Blog

Humility, a writer’s necessary value—that has a good ring to it. What about sincerity, an business manager’s important value? Or a doctor’s? Or a student’s? They all good wonderful. When humility is our guiding light, the course is usually available for fulfillment, development, relation, and commitment. In this book, we’re going to discuss about why.

That said, this is a guide for developers, and to that conclusion, I’d like to begin with a story—well, a voyage, actually. It’s a personal one, and I’m going to render myself a little prone along the way. I call it:

The Tale of Justin’s Preposterous Pate

When I was coming out of arts school, a long-haired, goateed novice, write was a known quantity to me, design on the web, however, was riddled with complexities to understand and learn, a problem to be solved. Though I had been fully trained in graphic design, font, and design, what fascinated me was how these classic skills may be applied to a budding online landscape. In the end, this topic may determine my career’s direction.

So I devoured HTML and JavaScript novels into the wee hours of the morning and self-taught myself how to code during my freshman year rather than student and go into print like many of my companions. I needed to understand the main ramifications of what my style choices may ultimately result in when rendered in a website.

The later ‘ 90s and early 2000s were the so-called” Wild West” of website design. Developers at the time were all trying to figure out how to incorporate design and visual connection into the online landscape. What were the laws? How may we break them and also engage, entertain, and present information? At a more micro level, how was my values, inclusive of modesty, admiration, and link, coincide in combination with that? I was looking for information.

Even though I’m referring to a different time, those are amazing factors between non-career relationships and the world of layout. What are your main passions, or ideals, that elevate medium? The main themes remain the same, much like the primary parallels between what fulfills you, who is independent of the physical or digital worlds.

First within tables, animated GIFs, Flash, then with Web Standards, divs, and CSS, there was personality, raw unbridled creativity, and unique means of presentment that often defied any semblance of a visible grid. Splash screens and “browser requirement” pages aplenty. Usability and accessibility were typically victims of such a creation, but such paramount facets of any digital design were largely (and, in hindsight, unfairly) disregarded at the expense of experimentation.

For example, this iteration of my personal portfolio site (” the pseudoroom” ) from that era was experimental, if not a bit heavy- handed, in the visual communication of the concept of a living sketchbook. Very skeuomorphic. This one involved sketching and then passing a Photoshop file back and forth to experiment with various user interactions with fellow designer and dear friend Marc Clancy, who is now a co-founder of the creative project organizing app Milanote. Then, I’d break it down and code it into a digital layout.

Along with design folio pieces, the site also offered free downloads for Mac OS customizations: desktop wallpapers that were effectively design experimentation, custom-designed typefaces, and desktop icons.

From around the same time, GUI Galaxy was a design, pixel art, and Mac-centric news portal some graphic designer friends and I conceived, designed, developed, and deployed.

Design news portals were incredibly popular during this period, featuring ( what would now be considered ) Tweet-size, small-format snippets of pertinent news from the categories I previously mentioned. If you took Twitter, curated it to a few categories, and wrapped it in a custom-branded experience, you’d have a design news portal from the late 90s / early 2000s.

We as designers had evolved and created a bandwidth-sensitive, web standards award-winning, much more accessibility-conscious website. Still ripe with experimentation, yet more mindful of equitable engagement. You can see a couple of content panes here, noting general news (tech, design ) and Mac-centric news below. We also provided many of the custom downloads that I previously mentioned on my folio website with a GUI Galaxy theme and name.

The site’s backbone was a homegrown CMS, with the presentation layer consisting of global design + illustration + news author collaboration. And the collaboration effort here, in addition to experimentation on a’ brand’ and content delivery, was hitting my core. We were creating something bigger than just one of us and establishing a global audience.

Collaboration and connection transcend media in their impact, which have been extremely satisfying for me as a designer.

Now, why am I taking you on this trip through design memory lane? Two reasons.

First, there’s a reason for the nostalgia for that design era ( the” Wild West” era, as I called it earlier ): the inherent exploration, personality, and creativity that saturated many design portals and personal portfolio sites. Ultra-finely detailed pixel art UI, custom illustration, bespoke vector graphics, all underpinned by a strong design community.

Today’s web design has been in a period of stagnation. There’s a good chance you’ve seen a website with a hero image or banner with text overlay ( possibly with a lovely rotating carousel of images ), a call to action, and three columns of sub-content directly beneath. Perhaps there are selections that vaguely relate to their respective content in an icon library.

Design, as it’s applied to the digital landscape, is in dire need of thoughtful layout, typography, and visual engagement that goes hand-in-hand with all the modern considerations we now know are paramount: usability. Accessibility. Load times and bandwidth- sensitive content delivery. A user-friendly presentation that is relevant wherever they are. We must be mindful of, and respectful toward, those concerns—but not at the expense of creativity of visual communication or via replicating cookie-cutter layouts.

