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

At the time, I didn’t realize yet how to functionally incorporate 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 at best I had only partially surpassed my goal of having a higher ( moral ) level of design, which is not what I would consider to be structurally integrated.

I made a deeper investigation into the main causes of business that prevent us from practicing regular honest style. 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 second move out to understand what we’re up against.

Control the system

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. Even with our best purposes, 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 at the appropriate amount within the system. 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. However, none of that will alter a company’s manner.
• 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 rather on feedback rings such as management power, staff identification, or design-system purchases can help a business become better at achieving its objectives. But that doesn’t alter the goals themselves, which means that the business will also work against your ethical-design ideals.
• The next level, data flows, is what most ethical-design activities focus on then: the transfer of moral methods, tools, 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 meant to keep profits, frequently revealed through comments like” the client didn’t ask for it” or “don’t make it too big” can also 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. So what might a more accurate representation look like:

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 effective means of achieving the company’s goals. 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 ineffective for maintaining a healthy relationship with nature.

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 give you the version I created for a group of coworkers at a design firm. 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 the individual level teaches us that success transcends the typical area of focus on usability and satisfaction, taking into account factors like how much time and effort are required from 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 of maintaining harmony with humanity’s only home is the one we have. 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 shared 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. Choosing the incorrect metric can completely derail good intentions.

Additionally, choosing the right metric is enormously helpful in focusing the design team. Once you complete the task of selecting metrics for our goals, you are forced to consider what success looks like in terms of words and how you can demonstrate that you’ve accomplished your ethical goals. What control over what we as designers have in place of the other can I include in my design or alter in my 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 have you the opportunity to structurally practice ethical design once your objectives have been defined and you have a reasonable idea of the potential metrics for your design project. It” simply” turns into a matter of using your imagination and sprinkling from the knowledge and tools that are already at your disposal.

I think this is quite exciting! It introduces a whole new set of difficulties and considerations to 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 to users with less focus? 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 can be overlooked, making the kickoff so simple to overlook. 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 makes their own 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 kickoff’s primary goal is the stated 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?

You need to be sure that you can trust success at this early stage because it will determine the project’s future. The design team can use diversity as a specific success factor during the kickoff if, for instance, they want to create an inclusive app for a diverse user group. The team can revert to that promise throughout the project if the client consents. As we agreed in our first meeting, having A and B’s diverse user group is essential to creating a successful product. Therefore, we conduct activity X and follow the research procedure Y. Compare those odds to a scenario where the team had to request 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 sustainability and progressive enhancement are crucial success factors for the platform. Additionally, the subject-matter expert stressed the value of involving students from underprivileged and low-income groups in the design process.

In a project brief that adequately described these elements, we consolidated our ideas and agreed on them after the kickoff.

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”? Create a session with your stakeholders to ( re)define success, which is what my response has always been. 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 those levers a new lease of life.

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 and challenge them to think about 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? With stakeholders, we wouldn’t have to go through contentious discussions 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. That uncomfortable space is where we need to be if we truly want to make a difference for those of us who aren’t from marginalized groups and have the privilege of speaking up and being heard. 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 talk about ethical design and keep it in articles and toolkits, then we are not designing ethically, for those of us who have the opportunity to speak up and be heard. 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 working on. 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 creation —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 has been a tried-and-true method that has worked for years because it solves a difficulty flawlessly.

Prioritizes the smart see. The mobile view is the simplest and arguably the most significant because it covers all the crucial user journeys and frequently accounts for a higher proportion of user visits ( depending on the project ) ).

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

Drawbacks of mobile-first

Model declarations can be set at higher breakpoints and therefore overwritten at higher breakpoints:

More difficulty. The more unneeded code you inherit from lower thresholds the higher up the target order you ascend.

Higher CSS sensitivity. Styles that have been returned to the default value in a class name charter then have a higher sensitivity. When you want to preserve the CSS candidates as simple as possible, this can cause a headache on massive projects.

