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

Computers have issues because conversation is more important than written language in spoken and written writing. To have productive conversations with us, machines may struggle with the messiness of mortal speech: the disfluencies and pauses, the gestures and body language, and the variations in word choice and spoken dialect that is stymie even the most carefully crafted human-computer interaction. Speaking English also has the advantage of face-to-face contact, which enables us to interpret nonverbal social cues in the human-to-human scenario.

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

Spoken language lacks this luxury. There are verbal cues and vocal behaviors that modulate conversation in nuanced ways, including how something is said, not what. These are also included in conversational cues that emphasize and enhance emotional context. Whether rapid-fire, low-pitched, or high-decibel, whether sarcastic, stilted, or sighing, our spoken language conveys much more than the written word could ever muster. As designers and content strategists, we face exciting challenges when it comes to voice interfaces, the machines we use to communicate over the phone.

Voice Compositions

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

• we require something ( such as a transaction ),
• we want to know something ( information of some sort ), or
• We are social creatures, and we need a conversation partner.

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

Most voice interfaces are more gimmicky than captivating in pure prosocial conversations because most people find it difficult to trust their machines to actually understand how we’re doing and to give them the kind of glad-handing we crave. There’s also ongoing debate as to whether users actually prefer the sort of organic human conversation that begins with a prosocial voice interaction and shifts seamlessly into other types. In Voice User Interface Design, Michael Cohen, James Giangola, and Jennifer Balogh advise sticking to user expectations by imitating how they interact with other voice interfaces rather than trying too hard to be human, which could lead to alienation ( ).

That leaves two different types of conversations we can have with one another that a voice interface can also have easily, including one that is transactional and one that is informational, teaching us something new ( “discuss a musical” ).

Transactional voice interactions

When you order a Hawaiian pizza with extra pineapple, you’re typically having a conversation and a voice interaction when you’re tapping buttons on a food delivery app. The conversation quickly shifts from an initial smattering of neighborly small talk to the actual task at hand, which is ordering a pizza ( generously topped with pineapple, as it should be ).

Alison: Hey, how’s it going?

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

Alison: Can I get a pizza from Hawaii with extra pineapple.

Burhan: Yes, but what size?

Alison: Large.

Burhan: Anything else?

Alison: No, that’s it.

Burhan: Something to drink?

I’ll have a bottle of Coke, Alison.

Burhan, you know what. That’ll be$ 13.55 and about fifteen minutes.

A service rendered or a product delivered is the desired outcome of the transaction, and each progressive disclosure in this transactional conversation reveals more and more of it. Conversations that are transactional have certain characteristics: they are direct, precise, and cost-effective. They quickly dispense with pleasantries.

Informational voice interactions

In the meantime, some conversations are primarily about getting information. Though Alison might visit Crust Deluxe with the sole purpose of placing an order, she might not actually want to walk out with a pizza at all. She might be interested in trying kosher or halal dishes, trying gluten-free dishes, or something else entirely. Even though we have a prosocial mini-conversation once more at the beginning to establish politeness, we’re after much more.

Alison: Hey, how’s it going?

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

Alison: Can I ask a few questions?

Burhan: Of course! Continue straight ahead.

Alison: Do you have any halal options on the menu?

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

Alison, what about pizzas that don’t contain gluten?

Burhan: We can definitely do a gluten-free crust for you, no problem, for both our deep-dish and thin-crust pizzas. Anything else I can say to you to help?

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

Burhan: Anytime, please.

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

Voice interfaces

At their core, voice interfaces employ speech to support users in reaching their goals. However, just because an interface has a voice component doesn’t mean that every user interaction with it is mediated by voice. We’re most concerned with pure voice interfaces, which depend entirely on spoken conversation and lack any visual component, making multimodal voice interfaces much more nuanced and challenging to deal with because they can lean on visual components like screens as crutches.

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

IVR ( interactive voice response ) systems

Written conversational interfaces have been used for computing for many years, but voice interfaces first started to appear in the early 1990s with text-to-speech ( TTS ) dictation programs that recited written text aloud and speech-enabled in-car systems that gave directions to a user-provided address. With the advent of interactive voice response ( IVR ) systems, intended as an alternative to overburdened customer service representatives, we became acquainted with the first true voice interfaces that engaged in authentic conversation.

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

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

Screen readers are the norm

Parallel to the evolution of IVR systems was the invention of the screen reader, a tool that transcribes visual content into synthesized speech. For Blind or visually impaired website users, it’s the predominant method of interacting with text, multimedia, or form elements. Screen readers are the norm represent perhaps the closest equivalent we have today to an out-of-the-box implementation of content delivered through voice.

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

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

Although incredibly instructive for voice interface designers, screen readers have a major flaw: they’re challenging to use and consistently verbose. Sometimes unwieldy pronouncements that name every manipulable HTML element and announce every formatting change are made because the visual structures of websites and web navigation don’t translate well to screen readers. For many screen reader users, working with web-based interfaces exacts a cognitive toll.

Accessibility advocate and voice engineer Chris Maury examines why the screen reader experience is ill-suited for users who rely on voice in Wired:

I hated the way Screen Readers operated from the beginning. Why are they designed the way they are? It makes no sense to present information visually before converting it to audio only after that. All the effort and thought that goes into creating the ideal user experience for an app is wasted, or worse, having a negative effect on blind users ‘ experience. ( )

Well-designed voice interfaces can often be more effective than long-winded screen reader monologues in guiding users to their destination. After all, users of the visual interface have the advantage of freely scurrying around the viewport to find information, ignoring areas that are unimportant to them. Blind users, meanwhile, are obligated to listen to every utterance synthesized into speech and therefore prize brevity and efficiency. Users with disabilities who have long had no choice but to use clumsy screen readers might find that voice interfaces, especially more contemporary voice assistants, provide a more streamlined experience.

