughtrack sitcoms set in the titular diner where everything is always going to shit. Not only will the steak get overcooked but the nearby supervolcano may exterminate all life in Fresno. Blessed with an endearing DIY energy (Ruiz-Healy handles all the exterior shots as miniature and “PS1 graphics”), Stars Diner should get a look from distributors and networks that don’t mind a little bit of anarchy. – AB

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror

The Rocky Horror Picture Show remains the longest running theatrically released film in history. Seriously, if your hometown has any sort of cool cred, it’s playing this Saturday at midnight somewhere. Yet, curiously, there has never been a major, comprehensive documentary about the phenomenon lest you count a ‘90s Behind the Music episode on VH1. Director Linus O’Brien, son of Richard O’Brien, and writer/producer Avner Shiloah correct that oversight with Strange Journey, aka the Rocky Horror Documentary.

Filled with most of the surviving stars and contributors to both the 1975 film and the original 1973 stage musical who shaped the lore, Strange Journey doesn’t necessarily teach diehards anything new, but it immortalizes for posterity the memories of all involved in a concise and elegantly told format. O’Brien and Shiloah also make the astute choice to intertwine the building of Rocky Horror with the legacy of its myth—eschewing a linear format in favor of using the feature-length to expand on why this show became such a conduit for counterculture, freedom, and escape. May it continue to provide that time warp release for another 50 years. – DC

The Surrender

Take a touch of Ari Aster’s Hereditary, add a heaping dose of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, and blend them together with a host of chopped up limbs and you’ve got the formula for Julia Max’s macabre horror flick, The Surrender. 

The Boys’ Colby Minifie stars as Megan, a woman who returns home to take care of her terminally ill father. After Megan’s dad succumbs to the inevitable, her mother Barbara (Kate Burton) turns to some alternative methods to bring him back. The Surrender leaves too much potential woo-woo wellness culture satire on the table but ultimately succeeds as a horror movie sizzle reel for all involved. – AB

The Threesome

If the star-crossed entanglements of characters played by Zoey Deutch and Jonah Hauer-King aren’t enough to sell you on this rom-com, then a first-act twist anchored by Bottoms breakout Ruby Cruz pushes The Threesome out of familiar territory and into something much closer to comedic bliss. 

Director Chad Hartigan masterfully balances the film’s big hearted moments of Ethan Ogilby’s script with key supporting roles from comedy TV mainstays like Jaboukie Young-White and Josh Segarra, and standout quips and one-liners from Deutch. 

“Whenever I read a script and find myself reading the lines out loud, I know I really want to do [the film],” Deutch tells us. “It’s almost like my body has a physical reaction to wanting to jump in and figure out how I would gel with [the role]. I loved the script.” – CL

The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick

Director Pete Ohs had a SXSW breakout in 2022 with Jethica and returned in 2025 with The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, a creeping rural psychological thriller. Like his past films, Ohs’ creative process is unique in that he shares writing credits with his actors, and they’re constantly evolving the narrative or solving problems on set together in real time. 

“Filmmaking is a collaborative medium, but that approach is extra collaborative,” Ohs says.  

He calls the process his “table of bubbles.” A shoot begins with an outline of the story and, with a “minimal crew anchored by a key location,” they shoot chronologically while writing scenes together. Zoë Chao, Callie Hernandez, and James Cusati-Moyer, and Jeremy O. Harris, the top four on a sparse call sheet, are all credited as writers on the film in which Chao’s Yvonne develops troubling symptoms after a tick bite during a weekend away at a secluded house amongst friends new and old.

Harris, who executive produced and previously collaborated with Ohs on the editing of Harris’ Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play., credited the director for building a creatively freeing atmosphere on set.