Requires more analysis tests. All higher thresholds must be regression tested if changes to CSS at a lower see ( 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 issue of home value supersedes

Overwriting values is not necessarily essentially bad; CSS was created to do that. However, sharing incorrect values is counterproductive and can be burdensome and inadequate. When you have to replace styles to restore them back to their defaults, which may cause issues after, especially if you are using a combination of bespoke CSS and power classes, it can also lead to more fashion specificity. We won’t be able to use a utility class for a style that has been upgraded to have a higher specificity.

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. However, if it appears that Grid would be much better for screens with large screens and Flexbox would be better for mobile, both can be accomplished entirely independently when the CSS is placed into closed media query ranges. Additionally, developing simultaneously requires you to have a thorough understanding of any given component in all breakpoints right away. This can help identify design flaws earlier 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. The key is to find common styles and exceptions so that you can include them in the appropriate stylesheet, which is a kind of 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 versus 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 separate the 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? The HTTP/2 user support is excellent.

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. Despite there still be a lot of advertising hype surrounding personalization systems, 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 holistic personalization platform 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 personalisation 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 understand 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 customisation as a target
• User data is disjointed or confusing
• You are conducting some sporadic targeting strategies or A/B tests.
• On the personalisation method, parties of contention
• Mandate of customer privacy rules ( e. g. GDPR ) requires revisiting existing user targeting practices

A powerful personalization plan will need 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 geopolitical goal is the personalisation initiative pursuing?
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 Sections: 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 was created to highlight specific examples from each level to make this more meaningful. We’ve found them useful in brainstorming about personalisation, so we’ll provide examples for you here.

Starting 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 personalisation program’s overall goal is described in The North Star. What do you wish to achieve? North Stars cast a ghost. The bigger the sun, the bigger the dark. Example of North Starts may incorporate:

Function: Personalize based on basic customer input. Examples:” Raw” messages, basic search effects, system user settings and settings options, general flexibility, basic improvements
1. Feature: Self-contained customisation componentry. Examples:” Cooked” notifications, advanced optimizations ( geolocation ), basic dynamic messaging, customized modules, automations, recommenders
2. Experience: Personal user experiences across numerous 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 experience with personalization at their base, like the “algotorial” songs by Spotify quite as Discover Weekly.

Goals

As in any great UX design, personalization may help promote designing with client intentions. Objectives are the military and tangible indicators that will show the success of the overall program. Start with your existing analytics and measurement system, as well as indicators you can benchmark against. In some cases, new targets may be ideal. The most important thing to keep in mind is that personalisation is certainly a desired outcome. It is a means to an end. Common targets include:

• Conversion
• Time on work
• Net promoter score ( NPS)
• Client satisfaction

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are where customisation 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 technology are implemented, 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: Occasion of available
• 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 get. 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 consumer sections, as defined by consumer data. At this stage, we find it helpful to contemplate two distinct concepts: a framework design and a willing design. The framework helps you acquire the user’s level of engagement at the personalization moment, such as when they are lightly browsing information or deep-dive. Think of it in terms of behavior in 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

We’ve written a lot more in depth about each of these concepts somewhere, so be sure to check out Colin’s Personalization Content Model and Jeff’s Personalization Context Model.

User Sections

Based on customer research, user segments can be created prescriptively or flexibly ( for example, using principles and logic tied to user behavior, or through A/B testing ). You will need to think about 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 who is logged in at the very least. Using the personalisation tower, here are some examples:

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

Actionable Data

Every business with a online presence has information. 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 data backbone and content repository. However, these approaches ought to be taken into account as part of the larger plan and may in fact help to speed up the organization’s progress overall. You’ll typically work together to create a profiling model with key stakeholders and product owners. The profiling model includes a defined process for 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 the foundation for an inventory of sorts ( we provide blanks for you to tailor your own ), a set of potential levers and motivations for the kind of 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 serves as the foundation for the workshops that both co-authors have conducted to build a program backlog, which would make a good article topic.