Voice-activated devices

When we think of voice assistants (the subset of voice interfaces now commonplace in living rooms, smart homes, and offices), many of us immediately picture HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey or hear Majel Barrett’s voice as the omniscient computer in Star Trek. Voice-activated devices are akin to personal concierges that can answer questions, schedule appointments, conduct searches, and perform other common day-to-day tasks. And they’re rapidly gaining more attention from accessibility advocates for their assistive potential.

Before the earliest IVR systems found success in the enterprise, Apple published a demonstration video in 1987 depicting the Knowledge Navigator, a voice assistant that could transcribe spoken words and recognize human speech to a great degree of accuracy. Then, in 2001, Tim Berners-Lee and others created their vision for a” semantic web agent” that would carry out routine tasks like” checking calendars, making appointments, and finding locations” ( hinter paywall ). Apple’s Siri finally made voice assistants a reality for consumers until 2011 when they were available.

Thanks to the plethora of voice assistants available today, there is considerable variation in how programmable and customizable certain voice assistants are over others ( Fig 1.1 ). At one extreme, everything but vendor-provided features are locked down. For instance, when they were released, core functionality for Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana couldn’t be expanded beyond their already-existing capabilities. There are no other means by which developers can interact with Siri at a low level, aside from predefined categories of tasks like sending messages, hailing rideshares, making restaurant reservations, and other things, which are still unavoidable today.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home offer a core foundation on which developers can build custom voice interfaces. For this reason, developers who feel constrained by the limitations of Siri and Cortana are increasingly using programmable voice assistants that are extensibable and customizable. Google Home has the ability to program arbitrary Google Assistant skills, while Amazon offers the Alexa Skills Kit, a developer framework for creating custom voice interfaces for Amazon Alexa. Today, users can choose from among thousands of custom-built skills within both the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant ecosystems.

As businesses like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google continue to occupy their positions, they are also selling and open-sourcing an unheard array of tools and frameworks for designers and developers, aiming to make creating voice interfaces as simple as possible, even without code.

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

Voice Content

Simply put, voice content is voice-transmitted content. Voice content must be free-flowing and organic, contextless and concise in order to preserve what makes human conversation so compelling in the first place. Everything written content is not.

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

Our initial foray into informational voice interfaces will likely be to provide user content, for many of us. There’s only one problem: any content we already have isn’t in any way ready for this new habitat. How can we make the content on our websites more conversational? And how do we create fresh copy that works with voice-recognition?

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

A day’s weather forcast]sic], the arrival and departure times for an airplane flight, an abstract from a long publication, or a single instant message can all be examples of microcontent. ( )

I would update Dash’s definition of microcontent to include all instances of bite-sized content that goes beyond written communiqués. After all, today we encounter microcontent in interfaces where a small snippet of copy is displayed alone, unmoored from the browser, like a textbot confirmation of a restaurant reservation. The best way to learn how to stretch your content to the limits of its potential is through microcontent, which will inform both established and new delivery methods.

Voice content stands out as being unique because it illustrates how content is experienced in space as opposed to time. We can glance at a digital sign underground for an instant and know when the next train is arriving, but voice interfaces hold our attention captive for periods of time that we can’t easily escape or skip, something screen reader users are all too familiar with.

We need to make sure that our microcontent truly performs well as voice content because it is essentially composed of isolated blobs without any connection to the channels where they will eventually end up. This means focusing on the two most crucial characteristics of robust voice content: voice content legibility and voice content discoverability.

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

Some wealthy runners had come to the conclusion that it was impossible to run a mile in less than four hours in the 1950s. Riders had been attempting it since the later 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body just wasn’t built for the job.

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

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

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

Establishing requirements for a lasting web

The key indicators of climate performance in most big companies are very well established, such as power per square metre for homes and miles per gallon for cars. The tools and methods for calculating those measures are standardized as well, which keeps everyone on the same site when doing economic evaluations. However, we are not required to follow any specific environmental standards in the world of websites and apps, and we have only recently developed the tools and methods to do so.

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

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

1. Transfer of data
2. Coal content of light

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

Transfer of data

Most researchers use kilowatt-hours per gigabyte (k Wh/GB ) as a metric of energy efficiency when measuring the amount of data transferred over the internet when a website or application is used. This serves as a reliable indicator of how much power is being consumed and how much carbon is being released. As a rule of thumb, the more files transferred, the more electricity used in the data center, telecoms systems, and end users products.

The easiest way to calculate data transfer for a single visit for web pages is to measure the page weight, which is the page’s transfer size in kilobytes when someone first visits the page. It’s fairly easy to measure using the developer tools in any modern web browser. Frequently, the statistics for the total data transfer of any web application are included in your web hosting account ( Fig. 2.1 ).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coal content of light

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reverting it to carbon emissions

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

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

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

Browser Energy

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

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

All of these advances are exciting and open up new possibilities for what the web can do to serve society and create positive experiences. However, more computation in a web browser requires more energy to be used by the user’s devices. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a lot of processing power on a user’s device unintentionally make them use older, slower devices and make their phones and laptops ‘ batteries discharge more quickly. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. This not only harms the environment, but it places a disproportionate financial burden on the poorest members of society.