“The genre isn’t horror. It’s much like [David] Lynch. It’s Ohs-ian. Part of being in an Ohs-ian universe is saying ‘yes’ to his table of bubbles. It’s a very fragile process to say ‘yes’ to what’s on the table to keep the table alive. It’s like being in film school with the best, most active professor.” – CL

We Bury the Dead

It seems increasingly tough these days to produce a zombie movie that feels fresh or innovative. So the fact that Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead finds a new way into the genre via We Bury the Dead makes the horror-drama hybrid one of the nicer genre surprises out of Austin this year. Technically a post-apocalyptic movie set down under where Ava (Daisy Ridley) is a woman looking for her missing husband after the world stopped, the truth is We Bury the Dead is the first undead parable in-tune with a post-COVID and post-Trump world.

In the film, life on the Australian island of Tasmania ended long before the story properly begins, with most of the inhabitants dropping dead after the U.S. government accidentally detonated an EMP off the coast of a sovereign ally. Oopsie. Curiouser still, a few of the dead won’t stay down. The hapless local authorities euphemistically refer to these folks as coming “back online.” Still, everyone is promised that the dead, and not-so-dead, will be treated with the “dignity” they deserve.

It’s in this context that Ridley’s Ava enters the island as a member of the Bodies Retrieval Unit. Like everyone else in the gig, she’s looking for a closure that will not come, and a loved one who at best will be a snarling corpse. The irony, and day-to-day indignity, of such a prospect grounds the horror in an eerie verisimilitude. Ridley does raw work, too, when encountering others haunted by those, uh, terminally online. – DC

Best Music Sets & Showcases

Initial reports that SXSW’s music festival is in a state of flux for 2026 have since been clarified by the event organizers. The show will go on, albeit reduced by two days. There has been a dramatic decrease in artist participation over the decade or so, and a shortening of the SXSW 2026’s overall schedule due to construction on Austin’s new convention center will inevitably lead to changes for the music festival that has been a staple of the event for nearly 40 years. 

The artists that did travel to SXSW 2025 still packed a punch, though. Of the artists we selected for our SXSW 2025 music preview, we caught sets by Aussie six-piece Coldwave (photo above), who captivated a packed inside stage audience at Mohawk during a late-night set, and Brazilian outfit Terraplana closed out Valhalla with a mesmerizing shoegaze set that evokes emo and grunge inspiration. 

From artists who also made our SXSW Music Mixtape playlist, we saw Sierra Spirit, a Native American indie artist from Oklahoma, shine during an intimate set with standout tracks “bleed you” and “better wild,” and Norway’s indie pop math rockers Mall Girl impressed with tantalizing vocals and thumping guitars inspired by midwest emo (see “Midwest”). 

The British Music Embassy, one of our favorite mainstays at SXSW, once again filled out one of the festival’s strongest lineups with strong sets from some of the buzzy bands showcasing last week, including Freak Slug, Gurriers, and Delivery. 

Finally, we stopped by the Sounds Australia House on Thursday for a second Coldwave set and photoshoot to make sure our eyes and ears didn’t deceive us. They delivered yet again. And they were followed by Brisbane three-piece Dune Rats (pictured above), who lit up Creek and Cave with their energetic mix of rowdy throwback pop punk. – CL

The post Everything We Saw at SXSW 2025  appeared first on Den of Geek.

Always wanted to pour your personal candle?- Jason Duff, the founder of Small Nation. Right then, you can do it in Downtown Bellefontaine! A new and exciting light bar has just been added by Triple Moon Designs in Bellefontaine, Ohio, giving visitors a unique expertise not normally found in small towns. [My team has had the opportunity to try it out ] ]

Jason Duff, the creator of Small Nation, host posts.

Have you ever wanted to light a light yourself? Right then, you can do it in Downtown Bellefontaine! A new and exciting light bar has just been added by Triple Moon Designs in Bellefontaine, Ohio, giving visitors a unique expertise not normally found in small towns. My staff has had the opportunity to try it out, and they are raved about it. Jessica Epley, an owner, has selected the best-smelling, purest scents as well as some of the priciest vessels, priced between$ 20 and$ 35.

This light bar&#8221, where customers can layout and make their own lights, gives the business of making candles a new lease of life. Bellefontaine, Ohio’s Triple Moon Designs. Photo courtesy of Small Nation.

Plus, Jessica you re-create your customized fragrance if you like it for you to make it the ideal Christmas or new client gift!