Pixel Problems

Websites built during this time period were frequently built using Macs with OS and desktops that resembled this. This is Mac OS 7.5, but 8 and 9 weren’t that different.

Desktop icons fascinated me: how could any single one, at any given point, stand out to get my attention? In this example, the user’s desktop is tidy, but think of a more realistic example with icon pandemonium. Or, say an icon was part of a larger system grouping ( fonts, extensions, control panels ) —how did it also maintain cohesion amongst a group?

These were 32 x 32 pixel creations, utilizing a 256-color palette, designed pixel-by-pixel as mini mosaics. This, in my opinion, was the embodiment of digital visual communication under such absurd constraints. And frequently, ridiculous limitations can lead to the purification of concept and theme.

So I began to research and do my homework. I was a student of this new medium, hungry to dissect, process, discover, and make it my own.

Expanding upon the notion of exploration, I wanted to see how I could push the limits of a 32×32 pixel grid with that 256-color palette. These absurd restrictions imposed a clarity of concept and presentation that I found incredibly appealing. I was thrust into the digital gauntlet because of it. And so, in my dorm room into the wee hours of the morning, I toiled away, bringing conceptual sketches into mini mosaic fruition.

These are some of my creations that made use of ResEdit, the only program I had at the time, to create icons. ResEdit was a clunky, built-in Mac OS utility that wasn’t really designed for what we were using it for. At the core of all of this work: Research. Challenge. Problem- solving. Again, these core connection-based values are agnostic of medium.

I want to talk about one more design portal, which serves as the second component of my story’s fusion.

This is K10k, short for Kaliber 1000. Michael Schmidt and Toke Nygaard founded K10k in 1998, which was the design news website during that time. With its pixel art-fueled presentation, ultra-focused care given to every facet and detail, and with many of the more influential designers of the time who were invited to be news authors on the site, well… it was the place to be, my friend. The concept of GUI Galaxy was inspired by what these people were doing, respect where respect is due.

For my part, the combination of my pixel art and web design work started to gain me some notoriety in the design world. K10k eventually added me as one of their very select group of news writers to the website’s content.

Amongst my personal work and side projects —and now with this inclusion—in the design community, this put me on the map. Additionally, my design work has started to appear on other design news portals, as well as in publications abroad and domestically. With that degree of success while in my early twenties, something else happened:

I evolved—devolved, really—into a colossal asshole ( and in just about a year out of art school, no less ). What satisfied me was the praise and the press, which went on to completely alter my mind. My ego was inflated by them. I actually felt a little better than my fellow designers.

The casualties? My design stagnated. Its evolution—my evolution — stagnated.

I effectively stopped researching and discovering because I felt so confident in my abilities. When I used to lead sketch concepts or iterations as my first instinctive step, I instead leaped right into Photoshop. I drew my inspiration from the tiniest of sources ( and with no discernible bias ). My peers frequently vehemently disapproved of any criticism of my work. The most tragic loss: I had lost touch with my values.

Some of my friendships and blossoming professional relationships almost ended up being destroyed by my ego. I was toxic in talking about design and in collaboration. But thankfully, those same friends gave me a priceless gift: candor. They called me out on my unhealthy behavior.

It’s true, I initially didn’t accept it, but after much reflection, I was able to accept it. I was soon able to accept, and process, and course correct. The realization laid me low, but the re-awakening was essential. I let go of the “reward” of admiration and turned my attention to the issues that had sparked my passion for art school. Most importantly: I got back to my core values.

Always Students

Following that short-term regression, I was able to push forward in my personal design and career. And I was able to reflect on myself as I grew to support further development and course correction as needed.

As an example, let’s talk about the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC was created” to help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, which concern the fundamental laws governing the interactions and forces between the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the interrelation between general relativity and quantum mechanics.” Thanks, Wikipedia.

In one of my earlier professional roles, I about fifteen years ago created the interface for the application that produced the LHC’s particle collision diagrams. These diagrams are often regarded as works of art unto themselves because they depict what is actually happening inside the Collider during any given particle collision event.

I had a fascinating experience designing the interface for this application because I collaborated with Fermilab physicists to understand both how the application was intended to use it and how the physicists themselves would use it. To that end, in this role,

Working with the Fermilab team to iterate and make improvements to the interface, I cut my teeth on usability testing. To me, their language and the topics they discussed seemed foreign. And by making myself humble and operating under the impression that I was just a student, I made myself available to them in order to form that crucial bond.

