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CSS is all about appearance containers. In fact, the whole website is made of containers, from the website viewport to components on a webpage. However, there are times when we have a fresh element that forces us to reevaluate our design strategy.

Square features, for instance, make it fun to play with round picture areas. Mobile screen notches and electronic keyboards present difficulties in how to best manage content that stays out of reach. And two display or portable devices make us reassess how to best utilize available space in a number of various device postures.

These new evolutions of the internet system made it both more demanding and more exciting to design products. They’re fantastic options for us to leave our triangular containers.

I’d like to talk about a new feature similar to the above: the Window Controls Overlay for Progressive Web Apps ( PWAs ).

Democratic Web Apps are bridging the gap between websites and apps. They combine the best of both worlds. On the one hand, they are flexible, relatable, and stable, just like websites. On the other hand, they provide more effective features, work online, and read documents just like local apps.

PWAs are really exciting as a style area because they challenge us to consider how blending online and device-native customer interfaces may be. On desktop products in certain, we have more than 40 years of history telling us what applications may look like, and it can be hard to break out of this mental concept.

PWAs on desktop are ultimately limited to the window they appear in, which is a rectangle with a title bar at the top.

Here’s what a typical desktop PWA app looks like:

Sure, as the author of a PWA, you get to choose the color of the title bar (using the Web Application Manifest theme_color property ), but that’s about it.

What if we could think differently and reclaim the entire window of the app? Doing so would give us a chance to make our apps more beautiful and feel more integrated in the operating system.

The Window Controls Overlay offers exactly this. This new PWA functionality makes it possible to take advantage of the full surface area of the app, including where the title bar normally appears.

About the window and title bar controls

Let’s start with an explanation of what the title bar and window controls are.

The title bar is the window at the top of an app that typically contains the app’s name. Window controls are the affordances, or buttons, that make it possible to minimize, maximize, or close the app’s window, and are also displayed at the top.

Window Controls Overlay removes the physical constraint of the title bar and window controls areas. The title bar and window control buttons are overlayed on top of the application’s web content, allowing for full height to be the app window.

If you are reading this article on a desktop computer, take a quick look at other apps. They’re probably already doing something similar. In fact, the very web browser you are using to read this uses the top area to display tabs.

Spotify displays album artwork all the way to the top edge of the application window.

Microsoft Word uses the available title bar space to display the auto-save and search functionalities, and more.

The goal of this feature is to give you the ability to use this space with your own content while also providing a way to account for the window control buttons. And it enables you to offer this modified experience on a range of platforms while not adversely affecting the experience on browsers or devices that don’t support Window Controls Overlay. PWAs are all about progressive enhancement, so this feature offers a chance to make the most of this additional space available.

Let’s use the feature

We’ll be working on a demo app for the remainder of this article to learn more about how to use the feature.

The demo app is called 1DIV. Users can create designs using CSS and a single HTML element in a simple CSS playground.

The app has two pages. The first lists your existing CSS designs:

You can edit and create CSS designs on the second page:

Since I’ve added a simple web manifest and service worker, we can install the app as a PWA on desktop. What it appears to be on macOS is shown below:

And on Windows:

Our app looks good, but the first page’s white title bar is a waste of space. In the second page, it would be really nice if the design area went all the way to the top of the app window.

Let’s use the Window Controls Overlay feature to make this better.

Enabling Window Controls Overlay

The concept is still being developed at the moment. To try it, you need to enable it in one of the supported browsers.

It has currently been implemented in Chromium as a result of a collaboration between Microsoft and Google. We can therefore use it in Chrome or Edge by going to the internal about: //flags page, and enabling the Desktop PWA Window Controls Overlay flag.

Using the overlay of window controls

To use the feature, we need to add the following display_override member to our web app’s manifest file:

{ "name": "1DIV", "description": "1DIV is a mini CSS playground", "lang": "en-US", "start_url": "/", "theme_color": "#ffffff", "background_color": "#ffffff", "display_override": [ "window-controls-overlay" ], "icons": [ ... ]}

On the surface, the feature seems to be very simple to use. This manifest change is the only thing we need to make the title bar disappear and turn the window controls into an overlay.

We’ll need some CSS and JavaScript code to make the most of the title bar area in our design and ensure that all users have a great experience regardless of device or browser.

Here is what the app looks like now:

Our logo, search field, and NEW button are now partially covered by the window controls, but the title bar has been removed, which is what we wanted.

It’s similar on Windows, with the difference that the close, maximize, and minimize buttons appear on the right side, grouped together with the PWA control buttons:

CSS to stay away from window controls

Along with the feature, new CSS environment variables have been introduced:

• titlebar-area-x
• titlebar-area-y
• titlebar-area-width
• titlebar-area-height

You can use these variables in conjunction with the CSS env function to position your content where the title bar would have been and make sure it doesn’t overlap with the window controls. In our case, we’ll use two of the variables to position our header, which contains the logo, search bar, and NEW button.

header { position: absolute; left: env(titlebar-area-x, 0); width: env(titlebar-area-width, 100%); height: var(--toolbar-height);}

The titlebar-area-x variable gives us the distance from the left of the viewport to where the title bar would appear, and titlebar-area-width is its width. (Remember, this is not equivalent to the width of the entire viewport, just the title bar portion, which as noted earlier, doesn’t include the window controls.)

By doing this, we make sure our content remains fully visible. We’re also defining fallback values (the second parameter in the env() function) for when the variables are not defined (such as on non-supporting browsers, or when the Windows Control Overlay feature is disabled).

Our header now adapts to its surroundings, and it doesn’t seem like there are any afterthoughts to the window control buttons. The app looks a lot more like a native app.

changing the window’s background color allows it to blend in.

Now let’s take a closer look at our second page: the CSS playground editor.

Not very good. Our CSS demo area does go all the way to the top, which is what we wanted, but the way the window controls appear as white rectangles on top of it is quite jarring.

We can change the theme color of the app to fix this. There are a couple of ways to define it:

PWAs can use the theme_color manifest member to define a theme color in the web app manifest file. This color is then used by the OS in different ways. It serves as a background color for the title bar and window controls on desktop computers.
• Websites can use the theme-color meta tag as well. It’s used by browsers to customize the color of the UI around the web page. For PWAs, this color can override the manifest theme_color.

In our case, we can set the manifest theme_color to white to provide the right default color for our app. The OS will read this color value when the app is installed and use it to make the window controls background color white. This color works great for our main page with the list of demos.

The theme-color meta tag can be changed at runtime, using JavaScript. So we can do that to override the white with the right demo background color when one is opened.

Here is the function we’ll use:

function themeWindow(bgColor) { document.querySelector("meta[name=theme-color]").setAttribute('content', bgColor);}

With this in place, we can envision how using color and CSS transitions can smooth transition from the list page to the demo page and make the window control buttons blend in with the rest of the app’s interface.

Dragging the window

Now, getting rid of the title bar entirely does have an important accessibility consequence: it’s much more difficult to move the application window around.

Users can use the Window Controls Overlay feature to move the window, but this area becomes limited to where the control buttons are, and they must very precisely aim between these buttons to move the window. However, the title bar offers a sizable area for users to click and drag.

Fortunately, this can be fixed using CSS with the app-region property. This property is, for now, only supported in Chromium-based browsers and needs the -webkit- vendor prefix. 

To make any element of the app become a dragging target for the window, we can use the following:

-webkit-app-region: drag;

Additionally, it is possible to specify explicitly that an element be non-draggable:

-webkit-app-region: no-drag; 

These options can be useful for us. We can make the entire header a dragging target while also making the NEW button and search field non-draggable so they can still be used as normal.

However, because the editor page doesn’t display the header, users wouldn’t be able to drag the window while editing code. Let’s take a different approach, then. We’ll create another element before our header, also absolutely positioned, and dedicated to dragging the window.

...

.drag { position: absolute; top: 0; width: 100%; height: env(titlebar-area-height, 0); -webkit-app-region: drag;}

With the above code, we’re making the draggable area span the entire viewport width, and using the titlebar-area-height variable to make it as tall as what the title bar would have been. This way, our draggable area is aligned with the window control buttons as shown below.

And now, to make sure our search field and button are usable:

header .search,header .new { -webkit-app-region: no-drag;}

With the above code, users can click and drag where the title bar used to be. Users are expecting to be able to move windows on their desktops, and we are not breaking this expectation, which is good.

Adapting to window resizing

It may be useful for an app to know both whether the window controls overlay is visible and when its size changes. In our situation, there won’t be enough room for the search field, logo, and button to fit because the user made the window very narrow. We would need to lower them a little.