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 specific choices about who will be made these decisions: when, when, and how.

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 stood up and immediately see meaningful results, even with the leading CMS platforms like Sitecore and Adobe or the most exciting composable CMS DXP out there. 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 doctor’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 personal 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. This style would eventually determine the direction of my job.

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 what my design choices would ultimately think when rendered in a website, which I did not want to do.

The later ‘ 90s and early 2000s were the so-called” Wild West” of website design. The modern landscape was being studied by designers at the time as they attempted to incorporate design and visual communication. What were the laws? How may we break them and also engage, entertain, and present information? At a more micro level, how was my values, inclusive of modesty, admiration, and link, coincide in combination with that? I was looking for answers.

Even though I’m referring to a different time, those are amazing factors between non-career relationships and the world of layout. What are your main passions, or ideals, that elevate medium? The main themes are the same, basically the same as what we previously discussed on the primary parallels between what fulfills you, independent of the physical or digital realms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why am I going down this design memory lane with you, now? 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 of seeing a website with a hero image or banner with text overlaying, perhaps with a lovely rotating carousel of images ( laying the snark on heavy there ), 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 connects with people 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. Under such absurd constraints, this seemed to me to be the embodiment of digital visual communication. 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 ridiculous requirements imposed a clarity of concept and presentation that I found to be incredibly appealing. The challenge of throwing the digital gauntlet had been thrown at me. And so, in my dorm room into the wee hours of the morning, I toiled away, bringing conceptual sketches into mini mosaic fruition.

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

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

This is K10k, short for Kaliber 1000. Michael Schmidt and Toke Nygaard founded K10k in 1998, which 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 work these people were doing gave rise to the idea of GUI Galaxy, which was inspired by their work.

For my part, I gained some notoriety in the design industry as a result of combining my web design work with my pixel art exploration. 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. My design work has also begun to appear on other design news portals, as well as in publications abroad and domestically as well as 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 ). The praise and the press immediately surpassed what I needed to fulfill, and they did just that. My ego was inflated by them. I actually felt a little better than my fellow designers.

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

I effectively stopped researching and discovering because I felt so incredibly confident in my abilities. When I used to lead sketch concepts or iterations as my first instinctive step, I instead leaped right into Photoshop. I got my inspiration from the tiniest of sources ( while wearing a blindfold ). My peers frequently vehemently disapproved of any criticism of my work. The most tragic loss: I had lost touch with my values.

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

Although it was something I initially rejected, I eventually had a chance to reflect on it in depth. 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 as I grew older, I could reflect on my own thoughts to help me develop further and make necessary course corrections.

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

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

Working with the Fermilab team to make changes and tweak the interface, I gave in to the practice. To me, how they spoke and what they talked about was like an alien tongue. And by making myself humble and operating under the impression that I was just a student, I made myself available to them in order to form that crucial bond.

I also had 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 data columns ended up using white text on a dark gray background rather than black text-on-white because of the level of ambient light-driven contrast in the facility. 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. I checked my ego before entering those values, which opened the door for those values.

An evergreen willingness to listen, learn, understand, grow, evolve, and connect yields our best work. In particular, I want to focus on the words’ grow’ and ‘ evolve’ in that statement. If we 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 focused lab training from a bootcamp for UX. Or the monogrammed portfolio of our creative 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. The artist we can be will never be there.

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

I am a artistic. Certainly all aspiring artists 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. That’s what my head does to destroy me. I’ll leave it alone for today. I may regret and then define. After I’ve said what I should have. Which is challenging enough.

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

Sometimes it does go that approach. Maybe what I need to make arrives right away. I’ve learned to avoid saying it right away because people think you don’t work hard enough when you know it’s the best idea when you’re on the go and you know it’s the best idea.