How Candle Making Has a Fiscal Splash Impact

Jessica’s fresh light bar is an excellent illustration of the kind of destination-like experience that revitalizes and energizes our community. Making these special experiences in a small community setting is of enormous value. They draw both residents and visitors. The light bar isn’t just about making candles; it’s also about creating unique experiences. Guests have the opportunity to create something that is uniquely their own, and this hands-on action creates a remarkable and stimulating experience that keeps visitors coming back.

The two-hour treating period for the candles is a distinctive feature. This predetermined waiting time is a proper benefit to our city. Readers are encouraged to examine and take in the other products in Bellefontaine while their candles are on display. They can have a coffee at a local café, browse the numerous salons, or sit at one of our local restaurants. This improves their overall expertise as well as supporting other local businesses, creating a multiplier effect of economic gain.

It&#8217 ;s creating a vibrant, interconnected community where firms support each other by individuals like Jessica who incorporate destination-type activities like the light bar into our city. This interaction is essential for the continued expansion and expansion of small towns. It makes our city’s downtown a vibrant hub of activity and interaction, drawing in more visitors and encouraging regional residents to discover and invest in their own neighborhood.

About the writer who writes the guest book

Smaller Nation was founded by Jason Duff. He leads the Small Nation crew in creating spaces, dreams, and places for smaller towns and small area entrepreneurs nationwide. He started his own firms before leading a group that has fully revitalized the town of Bellefontaine, Ohio, with a population of 14, 000. He is the fourth generation of a community of businesses. Learn more about how Jason and the Little Nation crew did it.

We agree: the computer-generated eyes 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, much like in the pictures. Knowledge is taken out of natural environment and recombined into an isolated preview that’s detached from reality.

However, it’s odd that designers use personalities to guide their style in the real world.

Personas: A action up

Most manufacturers have created, used, or come across personalities at least once in their profession. The Interaction Design Foundation defines profile as “fictional characters that you create based on your research in order to represent the various consumer types that might use your company, product, blog, or brand,” according to 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 relatable, ]and ] easy to communicate, digest, reference, and apply to product and service development.”

The decontextualization of identities

Personas are common because they make “dry” research information more realistic, more people. However, this approach places a cap on the study’s ability to analyze the data in a way that excludes the subjects 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 stable, 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, what you do and do. You appear distinct to different people, you may act helpful to some, tough to others. And you change your mind all the time about selections you’ve taken.

Current psychologists concur that while individuals typically act in accordance with specific patterns, how people act and make decisions is influenced by a combination of both history and environment. 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.

Personalities do not account for this variation in their attempt to improve reality; instead, they present a consumer as a predetermined set of features. 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 defies stereotypes, diminishes diversity, and doesn’t reveal reality.

Personas rely on people, not the environment

You’re designing for a environment, not an individual, in the real world. 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 pattern 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 define how the consumer relates to the environment.

Did you make the same choice 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 identify the grounds for your decisions, the image that “represents” you doesn’t take into account this interdependence. It doesn’t provide a explanation 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 made up of observations from numerous 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”. The celebrity’s statement was literally reported, but the reporter failed to explain the context and how the non-verbal expressions were used. 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. You purposefully understate the fact that” John Doe” is an abstract representation of research findings, but wouldn’t it be much more responsible to emphasize that John is only an abstraction? 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 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.

Everyone should use their own empathy and develop their own interpretation and emotional response if we want to conduct good design research by reporting the reality “as-is” and making it relatable for our audience.

Dynamic Selves: The alternative to personas

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

Designit suggests using 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 do we find 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. Dynamic Selves is how we define it.

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.