I also had the opportunity to observe the physicists ‘ use of the tool in their own homes, on their own terminals, during my first ethnographic observation. One takeaway was that the facility’s high level of ambient light-driven contrast ultimately led to the use of white text on a dark gray background rather than black text-on-white. They were able to focus on their eyes while working during the day while poring over enormous amounts of data. Additionally, since Fermilab and CERN are government entities with strict accessibility requirements, my knowledge in that field also expanded. The barrier-free design was another essential form of connection.

So to those core drivers of my visual problem-solving soul and ultimate fulfillment: discovery, exposure to new media, observation, human connection, and evolution. Before I entered those values, I had to check my ego before entering it, which opened the door to those values.

An evergreen willingness to listen, learn, understand, grow, evolve, and connect yields our best work. In particular, I want to focus on the words’ grow’ and ‘ evolve’ in that statement. If we constantly practice our craft, we are also making ourselves more and more adaptable. Yes, we have completed years of design research. Or the focused lab training from a bootcamp for UX. Or the monogrammed portfolio of our work. Or, ultimately, decades of a career behind us.

But all that said: experience does not equal “expert”.

The designer we are is our final form as soon as we close our minds through an inner monologue of “knowing it all” or branding ourselves a” #thoughtleader” on social media. The artist we can be will never be there.

I am a artistic. What I do is alchemy. It is a secret. Instead of letting it get done by me, I do it.

I am a innovative. This tag is not appropriate for all creatives. Not all people see themselves in this manner. Some innovative people practice technology in their work. That is their reality, and I respect it. Sometimes I even envy them, a minor. But my operation is different—my becoming is unique.

Apologizing and qualifying in advance is a diversion. That’s what my mind does to destroy me. I’ll leave it alone for today. I may regret and be qualified at any time. After I’ve said what I should have. Which is challenging enough.

Except when it flows like a wine valley and is simple.

Sometimes it does. Maybe I have to make something right away. When I say something at that time, I’ve learned not to say it because people often don’t work hard enough to acknowledge that the idea is the best idea even when you know it’s the best idea.

Maybe I work and work and work until the thought strikes me. It occasionally arrives right away, but I don’t remind people for three weeks. Sometimes I blurt out the plan so quickly that I didn’t stop myself. like a child who discovered a prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. I occasionally manage to escape this. Maybe other people agree: yes, that is the best plan. Most days they don’t and I regret having given way to joy.

Passion should only be saved for the meet, when it matters. not the informal gathering that two different gatherings precede that meeting. Anyone knows why we have all these sessions. We keep saying we’re going to get rid of them, but we just keep trying to find different ways to get them. They occasionally yet excel. But occasionally they are a hindrance to the real job. The percentages between when conferences are important, and when they are a sad distraction, vary, depending on what you do and where you do it. also who you are and what you do. Suddenly I digress. I am a artistic. That is the design.

Sometimes, despite many hours of diligent effort, someone is hardly useful. Maybe I have to take that and move on to the next task.

Don’t question about method. I am a artistic.

I am a artistic. I don’t handle my goals. And I don’t handle my best tips.

I can nail aside, surround myself with information or photos, and maybe that works. I can go for a walk, and occasionally that functions. There is a Eureka that has nothing to do with sizzling crude and flowing pots. I may be making dinner. I frequently have a sense of direction when I awaken. The idea that may have saved me disappears almost as frequently as I become aware and part of the world once more in a mindless weather of oblivion. For imagination, I believe, comes from that other world. The one we enter in aspirations, and possibly, before conception and after death. But that’s for writers to know, and I am not a writer. I am a artistic. And it’s for philosophers to build massive forces in their imaginative world that they claim to be true. But that is another diversion. And it’s miserable. Possibly on a much bigger issue than whether or not I am creative. But that’s also a step backwards from what I’m trying to say.

Often the process is evasion. And horror. You know the cliché about the abused designer? It’s true, even when the artist ( and let’s put that noun in quotes ) is trying to write a soft drink jingle, a callback in a tired sitcom, a budget request.

Some individuals who detest being called artistic perhaps been closeted artists, but that’s between them and their gods. No offence meant. Your wisdom is correct, too. My needs are own, though.

Creatives understand creatives.

Negatives are aware of cons, just like queers are aware of queers, just like real rappers are aware of true rappers. Creatives feel enormous regard for creatives. We love, respect, emulate, and nearly deify the excellent ones. To revere any man is, of course, a horrible mistake. We have been warned. We know much. We know people are really people. They dispute, they are depressed, they regret their most critical decisions, they are weak and thirsty, they can be cruel, they can be just as terrible as we can, if, like us, they are clay. But. But. However, they produce this incredible point. They give birth to something that may not occur before them and couldn’t exist without. They are thought’s founders. And I suppose, since it’s only lying it, I have to put that they are the mother of technology. Ba ho backside! Okay, that’s done. Continue.

