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I offer a second bit of advice to friends and family when they become new relatives: When you start to believe that you’ve got everything figured out, everything will change. Simply as you start to get the hang of injections, diapers, and ordinary sleep, it’s time for solid foods, potty training, and nighttime sleep. When you figure those away, it’s time for school and unique sleep. The cycle goes on and on.

The same applies for those of us working in design and development these times. Having worked on the web for about three years at this point, I’ve seen the typical wax and wane of concepts, strategies, and systems. Each day that we as developers and designers get into a regular rhythm, some innovative idea or technology comes down to shake things up and copy our world.

How we got below

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

The beginning of website standards

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

Server-side languages like PHP, Java, and.NET overtook Perl as the predominant back-end processors, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the trash bin. With these better server-side tools came the first era of web applications, starting with content-management systems ( particularly in the blogging space with tools like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress ). In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened doors for asynchronous interaction between the front end and back end. Suddenly, pages could update their content without needing to reload. A crop of JavaScript frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and jQuery arose to help developers build more reliable client-side interaction across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like image replacement let crafty designers and developers display fonts of their choosing. And technologies like Flash made it possible to add animations, games, and even more interactivity.

These new technologies, standards, and techniques reinvigorated the industry in many ways. Web design flourished as designers and developers explored more diverse styles and layouts. But we still relied on tons of hacks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes ( such as rounded or angled corners ) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks ). Complicated layouts required all manner of nested floats or absolute positioning ( or both ). Flash and image replacement for custom fonts was a great start toward varying the typefaces from the big five, but both hacks introduced accessibility and performance problems. And JavaScript libraries made it easy for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, although at the cost of doubling or even quadrupling the download size of simple websites.

The web as software platform

The symbiosis between the front end and back end continued to improve, and that led to the current era of modern web applications. Between expanded server-side programming languages ( which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others ) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Alongside these tools came others, including collaborative version control, build automation, and shared package libraries. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.

At the same time, mobile devices became more capable, and they gave us internet access in our pockets. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.

This combination of capable mobile devices and powerful development tools contributed to the waxing of social media and other centralized tools for people to connect and consume. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media offered connections on a global scale, with both the good and bad that that entails.

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

Where we are now

In the last couple of years, it’s felt like we’ve begun to reach another major inflection point. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. There are many different ways to make a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all flavors. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other tools of the IndieWeb can help with this, but they’re still relatively underimplemented and hard to use for the less nerdy. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.

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

Today, with a few commands and a couple of lines of code, we can prototype almost any idea. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. But the upfront cost that these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes due as upgrading and maintaining them becomes a part of our technical debt.

If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks—which used to let us adopt new techniques sooner—have now become hindrances instead. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And when scripts fail ( whether through poor code, network issues, or other environmental factors ), there’s often no alternative, leaving users with blank or broken pages.

Where do we go from here?

Today’s hacks help to shape tomorrow’s standards. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks —for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we’re unwilling to admit that they’re hacks or we hesitate to replace them. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?

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

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

Design with care. Whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes, consider the impacts of each decision. The convenience of many a modern tool comes at the cost of not always understanding the underlying decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the impact that those decisions can have. Rather than rushing headlong to “move fast and break things”, use the time saved by modern tools to consider more carefully and design with deliberation.

Always be learning. If you’re always learning, you’re also growing. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. You might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year, even if you were to focus solely on learning standards. ( Remember XHTML? ) But constant learning opens up new connections in your brain, and the hacks that you learn one day may help to inform different experiments another day.

Play, experiment, and be weird! This web that we’ve built is the ultimate experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be courageous and try new things. Build a playground for ideas. Make goofy experiments in your own mad science lab. Start your own small business. There has never been a more empowering place to be creative, take risks, and explore what we’re capable of.

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

Go forth and make

As designers and developers for the web ( and beyond ), we’re responsible for building the future every day, whether that may take the shape of personal websites, social media tools used by billions, or anything in between. Let’s imbue our values into the things that we create, and let’s make the web a better place for everyone. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then share it, make it better, make it again, or make something new. Learn. Make. Share. Grow. Rinse and repeat. Every time you think that you’ve mastered the web, everything will change.

Photo this. You’ve joined a club at your business that’s designing innovative product features with an focus on technology or AI. Or your business has really implemented a personalization website. Either way, you’re designing with statistics. Then what? When it comes to designing for personalization, there are many warning stories, no immediately achievement, and some guidelines for the baffled.

Between the dream of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong—like when we encounter “persofails” in the vein of a company constantly imploring daily consumers to buy more toilet seats—the personalization gap is true. It’s an particularly confusing place to be a modern professional without a map, a map, or a strategy.

For those of you venturing into customisation, there’s no Lonely Planet and some tour guides because powerful personalization is so specific to each group’s skills, systems, and market place.

But you can ensure that your team has packed its bags sensibly.

There’s a DIY formula to increase your chances for success. At minimum, you’ll defuse your boss’s irrational exuberance. Before the party you’ll need to effectively prepare.

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the music

Consider Spotify’s DJ feature, which debuted this past year.

We’re used to seeing the polished final result of a personalization feature. Before the year-end award, the making-of backstory, or the behind-the-scenes victory lap, a personalized feature had to be conceived, budgeted, and prioritized. Before any personalization feature goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a backlog of worthy ideas for expressing customer experiences more dynamically.

So how do you know where to place your personalization bets? How do you design consistent interactions that won’t trip up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve found that for many budgeted programs to justify their ongoing investments, they first needed one or more workshops to convene key stakeholders and internal customers of the technology. Make yours count.

​ From Big Tech to fledgling startups, we’ve seen the same evolution up close with our clients. In our experiences with working on small and large personalization efforts, a program’s ultimate track record—and its ability to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and organize its design and technology efforts—turns on how effectively these prepersonalization activities play out.

Time and again, we’ve seen effective workshops separate future success stories from unsuccessful efforts, saving countless time, resources, and collective well-being in the process.

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

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

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

Set your kitchen timer

How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The surrounding assessment activities that we recommend including can ( and often do ) span weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Here’s a summary of our broader approach along with details on the essential first-day activities.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

Kickstart: This sets the terms of engagement as you focus on the opportunity as well as the readiness and drive of your team and your leadership..
1. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
2. Work your plan: This phase is all about creating a competitive environment for team participants to individually pitch their own pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept project, its business case, and its operating model.