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

Joy should be saved for the meeting, where it will matter. not the informal gathering that two different gatherings precede that appointment. Anyone knows why we have all these discussions. We keep saying we’re going to get rid of them, but we end up really trying to. They occasionally yet excel. But occasionally they are a hindrance to the actual labor. 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 artistic. That is the topic.

Often, a lot of hours of diligent and diligent work ends up with something that is rarely useful. Maybe I have to accept that and move on to the next task.

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

I am a artistic. 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 works. There is a Eureka, which has nothing to do with boiling pots and sizzling petrol, and I may be making dinner. I frequently have a sense of direction when I awaken. The idea that may have saved me disappears almost as frequently as I become aware and a part of the world once more as a senseless wind of oblivion. For ingenuity, 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 are encouraged to build massive armies in their artistic world, which they insist is true. But that is another diversion. And it’s sad. 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 mitigation. And horror. You know the cliché about the abused designer? It’s true, even when the artist ( and let’s put that noun in quotes ) is trying to write a soft drink jingle, a callback in a tired sitcom, a budget request.

Some individuals who detest being called artistic perhaps been closeted artists, but that’s between them and their gods. No offence meant. Your wisdom is correct, too. However, mine is for me.

Creatives understand creatives.

Disadvantages are aware of cons, just like queers are aware of queers, just like real rappers are aware of actual rappers. Creatives feel enormous regard for creatives. We love, respect, emulate, and nearly deify the excellent ones. To revere any man is, of course, a dreadful mistake. We have been warned. We know much. We know people are really people. They dispute, they are depressed, they regret their most critical decisions, they are weak and thirsty, they can be cruel, they can be just as terrible as we can, if, like us, they are clay. But. But. However, they produce this incredible point. They give birth to something that may not occur without them and did not exist before them. They are the inspirations ‘ mother. 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 video! Also, I‘m no Miyazaki. Now THAT is brilliance. That is brilliance directly from God’s heart. This half-starved small item that I made? It essentially fell off the turnip vehicle. And the carrots weren’t actually new.

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

I am a artistic. I haven’t worked in advertising in 30 years, but in my hallucinations, it’s my former artistic managers who judge me. They are correct to do that. 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 artistic. Every project I create has a goal that makes Indiana Jones appear older and snoring in a deck head. The more I pursue creativity, the faster I can complete my work, and the longer I obsess over my ideas and whizz around in circles before I can complete that task.

I can move ten times more quickly than those who aren’t imaginative, 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 putting the work off as they do 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 fantastic career. I am that attached to the excitement rush of delay. I also have a fear of the climb.

I am not an actor.

I am a innovative. No an actor. Though I dreamed, as a boy, of eventually being that. Some of us criticize our abilities and fear our own selves 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 urge. And sit with what follows—the disasters as well as the achievements.

I am a artistic. Every term I’ve said these may offend another artists, who see things differently. Ask two artists a problem, get three ideas. Our dispute, our 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 innovative. I lament my lack of taste in almost all of the areas of human understanding, which 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 addictions, I’d probably have to spend the majority of our time looking ourselves in the eye, which is something that almost none of us can do for very long. No seriously. No truly. Because many in existence, if you really look at it, is terrible.

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

Working frees me from worrying about my job.

I am a innovative. I worry that my little present will disappear unexpectedly.

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

I am a artistic. I think there is the greatest secret in the process. I think I have to think 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 frightened of forgetting what I was saying because I was afraid of you seeing through my sad gestures toward the beautiful.

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 not trying to reject any of what he’s saying, but rather to give some context to initiatives and options where AI may produce real, positive impacts on people with disabilities. To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t true threats or pressing problems with AI that need to be addressed—there are, and we’ve needed to address them, like, yesterday—but I want to take a little time to talk about what’s possible in hope that we’ll get there one day.