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

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

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

This book will provide you with that plan of action. It covers how to incorporate safety concepts into your design work to create healthy tech, how to persuade your stakeholders that this work is required, and how to respond to criticism that what we really need is more variety. ( Spoiler: we do, but diversity alone is not the antidote to fixing unethical, unsafe tech. )

The diverse protection procedure

When you are designing for health, your goals are to:

• detect the abuse potential of your product.
• style ways to prevent the maltreatment, and
• offer assistance for harmed people to regain control and power.

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

• Conducting study
• creating themes
• Pondering problems
• Creating answers
• Testing for health

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

And if you’ve used it, if you have suggestions for improving it, or just want to give an example of how it helped your staff, please get in touch with me. It’s a dwelling report that I hope will continue to be a helpful and practical tool that technicians can use in their day-to-day job.

Be sure to study Chapter 7, which explicitly addresses the condition and should be handled a little different if you’re creating a product especially for a defenseless group or victims of some form of injury, such as an application for survivors of domestic violence, sexual abuse, or drug dependency. The guidelines below are for evaluating safety when designing a more basic product that will have a large customer base ( which, we now know from data, will include specific groups that should be protected from harm ). Chapter 7 concentrates on goods made specifically for those who are vulnerable and those who have endured trauma.

Step 1: Conduct research

A thorough analysis of how your technology might be used to abuse people as well as a detailed analysis of the experiences of those who have survived and perpetrated that kind of abuse should be included in the design research. At this stage, you and your team will investigate issues of interpersonal harm and abuse, and explore any other safety, security, or inclusivity issues that might be a concern for your product or service, like data security, racist algorithms, and harassment.

broad analysis

Your project should begin with broad, general research into similar products and issues around safety and ethical concerns that have already been reported. For instance, a team building a smart home device would be wise to comprehend the many ways that already-existing smart home devices have been misused as abuse tools. If your product will involve AI, seek to understand the potentials for racism and other issues that have been reported in existing AI products. Nearly all different types of technology have some sort of potential or actual harm that has been covered in academic writing or in the media. Google Scholar is a useful tool for finding these studies.

Specific research: Survivors

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

It is important to pay people for their knowledge and lived experiences, especially when interviewing survivors of any kind of trauma. Don’t ask survivors to share their trauma for free, as this is exploitative. You should always make the offer in the beginning, even though some survivors might not want to be paid. An alternative to payment is to donate to an organization working against the type of violence that the interviewee experienced. In Chapter 6, we’ll discuss how to appropriately interview survivors.

Specific research: Abusers

Teams aiming to design for safety are unlikely to be able to interview self-declared abductors or those who have broken laws in areas like hacking. Don’t make this a goal, rather, try to get at this angle in your general research. Describe the ways that abusers or bad actors use technology to harm others, how they use it to silence others, and how they justify or explain the abuse.

Step 2: Create archetypes

Use your research after you’ve finished conducting it to create abuser and survivor archetypes. Archetypes are not personas, as they’re not based on real people that you interviewed and surveyed. Instead, they are based on your investigation into potential safety problems, much like when we design for accessibility: we don’t need to have identified any blind or deaf people in our interview pool to come up with a design that is representative of them. Instead, we base those designs on existing research into what this group needs. While archetypes are broad and can be more generalized, real users typically represent real users and contain many details.

The abuser archetype is someone who will look at the product as a tool to perform harm ( Fig 5.2 ). They may be attempting to overthrow, monitor, abuse, or torment someone they know personally by using surveillance or anonymous harassment.

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

To capture a range of experiences, you might want to create several survivor archetypes. They may know that the abuse is happening but not be able to stop it, like when an abuser locks them out of IoT devices, or they know it’s happening but don’t know how, such as when a stalker keeps figuring out their location ( Fig 5.4). In your survivor archetype, include as many of these scenarios as you need. You’ll use these later on when you design solutions to help your survivor archetypes achieve their goals of preventing and ending abuse.

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

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

Step 3: Brainstorm problems

Brainstorm novel abuse cases and safety issues after creating archetypes. ” Novel” means things not found in your research, you’re trying to identify completely new safety issues that are unique to your product or service. This step is intended to exhaust every effort put forth to identify potential harms your product might cause. You aren’t worrying about how to prevent the harm yet—that comes in the next step.

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

Try conducting a Black Mirror brainstorming if you’re looking for a place to start. This exercise is based on the show Black Mirror, which features stories about the dark possibilities of technology. Try to figure out the most outrageous, horrible, and out-of-control ways your product could be used to cause harm in an episode of the show. When I’ve led Black Mirror brainstorms, participants usually end up having a good deal of fun ( which I think is great—it’s okay to have fun when designing for safety! ). I suggest that you time-box a Black Mirror brainstorm for the first half an hour, then dial it back, and then consider more realistic ways of harm the remaining half.

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

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

Step 4: Create solutions

At this point, you should have a list of ways your product can be used for harm as well as survivor and abuser archetypes describing opposing user goals. Next, it’s time to figure out how to design in accordance with the objectives of the identified abuser and the objectives of the survivor. This step is a good one to insert alongside existing parts of your design process where you’re proposing solutions for the various problems your research uncovered.

Questions to ask yourself include: What are some ways to protect yourself and support your archetypes?