In qualitative research, accuracy comes from accurate sampling rather than quantity. 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. You have understood Susan’s plan of action once you have seen her in a few different settings. 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 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 a smart thermostat 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 needed to understand the reason behind these early adopters in order to build a significant sample. We therefore recruited by asking people why they had a smart thermostat and how they got it. There were those who had chosen to purchase it, those who had been influenced by others, and those who had discovered 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. Your qualitative data will be enriched with examples and anecdotes thanks to this. 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 then become much more interesting and precise with the additions made by their spouses, husbands, 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 recorded on video and verbatim whenever possible in order to capture precise quotations. 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. These photos should be taken directly from field research, but any image that is evocative and representative will do, as long as it’s accurate and depicts meaningful actions that you associate with your participants. For example, one of our interviewees told us about his mountain home where he used to spend every weekend with his family. Therefore, we depicted him taking a hike with his young daughter.

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 designs

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.

A particularly intriguing finding was made in our example project regarding the concept of humidity. 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 highlighted a significant opportunity for our client 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 use your understanding of him to predict what he would think and act in the situations ( or scenarios ) you create.

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; the bigger the group, the smaller it is to feel empathy for others. 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 developing plot devices to “realize” the character, and no more need for additional 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

In their article on Mindsets, Designit mentioned that “design thinking tools provide 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 environments.

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 all of its messy, surprising, and unquantifiable beauty.

But what on earth is a passionate stress?

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

Sounds like this person needs self-care because she has too much on her disk. But no, she doesn’t have occasion for that. She begins to feel as though she’s dropping pellets. No accomplishing enough. 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 instantly KNOWS what she needs to accomplish! She really DO MORE.

This is a challenging and dangerous period. Know the reason. Because when she doesn’t end that new purpose, that storyline will get worse. She instantly starts failing. She isn’t doing much. SHE is not enough. She’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. Trying to prove herself to herself, but always succeeding in any endeavor. Not feeling “enough”.

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

I am the one who was

It’s interesting 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 postcards; 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 putting more of myself into it was linked to fears or confusion; I am the one who does. I learned first that when something frightens me, I can double down and work harder to make it better. I am in charge of the problem. When individuals have seen this in me as an adult, I’ve been told I seem brave, but make no mistake, I’m not. If I seem courageous, it’s because this conduct was forged from other people’s worries.

And here I am, more than 30 years later, also feeling the urge to aimlessly force myself forward when faced with daunting tasks in front of me, assuming that I am the one who is and consequently does. I find myself driven to prove that I can make things happen if I work longer hours, take on more responsibility, and do more.

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

Why the long history, then? You see, burnout is a fickle thing. Over the years, I’ve read and heard a lot about burnout. Burnout is real. Especially now, with COVID, many of us are balancing more than we ever have before—all at once! It’s challenging, and so many amazing professionals are affected by the avoidance, the shutting down, and the procrastination. There are important articles that relate to what I imagine must be the majority of people out there, but not me. That’s not how I look at burnout.

The dangerous invisibility of zealous burnout

A lot of work environments see the extra hours, extra effort, and overall focused commitment as an asset ( and sometimes that’s all it is ). They see someone 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 watched endless streaming COVID episodes to see how challenging the female protagonist is, but she is strong, funny, and capable of doing it. It’s a “very special episode” when she breaks down, cries in the bathroom, woefully admits she needs help, and just stops for a bit. Truth be told, countless people are hidden in tears or doom-scrolling to escape. We know that the media is a lie to amuse us, but often the perception that it’s what we should strive for has penetrated much of society.

Women and burnout

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you have a plan to stop feeling this way? If something 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 be pretty bad by now if you’re deeply in the cycle. If you need to, tell yourself you need to take care of the person your people depend on. If your roles are pushing you toward burnout, use them to help make healing easier by justifying the time spent working on you.

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

Cook an elaborate meal for someone!

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

Vent like a sniveling jerk.

Be careful with this one!

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

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

Pick up a book!

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

• Thrive by Arianna Huffington
• Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
• Girl, Stop Apologizing 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. Being tired, depressed, and worried is human nature. It’s OK to not do it all. Although being imperfect is terrifying, you cannot be brave without being fearful.

This last one is the most important: allow yourself permission to NOT do it all. You never promised to be everything to everyone at all times. We have greater power than the repressed fears that motivate us.