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

Kickstart: Whet your appetite

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

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

This is all about setting the table. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? If you want a broader view, here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework.

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature ( or something similar ). In our cards, we divide connected experiences into five levels: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to focus the conversation on the merits of ongoing investment as well as the gap between what you deliver today and what you want to deliver in the future.

Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is critical because it emphasizes how personalization can not only help your external customers but also affect your own ways of working. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Each team member should vote on where they see your product or service putting its emphasis. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. The intention here is to flesh out how different departments may view their own upsides to the effort, which can vary from one to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final kickstart activity is about naming your personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will data and privacy compliance be too big of a challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? ( We’re pretty sure that you do: it’s just a matter of recognizing the relative size of that need and its remedy. ) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. Our Detractor card, for example, lists six stakeholder behaviors that hinder progress.

Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential barriers to your future progress. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. As studies have shown, personalization efforts face many common barriers.

At this point, you’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? Good—you’re ready to continue.

Hit that test kitchen

Next, let’s look at what you’ll need to bring your personalization recipes to life. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. Their capabilities are sweeping and powerful, and they present broad options for how your organization can conduct its activities. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

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

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

The dishes will come from recipes, and those recipes have set ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

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

This isn’t just about discovering requirements. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team:

1. compare findings toward a unified approach for developing features, not unlike when artists paint with the same palette,
2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar,
3. and develop parity across performance measurements and key performance indicators too.

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

Compose your recipe

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

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

We first developed these cards and card categories five years ago. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And we still encounter new possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

Here are three examples for a subscription-based reading app, which you can generally follow along with right to left in the cards in the accompanying photo below.

1. Nurture personalization: When a guest or an unknown visitor interacts with a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it easier for them to encounter a related title they may want to read, saving them time.
2. Welcome automation: When there’s a newly registered user, an email is generated to call out the breadth of the content catalog and to make them a happier subscriber.
3. Winback automation: Before their subscription lapses or after a recent failed renewal, a user is sent an email that gives them a promotional offer to suggest that they reconsider renewing or to remind them to renew.

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

You can think of the later stages of the workshop as moving from recipes toward a cookbook in focus—like a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual” cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.

Better kitchens require better architecture

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

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

You can definitely stand the heat …

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach will bring about the necessary focus and intention to succeed. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, hit the test kitchen to save time, preserve job satisfaction and security, and safely dispense with the fanciful ideas that originate upstairs of the doers in your organization. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.

This workshop framework gives you a fighting shot at lasting success as well as sound beginnings. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. But if you use the same cookbook and shared recipes, you’ll have solid footing for success. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.

While there are associated costs toward investing in this kind of technology and product design, your ability to size up and confront your unique situation and your digital capabilities is time well spent. Don’t squander it. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

Ever since I was a boy, I’ve been fascinated with movies. I loved the characters and the excitement—but most of all the stories. I wanted to be an actor. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting adventures. I even dreamed up ideas for movies that my friends and I could make and star in. But they never went any further. I did, however, end up working in user experience (UX). Now, I realize that there’s an element of theater to UX—I hadn’t really considered it before, but user research is storytelling. And to get the most out of user research, you need to tell a good story where you bring stakeholders—the product team and decision makers—along and get them interested in learning more.

Think of your favorite movie. More than likely it follows a three-act structure that’s commonly seen in storytelling: the setup, the conflict, and the resolution. The first act shows what exists today, and it helps you get to know the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two introduces the conflict, where the action is. Here, problems grow or get worse. And the third and final act is the resolution. This is where the issues are resolved and the characters learn and change. I believe that this structure is also a great way to think about user research, and I think that it can be especially helpful in explaining user research to others.

Use storytelling as a structure to do research

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see research as being expendable. If budgets or timelines are tight, research tends to be one of the first things to go. Instead of investing in research, some product managers rely on designers or—worse—their own opinion to make the “right” choices for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get teams some of the way, but that approach can so easily miss out on solving users’ real problems. To remain user-centered, this is something we should avoid. User research elevates design. It keeps it on track, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay ahead of your competitors.

In the three-act structure, each act corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is critical to telling the whole story. Let’s look at the different acts and how they align with user research.

Act one: setup

The setup is all about understanding the background, and that’s where foundational research comes in. Foundational research (also called generative, discovery, or initial research) helps you understand users and identify their problems. You’re learning about what exists today, the challenges users have, and how the challenges affect them—just like in the movies. To do foundational research, you can conduct contextual inquiries or diary studies (or both!), which can help you start to identify problems as well as opportunities. It doesn’t need to be a huge investment in time or money.

Erika Hall writes about minimum viable ethnography, which can be as simple as spending 15 minutes with a user and asking them one thing: “‘Walk me through your day yesterday.’ That’s it. Present that one request. Shut up and listen to them for 15 minutes. Do your damndest to keep yourself and your interests out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography.” According to Hall, “[This] will probably prove quite illuminating. In the highly unlikely case that you didn’t learn anything new or useful, carry on with enhanced confidence in your direction.”  

This makes total sense to me. And I love that this makes user research so accessible. You don’t need to prepare a lot of documentation; you can just recruit participants and do it! This can yield a wealth of information about your users, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their lives. That’s really what act one is all about: understanding where users are coming from. 

Jared Spool talks about the importance of foundational research and how it should form the bulk of your research. If you can draw from any additional user data that you can get your hands on, such as surveys or analytics, that can supplement what you’ve heard in the foundational studies or even point to areas that need further investigation. Together, all this data paints a clearer picture of the state of things and all its shortcomings. And that’s the beginning of a compelling story. It’s the point in the plot where you realize that the main characters—or the users in this case—are facing challenges that they need to overcome. Like in the movies, this is where you start to build empathy for the characters and root for them to succeed. And hopefully stakeholders are now doing the same. Their sympathy may be with their business, which could be losing money because users can’t complete certain tasks. Or maybe they do empathize with users’ struggles. Either way, act one is your initial hook to get the stakeholders interested and invested.

Once stakeholders begin to understand the value of foundational research, that can open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making process. And that can guide product teams toward being more user-centered. This benefits everyone—users, the product, and stakeholders. It’s like winning an Oscar in movie terms—it often leads to your product being well received and successful. And this can be an incentive for stakeholders to repeat this process with other products. Storytelling is the key to this process, and knowing how to tell a good story is the only way to get stakeholders to really care about doing more research. 