Creatives disparage our personal small successes, because we compare them to those of the wonderful people. Wonderful video! Also, I‘m no Miyazaki. Now THAT is glory. That is brilliance straight out of the mouth of God. This half-starved small item that I made? It essentially fell off the pumpkin vehicle. And the carrots weren’t even new.

Creatives knows that, at best, they are Salieri. That is what Mozart’s artists do, actually.

I am a artistic. I haven’t worked in advertising in 30 times, but in my hallucinations, it’s my former artistic managers who judge me. They are correct in doing so. I am very lazy, overly simplistic, and when it actually counts, my mind goes blank. There is no supplement for innovative function.

I am a innovative. Every project I create has a goal that makes Indiana Jones appear to be a retiree snoring in a deck head. The more I pursue creativity, the faster I can finish my work, and the longer I brood and circle and gaze aimlessly before I can finish that work.

I can move ten times more quickly than those who aren’t creative, those who have just been creative for a short while, and those who have just had a short time of creative work. Only that I work twice as quickly as they do, putting the work away, just before I do it, When I put my mind to it, I am so confident in my ability to do a wonderful career. I am that attached to the excitement scramble of delay. I also have a fear of the climb.

I am not an actor.

I am a artistic. No an actor. Though I dreamed, as a child, of eventually being that. Some of us criticize our abilities and fear our own accomplishments because we are not Michelangelos and Warhols. That is narcissism—but at least we aren’t in elections.

I am a innovative. Though I believe in reason and science, I decide by intelligence and desire. And sit with what follows—the disasters as well as the achievements.

I am a artistic. Every term I’ve said these may offend another artists, who see things differently. Ask two artists a problem, get three ideas. Our dispute, our enthusiasm about it, and our responsibility to our own reality are, at least to me, the facts that we are artists, no matter how we may think about it.

I am a artistic. I lament my lack of taste in the areas of human knowledge that I know quite little, that is to say about everything. And I trust my preference above all other items in the regions closest to my soul, or perhaps, more precisely, to my passions. Without my passions, I’d probably have to spend the majority of our time looking ourselves in the eye, which is something that almost none of us can do for very much. No seriously. No actually. Because many in existence, if you really look at it, is terrible.

I am a artistic. I believe, as a family believes, that when I am gone, some little good part of me will take on in the head of at least one other people.

Working frees me from worrying about my job.

I am a innovative. I fear that my little product will disappear.

I am a innovative. I’m too busy making the next thing to devote too much time to it, especially since practically everything I create did achieve the level of success I conceive of.

I am a artistic. I think that method is the greatest secret. I think it is so important that I’m actually foolish enough to publish an essay I wrote into a little machine without having to go through or edit it. I didn’t do this generally, I promise. But I did it right away because I was even more frightened of forgetting what I was saying because I was afraid of you seeing through my sad movements toward the wonderful.

There. I think I’ve said it.

I’d like you to consider this a “yes … and” piece to complement Joe’s post. I’m no trying to reject any of what he’s saying, but rather to give some context to initiatives and opportunities where AI may produce real, positive impacts on people with disabilities. To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t true threats or pressing problems with AI that need to be addressed—there are, and we’ve needed to address them, like, yesterday—but I want to take a little time to talk about what’s possible in hope that we’ll get there one day.

Other text

Joe’s article spends a lot of time examining how computer vision versions can create other words. He raises a number of legitimate points about the state of affairs right now. And while computer-vision concepts continue to improve in the quality and complexity of information in their information, their benefits aren’t wonderful. He argues to be accurate that the state of image research is currently very poor, especially for some graphic types, in large part due to the lack of context-based analysis that exists in the AI systems ( which is a result of having separate “foundation” models for text analysis and image analysis ). Today’s models aren’t trained to distinguish between images that are contextually relevant ( that should probably have descriptions ) and those that are purely decorative ( which might not need a description ) either. However, I still think there’s possible in this area.

As Joe mentions, human-in-the-loop publishing of alt word should definitely be a factor. And if AI can intervene and provide a starting point for alt text, even if the quick reads,” What is this BS?” That’s certainly correct at all … Let me try to offer a starting point— I think that’s a win.

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

The image example provided in the GPT4 announcement provides an intriguing opportunity, even though complex images like graphs and charts are challenging to summarize succinctly ( even for humans ). Let’s say you came across a map that was simply the name of the table and the type of visualization it was: Pie table comparing smartphone use to have phone use among US households making under$ 30, 000 annually. ( That would be a pretty bad alt text for a chart because it frequently leaves many unanswered questions about the data, but let’s just assume that was the description in place. ) Imagine a world where users could ask questions about the graphic if your browser knew that that image was a pie chart ( because an onboard model concluded this ).