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

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

Look, I get that none of these ideas will “fix it”, and that’s not their purpose. None of us has complete control over what happens in our environment, but only how we react to it. These suggestions are to help stop the spiral effect so that you are empowered to address the underlying issues and choose your response. Most of the time, I find these to be effective. Maybe they’ll work for you.

Does this sound familiar?

If something resounds familiar to you, it’s not just you. Don’t let your negative self-talk tell you that you “even burn out wrong”. It’s 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 have the same meaning as the one we’re striving for, which is acceptable because the only way to judge 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.

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

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

One of the most successful soft 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 feedback can lead to conflict on projects, lower confidence, and long-term, undermine trust and teamwork. Quality comments can be a revolutionary force.

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

A long history of sequential feedback can be found online: code was written and discussed on mailing lists before becoming an open source standard. 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 principles with comments, but it also has some differences.

The material

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

This calculation, which is typically used to provide feedback to users, even fits really well in a design critique because it finally addresses one of the main issues that we address: 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.

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

Not confident about the keys ‘ patterns and hierarchy—it feels off. May 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? From the perspective of the project manager? A first-time user’s perspective?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, for the request approach:

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

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

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

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

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

No, because of the length in question, this kind of feedback is effective and can provide just enough information for a sound fix. Also if we zoom out, it can reduce future back-and-forth conversations and misunderstandings, improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of collaboration beyond the single comment. Imagine that in the example above the feedback were instead just,” Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons”. 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.

The equation above is not intended to provide a predetermined template for feedback, but rather a mnemonic to reflect and enhance the practice. 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. I’ve tried to summarize the necessary soft skills over the years using a formula that resembles that of the content receptivity equation.

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

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

Attitude is the equivalent of intent, and in the context of person-to-person feedback, it can be referred to as radical candor. That entails checking whether what we have in mind will actually help the person and improve the overall project before writing. This might be a hard reflection at times because maybe we don’t want to admit that we don’t really appreciate that person. Hopefully that’s not the case, but it can happen, and that’s okay. 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’s not what I meant to say! I felt really bad, and I just realized that I provided feedback to them for months, and every time I might have made them feel stupid. I was horrified … but also thankful. I quickly changed the way I typed “oh” into my list of replaced words (your choice between aText, TextExpander, or others ), so that it was instantly deleted when I typed “oh.”

Something to highlight because it’s quite frequent—especially in teams that have a strong group spirit—is that people tend to beat around the bush. It’s important to keep in mind that having a positive attitude doesn’t necessarily mean passing judgment on the feedback; rather, it simply means that 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. When I shared a comment with someone I knew,” How does this sound,”” How can I do it better,” or even” How would you have written it,” I discovered that the two versions had different meanings.

The format

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

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

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

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

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

There’s one powerful approach that combines both context and a focus on the positives: frame how the design is better than the status quo ( compared to a previous iteration, competitors, or benchmarks ) and why, and then on that foundation, you can add what could be improved. 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”. Just before sending, review your writing to make changes to this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content, tone, and format. Although each of these subjects offers a useful model, 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 third, the third, and so on. At first you’ll have to put in extra time for every piece of feedback that you give, but after a while, it’ll become second nature, and your impact on the work will multiply.

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

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

When we realize that receiving input can be seen as a form of pattern analysis, it might seem counterintuitive to begin the process with a question. In the same way that we wouldn’t perform any studies without the correct questions to get the insight that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to build strong issues.

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

And suddenly, as with any great research, we need to examine what we got up, get to the base of its perspectives, and take action. Iteration, evaluation, and 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 you turn a high-level moves review into folks rather commenting on the borders of buttons. Which issue may be important, so it might be difficult to get the team to pay attention to it.

But how do we get into this scenario? It’s a combination of various components. One is that we don’t often consider asking as a part of the input 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 issues, and we don’t make any improvements to them.

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

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

” Stage” refers to each of the actions of the process—in our event, the design process. The 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 input into updated designs as the job has evolved. The layers of user experience could serve as a starting point for future inquiries. What do you want to know: Project objectives? User requirements? Functionality? the content Interaction design? Information architecture UI design? design of navigation Visual design? Branding?