This brings us to act two, where you iteratively evaluate a design or concept to see whether it addresses the issues.

Act two: conflict

Act two is all about digging deeper into the problems that you identified in act one. This usually involves directional research, such as usability tests, where you assess a potential solution (such as a design) to see whether it addresses the issues that you found. The issues could include unmet needs or problems with a flow or process that’s tripping users up. Like act two in a movie, more issues will crop up along the way. It’s here that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this act. 

Usability tests should typically include around five participants according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can usually identify most of the problems: “As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.” 

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

Researchers have run usability tests in person for decades, but you can also conduct usability tests remotely using tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You can think of in-person usability tests like going to a play and remote sessions as more like watching a movie. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. In-person usability research is a much richer experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. You also get real-time reactions—including surprise, agreement, disagreement, and discussions about what they’re seeing. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors’ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.

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

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

The benefit of usability testing, whether remote or in person, is that you get to see real users interact with the designs in real time, and you can ask them questions to understand their thought processes and grasp of the solution. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. Furthermore, you can test hypotheses and gauge whether your thinking is correct. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. Act two is the heart of the story—where the excitement is—but there can be surprises too. This is equally true of usability tests. Often, participants will say unexpected things, which change the way that you look at things—and these twists in the story can move things in new directions. 

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

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

In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can help motivate stakeholders to address the issues that come up.

Act three: resolution

While the first two acts are about understanding the background and the tensions that can propel stakeholders into action, the third part is about resolving the problems from the first two acts. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That means the whole product team, including developers, UX practitioners, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other stakeholders that have a say in the next steps. It allows the whole team to hear users’ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. And it lets the UX research and design teams clarify, suggest alternatives, or give more context behind their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

This act is mostly told in voiceover with some audience participation. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They give the stakeholders their recommendations and their guidance on creating this vision.

Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. “The most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved,” writes Duarte. “That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently.”

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

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be visual, like quick mockups of how a new design could look that solves a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the end of the session when you’ve wrapped everything up in the conclusion by summarizing the main issues and suggesting a way forward. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. This stage gives stakeholders the next steps and hopefully the momentum to take those steps!

While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. All the elements of a good story are there in the three-act structure of user research: 

• Act one: You meet the protagonists (the users) and the antagonists (the problems affecting users). This is the beginning of the plot. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. The output of these methods can include personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards.

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

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

The researcher has multiple roles: they’re the storyteller, the director, and the producer. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters (in the research). And the stakeholders are the audience. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users’ stories through research. By the end, the stakeholders should walk away with a purpose and an eagerness to resolve the product’s ills. 

So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. Ultimately, user research is a win-win for everyone, and you just need to get stakeholders interested in how the story ends.

The 7 Roles of Every Small Business Owner and How to Manage Them written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Ever feel like running your business is a never-ending game of keeping plates spinning? I remember watching a circus performer as a kid, keeping seven or eight plates balanced on tall sticks. Just when one would start to wobble, he’d rush over to give it a quick spin, only to dash to the next one […]

The 7 Roles of Every Small Business Owner and How to Manage Them written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Although The Wheel of Time is filled with adversaries in the form of Darkfriends, Black Ajah, and even the harsh Seanchan and Whitecloaks, its real “big consequences” are the Forsaken, strong channelers whose connection with the Dark One allows them to live from one Age to the next. Because they are overwhelmingly more powerful than ]…]

The article The Wheel of Time Season 3: New Forsaken and Unexpected Alliances Revealed appeared initially on Den of Geek.

Everyone familiar with the work of Luis Buñel or John Waters knows that disturbing images are nothing new to film. But anyone who has been on the net for more than a moment even realizes that art and customized options have nothing on the world wide web. So how does the movie American Factory, in which Riverdale sun Lili Reinhart plays a glad moderator, present a video so surprising that it leaves her character Daisy clearly shaken? By emphasizing the animal factor.

&#8220, There&#8217, s a picture of my personality &#8217, s eye, with the photograph being burned into her head and insides, &#8221, Reinhart says while visiting the Den of Geek workshop at SXSW. &#8220, It&#8217, s more exciting to see a picture that &#8217, s traumatizing one from a different point-of-view than just seeing it on a computer screen. You &#8217, re really seeing how they &#8217, re processing it through their eyes. &#8221,

Written by Matthew Nemeth and directed by Uta Briesewitz, American Factory follows social media facilitator Daisy Moriarty, who at the hypothetical company of Paladin survives what might be the worst work on the planet: watching, reviewing, and debating whether marked social media content that has offended someone should be deleted. And when she finds a film that seems to describe a genuine violent crime, the picture becomes imprinted on her head.

Like many, Reinhart admits she didn&#8217, t spend a lot of time considering the daily horrors an online content moderator would face: &#8220, I was vaguely familiar with content moderation, but then I found out that actually a friend of mine does that as a part-time job. People walk away feeling fascinated that this job exists, that people sit at a desk and watch videos that you &#8217, re not supposed to see, and the horrible effects it can have on their well-being and mental health&#8230,. It&#8217, s not a job that you have forever and I think a lot of people walk away from it due to the mental downside of watching disturbing videos all day long. &#8221,

That surreality of that human element also drove the creatives as they developed the film.

&#8220, A lot of the anecdotes in the film are based on real events, &#8221, Briesewitz tells us during the conversation. &#8220, Matthew Nemeth did research and used articles for the script, I did research and watched a documentary about content moderation called The Cleaners. &#8221, However, she also was wary of letting these sources override her own voice as a filmmaker. &#8220, I didn&#8217, t want to take it much further than that because I felt like I knew what the world was. I wanted to stay focused on our story as well. It gets set in motion at this office, but then there&#8217, s a whole other story to it where Daisy goes into the world and tries to do something.

Reinhart had a bit easier job maintaining that balance because she grew up on the internet and didn&#8217, t need to do much research to play someone disturbed by anonymous strangers &#8217, posts.

&#8220, I grew up watching a lot of things that I should n&#8217, t have just from being exposed to the internet, &#8221, Reinhart admits. &#8220, I was on Reddit way too young, saw things on there that a 13-year-old girl should n&#8217, t see, or no one should see, to be honest. I think we all have that kind of a story and we all have a video or an image or something that we&#8217, ve seen that stuck with us, which is sad, but kind of the whole point of the film. &#8221, &nbsp,

For both filmmakers, the process of making the film was a reminder for how the innovation of hte internet has seemingly corresponded with folks feeling more isolated and detached from their world.