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

In some products, it’s possible to proactively recognize that harm is happening. For instance, a pregnancy app might be modified to allow users to report being assault victims, which could result in an offer to receive resources from local and national organizations. This sort of proactiveness is not always possible, but it’s worth taking a half hour to discuss if any type of user activity would indicate some form of harm or abuse, and how your product could assist the user in receiving help in a safe manner.

Nonetheless, be careful when doing anything that could harm a user if their devices are being monitored. If you do offer some kind of proactive help, always make it voluntary, and think through other safety issues, such as the need to keep the user in-app in case an abuser is checking their search history. In the next chapter, we’ll walk through a good illustration of this.

Step 5: Test for safety

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

Safety testing should be performed along with usability testing. If you’re at a company that doesn’t do usability testing, you might be able to use safety testing to cleverly perform both, a user who goes through your design attempting to weaponize the product against someone else can also be encouraged to point out interactions or other elements of the design that don’t make sense to them.

If your final prototype or the finished product has already been released, you’ll want to conduct safety testing on both. There’s nothing wrong with testing an existing product that wasn’t designed with safety goals in mind from the onset —”retrofitting” it for safety is a good thing to do.

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

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

testing for abuse

The goal of this testing is to understand how easy it is for someone to weaponize your product for harm. You want to make it impossible, or at least difficult for them to accomplish their goal, unlike with usability testing. Reference the goals in the abuser archetype you created earlier, and use your product in an attempt to achieve them.

For instance, we can imagine that the abuser archetype would have the goal of determining the location of his ex-girlfriend right now in a fitness app with GPS-enabled location features. With this goal in mind, you’d try everything possible to figure out the location of another user who has their privacy settings enabled. You might try to follow her running routes, view any information she has on her profile, view any information she has made private, and check out other users ‘ profiles, such as those of her followers.

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

Testing for Survivors

Testing for Survivors involves identifying how to give information and power to the survivor. It might not always make sense based on the product or context. Thwarting the attempt of an abuser archetype to stalk someone also satisfies the goal of the survivor archetype to not be stalked, so separate testing wouldn’t be needed from the survivor’s perspective.

There are times, however, when it makes sense. For example, for a smart thermostat, a survivor archetype’s goals would be to understand who or what is making the temperature change when they aren’t doing it themselves. If you couldn’t find the information in step 4, you would need to perform more work in step 4. You could test this by looking for the thermostat’s history log and looking for usernames, actions, and times.

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

Stress testing

To make your product more inclusive and compassionate, consider adding stress testing. This idea is a result of Design for Real Life by Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer. The authors pointed out that personas typically center people who are having a good day—but real users are often anxious, stressed out, having a bad day, or even experiencing tragedy. These are known as” stress cases,” and testing your products for users in stress-case scenarios can reveal areas where your design lacks compassion. Design for Real Life has more details about what it looks like to incorporate stress cases into your design as well as many other great tactics for compassionate design.

However, how can a content management system ( CMS ) be set up to reach your audience both now and in the future? I learned the hard way that creating a content model—a concept of information types, attributes, and relationships that let people and systems understand content—with my more comfortable design-system wondering would collapse my patient’s holistic information strategy. By developing content versions that are conceptual and even join related content, you can avoid that result.

A Fortune 500 company recently tapped me to guide the CMS application. The customer was excited by the benefits of an holistic information plan, including material modify, multichannel marketing, and robot delivery—designing content to be comprehensible to bots, Google knowledge panels, snippets, and voice user interfaces.

A content type is essential to an omnichannel content strategy, and it required conceptual types to be given names that don’t depend on how the content is presented. Our goal was to allow writers to produce original content that could be used wherever they felt was most useful. However, as the project progressed, I realized that the entire team had to be aware of a new style in order to support material reuse on the level that my customer needed.

Despite our best motives, we kept drawing from what we were more common with: design techniques. Unlike web-focused information strategies, an holistic information strategy doesn’t rely on WYSIWYG equipment for design and structure. Our inclination to approach the material model using our well-known design-system thinking consistently stifled our attention from one of the main objectives of a material model: delivering content to audiences across multiple marketing channels.

Two fundamental tenets must be followed in order to create a successful information type

We had to explain to our designers, developers, and stakeholders that their previous internet projects had taught them that content should be treated as visible building blocks that fit into layouts. Because it made the layouts feel more recognizable, the previous approach was more intuitive, at first, at least initially. We discovered two guiding principles that helped the group grasp how a willing model and the design processes we were familiar with were:

1. Instead of design, vocabulary must be used by content versions.
2. And glad models should connect elements that belong together.

Conceptual material models

A conceptual content type uses form and attribute names that reflect the content’s intended purpose and not its intended display. For instance, in a nonsemantic design, groups may produce varieties like teasers, press blocks, and cards. These types may simplify the presentation of material, but they do not aid in understanding the meaning of the information, which would have opened the door to the articles presented in each marketing channel. In comparison, a conceptual material type uses kind names like “product,”” service,” and “testimonial” to allow for each delivery channel to interpret and use the content as it sees fit.

A great place to start when creating a conceptual content concept is by reviewing the types and qualities that Schema has defined. com, a community-driven tool for type meanings that are comprehensible to platforms like Google search.