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

• Functionality: Is it desirable to automate account creation?
• Interaction design: Take a look through the updated flow and let me know whether you see any steps or error states that I might’ve missed.
• Information architecture: On this page, we have two competing pieces of information. Is the structure effective in communicating them both?
• User interface design: What do you think about the 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?

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

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

A quick fix is to get rid of the generic qualifiers from questions like “good,” “well,” “nice,” “bad,” “okay,” and” cool.” For example, asking,” When the block opens and the buttons appear, is this interaction good”? is it possible to look specific, but you can identify 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’s uncommon, it can occur. 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 who have less refined critique abilities will now be able to provide more useful feedback, and even experienced designers will appreciate the clarity and effectiveness gained from concentrating solely on what is required. It can save a lot of time and frustration.

The iteration

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

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

There are many benefits to using iteration posts:

• It creates a rhythm in the design work so that the designer can review feedback from each iteration and prepare for the next.
• 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, other feedback techniques ( such as live critique, pair designing, or inline comments ) can emerge.

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

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

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

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

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

Because it makes it easier to refer to the objects, it might also be helpful to have clear names on them. Write the post in a way that helps people understand the work. It’s not very different from creating a strong live presentation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The review

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

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

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

The first friction point is having to feel pressured to respond to each and every comment. Sometimes we write the iteration post, and we get replies from our team. It’s just a few of them, it’s simple, and there isn’t much of a problem with it. But other times, some solutions might require more in-depth discussions, and the amount of replies can quickly increase, which can create a tension between trying to be a good team player by replying to everyone and doing the next design iteration. This might be especially true if the respondent is a stakeholder or someone directly involved in the project who we feel we need to speak with. We need to accept that this pressure is absolutely normal, and it’s human nature to try to accommodate people who we care about. 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. These will be included in the upcoming iteration. In some cases, this could also be just a single top-level comment along the lines of” Thanks for all the feedback everyone—the next iteration is coming soon”!
• One more thing is to quickly summarize the comments before proceeding. Depending on your workflow, this can be particularly useful as it can provide a simplified checklist that you can then use for the next iteration.

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

Let’s begin by acknowledging again that there’s no need to reply to every comment. However, a brief response with a link to the previous discussion for additional information is typically sufficient if responding to a previously litigated point might be helpful. 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 relation to the design could be the third friction point, which might cause us to feel defensive if the review turned out to be more of a discussion. Treating feedback as user research helps us create a healthy distance between the people giving us feedback and our ego ( because yes, even if we don’t want to admit it, it’s there ). 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 up with a rationale for your choice, but sometimes “no” is the best choice.

As the designer leading the project, you’re in charge of that decision. In the end, everyone has their area of 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 over the centuries stuck in my mind. How do you generate solutions for scenarios you can’t think? Or create products that are functional on products that have not yet been created?

Flash, Photoshop, and flexible pattern

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

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

My first encounter with reactive style didn’t help my fear. My second project was to get an active fixed-width website and make it reactive. I quickly realized that you didn’t just put responsiveness 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 information was still readable, may shrink to fit the available storage.

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

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

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

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

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

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 elements should be used to replace responsive layouts.

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, it’s difficult to say for certain whether container queries will succeed. Responsive component libraries would definitely evolve how we design and would improve the possibilities for reuse and design at scale. However, we might always need to modify these elements to fit our content.

CSS is changing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intrinsic layouts

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

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

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

—Jen Simmons,” Designing Intrinsic Layouts”

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

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

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

Another 2010 moment?

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

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

One possible explanation for that is that I now work for a sizable company, which is quite different from the 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 new; it’s about applying existing skills and CSS knowledge in a unique way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content should come first

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

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

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

 First line of text with different styling...

—we can target content based on where it appears.

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

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

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

Directional variables must be specified in the Sass version.

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

These variables can be used as values—

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

—or as properties.

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

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

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

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

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

Fluid and fixed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, the circumstances

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

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

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

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

Responsible design

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

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

Chris Ashton

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

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

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

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

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

So how can we put users in control?

The media queries are returning.