The Window Controls Overlay feature comes with a JavaScript API we can use to do this: navigator.windowControlsOverlay.

The API offers three intriguing features:

• navigator.windowControlsOverlay.visiblelets us know whether the overlay is visible.
• navigator.windowControlsOverlay.getBoundingClientRect()lets us know where the title bar’s area is located and how big it is.
• navigator.windowControlsOverlay.ongeometrychangelets us know when the size or visibility changes.

Use this to check the size of the title bar area and lower the header if necessary.

if (navigator.windowControlsOverlay) { navigator.windowControlsOverlay.addEventListener('geometrychange', () => { const { width } = navigator.windowControlsOverlay.getBoundingClientRect(); document.body.classList.toggle('narrow', width < 250); });}

In the example above, we set the narrow class on the body of the app if the title bar area is narrower than 250px. We could do something similar with a media query, but using the windowControlsOverlay API has two advantages for our use case:

• It’s only fired when the feature is supported and used, we don’t want to adapt the design otherwise.
• We can see the title bar area on different operating systems, which is great because Mac and Windows have different title bar sizes. Using a media query wouldn’t make it possible for us to know exactly how much space remains.

.narrow header { top: env(titlebar-area-height, 0); left: 0; width: 100%;}

When the window is too small, we can move the header down using the above CSS code to avoid hitting the window control buttons, and we can also lower the thumbnails accordingly.

Thirty pixel of creative challenge

Using the Window Controls Overlay feature, we were able to take our simple demo app and turn it into something that feels so much more integrated on desktop devices. Something that transcends the typical window restrictions and offers a user with a unique experience.

In reality, this feature only gives us about 30 pixels of extra room and comes with challenges on how to deal with the window controls. However, these additional space and those difficulties can also serve as creative outlet for creative work.

More devices of all shapes and forms get invented all the time, and the web keeps on evolving to adapt to them. To make it easier for us, web authors, to integrate more and more deeply with those devices, new features are added to the web platform. From watches or foldable devices to desktop computers, we need to evolve our design approach for the web. Nowadays, web building enables us to think outside the rectangular box.

So let’s embrace this. Use the common technologies at our disposal and experiment with new concepts to create personalized experiences for all devices using just one codebase!

If you get a chance to try the Window Controls Overlay feature and have feedback about it, you can open issues on the spec’s repository. You can help make this feature even better because it’s still in its early stages of development. Or, you can take a look at the feature’s existing documentation, or this demo app and its source code.

However, we’re still very far from this best.

At the time, I didn’t realize yet how to functionally combine morality. Yes, I had found some tools that had worked for me in past projects, such as using checklists, notion monitoring, and “dark truth” sessions, but I didn’t manage to use those in every task. I was still battling for time and support, and I only managed to get a good deal of a higher ( moral ) design quality, which is not what I would consider to be structurally integrated.

I made a deeper investigation into the causes of business failure that prevent us from practicing social design every day. Today, after much research and experimentation, I believe that I’ve found the code that will let us functionally combine morality. And it’s unexpectedly easy! However, we must first focus out to understand what we’re up against.

Control the structure

Unfortunately, we’re trapped in a capitalist structure that reinforces materialism and inequality, and it’s obsessed with the dream of infinite growth. Sea levels, temperature, and our demand for energy continue to rise unquestioned, while the divide between rich and poor continues to increase. Owners expect ever-higher returns on their investments, and firms feel forced to set short-term goals that reflect this. Over the last years, those goals have twisted our well-intended human-centered mentality into a powerful system that promotes ever-higher levels of consumption. When we’re working for an organization that pursues “double-digit growth” or “aggressive sales targets” ( which is 99 percent of us ), that’s very hard to resist while remaining human friendly. Yet with our best intentions, and even though we like to suggest that we create solutions for people, we’re a part of the problem.

What can we do to alter this?

We can begin by acting in the appropriate program level. Donella H. Meadows, a system scholar, previously listed ways to influence a system in order of success. When you apply these to architecture, you get:

At the lowest level of effectiveness, you can change numbers such as accessibility results or the number of layout views. None of that will, however, alter a company’s direction.
• Similarly, affecting buffers ( such as team budgets ), stocks ( such as the number of designers ), flows ( such as the number of new hires ), and delays ( such as the time that it takes to hear about the effect of design ) won’t significantly affect a company.
• Focusing instead on feedback loops such as management control, employee recognition, or design-system investments can help a company become better at achieving its objectives. But that doesn’t change the objectives themselves, which means that the organization will still work against your ethical-design ideals.
• The next level, information flows, is what most ethical-design initiatives focus on now: the exchange of ethical methods, toolkits, articles, conferences, workshops, and so on. Ethics design has largely remained theoretical in this area. We’ve been focusing all of this time on the wrong system level.
• Take rules, for example—they beat knowledge every time. There can be widely accepted rules, such as how finance works, or a scrum team’s definition of done. However, unofficial rules intended to maintain profits, frequently revealed through comments like” the client didn’t ask for it” or “don’t make it too big” can smother ethical design.
• It is difficult to change the laws without exercising official authority. That’s why the next level is so influential: self-organization. Experimentation, bottom-up initiatives, passion projects, self-steering teams—all of these are examples of self-organization that improve the resilience and creativity of a company. It’s exactly this diversity of viewpoints that’s needed to structurally tackle big systemic issues like consumerism, wealth inequality, and climate change.
• Yet even stronger than self-organization are objectives and metrics. Every employee of our businesses works hard to increase their profits, which is why everything we do is done. And once I realized that profit is merely a measure, I realized how crucial a very specific, defined metric can be in the direction of a company.

The takeaway? We must first change the company’s measurable goals from the bottom up if we truly want to incorporate ethics into our daily design practice.

Redefine success

Traditionally, we consider a product or service successful if it’s desirable to humans, technologically feasible, and financially viable. You tend to see these represented as equals, if you type the three words in a search engine, you’ll find diagrams of three equally sized, evenly arranged circles.

But in our hearts, we all know that the three dimensions aren’t equally weighted: it’s viability that ultimately controls whether a product will go live. Therefore, this might be a more accurate representation:

Viability is the aim, while feasibility and desire are the means. Companies—outside of nonprofits and charities—exist to make money.

A genuinely purpose-driven company would try to reverse this dynamic: it would recognize finance for what it was intended for: a means. Therefore, both feasibility and viability are important factors in the company’s efforts to accomplish what they stated. It makes intuitive sense: to achieve most anything, you need resources, people, and money. ( Fun fact: the Italian language knows no difference between feasibility and viability, both are simply fattibilità. )

However, it is insufficient to substitute a desirable for a viable outcome for an ethical one. Consumption is still associated with desirability because the associated activities aim to determine what people want, regardless of whether or not it benefits them. Desirability objectives, such as user satisfaction or conversion, don’t consider whether a product is healthy for people. They don’t stop us from influencing or deceiving others, or prevent us from reducing society’s wealth inequality. They are unsuitable for striking a healthy balance with the natural world.

There’s a fourth dimension of success that’s missing: our designs also need to be ethical in the effect that they have on the world.

This is hardly a new idea. Many similar models exist, some calling the fourth dimension accountability, integrity, or responsibility. What I’ve never seen before, however, is the necessary step that comes after: to influence the system as designers and to make ethical design more practical, we must create objectives for ethical design that are achievable and inspirational. There’s no one way to do this because it highly depends on your culture, values, and industry. However, I’ll share the version I created with a group of design agency coworkers. Consider it a template to get started.

Pursue well-being, equity, and sustainability

We created objectives that address design’s effect on three levels: individual, societal, and global.

An objective on a personal level teaches us that success transcends the typical area of user experience and satisfaction, taking into account factors like how much time and effort are required of users. We pursued well-being:

We create products and services that allow for people’s health and happiness. Our solutions are calm, transparent, nonaddictive, and nonmisleading. We respect our users ‘ time, attention, and privacy, and help them make healthy and respectful choices.

An objective on the societal level forces us to consider our impact beyond just the user, widening our attention to the economy, communities, and other indirect stakeholders. We called this objective equity:

We develop goods and services that benefit society. We consider economic equality, racial justice, and the inclusivity and diversity of people as teams, users, and customer segments. We listen to local culture, communities, and those we affect.

Finally, the global goal on the global level aims to keep us in harmony with our only true home, humanity. Referring to it simply as sustainability, our definition was:

We develop goods and services that reward reuse and sufficiency. Our solutions support the circular economy: we create value from waste, repurpose products, and prioritize sustainable choices. We deliver functionality instead of ownership, and we limit energy use.