A semantic information model has many advantages:

A semantic material type decouples information from its presentation but that teams can change the website’s design without having to restructure its content, even if your team doesn’t worry about omnichannel content. In this way, content may withstand destructive site redesigns.
• A conceptual material model also gives you a competitive advantage. by including schema-based structured files. org’s forms and properties, a site can give hints to help Google understand the content, display it in research snippets or information panels, and use it to reply voice-interface customer questions. Potential visitors could access your content without ever walking into your website.
• A semantic content model is also necessary if you want to deliver omnichannel content in addition to those practical advantages. Delivery channels must be able to comprehend the same content in order to use it across multiple marketing channels. For instance, if your content model provided a list of questions and answers, it could be used as a voice interface or by a bot to answer frequently asked questions ( FAQ ) pages.

For example, using a semantic content model for articles, events, people, and locations lets A List Apart provide cleanly structured data for search engines so that users can read the content on the website, in Google knowledge panels, and even with hypothetical voice interfaces in the future.

Content models that connect

Instead of slicing up related content across disparate content components, I’ve come to the realization that the best models are those that are semantic and also connect related content components ( such as a FAQ item’s question and answer pair ). A good content model connects pieces of content that ought to be preserved so that multiple delivery channels can use it without having to assemble those pieces first.

Consider creating an essay or article. An article’s meaning and usefulness depends upon its parts being kept together. Without the full context of the article, would one of the headings or paragraphs have any relevance on their own? Our well-versed in designing systems frequently led us to want to develop content models that would break content into smaller pieces to fit the web-centric layout. Similar effects could have been felt to an article that had its headline removed. Content that belonged together became challenging to manage and nearly impossible for multiple delivery channels to understand because we were cutting content into separate pieces based on layout.

To illustrate, let’s look at how connecting related content applies in a real-world scenario. A complex layout for a software product page that included multiple tabs and sections was presented by the client’s design team. The content model lacked instincts, so we had to follow our instincts. Shouldn’t we make adding any number of tabs in the future as simple and as flexible as possible?

We felt like we needed a “tab section” content type because our design-system instincts allowed for the addition of multiple tab sections to a page because they were so well-versed. Each tab section would display various kinds of information. One tab might provide the software’s overview or its specifications. Another tab might provide a list of resources.

Our tendency to divide the content model into “tab section” pieces would have resulted in a cumbersome editing process and an unnecessary complexity of the model, as well as content that wasn’t understandable by other delivery channels. How would a different system have been able to determine which “tab section” referred to a product’s specifications or resource list, for instance? Would that system have had to have used tab sections and content blocks to calculate this? This would have prevented the tabs from ever being rearranged, and it would have required adding logic to each other delivery channel to interpret the layout of the design system. Additionally, it would have been difficult to migrate to a new content model in response to the new page redesign if the customer had decided against displaying this content in a tab layout.

We had a breakthrough when we discovered that our customer had a specific purpose in mind for each tab: it would reveal specific information such as the software product’s overview, specifications, related resources, and pricing. Our desire to concentrate on the visually appealing and well-known had obscured the design’s purpose once implementation began. With a little digging, it didn’t take long to realize that the concept of tabs wasn’t relevant to the content model. What was important was the meaning of the content they were planning to display in the tabs.

In fact, the customer could have chosen to switch to another format, using tabs, elsewhere. Based on the meaningful attributes the customer had desired to display on the web, we created content types for the software product. There were obvious semantic attributes like name and description as well as rich attributes like screenshots, software requirements, and feature lists. The software’s product information stayed together because it wasn’t sliced across separate components like “tab sections” that were derived from the content’s presentation. Any delivery channel—including future ones—could understand and present this content.

Conclusion

In this omnichannel marketing project, we discovered that the best way to maintain the content model was to ensure that it was semantic ( with type and attribute names that reflected the content’s meaning ) and that it kept content together that belonged ( as opposed to separating it ). These two ideas made it easier for us to shape the content model based on the design. Remember: If you’re developing a content model to support an omnichannel content strategy, or even if you just want to make sure Google and other interfaces understand your content, remember:

• A design system isn’t a content model. You should maintain the semantic value and contextual structure of the content strategy throughout the entire implementation process because team members might be drawn to conflate them and force your content model to resemble your design system. Without the use of a magic decoder ring, every delivery channel will be able to consume the content.
• If your team is having trouble making this transition, Schema can still offer some of the advantages. org–based structured data in your website. The advantage of search engine optimization is a compelling argument on its own, even if additional delivery channels are not in the works.
• Remind the team that removing the content model from the design will allow them to update the designs more quickly because content migration costs won’t be prohibitive. They’ll be able to create new designs without compromising the compatibility between the content and the design, and they’ll be prepared for the upcoming big thing.

By firmly defending these ideas, you’ll help your team treat content the way it deserves as the most important component of your user experience and the best way to engage with your audience.

Do you find yourself designing screens with only a vague idea of how the things on the screen relate to the things elsewhere in the system? Do you leave stakeholder meetings with unclear directives that often seem to contradict previous conversations? You know a better understanding of user needs would help the team get clear on what you are actually trying to accomplish, but time and budget for research is tight. When it comes to asking for more direct contact with your users, you might feel like poor Oliver Twist, timidly asking, “Please, sir, I want some more.” 

Here’s the trick. You need to get stakeholders themselves to identify high-risk assumptions and hidden complexity, so that they become just as motivated as you to get answers from users. Basically, you need to make them think it’s their idea. 

In this article, I’ll show you how to collaboratively expose misalignment and gaps in the team’s shared understanding by bringing the team together around two simple questions:

1. What are the objects?
2. What are the relationships between those objects?

A gauntlet between research and screen design

These two questions align to the first two steps of the ORCA process, which might become your new best friend when it comes to reducing guesswork. Wait, what’s ORCA?! Glad you asked.