Other text

Joe’s article spends a lot of time examining how computer vision models can create other words. He raises a lot of valid points about the state of the world 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. However, I still think there’s possible in this area.

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

If we can specifically station a design to examine image usage in context, it might help us more quickly determine which images are likely to be elegant and which ones are likely to need a description. That will help clarify which situations require image descriptions, and it will increase authors ‘ effectiveness in making their sites more visible.

Although complex images, such as graphs and charts, are challenging to summarize in any way ( even for humans ), the image example provided in the GPT4 announcement provides an intriguing opportunity as well. Let’s say you came across a map that was simply the description of the chart’s name and the type of representation it was: Pie graph comparing smartphone usage to have phone usage in US households earning 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 your computer knew that that picture was a dessert chart ( because an ship model concluded this ).

• Are there more smartphone users than have phones?
• How many more?
• Exists a group of people who don’t fall under either of these categories?
• How many is that?

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

What if you could request your website to make a complicated chart simpler? What if you asked it to separate a single line from a range curve? What if you could request your website to change the color combinations in your website so that it works better for your type of color blindness? What if you demanded that it switch colours 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.

Now imagine a specially designed model that could take the data from that map and transfer 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 wonderful!

Matching systems

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

Take Mentra, for example. They serve as a network of employment for people who are neurodivers. 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 the typical employment websites because it was run by neurodivergent people. They lessen the emotional and physical labor needed for job seekers by using their algorithm to suggest available candidates to businesses who can then connect with job seekers they are interested in.

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

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

Other ways that AI can helps people with disabilities

I’m sure I could go on and on about using AI to assist people with disabilities, but I’m going to make this last section into a bit of a lightning round. In no particular order:

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

The value of various teams and sources of data

Our differences must be acknowledged as important. The intersections of the identities we exist in have an impact on our lived experiences. These lived experiences—with all their complexities ( and joys and pain ) —are valuable inputs to the software, services, and societies that we shape. Our differences must be reflected in the data we use to develop new models, and those who provide it need to be compensated for doing so. Stronger models can be created using inclusive data sets, which lead to more equitable outcomes.

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

Want a model that doesn’t use ableist language? You might be able to use already-existing data sets to create a filter that can read 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.

I offer a single bit of advice to friends and family when they become new parents: When you start to think that you’ve got everything figured out, everything will change. Just as you start to get the hang of feedings, diapers, and regular naps, it’s time for solid food, potty training, and overnight sleeping. When you figure those out, it’s time for preschool and rare naps. The cycle goes on and on.

The same applies for those of us working in design and development these days. Having worked on the web for almost three decades at this point, I’ve seen the regular wax and wane of ideas, techniques, and technologies. Each time that we as developers and designers get into a regular rhythm, some new idea or technology comes along to shake things up and remake our world.

How we got here

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 birth of web standards

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

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

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

The web as software platform

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

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

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

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

Where we are now

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

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

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

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

Where do we go from here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go forth and make

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

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

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

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

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

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

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set your kitchen timer

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

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

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

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

Kickstart: Whet your appetite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hit that test kitchen

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

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

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

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

Verify your ingredients

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

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

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

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

Compose your recipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better kitchens require better architecture

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

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

You can definitely stand the heat…

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

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

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

I’ve been fascinated by shows since I was a child. I loved the figures and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I aspired to be an artist. And I backed up the idea that I would get to do the things Indiana Jones did and have interesting activities. 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 working in user experience ( UI). Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer analysis is story. And to get the most out of customer studies, you must tell a compelling story that involves stakeholders, including the product team and decision-makers, and piques their interest in learning more.

Think of your 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 what is happening now, and it also serves as a primer for the heroes and the difficulties and issues they face. Act two sets the scene for the fight and the activity begins. Here, issues grow or get worse. And the quality is the third and final work. This is where the problems are resolved and the figures grow and change. 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 when conducting analysis.