• Do more people use smartphones or other types of smartphones?
• How many more?
• Do you know of any people who don’t fall under either of these categories?
• How many is that?

Setting aside the realities of large language model ( LLM) hallucinations—where a model just makes up plausible-sounding “facts” —for a moment, the opportunity to learn more about images and data in this way could be revolutionary for blind and low-vision folks as well as for people with various forms of color blindness, cognitive disabilities, and so on. It might also be useful in educational settings to assist those who can, as is, comprehend the data contained in these charts.

What if you could ask your browser to make a complicated chart simpler? What if you demanded that the line graph be isolated into just one line? What if you could ask your browser to change the color combinations in your browser so that it works better for your type of color blindness? What if you asked it to switch colors in favor of patterns? Given these tools ‘ chat-based interfaces and our existing ability to manipulate images in today’s AI tools, that seems like a possibility.

Now imagine a specially designed model that could take the data from that chart and convert it to another format. For example, perhaps it could turn that pie chart ( or better yet, a series of pie charts ) into more accessible ( and useful ) formats, like spreadsheets. That would be amazing!

Matching algorithms

When Safiya Umoja Noble chose to put her book Algorithms of Oppression, she hit the nail on the head. Although her book focused on the ways that search engines can foster racism, I believe it’s equally true that all computer models have the potential to foster conflict, prejudice, and intolerance. We all know that poorly designed and maintained algorithms are incredibly harmful, whether it’s Twitter that keeps bringing you the most recent tweet from a drowsy billionaire, YouTube that keeps us in a q-hole, or Instagram that keeps us guessing what natural bodies look like. A large portion of this is a result of a lack of diversity in the people who design and construct them. When these platforms are built with inclusively baked in, however, there’s real potential for algorithm development to help people with disabilities.

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

When more people with disabilities are involved in developing algorithms, this can lower the likelihood that these algorithms will harm their communities. That’s why diverse teams are so important.

Imagine if the social media company’s recommendation engine was tuned to prioritize follow recommendations from people who discussed topics of interest to those who were fundamentally different from your current sphere of influence. For instance, if you were to follow a group of non-disabled white male academics who talk about AI, it might be advisable to follow those who are disabled, aren’t white, or aren’t men who also talk about AI. If you took its recommendations, perhaps you’d get a more holistic and nuanced understanding of what’s happening in the AI field. These same systems should also use their understanding of biases about particular communities—including, for instance, the disability community—to make sure that they aren’t recommending any of their users follow accounts that perpetuate biases against (or, worse, spewing hate toward ) those groups.

Other ways that AI can helps people with disabilities

I’m sure I could go on and on about using AI to assist people with disabilities, but I’m going to make this last section into a bit of a lightning round if I weren’t trying to put this together in between other tasks. In no particular order:

Voice preservation. You may have seen the VALL-E paper or Apple’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day announcement or you may be familiar with the voice-preservation offerings from Microsoft, Acapela, or others. It’s possible to train an artificial intelligence model to mimic your voice, which can be incredibly helpful for those who have ALS ( Lou Gehrig’s disease ), motor neuron disease, or other medical conditions that can make it difficult to talk. This is, of course, the same tech that can also be used to create audio deepfakes, so it’s something that we need to approach responsibly, but the tech has truly transformative potential.
• Voice recognition. Researchers are assisting people with disabilities in the collection of recordings of people with atypical speech, thanks to the assistance of the Speech Accessibility Project. As I type, they are actively recruiting people with Parkinson’s and related conditions, and they have plans to expand this to other conditions as the project progresses. More people with disabilities will be able to use voice assistants, dictation software, and voice-response services as a result of this research, which will result in more inclusive data sets that will enable them to use their computers and other devices more easily and with just their voices.
• Text transformation. The most recent generation of LLMs is quite capable of changing existing text without giving off hallucinations. This is incredibly empowering for those who have cognitive disabilities and who may benefit from text summaries or simplified versions, or even text that has been prepared for Bionic Reading.

The value of various teams and sources of data

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

Want a model that doesn’t demean or patronize or objectify people with disabilities? Make sure that you include information about disabilities that is written by people who have a range of disabilities and that is well represented in the training data.

Want a model that doesn’t use ableist language? You might be able to use already-existing data sets to create a filter that can read ableist language before it is read. That being said, when it comes to sensitivity reading, AI models won’t be replacing human copy editors anytime soon.

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

I have no doubt that AI can and will harm people … today, tomorrow, and well into the future. But I also believe that we can acknowledge that and, with an eye towards accessibility ( and, more broadly, inclusion ), make thoughtful, considerate, and intentional changes in our approaches to AI that will reduce harm over time as well. Today, tomorrow, and well into the future.