&#8220, Social media has given us permission to get away with not having human connection, &#8221, Reinhart observes. &#8220, You can go a whole day without talking to someone in-person because you have connection online. Not that online is a false sense of community, but it &#8217, s very different from having an actual community. Culture has shifted where you feel this false sense of closeness because you &#8217, re friends with people on Facebook and Instagram, thinking you don&#8217, t need to see them in-person anymore because we can just DM every now and then. &#8221,

Even though she&#8217, s never been much of a social media user, director Briesewitz&#8217, s experience of making American Sweatshop has changed even how she interacts with the internet.

&#8220, The movie reminded me that we can&#8217, t really rely on anybody policing the internet in a right way, &#8221, the helmer says. While art can use disturbing images to create a story or a point, the choices are are handled with discretion. Consider the aforementioned image of something being burned into Reinhart&#8217, s eyes in one scene. To Briesewitz it would have &#8220, been easy for us to make our point by choosing the horrible videos that we are commenting on. I didn’t want people to go and see the movie and think,’ I wish I’d had a warning that I would watch a beheading, because now I can’t unsee it.’ If we just hinted at the videos via title or just the sound, people will fill in their own horrors.”

It&#8217, s the difference between suggesting trauma and inflicting it, which is a very thin line to rely on a small office of entry-level workers to navigate for us. That line has also become sharper and more defined in the mind &#8217, s eye of American Sweatshop&#8216, s star.

&#8220, I&#8217, ve tried to just limit the exposure I have to socials in general, &#8221, says Reinhart. &#8220, I am trying to make sure what I&#8217, m engaging with is positive content and not horrific. ]And ] the movie has encouraged me to want to connect with my real-world rather than try and rely on social to be connected with human beings. I&#8217, d rather keep the in-person connection alive than foster or cater to an online relationship. &#8221,

American Sweatshop premiered at SXSW on March 8.

The post Lili Reinhart Reveals Playing a Content Moderator Has Changed Her Relationship with Social Media appeared first on Den of Geek.

Bong Joon-ho has not only not made a terrible movie, he has delivered eight feature-length movie separated only by levels of talent and your personal tastes. Trying to position them in any clear means involves grief and hate, but this is the computer, the house of heartbreak and hate, but here goes. Like some great ]…]

The article Every Bong Joon-Ho Movie Ranked appeared second on Den of Geek.

Everyone familiar with the work of Luis Buñel or John Waters knows that disturbing images are nothing new to film. But anyone who has been on the web for more than a moment even realizes that art and customized options have nothing on the world wide web. So how does the movie American Factory, in which Riverdale sun Lili Reinhart plays a glad moderator, present a video so surprising that it leaves her character Daisy clearly shaken? By emphasizing the animal factor.

&#8220, There&#8217, s a picture of my personality &#8217, s eye, with the photograph being burned into her head and insides, &#8221, Reinhart says while visiting the Den of Geek workshop at SXSW. &#8220, It&#8217, s more exciting to see a picture that &#8217, s traumatizing one from a different point-of-view than just seeing it on a computer screen. You &#8217, re really seeing how they &#8217, re processing it through their eyes. &#8221,

Written by Matthew Nemeth and directed by Uta Briesewitz, American Factory follows social media facilitator Daisy Moriarty, who at the hypothetical company of Paladin survives what might be the worst work on the planet: watching, reviewing, and debating whether marked social media content that has offended someone should be deleted. And when she finds a video that seems to depict a real violent crime, the image becomes imprinted on her mind.

Like many, Reinhart admits she didn&#8217, t spend a lot of time considering the daily horrors an online content moderator would face: &#8220, I was vaguely familiar with content moderation, but then I found out that actually a friend of mine does that as a part-time job. People walk away feeling fascinated that this job exists, that people sit at a desk and watch videos that you &#8217, re not supposed to see, and the horrible effects it can have on their well-being and mental health&#8230,. It&#8217, s not a job that you have forever and I think a lot of people walk away from it due to the mental downside of watching disturbing videos all day long. &#8221,

That surreality of that human element also drove the creatives as they developed the film.

&#8220, A lot of the anecdotes in the film are based on real events, &#8221, Briesewitz tells us during the conversation. &#8220, Matthew Nemeth did research and used articles for the script, I did research and watched a documentary about content moderation called The Cleaners. &#8221, However, she also was wary of letting these sources override her own voice as a filmmaker. &#8220, I didn&#8217, t want to take it much further than that because I felt like I knew what the world was. I wanted to stay focused on our story as well. It gets set in motion at this office, but then there&#8217, s a whole other story to it where Daisy goes into the world and tries to do something.

Reinhart had a bit easier job maintaining that balance because she grew up on the internet and didn&#8217, t need to do much research to play someone disturbed by anonymous strangers &#8217, posts.

&#8220, I grew up watching a lot of things that I should n&#8217, t have just from being exposed to the internet, &#8221, Reinhart admits. &#8220, I was on Reddit way too young, saw things on there that a 13-year-old girl should n&#8217, t see, or no one should see, to be honest. I think we all have that kind of a story and we all have a video or an image or something that we&#8217, ve seen that stuck with us, which is sad, but kind of the whole point of the film. &#8221, &nbsp,

For both filmmakers, the process of making the film was a reminder for how the innovation of hte internet has seemingly corresponded with folks feeling more isolated and detached from their world.

&#8220, Social media has given us permission to get away with not having human connection, &#8221, Reinhart observes. &#8220, You can go a whole day without talking to someone in-person because you have connection online. Not that online is a false sense of community, but it &#8217, s very different from having an actual community. Culture has shifted where you feel this false sense of closeness because you &#8217, re friends with people on Facebook and Instagram, thinking you don&#8217, t need to see them in-person anymore because we can just DM every now and then. &#8221,

Even though she&#8217, s never been much of a social media user, director Briesewitz&#8217, s experience of making American Sweatshop has changed even how she interacts with the internet.