Unfortunately, some people now believe that study is unprofitable. If finances or timelines are small, analysis tends to be one of the first points to go. Some goods managers rely on designers or, worse, their own mind to make the “right” decisions for users based on their own knowledge or accepted best practices rather than investing in research. That might lead to some clubs getting in the way, but it’s too easy to overlook the real problems facing users. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. User study improves style. 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 examine the various functions and how they relate to consumer study.

Act one: layout

Fundamental analysis comes in handy because the layout is all about comprehending the background. Basic research ( also known as conceptual, discovery, or preliminary research ) aids 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 challenges and opportunities. It doesn’t need to get a great investment in time or money.

What is the least sustainable 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 protect both your objectives and yourself. Bam, you’re doing ethnography”. Hall predicts that “[This ] will probably prove quite fascinating. In the unlikely event that you don’t learn anything new or important, move on with more self-assurance in your direction.

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. Understanding where people are coming from is what action one is really all about.

Jared Spool discusses the significance of basic research and how it may make up 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 along 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 place in the story where you realize that the principal characters—or the people in this case—are facing issues that they need to conquer. This is where you begin to develop compassion for the heroes and support their success, much like in the movies. And hoped that participants are now doing the same. Their love may be with their company, which could be losing wealth because people didn’t complete certain tasks. Or perhaps they have empathy for people ‘ problems. In either case, work one serves as your main strategy for piqueing interest and investment from the participants.

When stakeholders begin to understand the value of basic research, that is open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making approach. And that can help product teams become more user-centric. 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 encourage producers to repeat the process 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. The issues might be caused by unmet needs or issues with a flow or process that is causing users to fall asleep. 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.

Usability tests should typically consist of five participants, according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can typically identify the majority of the issues:” As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly 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 interpret in-person usability tests as a form of theater watching as opposed to remote testing. Each has advantages and disadvantages. In-person usability research is a much richer experience. The sessions can be had by stakeholders with other stakeholders. Additionally, you get real-time reactions, including surprises, disagreements, and discussions about what they’re seeing. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors ‘ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.

If conducting usability testing in the field is like watching a play that is staged and controlled, where any two sessions may be very different from one another. You can conduct usability testing in the real world by creating a replica of the environment where users interact with the product and 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. Usability tests in person offer a level of detail that is frequently absent from remote testing.

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. And they make access to a much wider range of users in their own country. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working.

You can ask real users questions to understand their thoughts and understanding of the solution as a result of usability testing, whether it is conducted remotely or in person. This can help you 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 participants say frequently alter the way you look at things, and these unexpected revelations can lead to unexpected turns in the narrative.

Unfortunately, user research can occasionally be viewed as wasteful. And too often usability testing is the only research process that some stakeholders think that they ever need. In fact, if the designs you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a thorough understanding of your users ( foundational research ), there isn’t much to be gained by conducting usability testing in the first place. Because you narrow down the subject matter of your feedback 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 thing you’re building will actually solve that problem, despite the fact that you might have set out to solve the right problem. 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 it’s crucial to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stay for the final act. That means the whole product team, including developers, UX practitioners, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other stakeholders that have a say in the next steps. It allows the entire team to discuss what’s 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 decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

Voiceover narration of this act is typically used with audience input. 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 employ the same methods as great storytellers: they create a conflict that needs to be settled by reminding people of the status quo and then revealing a better way, according to Duarte. ” 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 “what might be “—your suggestions for how to respond to them. And so forth.

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be as visual as quick sketches of a potential solution to a problem. These can help create conversation and momentum. And this continues until the end of the session when you’ve wrapped everything up in the conclusion by summarizing the main issues and suggesting a way forward. 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 both the users ‘ protagonists and the antagonists ( the user-related issues ). 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 face problems and difficulties, which they must overcome, and there is conflict and tension. Researchers might use heuristics evaluation, usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and other methods in act two. The output of these can include usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices.