In essence, ethical design ( to us ) meant achieving the wellbeing of each user and an equitable value distribution within society through a design that can sustain our living planet. When we introduced these objectives in the company, for many colleagues, design ethics and responsible design suddenly became tangible and achievable through practical—and even familiar—actions.

Measure impact

But defining these objectives still isn’t enough. What truly caught the attention of senior management was the fact that we created a way to measure every design project’s well-being, equity, and sustainability.

This overview lists example metrics that you can use as you pursue well-being, equity, and sustainability:

There’s a lot of power in measurement. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets done. This example was once provided by Donella Meadows:

The system will produce military spending if the desired system state is national security, which is defined as the amount of money spent on the military. It may or may not produce national security”.

This phenomenon explains why desirability is a poor indicator of success: it’s typically defined as the increase in customer satisfaction, session length, frequency of use, conversion rate, churn rate, download rate, and so on. But none of these metrics increase the health of people, communities, or ecosystems. What if instead we measured success through metrics for ( digital ) well-being, such as ( reduced ) screen time or software energy consumption?

There’s another important message here. Even if we set an objective to build a calm interface, if we were to choose the wrong metric for calmness—say, the number of interface elements—we could still end up with a screen that induces anxiety. The wrong metric can completely derail good intentions when chosen.

Additionally, choosing the right metric is enormously helpful in focusing the design team. When you perform the task of selecting metrics for our goals, you are made to consider what success looks like in terms of words and how you can demonstrate that you have met your ethical goals. It also makes you think about what we as designers have control over: what can I add or change in my design process to achieve the desired level of success? The response to this query provides a lot of insight and clarity.

And finally, it’s good to remember that traditional businesses run on measurements, and managers love to spend much time discussing charts ( ideally hockey-stick shaped ) —especially if they concern profit, the one-above-all of metrics. For good or ill, to improve the system, to have a serious discussion about ethical design with managers, we’ll need to speak that business language.

Practice daily ethical design

Only then do you have a chance to structurally practice ethical design once you have defined your objectives and have a reasonable idea of the potential metrics for your design project. Making the decision to” simply” use your imagination and pick one of the many resources and knowledge resources at your disposal.

I think this is quite exciting! It introduces a whole new set of difficulties and considerations for the design process. Would a brief illustration suffice, or should you go with that enticing video? Which typeface is the most calm and inclusive? What brand-new equipment and techniques do you employ? When is the website’s end of life? How can you offer the same service while giving users less time to think about it? How can you ensure that those who are impacted by decisions are present when they are made? How can you measure our effects?

What doing good design means will be completely altered by the new definition of success.

There is, however, a final piece of the puzzle that’s missing: convincing your client, product owner, or manager to be mindful of well-being, equity, and sustainability. For this, it’s essential to engage stakeholders in a dedicated kickoff session.

Kick it off or return to the pre-existing situation.

The most crucial meeting that it is so easy to forget to include is the kickoff. It consists of two major phases: 1 ) the alignment of expectations, and 2 ) the definition of success.

In the first phase, the entire ( design ) team goes over the project brief and meets with all the relevant stakeholders. Everyone gets to know one another, shares their hopes for the outcome and their contributions to it. Assumptions are raised and discussed. The goal is to reach the same level of understanding, which will help to prevent mistakes and surprises later on in the project.

For example, for a recent freelance project that aimed to design a digital platform that facilitates US student advisors ‘ documentation and communication, we conducted an online kickoff with the client, a subject-matter expert, and two other designers. We used a combination of canvases on Miro: one with questions from” Manual of Me” ( to get to know each other ), a Team Canvas ( to express expectations ), and a version of the Project Canvas to align on scope, timeline, and other practical matters.

The stated purpose of a kickoff is the above. But just as important as expressing expectations is agreeing on what success means for the project—in terms of desirability, viability, feasibility, and ethics. What are the objectives in each dimension?

It’s crucial to reach an understanding of what success means at this early stage because you can depend on it for the duration of the project. The design team can use diversity as a specific success factor during the kickoff if they want to create an inclusive app for a diverse user base, for instance. The team can follow-up on that promise throughout the project if the client consents. To create a successful product, we agreed in our first meeting that a diverse user group that includes A and B is necessary. Therefore, we conduct activity X and follow the research procedure Y. Compare those odds to a situation where the team had to ask for permission halfway through the project and didn’t agree to it in advance. The client might argue that that was in excess of the agreed scope, and she would be correct.

To define success, I created a round canvas that I call the Wheel of Success in the case of this freelance project. It consists of an inner ring, meant to capture ideas for objectives, and a set of outer rings, meant to capture ideas on how to measure those objectives. The rings are divided into five dimensions of successful design: healthy, equitable, sustainable, desirable, feasible, and viable.

We went through each dimension, writing down ideas on digital sticky notes. Then we exchanged ideas and verbally agreed on the most crucial ones. Our client, for instance, agreed that the platform’s success depends heavily on sustainability and progressive enhancement. Additionally, the subject-matter expert stressed the importance of including students from underprivileged and low-income groups in the design process.

In a project brief that adequately described these elements, we followed up our discussions and agreed on them.

the project’s origin and purpose: why are we doing this project?
• the problem definition: what do we want to solve?
• the concrete goals and metrics for each success dimension: what do we want to achieve?
• the scope, process, and role descriptions: how will we achieve it?

With such a brief in place, you can use the agreed-upon objectives and concrete metrics as a checklist of success, and your design team will be ready to pursue the right objective—using the tools, methods, and metrics at their disposal to achieve ethical outcomes.

Conclusion

Over the past year, quite a few colleagues have asked me,” Where do I start with ethical design”? My response has always been the same: hold a meeting with your stakeholders to ( re)define success. Even though you might not always be entirely successful in coming to terms with goals that address all responsibility objectives, that consistently beats the status quo. If you want to be an ethical, responsible designer, there’s no skipping this step.

To be even more specific: if you consider yourself a strategic designer, your challenge is to define ethical objectives, set the right metrics, and conduct those kick-off sessions. If you think of yourself as a system designer, you need to understand how your industry influences consumerism and inequality, how finance drives business, and how to think creatively about how to use the most powerful tools to influence the system. Then redefine success to give people the ability to use those resources.

And for those who identify as service designers, UX designers, or UI designers, stay away from toolkits, meetups, and conferences for a while if you truly want to have a positive, meaningful impact. Instead, gather your colleagues and define goals for well-being, equity, and sustainability through design. Engage your stakeholders in a workshop to find ways to accomplish and evaluate those ethical objectives. Take their input, make it concrete and visible, ask for their agreement, and hold them to it.

Otherwise, I’m genuinely sorry to say, you’re wasting your precious time and creative energy.

Of course, engaging your stakeholders in this way can be uncomfortable. Many of my colleagues expressed doubts such as” What will the client think of this”?,” Will they take me seriously”?, and “Can’t we just do it within the design team instead”? In fact, a product manager once questioned why ethics couldn’t just be a set process in design; to simply do it without making the effort to define ethical goals. It’s a tempting idea, right? We wouldn’t need to engage in contentious discussions with stakeholders about what values or which key-performance indicators to use. It would let us focus on what we like and do best: designing.

But as systems theory tells us, that’s not enough. For those of us who aren’t from marginalized groups and have the privilege of speaking up and being heard, that uncomfortable space is where we need to be if we truly want to make a difference. We can’t remain within the design-for-designers bubble, enjoying our privileged working-from-home situation, disconnected from the real world out there. If we only keep talking about ethical design and it continues to be contained within articles and toolkits, for those of us who have the opportunity to speak up and be heard, we are not designing ethically. It’s just theory. By challenging them to redefine success in business, we must actively engage with our colleagues and clients.

With a bit of courage, determination, and focus, we can break out of this cage that finance and business-as-usual have built around us and become facilitators of a new type of business that can see beyond financial value. We simply need to come to terms with the right goals at the start of each design project, identify the appropriate metrics, and acknowledge that we already have everything we need to get started. That’s what it means to do daily ethical design.

For their inspiration and support over the years, I would like to thank Emanuela Cozzi Schettini, José Gallegos, Annegret Bönemann, Ian Dorr, Vera Rademaker, Virginia Rispoli, Cecilia Scolaro, Rouzbeh Amini, and many others.

The mobile-first style approach is great—it focuses on what really matters to the consumer, it’s well-practiced, and it’s been a popular style design for years. But developing your CSS mobile-first should also be fantastic, too…right?

Well, not necessarily. Classic mobile-first CSS development is based on the principle of overwriting style declarations: you begin your CSS with default style declarations, and overwrite and/or add new styles as you add breakpoints with min-width media queries for larger viewports (for a good overview see “What is Mobile First CSS and Why Does It Rock?”). But all those exceptions create complexity and inefficiency, which in turn can lead to an increased testing effort and a code base that’s harder to maintain. Admit it—how many of us willingly want that?