ORCA stands for Objects, Relationships, CTAs, and Attributes, and it outlines a process for creating solid object-oriented user experiences. Object-oriented UX is my design philosophy. ORCA is an iterative methodology for synthesizing user research into an elegant structural foundation to support screen and interaction design. OOUX and ORCA have made my work as a UX designer more collaborative, effective, efficient, fun, strategic, and meaningful.

The ORCA process has four iterative rounds and a whopping fifteen steps. In each round we get more clarity on our Os, Rs, Cs, and As.

I sometimes say that ORCA is a “garbage in, garbage out” process. To ensure that the testable prototype produced in the final round actually tests well, the process needs to be fed by good research. But if you don’t have a ton of research, the beginning of the ORCA process serves another purpose: it helps you sell the need for research.

In other words, the ORCA process serves as a gauntlet between research and design. With good research, you can gracefully ride the killer whale from research into design. But without good research, the process effectively spits you back into research and with a cache of specific open questions.

Getting in the same curiosity-boat

What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.

Mark Twain

The first two steps of the ORCA process—Object Discovery and Relationship Discovery—shine a spotlight on the dark, dusty corners of your team’s misalignments and any inherent complexity that’s been swept under the rug. It begins to expose what this classic comic so beautifully illustrates:

This is one reason why so many UX designers are frustrated in their job and why many projects fail. And this is also why we often can’t sell research: every decision-maker is confident in their own mental picture. 

Once we expose hidden fuzzy patches in each picture and the differences between them all, the case for user research makes itself.

But how we do this is important. However much we might want to, we can’t just tell everyone, “YOU ARE WRONG!” Instead, we need to facilitate and guide our team members to self-identify holes in their picture. When stakeholders take ownership of assumptions and gaps in understanding, BAM! Suddenly, UX research is not such a hard sell, and everyone is aboard the same curiosity-boat.

Say your users are doctors. And you have no idea how doctors use the system you are tasked with redesigning.

You might try to sell research by honestly saying: “We need to understand doctors better! What are their pain points? How do they use the current app?” But here’s the problem with that. Those questions are vague, and the answers to them don’t feel acutely actionable.

Instead, you want your stakeholders themselves to ask super-specific questions. This is more like the kind of conversation you need to facilitate. Let’s listen in:

“Wait a sec, how often do doctors share patients? Does a patient in this system have primary and secondary doctors?”

“Can a patient even have more than one primary doctor?”

“Is it a ‘primary doctor’ or just a ‘primary caregiver’… Can’t that role be a nurse practitioner?”

“No, caregivers are something else… That’s the patient’s family contacts, right?”

“So are caregivers in scope for this redesign?”

“Yeah, because if a caregiver is present at an appointment, the doctor needs to note that. Like, tag the caregiver on the note… Or on the appointment?”

Now we are getting somewhere. Do you see how powerful it can be getting stakeholders to debate these questions themselves? The diabolical goal here is to shake their confidence—gently and diplomatically.

When these kinds of questions bubble up collaboratively and come directly from the mouths of your stakeholders and decision-makers, suddenly, designing screens without knowing the answers to these questions seems incredibly risky, even silly.

If we create software without understanding the real-world information environment of our users, we will likely create software that does not align to the real-world information environment of our users. And this will, hands down, result in a more confusing, more complex, and less intuitive software product.

The two questions

But how do we get to these kinds of meaty questions diplomatically, efficiently, collaboratively, and reliably? 

We can do this by starting with those two big questions that align to the first two steps of the ORCA process:

1. What are the objects?
2. What are the relationships between those objects?

In practice, getting to these answers is easier said than done. I’m going to show you how these two simple questions can provide the outline for an Object Definition Workshop. During this workshop, these “seed” questions will blossom into dozens of specific questions and shine a spotlight on the need for more user research.

Prep work: Noun foraging

In the next section, I’ll show you how to run an Object Definition Workshop with your stakeholders (and entire cross-functional team, hopefully). But first, you need to do some prep work.

Basically, look for nouns that are particular to the business or industry of your project, and do it across at least a few sources. I call this noun foraging.

Here are just a few great noun foraging sources:

• the product’s marketing site
• the product’s competitors’ marketing sites (competitive analysis, anyone?)
• the existing product (look at labels!)
• user interview transcripts
• notes from stakeholder interviews or vision docs from stakeholders

Put your detective hat on, my dear Watson. Get resourceful and leverage what you have. If all you have is a marketing website, some screenshots of the existing legacy system, and access to customer service chat logs, then use those.

As you peruse these sources, watch for the nouns that are used over and over again, and start listing them (preferably on blue sticky notes if you’ll be creating an object map later!).

You’ll want to focus on nouns that might represent objects in your system. If you are having trouble determining if a noun might be object-worthy, remember the acronym SIP and test for:

1. Structure
2. Instances
3. Purpose

Think of a library app, for example. Is “book” an object?

Structure: can you think of a few attributes for this potential object? Title, author, publish date… Yep, it has structure. Check!

Instance: what are some examples of this potential “book” object? Can you name a few? The Alchemist, Ready Player One, Everybody Poops… OK, check!

Purpose: why is this object important to the users and business? Well, “book” is what our library client is providing to people and books are why people come to the library… Check, check, check!