Act three: The main characters win, and the audience is shown 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. Although the participants are only a small part in the study, they are significant characters. And the stakeholders are the audience. However, the most crucial thing is to create the right narrative and use storytelling to research user stories. In the end, the parties should leave with a goal and an eagerness to fix the product’s flaws.

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

For 32 times, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books were a regular feature in bestseller listings, and dominated the science-fiction and story part of the store. Sir Terry flew the flag for anyone who enjoyed letting their [ …] come to mind when fantasy literature was less popular than other genres and comic fantasy even less.

On Den of Geek, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are ranked from good to great, which is the first entry.

The state that” Stranger in a Strange Area” is the worst season of Lost has never been incontroversial. The seventh season of the second season of the show received nearly universally bad reviews immediately after it first aired in 2007, and its popularity hasn’t improved in the nearly 18 years since its debut. It’s the second-lowest-ranked episode of the show on IMDb ( and the lowest-rated overall episode ) and has become a kind of shorthand for the series ‘ broader shortcomings. In previous interviews, also Lost screenwriters Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have criticized the event, with Cuse going so far as to visit it” cringe-worthy.”

However,” Stranger in a Strange Area” should be at least a little gratifying to Abandoned fans everywhere. Not as a independent episode, perhaps, but as a crucial component of the series as a whole that is more important than many other officially greater but mostly meaningless episodes that have already come out. &nbsp,

Without” Stranger in a Weird Land,” Lost might have turned out to be much worse. It not only helped keep the show, but it did so in a way that is especially important now that more and more visitors are romanticizing the era of community TV-style programming.

What Characterizes a Stranger as But Bad in a Strange Area?

On paper,” Stranger In a Strange Land” doesn’t seem worthy of widespread scorn. It’s not some great entry in the collection that fumbled a great instant, nor is it a crumbling core of the movie’s mythology. It’s really a side-adventure about Jack’s day serving in the Others ‘ station, with memories from his trip to Thailand slowly helping to clarify where the character got his tattoos. &nbsp,

But if you find yourself thinking” Wow, that sounds like a Jack-heavy episode”, then you’ve put your finger on part of the problem. While the animosity between Jack and his character has arguably been pushed past the point of reason, much of the character’s disdain is rooted in valid criticisms. &nbsp,

Jack remained a stick in the mud in a show that was characterized by how its characters developed and what we learned about their past. Early on, he was positioned at the center of the ensemble cast of the show, but he largely served as a voice of resolute opposition while those around him had more interesting adventures. Even worse, Jack’s flashback episodes frequently brought up the same underlying themes ( daddy issues and substance abuse ). Gasp! ) while many other flashbacks gradually revealed more intricate character tapestries. At the very least, they were often more independently entertaining. &nbsp,

The main reason why” Stranger in a Strange Land” is disliked rather than despised is because of those flashbacks. The episode’s shocking focus shifts to a trip Jack made to Thailand. He has a relationship there with Achara, a woman who claims to be able to tattoo people with real-world markings. She is frequently better than Bai Ling. A sullen and growing increasingly belligerent ( try not to be alarmed ) Jack eventually persuades Achara to convince him of the allegedly mystical tattoos. &nbsp,

While the episode captures the thrills of hearing about some dude’s trip to Thailand (” Bro”, he’ll claim. ” It’s wild” ), it’s the tattoo plot point that is most often remembered and ridiculed. Previews for” Stranger in a Strange Land” teased answers to three of Lost‘s “biggest mysteries”. The whereabouts of relatively minor characters are the focus of two of those mysteries, while the third seems to have to do with Jack’s tattoos: a question that few people ever asked before the series suggested it was a significant piece of the puzzle. &nbsp,

Before” Stranger in a Strange Land,” there had been some unpleasant and largely forgettable episodes of Lost, but those teases really irritated viewers who pleaded for the show to start bringing back answers rather than solving mysteries. One thing is a bad filler episode in a 23-episode season. A bad filler episode that teases a significant event and delivers a wheel-spinning, Jack-focused adventure that validates most of the criticisms made against the character and the series up until that point is completely different. &nbsp,

Even removed from those expectations,” Stranger in a Strange Land” is a particularly poorly acted, poorly written, and poorly paced entry in a series that was about to be firing on all cylinders. You can probably skip it unless you long to watch Jack fly a kite while the majority of other people put their plots on hold for a week.