Many thanks to Kartik Sawhney for helping me with the development of this piece, Ashley Bischoff for her invaluable editorial assistance, and, of course, Joe Dolson for the prompt.

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

How we got below

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

The 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 language like PHP, Java, and.NET took Perl as the primary back-end computers, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the garbage bin. With these better server-side instruments came the first time of online applications, starting with content-management systems ( especially in the blog space with tools like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress ). AJAX opened the door to sequential connection between the front end and back end in the mid-2000s. Immediately, websites may update their information without needing to refresh. A grain of JavaScript systems, including Prototype, YUI, and jQuery, were created to aid designers in creating more trustworthy client-side interactions across browsers with wildly varying standards support. Techniques like photo alternative enable skilled manufacturers and developers to use fonts of their choosing. And technology like Flash made it possible to include movies, sports, and even more engagement.

These new technology, standards, and approaches reinvigorated the market in many ways. As manufacturers and designers explored more diversified styles and designs, website design flourished. However, we also relied heavily on numerous exploits. When it came to basic layout and text styling, early CSS was a significant improvement over table-based layouts, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still rely heavily on images for complex shapes ( such as rounded or angled corners ) and tiled backgrounds (among other hacks ) for the appearance of full-length columns. All kinds of nested floats or absolute positioning ( or both ) were necessary for complicated layouts. The big five typefaces were initially influenced by display and photo replacement, but both tricks caused accessibility and performance issues. And JavaScript books made it simple for anyone to add a dash of connection to pages, even at the expense of double, also quadrupling, the get size of basic websites.

The internet as application platform

The balance between the front end and the back end continued to improve, leading to the development of the latest web application time. 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 equipment came others, including creative type control, build technology, and shared bundle libraries. What was once mainly used for linked papers turned into a world with limitless possibilities.

At the same time, wireless equipment became more ready, and they gave us online access in our wallets. Mobile applications and flexible style opened up possibilities for new contacts anytime, anywhere.

This fusion of potent portable devices and potent development resources contributed to the growth of social media and various consolidated tools for user interaction and consumption. As it became easier and more popular to interact with others immediately on Twitter, Facebook, and yet Slack, the need for held private websites waned. Social media provided relationships on a global level, with both the positive and negative effects.

Want a much more thorough story of how we came to be around as well as some other perspectives on how we can get better? ” Of Time and the Web” was written by Jeremy Keith. Or check out the” Web Design History Timeline” at the Web Design Museum. A joy visit through” Internet Artifacts” is also provided by Neal Agarwal.

Where we are now

In the last couple of years, it’s felt like we’ve begun to achieve another big tone level. As social-media programs bone and fade, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own articles again. From the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators and content management systems of all kinds, there are many different ways to create websites. We lose essential infrastructure for discovery and connection because of social media’s fracture, which also comes with a price. 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 create incredible personal websites and update them frequently, but without discovery and connection, it can feel as though we could as well be yelling into the void.

Browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other standards like web components has accelerated, especially through efforts like Interop. In a fraction of the time that they once did, new technologies gain universal support. I frequently find out about a new feature and check its browser support only to discover that its coverage has already exceeded 80 %. The barrier to using more recent techniques isn’t browser support anymore; it’s more often the speed at which 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. With all the tools we currently have, it is simpler than ever to launch a new venture. However, the upfront cost these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes down as the maintenance and upgrading they become a part of our technical debt.

Adopting new standards can sometimes take longer if we rely on third-party frameworks because we might have to wait for those frameworks to adopt them. These frameworks—which used to let us adopt new techniques sooner—have now become hindrances instead. Users must wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages, as these same frameworks frequently come with performance costs as well. 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 refuse to acknowledge that they are hacks or when we choose not to replace them. What can we do to create the web’s future that we desire?

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 right now, but how do they affect everything else? What’s the cost to users? To future developers? To standards adoption? The convenience may be worthwhile at times. It’s occasionally just a hack that you’ve gotten used to. And occasionally, it prevents you from pursuing better options.

Start from standards. Standards change over time, but browsers have done a remarkably good job of staying current with outdated standards. The same isn’t always true of third-party frameworks. Even the most heinous of HTML from the 1990s still function perfectly today. Even after a few years, the same can’t be said about websites created with frameworks.

Design with care. Whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes, consider the impacts of each decision. Many modern tools have the convenience of making the necessary decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the effects those decisions can have. Use the time saved by modern tools to consider more carefully and design with consideration rather than rush to “move fast and break things”

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. Even if you were to concentrate solely on learning standards, you might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year. ( Remember XHTML? ) However, ongoing learning opens up new connections in your brain, and the techniques you learn in one day may be used to guide different experiments in the future.