&#8220, The movie reminded me that we can&#8217, t really rely on anybody policing the internet in a right way, &#8221, the helmer says. While art can use disturbing images to create a story or a point, the choices are are handled with discretion. Consider the aforementioned image of something being burned into Reinhart&#8217, s eyes in one scene. To Briesewitz it would have &#8220, been easy for us to make our point by choosing the horrible videos that we are commenting on. I didn’t want people to go and see the movie and think,’ I wish I’d had a warning that I would watch a beheading, because now I can’t unsee it.’ If we just hinted at the videos via title or just the sound, people will fill in their own horrors.”

It&#8217, s the difference between suggesting trauma and inflicting it, which is a very thin line to rely on a small office of entry-level workers to navigate for us. That line has also become sharper and more defined in the mind &#8217, s eye of American Sweatshop&#8216, s star.

&#8220, I&#8217, ve tried to just limit the exposure I have to socials in general, &#8221, says Reinhart. &#8220, I am trying to make sure what I&#8217, m engaging with is positive content and not horrific. ]And ] the movie has encouraged me to want to connect with my real-world rather than try and rely on social to be connected with human beings. I&#8217, d rather keep the in-person connection alive than foster or cater to an online relationship. &#8221,

American Sweatshop premiered at SXSW on March 8.

The post Lili Reinhart Reveals Playing a Content Moderator Has Changed Her Relationship with Social Media appeared first on Den of Geek.

Everyone familiar with the work of Luis Buñel or John Waters knows that disturbing images are nothing new to film. But anyone who has been on the web for more than a moment even realizes that art and customized options have nothing on the world wide web. So how does the film American Sweatshop, in]… ]

The article Lili Reinhart Reveals Playing a Material Moderator Has Changed Her Partnership with Social Media appeared first on Den of Geek.

Everyone familiar with the work of Luis Buñel or John Waters knows that disturbing images are nothing new to film. But anyone who has been on the net for more than a moment even realizes that art and customized options have nothing on the world wide web. So how does the movie American Factory, in which Riverdale sun Lili Reinhart plays a glad moderator, present a video so surprising that it leaves her character Daisy clearly shaken? By emphasizing the human element.

&#8220, There&#8217, s a picture of my personality &#8217, s eye, with the photograph being burned into her head and insides, &#8221, Reinhart says while visiting the Den of Geek workshop at SXSW. &#8220, It&#8217, s more exciting to see a picture that &#8217, s traumatizing one from a different point-of-view than just seeing it on a computer screen. You &#8217, re really seeing how they &#8217, re processing it through their eyes. &#8221,

Written by Matthew Nemeth and directed by Uta Briesewitz, American Factory follows social media facilitator Daisy Moriarty, who at the hypothetical company of Paladin survives what might be the worst work on the planet: watching, reviewing, and debating whether marked social media content that has offended someone should be deleted. And when she finds a film that seems to describe a genuine violent crime, the picture becomes imprinted on her head.

Like many, Reinhart admits she didn&#8217, t spend a lot of time considering the normal horrors an online content moderator had experience: &#8220, I was vaguely familiar with glad moderation, but finally I found out that really a friend of mine does that as a part-time job. People walk away feeling fascinated that this job exists, that people sit at a desk and watch videos that you &#8217, re not supposed to see, and the horrible effects it can have on their well-being and mental health&#8230,. It&#8217, s not a job that you have forever and I think a lot of people walk away from it due to the mental downside of watching disturbing videos all day long. &#8221,

That surreality of that human element also drove the creatives as they developed the film.

&#8220, A lot of the anecdotes in the film are based on real events, &#8221, Briesewitz tells us during the conversation. &#8220, Matthew Nemeth did research and used articles for the script, I did research and watched a documentary about content moderation called The Cleaners. &#8221, However, she also was wary of letting these sources override her own voice as a filmmaker. &#8220, I didn&#8217, t want to take it much further than that because I felt like I knew what the world was. I wanted to stay focused on our story as well. It gets set in motion at this office, but then there&#8217, s a whole other story to it where Daisy goes into the world and tries to do something.

Reinhart had a bit easier job maintaining that balance because she grew up on the internet and didn&#8217, t need to do much research to play someone disturbed by anonymous strangers &#8217, posts.

&#8220, I grew up watching a lot of things that I should n&#8217, t have just from being exposed to the internet, &#8221, Reinhart admits. &#8220, I was on Reddit way too young, saw things on there that a 13-year-old girl should n&#8217, t see, or no one should see, to be honest. I think we all have that kind of a story and we all have a video or an image or something that we&#8217, ve seen that stuck with us, which is sad, but kind of the whole point of the film. &#8221, &nbsp,

For both filmmakers, the process of making the film was a reminder for how the innovation of hte internet has seemingly corresponded with folks feeling more isolated and detached from their world.

&#8220, Social media has given us permission to get away with not having human connection, &#8221, Reinhart observes. &#8220, You can go a whole day without talking to someone in-person because you have connection online. Not that online is a false sense of community, but it &#8217, s very different from having an actual community. Culture has shifted where you feel this false sense of closeness because you &#8217, re friends with people on Facebook and Instagram, thinking you don&#8217, t need to see them in-person anymore because we can just DM every now and then. &#8221,

Even though she&#8217, s never been much of a social media user, director Briesewitz&#8217, s experience of making American Sweatshop has changed even how she interacts with the internet.

&#8220, The movie reminded me that we can&#8217, t really rely on anybody policing the internet in a right way, &#8221, the helmer says. While art can use disturbing images to create a story or a point, the choices are are handled with discretion. Consider the aforementioned image of something being burned into Reinhart&#8217, s eyes in one scene. To Briesewitz it would have &#8220, been easy for us to make our point by choosing the horrible videos that we are commenting on. I didn’t want people to go and see the movie and think,’ I wish I’d had a warning that I would watch a beheading, because now I can’t unsee it.’ If we just hinted at the videos via title or just the sound, people will fill in their own horrors.”

It&#8217, s the difference between suggesting trauma and inflicting it, which is a very thin line to rely on a small office of entry-level workers to navigate for us. That line has also become sharper and more defined in the mind &#8217, s eye of American Sweatshop&#8216, s star.

&#8220, I&#8217, ve tried to just limit the exposure I have to socials in general, &#8221, says Reinhart. &#8220, I am trying to make sure what I&#8217, m engaging with is positive content and not horrific. ]And ] the movie has encouraged me to want to connect with my real-world rather than try and rely on social to be connected with human beings. I&#8217, d rather keep the in-person connection alive than foster or cater to an online relationship. &#8221,

American Sweatshop premiered at SXSW on March 8.