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

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

The Level 5 spec for Media Queries is still being developed 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 the same way we have for this constantly changing landscape. By putting content first and allowing that content to adapt to whatever space surrounds it, we can create more robust, flexible designs that increase the longevity of our products.

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

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

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

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

Computers have trouble because between spoken and written language, speech is more primordial. Machines must wrestle with the chaos of human speech, including the squabbling and pauses, the gestures and body language, and the dialect variations that can stymie even the most skillfully created human-computer interaction. In the human-to-human scenario, spoken language also has the privilege of face-to-face contact, where we can readily interpret nonverbal social cues.

In contrast, written language develops its own fossil record of dated terms and phrases as we record it and retain usages long after they are no longer relevant in spoken communication ( for example, the salutation” To whom it may concern” ). Because it tends to be more consistent, polished, and formal, written text is fundamentally much easier for machines to parse and understand.

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

Voice Compositions

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

• we need something done ( such as a transaction ),
• we want to know something, some kind of information, or
• we are social beings and want someone to talk to ( conversation for conversation’s sake ).

These three categories, which I refer to as transactional, informational, and prosocial, also apply to essentially every voice interaction: a single conversation that starts with the voice interface’s first greeting and ends with the user leaving the interface. Note here that a conversation in our human sense—a chat between people that leads to some result and lasts an arbitrary length of time—could encompass multiple transactional, informational, and prosocial voice interactions in succession. In other words, a voice interaction is a conversation, but it may not always be one voice interaction.

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

A voice interface can also have two types of conversations we can have with one another that are both transactional and informational, each learning something new ( “discuss a musical” ).

Transactional voice interactions

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

Alison: Hey, how are things going?

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

Alison, can I get a pineapple-onion pizza in Hawaii?

Burhan: Sure, what size?

Alison: Big.

Burhan: Anything else?

Alison: No, that’s it.

Burhan: Something to drink?

Alison: I’ll have a bottle of Coke.

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

Each progressive disclosure in this transactional conversation reveals more and more of the desired outcome of the transaction: a service rendered or a product delivered. Transactional conversations exhibit a few key characteristics: they’re direct, to the point, and economical. They quickly dispense with pleasantries.

Informational voice interactions

Meanwhile, some conversations are primarily about obtaining information. Alison might only want to place an order at Crust Deluxe, but she might not want to leave without a pizza at all. She might be just as interested in whether they serve halal or kosher dishes, gluten-free options, or something else. Even though we have a prosocial mini-conversation once more at the beginning to practice politeness, we are after much more.

Alison: Hey, how are things going?

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

Alison: Can I ask a few questions?

Burhan: Of course! Go right ahead.

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

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

Alison: What about gluten-free pizzas?

Burhan: For both our deep-dish and thin-crust pizzas, we can definitely make a gluten-free crust for you, without a problem. Anything else I can answer for you?

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

Burhan: Anytime, come back soon!

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

Voice Interfaces

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

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

IVR ( interactive voice response ) systems

Though written conversational interfaces have been fixtures of computing for many decades, voice interfaces first emerged in the early 1990s with text-to-speech ( TTS ) dictation programs that recited written text aloud, as well as speech-enabled in-car systems that gave directions to a user-provided address. We became familiar with the first real voice interfaces that could actually be spoken to without having to deal with overburdened customer service representatives as a result of the development of interactive voice response ( IVR ) systems.

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

IVR systems have a reputation for having less scintillating conversations than we’re used to in real life ( or even in science fiction ), despite being extremely repetitive and monotonous.

Screen readers

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

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

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

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

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

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

In many cases, well-designed voice interfaces can speed users to their destination better than long-winded screen reader monologues. After all, users of the visual interface have the advantage of freely scurrying around the viewport to find information without getting too close to it. Blind users, meanwhile, are obligated to listen to every utterance synthesized into speech and therefore prize brevity and efficiency. Users with disabilities who have long had no choice but to use clumsy screen readers might find that voice interfaces, especially more contemporary voice assistants, provide a more streamlined experience.