Play, experiment, and be weird! This web that we’ve built is the ultimate experiment. Despite being the largest human endeavor in human history, each of us has the ability to make their own money there. Be courageous and try new things. Build a playground for ideas. Create absurd experiments in your own crazy 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 something that 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.

Picture this. You’ve joined a squad at your company that’s designing new product features with an emphasis on automation or AI. Or your company has just implemented a personalization engine. Either way, you’re designing with data. Now what? When it comes to designing for personalization, there are many cautionary tales, no overnight successes, and few guides for the perplexed. 

Between the fantasy of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong—like when we encounter “persofails” in the vein of a company repeatedly imploring everyday consumers to buy additional toilet seats—the personalization gap is real. It’s an especially confounding place to be a digital professional without a map, a compass, or a plan.

For those of you venturing into personalization, there’s no Lonely Planet and few tour guides because effective personalization is so specific to each organization’s talent, technology, and market position. 

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:

1. 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. .
2. 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.
3. 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.

Weekend Favs February 22nd written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week. I don’t go into depth about the finds, but I encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online […]

The 7 Roles Every Small Business Owner Must Master (and How to Manage Them All) written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I discussed the many hats small business owners wear and how to manage them effectively. Running a business often feels like spinning plates—balancing leadership, sales, client management, and more. Without the right systems in place, entrepreneurs can quickly become overwhelmed.

I broke down the seven essential roles every small business owner must master and shared practical strategies for streamlining operations, leveraging automation tools, and using business delegation to scale efficiently. From marketing strategy to project management, these insights help entrepreneurs focus on business growth while reducing day-to-day chaos.

Mastering these small business management roles is key to scaling a business without burnout. By delegating, automating, and focusing on core priorities, entrepreneurs can build a more sustainable and profitable business.

Key Takeaways:

• CEO Vision: Small business owners must take time to plan long-term goals and growth strategies to avoid getting stuck in daily tasks.
• Sales & Marketing: Consistently generating leads and automating follow-ups ensures a steady pipeline of clients.
• Strategic Planning: A repeatable marketing strategy helps differentiate your business and deliver measurable results.
• Project & Client Management: Using productivity tools for entrepreneurs like Monday or Asana simplifies workflow and client communication.
• Finance & Accounting: Outsourcing bookkeeping frees up time and ensures financial stability.
• Time Management & Delegation: Leveraging virtual assistants for business and outsourcing for small businesses reduces workload while improving efficiency.
• Automation & AI: Sales automation and business process automation help small business owners scale without increasing workload.

Chapters:

[00:26] Juggling Multiple Roles
[04:38] The CEO Role
[05:37] The Sales Person Role
[07:09] The Strategist Role
[08:46] The Project Manager Role
[09:49] The Marketing Role
[12:59] The Client Manager Role
[13:56] The 4-Prong Approach

Dope Women is not your grandmother’s historical play (unless of course, your aunt has lived a existence, has good style in TV, and frankly, could do with a bit more value and a bit less disdain from people assuming that she won’t be able to see anything that isn’t presented by Alan Titchmarsh ). To try ]… ]

The post Dope Girls Cast: Meet the 1920s-Set BBC Drama’s Characters appeared first on Den of Geek.

Dope Girls is not your grandma’s historical drama (unless of course, your grandma has lived a life, has good taste in TV, and frankly, could do with a bit more respect and a bit less condescension from people assuming that she won’t be able to watch anything that isn’t presented by Alan Titchmarsh ).

To try again then, Dope Girls is no Downton Abbey. It might be set in the same time period, but this tale of Soho women dancing with danger, death and well, other dancers in the nightclubs where they work is a world away from the genteel intrigues of the Earl of Grantham.

With a cast including actors from the US, Australia and the UK, here’s who’s playing who in BBC One’s new Saturday night series.

Eliza Scanlen as Violet Davies

Violet is a new recruit to the Metropolitan police service hoping to be chosen for &#8220, The Female Experiment&#8221, in which women were first made officers in the UK. She&#8217, s tough, alone and has nothing to lose, which makes her a dangerous prospect.

She’s played by Australian actor Eliza Scanlen, whose breakout roles came in HBO’s 2018 adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, and in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 feature film Little Women, in which Scanlen played second-to-youngest March sister Beth. She’s recently appeared opposite Doctor Who‘s Ncuti Gatwa in this year’s National Theatre production of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Julianne Nicholson as Kate Galloway

Kate is cruelly forced to find her own way after she loses her job, and has to go to extreme lengths to provide a living for her and her teenage daughter Evie, a clever girl with the potential to be among the first women in the UK to go to university.