The article Lili Reinhart Reveals Playing a Material Moderator Has Changed Her Partnership with Social Media appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the days since Eon Productions heads Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson announced they were turning power of the James Bond company over to Amazon, the online has been alight with batters for problem spin offs. It’s not hard to imagine the streamer green-lighting a drama about the early days of M, a Penguin-style ]…]

The blog A Young James Bond TV Spin-Off? It Now Exists appeared initially on Den of Geek.

Everyone familiar with the work of Luis Buñel or John Waters knows that disturbing images are nothing new to film. But anyone who has been on the web for more than a moment even realizes that skill and customized options have nothing on the world wide web. So how does the movie American Factory, in which Riverdale sun Lili Reinhart plays a glad moderator, present a video so surprising that it leaves her character Daisy clearly shaken? By emphasizing the animal factor.

&#8220, There&#8217, s a picture of my personality &#8217, s eye, with the photograph being burned into her head and insides, &#8221, Reinhart says while visiting the Den of Geek workshop at SXSW. &#8220, It&#8217, s more exciting to see a picture that &#8217, s traumatizing one from a different point-of-view than just seeing it on a computer screen. You &#8217, re really seeing how they &#8217, re processing it through their eyes. &#8221,

Written by Matthew Nemeth and directed by Uta Briesewitz, American Factory follows social media facilitator Daisy Moriarty, who at the hypothetical company of Paladin survives what might be the worst work on the planet: watching, reviewing, and debating whether marked social media content that has offended someone should be deleted. And when she finds a film that seems to describe a genuine violent crime, the picture becomes imprinted on her head.

Like many, Reinhart admits she didn&#8217, t spend a lot of time considering the normal horrors an online content moderator had experience: &#8220, I was vaguely familiar with glad moderation, but finally I found out that really a friend of mine does that as a part-time job. People walk away feeling fascinated that this job exists, that people sit at a desk and watch videos that you &#8217, re not supposed to see, and the horrible effects it can have on their well-being and mental health&#8230,. It&#8217, s not a job that you have forever and I think a lot of people walk away from it due to the mental downside of watching disturbing videos all day long. &#8221,

That surreality of that human element also drove the creatives as they developed the film.

&#8220, A lot of the anecdotes in the film are based on real events, &#8221, Briesewitz tells us during the conversation. &#8220, Matthew Nemeth did research and used articles for the script, I did research and watched a documentary about content moderation called The Cleaners. &#8221, However, she also was wary of letting these sources override her own voice as a filmmaker. &#8220, I didn&#8217, t want to take it much further than that because I felt like I knew what the world was. I wanted to stay focused on our story as well. It gets set in motion at this office, but then there&#8217, s a whole other story to it where Daisy goes into the world and tries to do something.

Reinhart had a bit easier job maintaining that balance because she grew up on the internet and didn&#8217, t need to do much research to play someone disturbed by anonymous strangers &#8217, posts.

&#8220, I grew up watching a lot of things that I should n&#8217, t have just from being exposed to the internet, &#8221, Reinhart admits. &#8220, I was on Reddit way too young, saw things on there that a 13-year-old girl should n&#8217, t see, or no one should see, to be honest. I think we all have that kind of a story and we all have a video or an image or something that we&#8217, ve seen that stuck with us, which is sad, but kind of the whole point of the film. &#8221, &nbsp,

For both filmmakers, the process of making the film was a reminder for how the innovation of hte internet has seemingly corresponded with folks feeling more isolated and detached from their world.

&#8220, Social media has given us permission to get away with not having human connection, &#8221, Reinhart observes. &#8220, You can go a whole day without talking to someone in-person because you have connection online. Not that online is a false sense of community, but it &#8217, s very different from having an actual community. Culture has shifted where you feel this false sense of closeness because you &#8217, re friends with people on Facebook and Instagram, thinking you don&#8217, t need to see them in-person anymore because we can just DM every now and then. &#8221,

Even though she&#8217, s never been much of a social media user, director Briesewitz&#8217, s experience of making American Sweatshop has changed even how she interacts with the internet.

&#8220, The movie reminded me that we can&#8217, t really rely on anybody policing the internet in a right way, &#8221, the helmer says. While art can use disturbing images to create a story or a point, the choices are are handled with discretion. Consider the aforementioned image of something being burned into Reinhart&#8217, s eyes in one scene. To Briesewitz it would have &#8220, been easy for us to make our point by choosing the horrible videos that we are commenting on. I didn’t want people to go and see the movie and think,’ I wish I’d had a warning that I would watch a beheading, because now I can’t unsee it.’ If we just hinted at the videos via title or just the sound, people will fill in their own horrors.”

It&#8217, s the difference between suggesting trauma and inflicting it, which is a very thin line to rely on a small office of entry-level workers to navigate for us. That line has also become sharper and more defined in the mind &#8217, s eye of American Sweatshop&#8216, s star.

&#8220, I&#8217, ve tried to just limit the exposure I have to socials in general, &#8221, says Reinhart. &#8220, I am trying to make sure what I&#8217, m engaging with is positive content and not horrific. ]And ] the movie has encouraged me to want to connect with my real-world rather than try and rely on social to be connected with human beings. I&#8217, d rather keep the in-person connection alive than foster or cater to an online relationship. &#8221,

American Sweatshop premiered at SXSW on March 8.

The post Lili Reinhart Reveals Playing a Content Moderator Has Changed Her Relationship with Social Media appeared first on Den of Geek.

For most older Teenagers, your scariest movie theatre experience wasn’t seeing Casey Becker get stabbed in Scream, it wasn’t Samara coming out of the TV in The Ring, and it wasn’t even when the Borg came up for Picard in Star Trek: First Contact. It was feeling your parents strained up with horror when Raphael ]…]

The article Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Was the First Modern Comic Book Adaptation appeared second on Den of Geek.

Everyone familiar with the work of Luis Buñel or John Waters knows that disturbing images are nothing new to film. But anyone who has been on the net for more than a moment even realizes that art and customized options have nothing on the world wide web. So how does the movie American Factory, in which Riverdale sun Lili Reinhart plays a glad moderator, present a video so surprising that it leaves her character Daisy clearly shaken? By emphasizing the human element.