Mobile-first CSS may yet be the best option for your own projects, but you need to first determine how ideal it is in light of the physical design and user interactions you’re trying to create. To help you get started, here’s how I go about tackling the elements you need to watch for, and I’ll discuss some alternative remedies if mobile-first doesn’t seem to fit your job.

Benefits of mobile-first

Some of the points to enjoy with mobile-first CSS growth —and why it’s been the de facto growth strategy for thus long—make a lot of feeling:

Development pyramid. One thing you definitely get from mobile-first is a great development hierarchy—you only focus on the cellular view and get developing.

Tried and tested. It’s a tried-and-true method that has worked for years because it solves a problem really well.

Prioritizes the mobile view. The mobile view is the simplest and perhaps the most crucial because it covers all of the crucial user journeys and frequently accounts for more user visits ( depending on the project ) in terms of both simple and crucial aspects.

Prevents desktop-centric development. It can be tempting to initially focus on the desktop view because desktop computers are used for development. No one wants to spend their time retrofitting a desktop-centric website to work on mobile devices, but thinking about mobile right away keeps us from getting stuck later on!

Disadvantages of mobile-first

Style declarations can be set at higher breakpoints and then overwritten at higher breakpoints:

More complexity. The more unnecessary code you inherit from lower breakpoints the higher up the breakpoint hierarchy you ascend.

Higher CSS specificity. A class name declaration’s default style has now a higher specificity that has been returned to the browser’s default value. When you want to keep the CSS selectors as simple as possible, this can cause a headache on large projects.

Requires more regression testing. All higher breakpoints must be regression tested if changes to CSS at a lower view ( such as adding a new style ) are to be made.

The browser can’t prioritize CSS downloads. At wider breakpoints, classic mobile-first min-width media queries don’t leverage the browser’s capability to download CSS files in priority order.

The problem of property value overrides

Overwriting values is not necessarily inherently wrong; CSS was created to do that. Still, inheriting incorrect values is unhelpful and can be burdensome and inefficient. When you have to overwrite styles to reset them back to their defaults, which may cause issues later, especially if you are using a combination of bespoke CSS and utility classes, it can also lead to more style specificity. A style with a higher specificity that has been reset won’t be able to be used with a utility class.

With this in mind, I’m developing CSS with a focus on the default values much more these days. Since there’s no specific order, and no chains of specific values to keep track of, this frees me to develop breakpoints simultaneously. I concentrate on finding common styles and isolating the specific exceptions in closed media query ranges (that is, any range with a max-width set). 

This approach opens up some opportunities, as you can look at each breakpoint as a clean slate. If a component’s layout looks like it should be based on Flexbox at all breakpoints, it’s fine and can be coded in the default style sheet. When CSS is placed into closed media query ranges, it can be done both Grid and Flexbox completely independently. Additionally, having a thorough understanding of any given component in all breakpoints upfront is necessary for developing simultaneously. This can help identify issues with the design more quickly in the development process. We don’t want to go down the rabbit hole while creating complex mobile components, only to discover that the desktop designs are just as complex and incompatible with the HTML we created for the mobile view!

Though this approach isn’t going to suit everyone, I encourage you to give it a try. There are plenty of tools out there to help with concurrent development, such as Responsively App, Blisk, and many others.

Having said that, I don’t feel the order itself is particularly relevant. If you like to work on one device at a time, are comfortable with focusing on the mobile view, and are familiar with the requirements for other breakpoints, then you should definitely follow the classic development order. It’s crucial to find common styles and exceptions in the appropriate stylesheet, which is a manual tree-shaking procedure! Personally, I find this a little easier when working on a component across breakpoints, but that’s by no means a requirement.

Closed media query ranges in practice

In classic mobile-first CSS we overwrite the styles, but we can avoid this by using media query ranges. To illustrate the difference ( I’m using SCSS for brevity ), let’s assume there are three visual designs:

• smaller than 768
• from 768 to below 1024
• 1024 and anything larger

Take a simple example where a block-level element has a default padding of “20px,” which is overwritten at tablet to be “40px” and set back to “20px” on desktop.

.my-block { padding: 20px; @media (min-width: 768px) { padding: 40px; } @media (min-width: 1024px) { padding: 20px; }}

.my-block { padding: 20px; @media (min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 1023.98px) { padding: 40px; }}

The subtle difference is that the mobile-first example sets the default padding to “20px” and then overwrites it at each breakpoint, setting it three times in total. In contrast, the second example sets the default padding to “20px” and only overrides it at the relevant breakpoint where it isn’t the default value (in this instance, tablet is the exception).

The goal is to: 

• Only set styles when needed. 
• Not set them with the expectation of overwriting them later on, again and again. 

To this end, closed media query ranges are our best friend. If we need to make a change to any given view, we make it in the CSS media query range that applies to the specific breakpoint. We’ll be much less likely to introduce unwanted alterations, and our regression testing only needs to focus on the breakpoint we have actually edited. 

Taking the above example, if we find that .my-block spacing on desktop is already accounted for by the margin at that breakpoint, and since we want to remove the padding altogether, we could do this by setting the mobile padding in a closed media query range.

.my-block {  @media (max-width: 767.98px) {    padding: 20px;  }  @media (min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 1023.98px) {    padding: 40px;  }}

The browser default padding for our block is “0,” so instead of adding a desktop media query and using unset or “0” for the padding value (which we would need with mobile-first), we can wrap the mobile padding in a closed media query (since it is now also an exception) so it won’t get picked up at wider breakpoints. At the desktop breakpoint, we won’t need to set any padding style, as we want the browser default value.

separating the CSS from combining it

Due to the browser's concurrent request limit (typically around six ), it was crucial back then to keep the number of requests to a minimum. As a consequence, the use of image sprites and CSS bundling was the norm, with all the CSS being downloaded in one go, as one stylesheet with highest priority.

With HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 now on the scene, the number of requests is no longer the big deal it used to be. By using a media query, we can break CSS into several files. The obvious benefit of this is that the browser can now request the CSS it currently requires with a higher priority than the CSS it doesn't. This is more effective and can shorten the amount of time a page is blocked overall.

Which HTTP version are you using?

To determine which version of HTTP you're using, go to your website and open your browser's dev tools. Next, go to the Network tab and check whether the Protocol column is visible. If "h2" is listed under Protocol, it means HTTP/2 is being used.

Note: to view the Protocol in your browser's dev tools, go to the Network tab, reload your page, right-click any column header ( e. g., Name ), and check the Protocol column.

Also, if your site is still using HTTP/1... WHY?!! What are you anticipating? Excellent user support exists for HTTP/2.

Splitting the CSS

Separating the CSS into individual files is a worthwhile task. Linking the separate CSS files using the relevant media attribute allows the browser to identify which files are needed immediately (because they’re render-blocking) and which can be deferred. Based on this, it allocates each file an appropriate priority.

We can see that the mobile and default CSS are loaded with" Highest" priority in the following example of a website that is visited on a mobile breakpoint, since they are currently required to render the page. The remaining CSS files ( print, tablet, and desktop ) are still downloaded in case they'll be needed later, but with" Lowest" priority.

Before rendering can begin, the browser will need to download and parse the CSS file when using bundled CSS.

While, as noted, with the CSS separated into different files linked and marked up with the relevant media attribute, the browser can prioritize the files it currently needs. Using closed media query ranges allows the browser to do this at all widths, as opposed to classic mobile-first min-width queries, where the desktop browser would have to download all the CSS with Highest priority. We can’t assume that desktop users always have a fast connection. For instance, in many rural areas, internet connection speeds are still slow. 

Depending on project requirements, the media queries and the number of separate CSS files will vary from project to project, but the example below might look similar.

Depending on the project’s deployment strategy, a change to one file (mobile.css, for example) would only require the QA team to regression test on devices in that specific media query range. Compare that to the prospect of deploying the single bundled site.css file, an approach that would normally trigger a full regression test.

Moving on

The adoption of mobile-first CSS was a significant milestone in web development because it allowed front-end developers to concentrate on mobile web applications rather than creating websites for desktop use and attempting to retrofit them to work on other devices.

I don't think anyone wants to return to that development model again, but it's important we don't lose sight of the issue it highlighted: that things can easily get convoluted and less efficient if we prioritize one particular device—any device—over others. For this reason, focusing on the CSS in its own right, always mindful of what is the default setting and what's an exception, seems like the natural next step. I've started to notice subtle simplifications in both the CSS of my own and that of other developers, and that testing and maintenance work is also a little more effective and streamlined.