She’s played by US actor Julianne Nicholson, who’s currently appearing as the wealthy Sinatra in Disney/Hulu political thriller Paradise ( which has just been renewed for a second season ). She’s known for Law &amp, Order, The Outsider, having played Esther in Boardwalk Empire, Lillian in Masters of Sex and Lorri in the first season of Kate Winslet-starring crime drama Mare of Easttown.

Umi Myers as Billie Cassidy

Billie is a Soho nightclub dancer who lives a bohemian, drink and drug-fuelled lifestyle with her singer friend Eddie Cobb. She’s played by Umi Myers, a recent graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, with previous stage parts and an appearance in Bob Marley: One Love. Dope Girls is Myers ‘ first television lead role.

Geraldine James as Isabella Salucci

The matriarch of the fearsome Salucci crime family, Isabella is a ruthless survivor who&#8217, s held her clan together through the War and much more. She’s played by Geraldine James, a familiar face on screen and stage who’s had a long and healthy career going back to the late 1970s. To some TV viewers, she’ll always be indivisible from the part of Sarah in The Jewel in the Crown, to others, she’ll be best recognised as Rose from Band of Gold, Milner in Channel 4’s Utopia, Mrs Hudson in the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films, and Marissa in Anne With an E, to name just a few.

Dustin Demri-Burns as Damaso Salucci

A Salucci son, Damaso is a member of a powerful Soho crime family, and has a terrifying brutal side. He’s played by Dustin Demri-Burns, who’s well known for comedy roles in Cardinal Burns, Stath Lets Flats, GameFace and Am I Being Unreasonable?, but has an equally healthy career in dramas with a comedic edge from The Great to Slow Horses, Britannia, Sweetpea and The Decameron.

Ian Bonar as Sgt Frank Turner

Sgt Turner is helping to run The Female Experiment, which saw the UK&#8217, s first female police officers. He&#8217, s a complicated man who does n&#8217, t wield his power well, and makes an early enemy of Violet. He’s played by Ian Bonar, who recently appeared opposite Peter Capaldi in Apple TV +’s Criminal Record, as well as roles across various TV genres, from I May Destroy You to New Blood, Vera and many more.

Fiona Button as Sophie Asquith-Gore

The wife of a wealthy and important government minister, and the mother to Evie&#8217, s friend Alice, Sophie is grieving the brother she lost in the war, and thinks that she can still speak to him via a medium. She’s played by actor-director Fiona Button, who’s known for the role of Rose Defoe in Abi Morgan’s legal drama The Split, and was recently seen as Denise in series three of Industry, as well as in Grantchester, Out of Her Mind, and plenty of theatre productions.

Nabhaan Rizwan as Silas Huxley

Medium and occultist Silus Huxley takes money from the wealthy to help them contact their dead. He’s played by Nabhaan Rizwan, who recently played Dionysus in Netflix’s KAOS, as well as appearing opposite his brother Mawaan Rizwan in his sitcom Juice, and in the US playing Frank in Station Eleven, after his breakout role in 2018’s BBC crime drama Informer.

Will Keen as Frederick Asquith-Gore

A powerful government minister who&#8217, s set on rooting out the rot in London &#8217, s seedy nightclubs, Frederick Asquith-Gore is played by screen and stage actor Will Keen ( incidentally, the father of Logan and His Dark Materials ‘ Dafne Keen ), who recently appeared in BBC drama Wolf Hall as Thomas Cranmer, as well as playing Lord Belzagar in the second season of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Norfolk in My Lady Jane, the Queen’s private secretary in The Crown, and David in Ridley Road, as well as appearing in feature film Operation Mincemeat and more.

ALSO APPEARING

&#8211, Musical stage and screen actor Michael Duke as nightclub singer Eddie Cobb.
– The Outrun and The Power‘s Eilidh Fisher as Kate’s daughter Evie Galloway.
– The Bay, The Reckoning, True Detective and Strike‘s Eloise Thomas as Evie’s schoolfriend Alice Asquith-Gore.
– The Sixth Commandment‘s, Ghosts‘ and Lead Balloon‘s Anna Crilly as butcher Anne Sanders.
– Bridgerton and The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself‘s Priya Kansara as nightclub dancer Lily Lee.
– Heartstopper‘s Ben Hope, aka Sebastian Croft as nightclub owner Silvio Salucci.
– The Newsreader and The Inheritance‘s Rory Fleck Byrne as returned soldier Luca Salucci.

Dope Girls airs on BBC One and streams on BBC iPlayer.

The post Dope Girls Cast: Meet the 1920s-Set BBC Drama&#8217, s Characters appeared first on Den of Geek.