&#822 retinas, , Th e e&#8217 &#8221, Reinhart says while visiting the Den of Geek studio at s a sh o of my characte &#8217, s e es, with the i SXSW. &#8220, It&#8217, s more exciting to see a picture that &#8217, s traumatizing one from a different point-of-view than just seeing it on a computer screen. You &#8217, re really seeing how they &#8217, re processing it through their eyes. &#8221,

Written by Matthew Nemeth and directed by Uta Briesewitz, American Factory follows social media facilitator Daisy Moriarty, who at the imaginary company of Paladin survives what might be the worst work on the planet: watching, reviewing, and debating whether marked social media content that has offended someone should be deleted. And when she finds a video that seems to depict a real violent crime, the image becomes imprinted on her mind.

Like many, Reinhart admits she didn&#8217, t spend a lot of time considering the daily horrors an online content moderator would face: &#8220, I was vaguely familiar with content moderation, but then I found out that actually a friend of mine does that as a part-time job. People walk away feeling fascinated that this job exists, that people sit at a desk and watch videos that you &#8217, re not supposed to see, and the horrible effects it can have on their well-being and mental health&#8230,. It&#8217, s not a job that you have forever and I think a lot of people walk away from it due to the mental downside of watching disturbing videos all day long. &#8221,

That surreality of that human element also drove the creatives as they developed the film.

&#8220, A lot of the anecdotes in the film are based on real events, &#8221, Briesewitz tells us during the conversation. &#8220, Matthew Nemeth did research and used articles for the script, I did research and watched a documentary about content moderation called The Cleaners. &#8221, However, she also was wary of letting these sources override her own voice as a filmmaker. &#8220, I didn&#8217, t want to take it much further than that because I felt like I knew what the world was. I wanted to stay focused on our story as well. It gets set in motion at this office, but then there&#8217, s a whole other story to it where Daisy goes into the world and tries to do something.

Reinhart had a bit easier job maintaining that balance because she grew up on the internet and didn&#8217, t need to do much research to play someone disturbed by anonymous strangers &#8217, posts.

&#8220, I grew up watching a lot of things that I should n&#8217, t have just from being exposed to the internet, &#8221, Reinhart admits. &#8220, I was on Reddit way too young, saw things on there that a 13-year-old girl should n&#8217, t see, or no one should see, to be honest. I think we all have that kind of a story and we all have a video or an image or something that we&#8217, ve seen that stuck with us, which is sad, but kind of the whole point of the film. &#8221, &nbsp,

For both filmmakers, the process of making the film was a reminder for how the innovation of hte internet has seemingly corresponded with folks feeling more isolated and detached from their world.

&#8220, Social media has given us permission to get away with not having human connection, &#8221, Reinhart observes. &#8220, You can go a whole day without talking to someone in-person because you have connection online. Not that online is a false sense of community, but it &#8217, s very different from having an actual community. Culture has shifted where you feel this false sense of closeness because you &#8217, re friends with people on Facebook and Instagram, thinking you don&#8217, t need to see them in-person anymore because we can just DM every now and then. &#8221,

Even though she&#8217, s never been much of a social media user, director Briesewitz&#8217, s experience of making American Sweatshop has changed even how she interacts with the internet.

&#8220, The movie reminded me that we can&#8217, t really rely on anybody policing the internet in a right way, &#8221, the helmer says. While art can use disturbing images to create a story or a point, the choices are are handled with discretion. Consider the aforementioned image of something being burned into Reinhart&#8217, s eyes in one scene. To Briesewitz it would have &#8220, been easy for us to make our point by choosing the horrible videos that we are commenting on. I didn’t want people to go and see the movie and think,’ I wish I’d had a warning that I would watch a beheading, because now I can’t unsee it.’ If we just hinted at the videos via title or just the sound, people will fill in their own horrors.”

It&#8217, s the difference between suggesting trauma and inflicting it, which is a very thin line to rely on a small office of entry-level workers to navigate for us. That line has also become sharper and more defined in the mind &#8217, s eye of American Sweatshop&#8216, s star.

&#8220, I&#8217, ve tried to just limit the exposure I have to socials in general, &#8221, says Reinhart. &#8220, I am trying to make sure what I&#8217, m engaging with is positive content and not horrific. ]And ] the movie has encouraged me to want to connect with my real-world rather than try and rely on social to be connected with human beings. I&#8217, d rather keep the in-person connection alive than foster or cater to an online relationship. &#8221,

American Sweatshop premiered at SXSW on March 8.

The post Lili Reinhart Reveals Playing a Content Moderator Has Changed Her Relationship with Social Media appeared first on Den of Geek.

This Person Does Not Arise is a site that generates mortal eyes with a machine learning algorithm. It takes actual photos and recombines them into false people faces. We just scrolled past a LinkedIn article stating that this website may be important “if you are developing a image and looking for a photo”.

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

But strangely enough, manufacturers use personalities to encourage their style for the real world.

Personas: A action up

Most manufacturers have created, used, or come across personalities at least once in their profession. In their content” Personas- A Plain Introduction”, the Interaction Design Foundation defines profile as “fictional characters, which you create based upon your study in order to reflect the unique user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand”. 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 ). The purpose of personas, as stated by design agency Designit, is” to make the research relatable, ]and ] easy to communicate, digest, reference, and apply to product and service development”.

The decontextualization of personalities

Personas are common because they make “dry” research information more realistic, more people. However, this approach constrains the study’s data research in such a way that the investigated customers are removed from their unique settings. 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 understand what the image did, but you don’t have the qualifications 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.

Identities assume people are dynamic

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. You act, think, and feel different according to the situations you experience. 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.

Modern psychology agree that while persons usually behave according to certain styles, it’s actually a combination of history and culture that determines how people act and take decisions. 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.

In their effort to reduce reality, personalities do not take this variability into consideration, they present a person as a predetermined set of features. Like personality tests, personas snatch people away from real life. Even worse, people are reduced to a label and categorized as” that kind of person” with no means to exercise their innate flexibility. This practice reinforces stereotypes, lowers diversity, and doesn’t reflect reality.

Personas focus on individuals, not the environment

In the real world, you’re designing for a context, not for an individual. Each person lives in a family, a community, an ecosystem, where there are environmental, political, and social factors you need to consider. A design is never meant for a single user. Rather, you design for one or more particular contexts in which many people might use that product. Personas, however, show the user alone rather than describe how the user relates to the environment.