In the end, simplifying CSS rule creation whenever possible is a cleaner approach than circling around in circles of overrides. But whichever methodology you choose, it needs to suit the project. Mobile-first may—or may not—turn out to be the best choice for what's involved, but first you need to solidly understand the trade-offs you're stepping into.

As a UX skilled in today’s data-driven landscape, it’s extremely likely that you’ve been asked to design a personal digital experience, whether it’s a common website, user portal, or local application. Although there is still a lot of advertising hype surrounding personalization programs, there are still very some standardized methods for implementing personalized UX.

That’s where we come in. We set ourselves the challenge of developing a systematic personalization framework especially for UX practitioners after finishing dozens of personalization tasks over the past few years. The Personalization Pyramid is a designer-centric model for standing up human-centered customisation programs, spanning information, classification, content delivery, and general goals. By using this strategy, you will be able to understand the core elements of a modern, UX-driven personalization system ( or at the very least know enough to get started ).

Getting Started

For the sake of this article, we’ll suppose you’re already familiar with the basics of online personalization. A nice guide can be found these: Website Personalization Planning. Although Graphic tasks in this field can take a variety of forms, they frequently start from the same place.

Popular circumstances for launching a personalization task:

• Your business or client made a purchase to support personalization with a content management system ( CMS ), marketing automation platform ( MAP ), or other related technology.
• The CMO, CDO, or CIO has identified personalisation as a target
• User data is disjointed or confusing
• You are conducting some sporadic targeting strategies or A/B tests.
• On the personalisation method, stakeholders disagree.
• Mandate of customer privacy rules ( e. g. GDPR ) requires revisiting existing user targeting practices

A powerful personalization program does require the same fundamental building blocks regardless of where you begin. We’ve captured these as the “levels” on the tower. Whether you are a UX artist, scholar, or planner, understanding the core components may help make your contribution effective.

From top to bottom, the rates include:

North Star: What larger corporate goal is driving the personalization system?
1. Objectives: What are the specific, tangible benefits of the system?
2. Touchpoints: Where will the personalized experience been served?
3. Contexts and Campaigns: What personalization information does the person view?
4. User Parts: What constitutes a special, suitable market?
5. What trustworthy and credible information does our professional platform collect to enable personalization?
6. Natural Data: What wider set of data is potentially available ( now in our environment ) allowing you to optimize?

We’ll go through each of these amounts sequentially. An associated deck of cards serves as an example of each level’s specific cases to make this more meaningful. We’ve included example for you here because we think they’re useful for customisation brainstorming sessions.

Beginning at the Top

The elements of the pyramids are as follows:

North Star

What overall goal do you have with your personalization system ( big or small ) is a northern star. The North Star identifies the personalization program’s (one ) overall goal. What do you wish to achieve? North Stars cast a ghost. The bigger the sun, the bigger the dark. Example of North Starts may contain:

Function: Personalize based on basic customer sources. Examples:” Raw” messages, basic search effects, system user settings and settings options, general flexibility, basic improvements
1. Feature: Self-contained personalisation componentry. Examples:” Cooked” notifications, advanced optimizations ( geolocation ), basic dynamic messaging, customized modules, automations, recommenders
2. Experience: Personal user experiences across several interactions and consumer flows. Examples: Email campaigns, landing pages, advanced messaging ( i. e. C2C chat ) or conversational interfaces, larger user flows and content-intensive optimizations ( localization ).
3. Solution: Highly differentiating customized product experiences. Example: Standalone, branded encounters with personalization at their base, like the “algotorial” songs by Spotify quite as Discover Weekly.

Goals

As in any great UX layout, personalization may help promote designing with client intentions. The goals serve as the military and measurable indicators of the success of the entire system. A good place to begin is with your existing analytics and assessment software and metrics you can standard against. In some cases, new targets may be suitable. The most important thing to keep in mind is that personalisation is not a desired outcome. It is a means to an end. Common targets include:

• Conversion
• Time on work
• Net promoter score ( NPS)
• Consumer pleasure

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are where personalisation takes place. As a UX artist, this will be one of your largest areas of responsibility. The touchpoints you have will depend on how your personalization and the related technologies are configured, and they should be based on enhancing a person’s encounter at a specific point in the journey. Touchpoints can be multi-device ( mobile, in-store, website ) but also more granular ( web banner, web pop-up etc. ). Here are some examples:

Channel-level Touchpoints

• Email: Role
• Email: Period of empty
• In-store display ( JSON endpoint )
• Native game
• Search

Wireframe-level Touchpoints

• Web overlay
• Web call club
• Web symbol
• Web content wall
• Web list

If you’re designing for online interface, for instance, you will likely need to include personal “zones” in your wireframes. Based on our next action, context, and campaigns, the articles for these can be presented dynamically in touchpoints.

Contexts and Campaigns

After you’ve outlined some touchpoints, you may consider the actual personal information a user may acquire. Many personalization tools will refer to these as” campaigns” ( so, for example, a campaign on a web banner for new visitors to the website ). These will be displayed automatically to specific customer segments at specific touchpoints, as defined by user data. At this stage, we find it helpful to contemplate two distinct concepts: a framework design and a willing design. The environment helps you consider the level of user engagement at the customisation moment, for instance, if they are just lightly browsing information rather than engaging in a deep dive. Think of it in conditions of activities for data recovery. The content model can then guide you in deciding which personalization to use in terms of the context ( for instance, an” Enrich” campaign that features related articles might be a good substitute for extant content ).

Personalization Context Model:

1. Browse
2. Skim
3. Nudge
4. Feast

Personalization Content Model:

1. Alert
2. Create Easier
3. Cross-Sell
4. Enrich

If you’d like to learn more about each of these concepts, check out Colin’s Personalization Content Model and Jeff’s Personalization Context Model.

User Parts

User segments may be created based on consumer research, either prescriptively or flexibly ( for example, using principles and logic tied to set user actions or through A/B testing ). You will need to consider how to treat the logged-in visitor, the guest or returning visitor, for whom you may have a stateful cookie ( or another post-cookie identifier ), or the authenticated visitor at the least. The personalisation pyramid has some of the following instances:

• Unknown
• Guest
• Authenticated
• Default
• Referred
• Role
• Cohort
• Unique ID

Actionable Data

Every business has access to data, regardless of its online presence. It’s important to inquire about how to use the data you can ethically collect on users, its inherent reliability and value, and how to use it ( sometimes referred to as “data activation” ). Fortunately, the tide is turning to first-party information: a recent study by Twilio estimates some 80 % of firms are using at least some type of first-party information to personalize the customer experience.

First-party data represents multiple advantages on the UX front, including being relatively simple to collect, more likely to be accurate, and less susceptible to the” creep factor” of third-party data. Therefore, determining which method of data collection is best for your audiences should be a crucial component of your UX strategy. Here are some examples:

When it comes to recognizing and making decisions about various audiences and their signals, there is a trend of profiling. As time and confidence and data volume increase, it varies to more granular constructs about smaller and smaller cohorts of users.

Although some form of implicit or explicit data is typically required for any implementation ( more commonly known as first party and third-party data ), ML efforts are typically not cost-effective right away. This is because optimization requires a strong content repository and data backbone. These approaches, however, should be taken into account as part of the overall plan and may in fact help to speed up the organization’s progress overall. At this point, you will typically work with important stakeholders and product owners to create a profiling model. The profiling model includes a defining approach to setting up profiles, profile keys, profile cards, and pattern cards. A multi-faceted approach to profiling which makes it scalable.

Pulling it Together

The cards serve as a starting point for an inventory of sorts ( we offer blanks for you to customize your own ), a set of potential levers and motivations for the personalization activities you aspire to deliver, but they are more valuable when grouped together.

One can begin to chart the entire course of a card’s “hand” from leadership focus to tactical and tactical execution. It is also at the heart of the way that both co-authors have organized workshops to build a backlog of programs, which would make a good subject for a separate article.

In the meantime, it is important to note that each colored class of cards is helpful in understanding the range of options that you might have, as well as making informed choices about who, where, when, and how, will be made these choices.

Lay Down Your Cards

Any sustainable personalization strategy must consider near, mid and long-term goals. There is simply no “easy button” where a personalization program can be installed and run without waiting for any meaningful results, even with the market leader CMS platforms like Sitecore and Adobe or the most innovative composable CMS DXP available today. That said, there is a common grammar to all personalization activities, just like every sentence has nouns and verbs. These cards attempt to map that territory.

Humility, a writer’s necessary value—that has a good ring to it. What about sincerity, an business manager’s important value? Or a surgeon’s? Or a teacher’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 private one, and I’m going to make 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 theme may determine my career’s direction.