Many people involved in the production of” Stranger in a Strange Land” have since stated that they knew the episode would be a turning point for the series. They didn’t care, but rather the episode was largely the result of events that were beyond their control. However, that doesn’t mean they were above using that despised episode to their eventual advantage.

How” Stranger in a Strange Land” Saved Lost

Damon Lindelof, the co-creator of Lost, reiterates that he also thinks” Stranger in a Strange Land” is a bad episode in an interview with USA Today and asks viewers to be a little bit kinder to it. According to Lindelof, the episode was the result of “many different circumstances” that contributed to it being as bad as it was. Said circumstances include a “bad casting decision”, a “bad premise decision”, and a “bad flashback story” .&nbsp,

The fact that the show’s creators still had to adhere to more traditional network TV production requirements that didn’t benefit their more serialized series was the biggest contributor to the episode’s various issues. They requested permission from ABC to allow them to set a firmer end date for the program so they could gradually advance through fewer, more meaningful episodes. ABC dissented, and it appeared to believe that more Lost was good Lost.

That is until they came across” Stranger in a Strange Land.” In a 2009 interview with writer Alan Sepinwall, Lindelof recalls that he sat in on a notes call with the network about” Stranger in a Strange Land” and heard them say,” We don’t like this episode,” which many people have since responded. When you’re in charge of the hottest television series, Lilindelof provided the kind of open response that you can only accept with candor.

” We don’t like it, either, but it’s the best we can do if we’re not moving the story forward”, Lindelof said. ” This is the future of the show: how Jack got his tattoos. Everything we’ve been saying for two years about what’s to come, is now all here on the screen. You argued that an hour of Matthew Fox in emotionally-based conflicts, it doesn’t matter what the flashback story is, it’ll be fine. But now that we’re doing his ninth flashback story, you just don’t care”.

The network was given the convincing evidence that Lindelof needed to be able to establish an end date for Lost. Without that end date, they &#8211, and us &#8211, were probably going to have to suffer through a lot more episodes like that. Finally, ABC agreed and gave the showrunners the opportunity to share their plan for a six-season adaptation of the series. &nbsp,

The three seasons of Lost that followed that conversation are hardly ideal. They have fewer episodes and advance to a conclusion that continues to divide viewers today. Yet, we never really got anything as bad as” Stranger in a Strange Land” again. We never saw a single episode that was so pointless or monotonous that the production circumstances of its superfluous existence only made it worse. In the end, Lost‘s worst episode made a compelling case for ABC to start examining their golden goose as something a little more priceless. &nbsp,

The filler episode has evolved into a kind of rallying cry for a better, or at least different, way of doing things in a time of renewed network TV nostalgia when more people are yearning for a simpler form of second-screen entertainment. Yet,” Stranger in a Strange Land” reminds us that such episodes can cut both ways. They can serve as the foundation for more expensive shows that consistently deliver standalone thrills each week, but they also contribute to the reason why some in the industry once pleaded with the networks to rethink what television can be. &nbsp,

Such apprehension should be taken in isolation from any arguments in favor of returning to that format. Their enthusiasm for the concept of a thing frequently conveniently overlooks the reality of how low even the best shows can sag over the course of 20+ episodes. Or, as Jack says regarding an interpretation of his infamous tattoos,” That’s what they say, that’s not what they mean” .&nbsp,

The episode How Lost’s Worst Episode Helped Save the Show first appeared on Den of Geek.