As you are noun foraging, focus on capturing the nouns that have SIP. Avoid capturing components like dropdowns, checkboxes, and calendar pickers—your UX system is not your design system! Components are just the packaging for objects—they are a means to an end. No one is coming to your digital place to play with your dropdown! They are coming for the VALUABLE THINGS and what they can do with them. Those things, or objects, are what we are trying to identify.

Let’s say we work for a startup disrupting the email experience. This is how I’d start my noun foraging.

First I’d look at my own email client, which happens to be Gmail. I’d then look at Outlook and the new HEY email. I’d look at Yahoo, Hotmail…I’d even look at Slack and Basecamp and other so-called “email replacers.” I’d read some articles, reviews, and forum threads where people are complaining about email. While doing all this, I would look for and write down the nouns.

(Before moving on, feel free to go noun foraging for this hypothetical product, too, and then scroll down to see how much our lists match up. Just don’t get lost in your own emails! Come back to me!)

Drumroll, please…

Here are a few nouns I came up with during my noun foraging:

• email message
• thread
• contact
• client
• rule/automation
• email address that is not a contact?
• contact groups
• attachment
• Google doc file / other integrated file
• newsletter? (HEY treats this differently)
• saved responses and templates

Scan your list of nouns and pick out words that you are completely clueless about. In our email example, it might be client or automation. Do as much homework as you can before your session with stakeholders: google what’s googleable. But other terms might be so specific to the product or domain that you need to have a conversation about them.

Aside: here are some real nouns foraged during my own past project work that I needed my stakeholders to help me understand:

• Record Locator
• Incentive Home
• Augmented Line Item
• Curriculum-Based Measurement Probe

This is really all you need to prepare for the workshop session: a list of nouns that represent potential objects and a short list of nouns that need to be defined further.

Facilitate an Object Definition Workshop

You could actually start your workshop with noun foraging—this activity can be done collaboratively. If you have five people in the room, pick five sources, assign one to every person, and give everyone ten minutes to find the objects within their source. When the time’s up, come together and find the overlap. Affinity mapping is your friend here!

If your team is short on time and might be reluctant to do this kind of grunt work (which is usually the case) do your own noun foraging beforehand, but be prepared to show your work. I love presenting screenshots of documents and screens with all the nouns already highlighted. Bring the artifacts of your process, and start the workshop with a five-minute overview of your noun foraging journey.

HOT TIP: before jumping into the workshop, frame the conversation as a requirements-gathering session to help you better understand the scope and details of the system. You don’t need to let them know that you’re looking for gaps in the team’s understanding so that you can prove the need for more user research—that will be our little secret. Instead, go into the session optimistically, as if your knowledgeable stakeholders and PMs and biz folks already have all the answers. 

Then, let the question whack-a-mole commence.

1. What is this thing?

Want to have some real fun? At the beginning of your session, ask stakeholders to privately write definitions for the handful of obscure nouns you might be uncertain about. Then, have everyone show their cards at the same time and see if you get different definitions (you will). This is gold for exposing misalignment and starting great conversations.

As your discussion unfolds, capture any agreed-upon definitions. And when uncertainty emerges, quietly (but visibly) start an “open questions” parking lot. 😉

After definitions solidify, here’s a great follow-up:

2. Do our users know what these things are? What do users call this thing?

Stakeholder 1: They probably call email clients “apps.” But I’m not sure.

Stakeholder 2: Automations are often called “workflows,” I think. Or, maybe users think workflows are something different.

If a more user-friendly term emerges, ask the group if they can agree to use only that term moving forward. This way, the team can better align to the users’ language and mindset.

OK, moving on. 

If you have two or more objects that seem to overlap in purpose, ask one of these questions:

3. Are these the same thing? Or are these different? If they are not the same, how are they different?

You: Is a saved response the same as a template?

Stakeholder 1: Yes! Definitely.

Stakeholder 2: I don’t think so… A saved response is text with links and variables, but a template is more about the look and feel, like default fonts, colors, and placeholder images. 

Continue to build out your growing glossary of objects. And continue to capture areas of uncertainty in your “open questions” parking lot.

If you successfully determine that two similar things are, in fact, different, here’s your next follow-up question:

4. What’s the relationship between these objects?

You: Are saved responses and templates related in any way?

Stakeholder 3:  Yeah, a template can be applied to a saved response.

You, always with the follow-ups: When is the template applied to a saved response? Does that happen when the user is constructing the saved response? Or when they apply the saved response to an email? How does that actually work?

Listen. Capture uncertainty. Once the list of “open questions” grows to a critical mass, pause to start assigning questions to groups or individuals. Some questions might be for the dev team (hopefully at least one developer is in the room with you). One question might be specifically for someone who couldn’t make it to the workshop. And many questions will need to be labeled “user.” 

Do you see how we are building up to our UXR sales pitch?

5. Is this object in scope?

Your next question narrows the team’s focus toward what’s most important to your users. You can simply ask, “Are saved responses in scope for our first release?,” but I’ve got a better, more devious strategy.

By now, you should have a list of clearly defined objects. Ask participants to sort these objects from most to least important, either in small breakout groups or individually. Then, like you did with the definitions, have everyone reveal their sort order at once. Surprisingly—or not so surprisingly—it’s not unusual for the VP to rank something like “saved responses” as #2 while everyone else puts it at the bottom of the list. Try not to look too smug as you inevitably expose more misalignment.

I did this for a startup a few years ago. We posted the three groups’ wildly different sort orders on the whiteboard.

The CEO stood back, looked at it, and said, “This is why we haven’t been able to move forward in two years.”