But I drained HTML and JavaScript publications until the early hours of the morning and self-taught myself how to code during my freshman year rather than student and go into write like many of my friends. 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 web 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 eager to learn more.

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 elements are all the same, basically the same as what we previously discussed earlier on the immediate parallels between what fulfills you, independent of the visible or online domains.

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. On this one, we would first sketch and then pass a Photoshop file back and forth to trick things out and play with various user interactions. I co-founded the creative project organizing app Milanote and my dear friend, fellow designer Marc Clancy. 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 a larger-than-anyone experience 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 was not specifically designed for our needs. At the core of all of this work: Research. Challenge. Problem- solving. Again, these core connection-based values are agnostic of medium.

One more design portal that I want to mention also serves as the second reason for my story to connect this all.

This is K10k, short for Kaliber 1000. Michael Schmidt and Toke Nygaard founded K10k in 1998, which served as the web’s design news source at the 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 community. K10k eventually figured out and added me as one of their very limited group of news writers to add content to the website.

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 be published in various printed collections, in domestic and international magazines, and in various printed collections. 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. They inflated my ego. 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 was so confident in my abilities. When I used to lead myself to iterate through concepts or sketches, I leaped right into Photoshop. I drew my inspiration from the tiniest of sources ( and with no discernible bias ). Any criticism of my work from my fellow students was frequently vehemently dissented. The most tragic loss: I had lost touch with my values.

My ego almost destroyed some of my friendships and blossoming professional relationships. 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 focused instead on what ignited the fire in my 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 assist in answering 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 by 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, how they spoke and what they talked about was like an alien tongue. And by accepting that I was just a student and working with the mindset that I was only a student, I made myself available to them in order to form that crucial bond.

I also had my first ethnographic observational experience, where I observed how the physicists used the tool in their own environments, on their own terminals. 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 checked my ego before entering the door.

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 are constantly improving our craft, we are also continuously making ourselves available for improvement. Yes, we have years of practical design experience under our belt. or the intensive lab training offered at a UX bootcamp. 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 when we close our minds with an inner monologue of “knowing it all” or branding ourselves a” #thoughtleader” on social media. There will never be a designer like us.

I am a artistic. What I do is alchemy. It is a puzzle. I don’t perform it as much as I let it be done by me.

I am a artistic. Certainly all creative people approve of this brand. No everyone see themselves in this manner. Some innovative individuals incorporate technology into their work. That is their reality, and I respect it. Sometimes I even envy them, a minor. But my approach is different—my becoming is unique.

Apologizing and qualifying in progress is a diversion. My brain uses that to destroy me. I’ll leave it alone for today. I may come back later to make amends and define. After I’ve said what I originally said. Which is challenging enough.

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

Sometimes it does. Maybe what I need to make arrives right away. I’ve learned to avoid saying it right away because they think you don’t work hard enough when you realize that sometimes the thought just comes along and it is the best plan and you know it is the best idea.

Maybe I just work until the thought strikes me. Maybe it arrives right away and I don’t remind people for three weeks. Sometimes I get so excited about something that just happened that I blurt it out and didn’t stop myself. like a child who discovered a medal in one of his Cracker Jacks. Maybe I get away with this. Maybe other people agree: yes, that is the best plan. Most times they don’t and I regret having given way to passion.

Passion should only be saved for the meet, when it matters. Certainly the informal get-together that comes before that meet with two more meetings. Anyone knows why we have all these discussions. 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 actual 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. And who you are and how you go about doing it. Suddenly I digress. I am a innovative. That is the style.

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

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

I am a innovative. I don’t handle my desires. And I don’t handle my best tips.

I can nail apart, surround myself with information or photos, and maybe that works. I can go for a walk, and occasionally that functions. There is a Eureka, which has nothing to do with boiling pots and sizzling petrol, and I may be making dinner. I frequently know what to do when I awaken. The idea that may have saved me disappears almost as frequently as I become aware and a part of the world once more as a senseless wind 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. Theologians should circulate large armies throughout their artistic globe, which they claim to be true. But that is another diversion. And a miserable one. Whether or not I am innovative or not, this may be on a much larger issue. 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 reality is correct, too. My needs are own, though.

Creatives understand creatives.

Disadvantages are aware of cons, just like queers are aware of queers, just like real rappers are aware of actual rappers are aware of cons. 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 simply 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 issue. They give birth to something that may not exist 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 belittle our personal small successes, because we compare them to those of the wonderful people. Wonderful graphics! Also, I‘m no Miyazaki. Now THAT is glory. That is brilliance directly from God’s heart. This half-starved small item that I made? It essentially fell off the turnip truck’s again. And the carrots weren’t actually new.

Creatives knows that, at best, they are Salieri. Also Mozart’s original artists believe that.

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

I am a innovative. Every experience I create has the potential to make Indiana Jones look older while snoring in a deck head. The more I pursue my creative endeavors, the faster I progress in my work, and the more I slog through loops and gaze blankly before beginning that task.

I can move ten times more quickly than those who aren’t innovative, 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 spend twice as long as they do putting the job away before I work ten times as quickly as they do. 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 rush of delay. The leap also terrifies me.

I am not an actor.

I am a artistic. Not an actor. Though I dreamed, as a child, of eventually being that. Some of us criticize our abilities and like our own accomplishments because we are not Michelangelos and Warhols. That is narcissism—but at least we aren’t in elections.

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

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 love 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 almost all of the areas of human understanding that I know very little about. 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 had probably have to spend time staring living in the eye, which almost none of us can do for very long. No seriously. No really. Because many in existence, if you really look at it, is intolerable.

I am a innovative. 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 artistic. I spend way too much time making the next thing, given that almost nothing I create did achieve the level of brilliance I conceive of.

I am a innovative. I think that method is the greatest mystery. I think I have to consider it so strongly that I actually made the foolish decision to publish an essay I wrote without having to go through or edit. I didn’t do this generally, I promise. But I did it right away because I was even more scared of forgetting what I was saying because I was as scared as I might be of you seeing through my sad gestures toward the gorgeous.

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 just trying to contradict what he’s saying, but I’m just trying to give some context to initiatives and opportunities where AI can make a difference for people with disability. 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 words

Joe’s article spends a lot of time examining how computer vision models 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. As he rightly points out, the state of image research is currently very poor, especially for some graphic types, in large part due to the lack of context for which AI systems look at images ( which is a result of having separate “foundation” models for words analysis and picture analysis ). Today’s models aren’t trained to distinguish between images that are contextually relevant ( that should probably have descriptions ) and those that are purely decorative ( which might not need a description ) either. Nonetheless, 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 to provide a starting place for alt text, even if the swift might say What is this BS? That’s not correct at all … Let me try to offer a starting point— I think that’s a gain.

If we can specifically station a design to examine image usage in context, this may help us more quickly determine which images are likely to be elegant and which ones are likely to be descriptive. That will 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 interesting opportunity as well, even though complex images like graphs and charts are challenging to describe in any kind of succinct way ( even for humans ). Let’s say you came across a map that merely stated the chart’s name and the type of representation it was:” Pie chart comparing smartphone use to have phone usage in US households making under$ 30, 000 annually.” ( That would be a pretty bad alt text for a chart because it would frequently leave many unanswered questions about the data, but let’s just assume that that was the description in place. ) Imagine a world where people could ask questions about the vivid if their browser knew that the image was a dessert chart ( because an ship model concluded this ).

• Are there more smartphone users than have devices?
• How many more?
• Do you know of any persons 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 helpful in education settings to assist those who can see these graphs as they are able to comprehend the information in the charts.

What if you could request your website to make a complicated map simpler? What if you asked it to separate a single line from a collection curve? What if you could request your computer to transform the different lines ‘ colors so they match your color blindness better? What if you asked it to switch shades in favor of habits? Given these resources ‘ chat-based interface and our existing ability to manipulate photos in today’s AI devices, that seems like a chance.

Imagine a specially designed model that could extract 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 write her book Algorithms of Oppression, she hit the nail on the head. Although her book focused on how 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 written and maintained algorithms are incredibly harmful, whether it’s Twitter constantly showing you the most recent tweet from a drowsy billionaire, YouTube sending us into a q-hole, or Instagram warping our ideas of 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. They match job seekers with potential employers using an algorithm based on more than 75 data points. On the job-seeker side of things, it considers each candidate’s strengths, their necessary and preferred workplace accommodations, environmental sensitivities, and so on. 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 traditional 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 that they are interested in.

More people with disabilities can be used to create algorithms, which can lessen the likelihood that they will harm their communities. That’s why diverse teams are so important.