Would you always make the same decision over and over again? Maybe you’re a committed vegan but still decide to buy some meat when your relatives are coming over. As they depend on different situations and variables, your decisions—and behavior, opinions, and statements —are not absolute but highly contextual. The persona that “represents” you wouldn’t take into account this dependency, because it doesn’t specify the premises of your decisions. It doesn’t provide a justification of why you act the way you do. Personas enact the well-known bias called fundamental attribution error: explaining others ‘ behavior too much by their personality and too little by the situation.

As mentioned by the Interaction Design Foundation, personas are usually placed in a scenario that’s a” specific context with a problem they want to or have to solve “—does that mean context actually is considered? Unfortunately, what often happens is that you take a fictional character and based on that fiction determine how this character might deal with a certain situation. This is made worse by the fact that you haven’t even fully investigated and understood the current context of the people your persona seeks to represent, so how could you possibly understand how they would act in new situations?

Personas are meaningless averages

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

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

But personas go a step further, extracting a decontextualized finding and joining it with another decontextualized finding from somebody else. 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 meaning. 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 relatability of personas is deceiving

To a certain extent, designers realize that a persona is a lifeless average. To overcome this, designers invent and add “relatable” details to personas to make them resemble real individuals. 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 deliberately obscure 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.

It’s the finishing touch of a persona’s decontextualization: after having assumed that people’s personalities are fixed, dismissed the importance of their environment, and hidden meaning by joining isolated, non-generalizable findings, designers invent 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 create connections that are familiar to us“. This practice reinforces stereotypes, doesn’t reflect real-world diversity, and gets further away from people’s actual reality with every detail added.

To do good design research, we should report the reality “as-is” and make it relatable for our audience, so everyone can use their own empathy and develop their own interpretation and emotional response.

Dynamic Selves: The alternative to personas

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

Designit has proposed using Mindsets instead of 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 not get fixated on a single user’s way of being. 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. The question remains, what determines a certain Mindset?

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 example, 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.

In developing an alternative to personas, we aim to transform the standard design process to be context-based. Contexts are generalizable and have patterns that we can identify, just like we tried to do previously with people. So how do we identify these patterns? How do we ensure truly context-based design?

Understand real individuals in multiple contexts

Nothing is 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. We refer to this approach as Dynamic Selves.

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

1. Choose the right sample

When we argue against personas, we’re often challenged with quotes such as” Where are you going to find a single person that encapsulates all the information from one of these advanced 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, validity does not derive from quantity but from accurate sampling. You select the people that best represent the “population” you’re designing for. If this sample is chosen well, and you have understood the sampled people in sufficient depth, you’re able to infer how the rest of the population thinks and behaves. There’s no need to study seven Susans and five Yuriys, one of each will do.

Similarly, you don’t need to understand Susan in fifteen different contexts. Once you’ve seen her in a couple of diverse situations, you’ve understood the scheme of Susan’s response to different contexts. Not Susan as an atomic being but Susan in relation to the surrounding environment: how she might act, feel, and think in different situations.

Given that each person is representative of a part of the total population you’re researching, it becomes clear why each should be represented as an individual, as each already is an abstraction of a larger group of individuals in similar contexts. 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.

Yet the question remains: how do you select a representative sample? 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.

In our example project, we were designing an application for those who own a smart thermostat. In the future, everyone could have a smart thermostat in their house. Right now, though, only early adopters own one. To build a significant sample, we needed to understand the reason why these early adopters became such. We therefore recruited by asking people why they had a smart thermostat and how they got it. There were those who had chosen to buy it, those who had been influenced by others to buy it, and those who had found it in their house. So we selected representatives of these three situations, from different age groups and geographical locations, with an equal balance of tech savvy and non-tech savvy participants.

2. Conduct your research

After having chosen and recruited your sample, conduct your research using ethnographic methodologies. This will make your qualitative data rich with anecdotes and examples. 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 tell a story that would then become much more lively and precise with the corrections or additional details coming from wives, husbands, children, or sometimes 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 wide research focus allowed us to shape a vivid mental image of dynamic situations with 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 are best set up in a semi-structured way, where follow-up questions will dive into topics mentioned spontaneously by the interviewee. This open-minded “plan to be surprised” will yield the most insightful findings. When we asked one of our participants how his family regulated the house temperature, he replied,” My wife has not installed the thermostat’s app—she uses WhatsApp instead. 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

During the research analysis, you start representing each individual with multiple Dynamic Selves, each” Self” representing one of the contexts you have investigated. 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. In our case, as our research focused on families and their lifestyle to understand their needs for thermal regulation, the important demographics were family type, number and nature of houses owned, economic status, and technological maturity. ( 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 ).

To capture exact quotes, interviews need to be video-recorded and notes need to be taken verbatim as much as possible. 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. Ideally, these photos should come directly from field research, but an evocative and representative image will work, too, as long as it’s realistic 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 portrayed him hiking with his little 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 multiple cards about themselves.

4. Identify design opportunities

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.

In our example project, there was a particularly interesting insight around 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 big opportunity for our client to educate users on this concept and become 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. In our thermostat project, we have come to know one of the participants, Davide, as a boyfriend, dog-lover, and tech enthusiast.

Davide is an individual we might have once reduced to a persona called “tech enthusiast”. But we can have tech enthusiasts who have families or are single, who are rich 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 infer what he would think and do in the contexts ( or scenarios ) that you design for.

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 important because our empathy for people is affected by scale: the bigger the group, the harder 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 inventing details to make the character more “realistic”, no more unnecessary additional bias. It’s simply how this person is in real life. In fact, in our experience, personas quickly become nothing more than a name in our priority guides and prototype screens, as we all know that 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.

And finally, real people in their specific contexts are a better basis for anecdotal storytelling and therefore are more effective in persuasion. Documentation of real research is essential in achieving this result. It adds weight and urgency behind your design arguments:” When I met Alessandra, the conditions of her workplace struck me. Noise, bad ergonomics, lack of light, you name it. If we go for this functionality, I’m afraid we’re going to add complexity to her life”.

Conclusion

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

Design needs simplification but not generalization. You have to look at the research elements that stand out: the sentences that captured your attention, the images that struck you, the sounds that linger. Portray those, use them to describe the person in their multiple 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 move away from fiction, and embrace reality—in its messy, surprising, and unquantifiable beauty—as our guide and inspiration.