Voice assistants

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

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

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

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

As businesses like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google continue to dominate their markets, they are also selling and open-sourcing an unmatched range of tools and frameworks for designers and developers, aiming to make creating voice interfaces as simple as possible, even without the use of any code.

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

Voice Content

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

Our world is replete with voice content in various forms: screen readers reciting website content, voice assistants rattling off a weather forecast, and automated phone hotline responses governed by IVR systems. We’re most concerned with the audiobook content being delivered as a requirement rather than an option.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Establishing requirements for a green website

The essential environmental performance indicators for the majority of major industries are pretty well established, such as power per square metre for homes and miles per gallon for cars. The tools and methods for calculating those measures are standardized as well, which keeps everyone on the same site when doing economic evaluations. However, we aren’t held to any specific environmental standards in the world of websites and apps, and we only recently have access to the tools and strategies we need to do so.

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

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

1. Transfer of data
2. Coal content of light

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

Transfer of data

Most researchers use kilowatt-hours per gigabyte (k Wh/GB ) as a metric of energy efficiency when measuring the amount of data transferred over the internet when a website or application is used. This serves as a great example of how much energy is consumed and how much carbon is released. As a rule of thumb, the more data transferred, the more energy used in the data center, telecoms networks, and end user devices.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We could start looking at the transferability of our web pages for repeat visitors if we want to take it one step further. Although page weight for the first time someone visits is the easiest thing to measure, and easy to compare on a like-for-like basis, we can learn even more if we start looking at transfer size in other scenarios too. For instance, repeat users who load the same page frequently will likely have a high percentage of the files cached in their browser, which means they won’t need to move all of the files back on subsequent visits. Likewise, a visitor who navigates to new pages on the same website will likely not need to load the full page each time, as some global assets from areas like the header and footer may already be cached in their browser. Moving away from the first visit and allowing us to determine page weight budgets for scenarios other than this one can help us learn even more about how to optimize efficiency for users who regularly visit our pages.

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

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

Coal content of light

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reverting it to carbon emissions

If we combine carbon intensity with a calculation for energy consumption, we can calculate the carbon emissions of our websites and apps. The method my team developed converts the amount of electricity transferred when loading a web page into a CO₂ figure ( Fig. ₂.4), and then converts that data into a figure for the tool. It also factors in whether or not the web hosting is powered by renewable energy.

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

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

Browser Energy

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

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

All of these advances are exciting and open up new possibilities for what the web can do to serve society and create positive experiences. However, more energy is used by the user’s devices as a result of the user’s web browser’s increased computation. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a lot of processing power on a user’s device unintentionally exclude those who have older, slower devices and make the batteries on phones and laptops drain more quickly. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. The poorest members of society are also under disproportionate financial burdens due to this, which is not just bad for the environment.

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

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

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

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

The method for equitable safety

Your objectives when designing for protection are as follows:

• discover ways your solution can be used for abuse,
• style ways to prevent the maltreatment, and
• offer assistance for harmed people to regain control and power.

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

• conducting exploration
• Creating themes
• pondering issues
• Designing options
• Testing for health

The Process is meant to be flexible; in some situations, it didn’t make sense for groups to employ every step. Use the parts that are related to your special function and environment, this is meant to be something you can put into your existing style process.

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

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

Step 1: Conduct research

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

broad analysis

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

Specific research: Survivors

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

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

Abusers specifically: research

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

Step 2: Create archetypes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 3: Brainstorm issues

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

What other abuses could your product be used for besides what you’ve already discovered through your research? I recommend setting aside at least a few hours with your team for this process.

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

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

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

Step 4: Design solutions

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

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

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

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

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

Step 5: Test for safety

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

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

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

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

You as the designer are probably too closely acquainted with the product and its design at this point, just like other usability testing techniques, and you know the product too well. Instead of doing it yourself, set up testing as you would with other usability testing: find someone who is not familiar with the product and its design, set the scene, give them a task, encourage them to think out loud, and observe how they attempt to complete it.

Abuse testing

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

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

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

Survivor testing

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

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

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

Stress testing

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