Imagine if a social media company’s recommendation engine was tuned to prioritize follow recommendations for people who discussed topics similar to those that were important but who were different from your current sphere of influence in some fundamental ways. 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

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

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 ) or 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 well as to use only their voices to control computers and other devices, according to this research.
• Text transformation. The most recent generation of LLMs is capable of altering already-existing text without giving off hallucinations. This is incredibly empowering for those who have cognitive disabilities and who may benefit from text summaries, simplified versions, or even text that has been prepared for Bionic Reading.

the significance of various teams and data

We must acknowledge that our differences matter. 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. The data we use to train new models must be based on our differences, and those who provide it to us 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 has been written by people with a variety of disabilities 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 and interpret 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 get into a routine pattern, a brand-new concept or technology emerges to shake things up and completely alter our planet.

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. Developers created a crop of credible client-side interactions across browsers with wildly varying standards aid, such as Prototype, YUI, and jQuery. Techniques like picture alternative enable the use of fonts by skilled developers and developers. 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 developers and designers explored more diversified styles and designs, website design flourished. However, we also depend on numerous tricks. 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 relied heavily on images for complex shapes ( such as rounded or angled corners ) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks ). All kinds of nested floats or absolute positioning ( 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 existing 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. Reliable architecture and mobile apps opened up possibilities for fresh relationships anytime.

The development of social media and other centralized resources for people to connect and use resulted from this blend of potent portable devices and potent development resources. 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 connections on a global scale, with both the positive and negative effects.

Want a much more in-depth account of how we came to this, along with some other suggestions for improvement? ” Of Time and the Web” was written by Jeremy Keith. Or check out the” Web Design History Timeline” at the Web Design Museum. A fun tour of” Internet Artifacts” is also available from Neal Agarwal.

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 create a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all varieties. Social media fracturing also has a price: we lose essential 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. Without discovery and connection, it can feel as though we could be shouting into the void when we can create incredible personal websites and continually update them.

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 receive universal support. I frequently find out about a new feature and check its browser support only to discover that its coverage is already over 80 %. Browser support is frequently the only obstacle to using newer techniques today, rather than the time it takes to train and adopt new techniques.

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, as the initial cost of these frameworks may be saved in the beginning, it eventually becomes due as their upkeep and maintenance becomes a component 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 those standards. These frameworks—which used to let us adopt new techniques sooner—have now become hindrances instead. Users must wait for scripts to load before being able to read or interact with pages because these same frameworks frequently come with performance costs. 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 refuse to take their place. 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 in some circumstances. Sometimes it’s just a hack that you’ve gotten used to. And occasionally, it prevents you from pursuing better options.

Start from standards. Although standards change over time, 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 advanced HTML from the 1990s still function flawlessly today. The same can’t be said about websites created with frameworks even after a few years.

Design with care. Whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes, consider the impacts of each decision. Many modern tools have the convenience of having the ability to always understand the decisions that underlie their creation and to never consider the effects those decisions may have. Use the time saved by modern tools to think more carefully and make decisions with care rather than rushing to “move fast and break things”

Always be learning. If you’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 single largest human endeavor in history, each of us has the ability to make our own money out of it. 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 only qualified to make for yourself. 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.

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

There are no Lonely Planet and some tour guides for those of you who want to personalize because successful personalization depends so much on each group’s talent, technology, and market position.

However, you can make sure your team has properly packed its carriers.

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

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the song

Take into account the DJ have on Spotify, which was introduced last year.

We’re used to seeing the polished final outcome of a personalization have. A personal have had to be developed, budgeted, and given priority before the year-end prize, the making-of-backstory, or the behind-the-scenes success chest. Before any customisation function is implemented in your product or service, it lives among a long list of thought-provoking concepts that can be used to create more dynamic user experience.

So how do you understand where to position your personalization bet? How can you create regular interactions that didn’t irritate users or worse, breed trust? We’ve discovered that several budgeted programs second required one or more workshops to join key stakeholders and domestic customers of the technology in order to justify their continuous investments. Make it count.

We’ve closely monitored the same evolution with our consumers, from major software to young companies. How effective these prepersonalization hobbies are, in our experience working on small and large personalization initiatives, depends on a program’s best track record, including its ability to weather challenging concerns, work steadily toward shared answers, and manage its design and engineering efforts.

Time and again, we’ve seen successful workshops individual coming success stories from fruitless efforts, saving many time, resources, and social well-being in the process.

A yearlong project of assessment and feature development is a part of a personalization practice. It’s never a technical load switch-flip. It’s ideal managed as a queue that usually evolves through three actions:

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

We think there is a basic language, a set of “nouns and verbs” that your business can use to create personalized, personalized, or automatic experiences, which is why we created our democratic personalization platform and why we’re testing an accompanying deck of cards. You won’t require these cards. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.

Set the timer for the kitchen.

How long does a prepersonalization workshop take to prepare? The surrounding assessment activities that we recommend including can ( and often do ) span weeks. We suggest aiming for two to three days for the core workshop. Here are a summary of our broad approach and information on the most crucial first-day activities.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

Kickstart: This specifies the terms of engagement as you concentrate on the potential, the readiness and drive of your team, and your leadership.
1. The card-based workshop activities center on a plan of attack and the scope of work, which is outlined in the plan of action.
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, divided into two long time periods, to work through those initial two phases more effectively.

Kickstart: Apt your appetite

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

Create a conversation by mentioning consumer and business-to-business examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions ( such as onboarding sequences or wizards ), notifications, and recommenders. These cards contain a catalog, which we have. To jog your mind, here are 142 different interactions.

This is all about setting the table. What potential avenues might the practice take in your organization? Here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework for a broader perspective.

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature ( or something similar ). We break down connected experiences into five categories in our cards: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Here, you can size your own build. 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 concept on the following 2 2 grid, which lists the four enduring justifications for a unique experience. This is crucial because it emphasizes how personalization can affect your own methods of working as well as your external customers. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Each team member should vote on where they see your product or service putting its emphasis. Naturally, you can’t give them all a prioritization. Here, the goal is to show how various departments may view their own benefits from the effort, which can vary from one department to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final KickStart activity is about filling in the personalization gap. Is the customer journey well documented in your business? Will data and privacy compliance be too big of a challenge? Do you have any needs for content metadata that you must address? ( We’re pretty sure you do; it’s just a matter of acknowledging the magnitude of that need and finding a solution. ) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. For instance, our Detractor card lists six intractable stakeholder attitudes that prevent progress.

It is crucial to your success to work together and manage expectations. Consider the potential barriers to your future progress. Give the participants a list of specific steps you can take to overcome or reduce those obstacles in your organization. As research has shown, personalization initiatives face a number of common obstacles.

You should have, at this point, discussed sample interactions, emphasized a significant benefit, and identified significant gaps. Good—you’re ready to continue.

Hit the test kitchen

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

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 creating, testing, and improving the snacks and meals that will be a part of your personalizedization program’s constantly evolving menu.

Over the course of the workshop, the ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together. And by creating “dishes,” you can expect individual team members to create personalized interactions that either serve their or others ‘ needs.

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

Verify your ingredients

You’ll ensure that you have everything you need to create your desired interaction ( or that you can determine what needs to be added to your pantry like a good product manager ) and that you have validated with the right stakeholders present. These factors include the intended audience, the intended audience, the intended audience, the interaction’s context, and your overall ensemble.

This isn’t just about discovering requirements. The team can: Describe your personalizations as a series of if-then statements by documenting them as follows:

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

This enables you to streamline your technical and design efforts while providing a common color scheme for your personalized or automated experience.

Compose your recipe

What elements are significant to you? Consider the construct of a who-what-when-why

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

We first developed these cards and card categories five years ago. We regularly test their suitability with clients and audience members at conferences. And there are still fresh possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

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

1. When a visitor or an unidentified visitor interacts with a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it simpler for them to read a related title, 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: A user receives an email before their subscription expires or after a recent failed renewal to request that they reconsider or remind them to do so.

We’ve also found that cocreating the recipes themselves can sometimes be the most effective way to start brainstorming about what these cards might be for your organization. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

The later stages of the workshop could be characterized as moving from focusing on a cookbook to a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual” cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team using a standard jobs-to-be-done format, which will allow for measurement and outcomes, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and production delivery.

Better kitchens require better architecture

For those who are actually delivering it, simplifying a customer experience is a challenging task. Beware of anyone who contradicts your advice. With that being said,” Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes“.

When a team overfits: they aren’t designing with their best data, personalization turns into a laughing line. Every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, which contributes to a drag on the effectiveness of personalization, much like a sparse pantry. Your AI’s output quality, for example, is indeed limited by your IA. Before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture, Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable.

You can withstand the heat without a doubt.

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach can achieve the necessary concentration and intention. Banish your ideal 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. Both food and mouths must be fed.

This organizational framework gives you a fighting chance at long-term success as well as solid ground. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. However, if you use the same cookbook and the same recipe combination, you’ll have solid ground for success. We created these activities so that you can anticipate the needs of your organization before the hazards become overwhelming.

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 waste it. The pudding is the proof, as they say.

I’ve been fascinated by shows since I was a child. I loved the heroes and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I aspired to be an artist. And I figured out that I would be able to embark on exciting activities in the same way that Indiana Jones did. I also dreamed up suggestions for videos that my friends and I could render and sun in. But they never advanced more. However, I did end up in the user experience ( UX) field. Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer research is story. And you must show a compelling story to entice stakeholders, such as the product team and decision-makers, to learn more in order to get the most out of consumer research.

Think of your preferred film. More than likely it follows a three-act construction that’s frequently seen in story: the layout, the fight, and the quality. The second act provides an overview of the characters, their difficulties, and issues that they face, as well as a description of what is happening today. Act two sets the scene for the fight and introduces the activity. Here, difficulties grow or get worse. The solution comes in the third and final action. The figures learn and change as a result of the resolutions and issues are resolved. I believe that this architecture is also a great way to think about customer study, and I think that it can be particularly helpful in explaining person exploration to others.

Use story as a framework for conducting research

It’s unfortunate to say that many people now view studies as being unprofitable. If finances or timelines are strong, analysis tends to be one of the first points to go. Some goods managers rely on developers or, worse, their own judgment to make the “right” decisions for customers based on their experience or accepted best practices rather than investing in research. That may lead some groups, but that approach can so easily miss the chance to solve people ‘ real issues. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. Design is enhanced by consumer study. It keeps it on track by pointing out issues and prospects. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay away of your competition.

Each action corresponds to a stage of the process in the three-act composition, and each stage is crucial to telling the complete story. Let’s take a look at the various functions and how they relate to consumer research.

Act one: installation

The rig consists entirely in comprehending the history, and that’s where basic research comes in. Basic research ( also known as relational, discovery, or preliminary research ) assists in understanding users and identifying their issues. You’re learning about what exists now, the obstacles people have, and how the problems affect them—just like in the videos. You can conduct contextual inquiries or diary studies ( or both! ) to conduct foundational research. ), which may assist you in identifying both prospects and problems. It doesn’t need to be a great investment in time or money.

What is the least practical ethnography that Erika Hall can do is spend fifteen minutes with a consumer and say,” Walk me through your day yesterday. That is it. Current that one ask. Opened up and spend fifteen minutes listening to them. Do everything in your power to keep yourself and your pursuits out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography”. According to Hall, “[This ] will probably prove quite fascinating. In the unlikely event that you don’t learn anything valuable or fresh, you can move forward with greater self-assurance.

This makes total sense to me. And I adore how consumer research is now so simple. You can simply attract participants and carry out the recruitment process without having to make a lot of paperwork! This can offer a wealth of knowledge about your customers, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their life. That’s what action one is really all about: understanding where people are coming from.

Jared Spool discusses the significance of fundamental research and how it should comprise the majority of your study. If you can pick from any further user data that you can get your hands on, such as surveys or analytics, that can complement what you’ve heard in the fundamental studies or even time to areas that need more research. All of this information together provides a more in-depth understanding of the state of things and all of its flaws. And that’s the start of a gripping tale. 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. This is where you begin to develop empathy for the characters and support their success, much like in movies. And hoped that 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 perhaps they feel something for the struggles of users. In either case, act one serves as your main strategy for piqueing interest and investment from the stakeholders.

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 influence product teams ‘ focus on improving. Everyone benefits from this, including the product, stakeholders, and users. It’s like winning an Oscar in movie terms—it often leads to your product being well received and successful. And this might serve as a motivator for stakeholders to carry this out with other goods. The secret to this process is storytelling, and knowing how to tell a compelling story is the only way to entice stakeholders to do 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 resolving the issues you first raised. 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. Unmet needs or issues with a flow or process that are making users uncomfortable could be the causes. More problems will come up in the process, much like in the second act of a film. It’s here that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this act.

According to Jakob Nielsen, five users should be typically in usability tests, which means that this number of users can typically identify the majority of the issues:” You learn less and less as you add more and more users because you will keep seeing the same things over and over again… After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by repeatedly observing the same findings but not learning much new.”

The plot may become lost if you try to tell a story with too many characters, which is similar to storytelling in this case. 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 problems that need to be solved while also highlighting the worth of conducting the research in the first place.

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

If conducting usability testing in the field is like watching a play that is staged and controlled, where any two sessions may be very different from one another. You can conduct usability testing in the real world by creating a replica of the environment where users interact with the product and then conducting your research there. Or you can go out to meet users at their location to do your research. With either option, you can see how things work in context, how things change, and how conversion can change completely in different ways depending on the circumstances. You have less control over how these sessions end as researchers, but this can occasionally help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests add a level of detail that remote usability tests frequently lack.

That doesn’t mean that “movies” —remote sessions—aren’t a good option. Remote sessions can reach a wider audience. They make it possible for much more people to participate in the study and observe what is happening. Additionally, they make the doors accessible to a much wider range 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.

You can ask real users questions to understand their thoughts and understanding of the solution as a result of usability testing, whether it is done remotely or in person. This can help you identify issues as well as understand why they were initially issues. Furthermore, you can test hypotheses and gauge whether your thinking is correct. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer understanding of how useful the designs are and whether or not they fulfill their intended purpose. Act two is where the excitement is at the heart of the narrative, but there are also potential surprises. This is equally true of usability tests. Unexpected things that are said by participants frequently alter how you view things, and these unexpected developments in the story can lead to unexpected turns in your perception.

Unfortunately, user research can occasionally be viewed as unreliable. And too often usability testing is the only research process that some stakeholders think that they ever need. There isn’t much to be gained by conducting usability testing in the first place if the designs you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in thorough understanding of your users ( foundational research ). Because you’re narrowing the scope of what you’re receiving feedback on without understanding the needs of the users. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. In the context of a usability test, it’s only feedback on a particular design.

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

In act two, stakeholders will hopefully be able to observe the story develop in the user sessions, which reveal the conflict and tension in the current design’s highs and lows. And in turn, this can encourage stakeholders to take action on the issues raised.

Act three: resolution

The third act is about resolving the issues raised by the first two acts, whereas the first two are about comprehending the context and the tensions that can compel action. While the first two acts require an audience, the final act requires that they remain engaged throughout. 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 entire team to discuss what is possible within the project’s constraints, ask questions, and discuss user feedback together. Additionally, it enables the UX design and research teams to clarify, suggest alternatives, or provide more context for their choices. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

This act is primarily told in voiceover with some audience participation. The researcher serves as the narrator, who depicts the issues and what the product’s potential future might look like given what the team has learned. They give the stakeholders their recommendations and their guidance on creating this vision.

In the Harvard Business Review, Nancy Duarte describes a method for structuring presentations that follow a persuasive narrative. The most effective presenters” set up a conflict that needs to be resolved” using the same methods as great storytellers, Duarte writes. ” That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently”.

This kind of structure is in line with research findings, particularly those from usability tests. It provides evidence for “what is “—the problems that you’ve identified. And your suggestions for how to deal with them are “what could be.” And so forth and forth.

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be as visual as quick sketches of a potential solution to a problem. These can help create momentum and conversation. 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. The part where you make a second or third reference to the main themes or issues or concerns for the product is when you make the denouement of the story. This stage provides stakeholders with the next steps, and hopefully, the motivation to take those steps as well!

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

Act one: You encounter the protagonists ( the users ) and the antagonists ( the issues affecting users ). This is the beginning of the plot. Researchers might employ techniques like contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics in act one. These techniques can produce personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards.

Act two: Next, there’s character development. The protagonists encounter problems and challenges, which they must overcome, and there is conflict and tension. Researchers might employ heuristics evaluation, competitive benchmarking, and usability testing in act two. The output of these can include usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices.

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

The researcher performs a number of tasks: they are the producer, the director, and the storyteller. The participants only have a small part in the study, but they are significant characters ( in it ). And the stakeholders are the audience. However, the most crucial thing is to get the narrative straight and to use storytelling to research users ‘ stories. By the end, the parties should leave with a goal and an eagerness to address the product’s flaws.

So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. User research is ultimately a win-win situation for everyone, and all you need to do is pique stakeholders ‘ interest in how the story ends.