Admittedly, it’s tragic to hear that, but as a professional, it feels pretty awesome to be the one who facilitated a watershed realization.

Once you have a good idea of in-scope, clearly defined things, this is when you move on to doing more relationship mapping.

6. Create a visual representation of the objects’ relationships

We’ve already done a bit of this while trying to determine if two things are different, but this time, ask the team about every potential relationship. For each object, ask how it relates to all the other objects. In what ways are the objects connected? To visualize all the connections, pull out your trusty boxes-and-arrows technique. Here, we are connecting our objects with verbs. I like to keep my verbs to simple “has a” and “has many” statements.

This system modeling activity brings up all sorts of new questions:

• Can a saved response have attachments?
• Can a saved response use a template? If so, if an email uses a saved response with a template, can the user override that template?
• Do users want to see all the emails they sent that included a particular attachment? For example, “show me all the emails I sent with ProfessionalImage.jpg attached. I’ve changed my professional photo and I want to alert everyone to update it.” 

Solid answers might emerge directly from the workshop participants. Great! Capture that new shared understanding. But when uncertainty surfaces, continue to add questions to your growing parking lot.

Light the fuse

You’ve positioned the explosives all along the floodgates. Now you simply have to light the fuse and BOOM. Watch the buy-in for user research flooooow.

Before your workshop wraps up, have the group reflect on the list of open questions. Make plans for getting answers internally, then focus on the questions that need to be brought before users.

Here’s your final step. Take those questions you’ve compiled for user research and discuss the level of risk associated with NOT answering them. Ask, “if we design without an answer to this question, if we make up our own answer and we are wrong, how bad might that turn out?” 

With this methodology, we are cornering our decision-makers into advocating for user research as they themselves label questions as high-risk. Sorry, not sorry. 

Now is your moment of truth. With everyone in the room, ask for a reasonable budget of time and money to conduct 6–8 user interviews focused specifically on these questions. 

HOT TIP: if you are new to UX research, please note that you’ll likely need to rephrase the questions that came up during the workshop before you present them to users. Make sure your questions are open-ended and don’t lead the user into any default answers.

Final words: Hold the screen design!

Seriously, if at all possible, do not ever design screens again without first answering these fundamental questions: what are the objects and how do they relate?

I promise you this: if you can secure a shared understanding between the business, design, and development teams before you start designing screens, you will have less heartache and save more time and money, and (it almost feels like a bonus at this point!) users will be more receptive to what you put out into the world. 

I sincerely hope this helps you win time and budget to go talk to your users and gain clarity on what you are designing before you start building screens. If you find success using noun foraging and the Object Definition Workshop, there’s more where that came from in the rest of the ORCA process, which will help prevent even more late-in-the-game scope tugs-of-war and strategy pivots. 

All the best of luck! Now go sell research!

CSS is all about appearance containers. In fact, the whole website is made of containers, from the website viewport to components on a webpage. However, every now and then a new element appears that prompts us to reevaluate our style philosophy.

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

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

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

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

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

PWAs on pc are ultimately limited to the glass they appear in, which is a square with a name bar at the top.

Here’s what a standard pc PWA app looks like:

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

What if we could look beyond this field and reclaim the entire screen of the app? Doing so would give us a chance to create our applications more wonderful and feel more included in the operating system.

The Window Controls Overlay offers precisely this. This innovative PWA operation makes it possible to take advantage of the full floor area of the app, including where the name bar usually appears.

About the glass and title bar settings

Let’s begin with an explanation of what the title bar and screen controls are.

The name club, which typically contains the phone’s name, appears at the top of an game glass. Window regulates are the affordances, or buttons, that make it possible to decrease, increase, or near the app’s screen, and are also displayed at the top.

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s use the feature

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

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

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

The second page enables you to create and edit CSS designs:

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

And on Windows:

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

To enhance this, let’s use the Window Controls Overlay feature.

Enabling Window Controls Overlay

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

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

Using Window Controls Overlay

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

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

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

We’ll need a little bit of CSS and JavaScript code to make the most of the title bar area in our design and make a great experience for all users regardless of device or browser they use.

Here is what the app looks like now:

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

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

CSS to avoid the window controls

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

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

You can position your content where the title bar would have been by using these variables with the CSS env function to prevent it from overlapping with the window controls. In our case, we’ll use two of the variables to position our header, which contains the logo, search bar, and NEW button.

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

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

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

Our header now adapts to its surroundings, and it doesn’t seem like the window control buttons were left out. The app looks a lot more like a native app.

Changing the window controls the background color so that it blends in

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

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

By changing the theme color of the app, we can fix this. There are a couple of ways to define it:

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

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

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

Here is the function we’ll use:

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

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

Dragging the window

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

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

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

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

-webkit-app-region: drag;

Additionally, it is possible to expressly make an element non-draggable:

-webkit-app-region: no-drag; 

These options can be useful for us. We can rename the entire header as a dragging target, but we can also make the NEW button and search field non-draggable so they can still be used as they normally are.

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

adapting to window resizing

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

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

Three intriguing things are provided by the API:

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the window is too small, we can use the above CSS code to move our header down and the thumbnails down in accordance with this.

Thirty pixel of creative challenge

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the time, I didn’t realize yet how to functionally 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 I only managed to get a good deal of a higher ( moral ) design quality, which is not what I would consider to be structurally integrated.

I made a deeper investigation into the 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 amazingly easy! However, we must first 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 may begin by acting appropriately throughout the program. 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 course.
• 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 techniques, toolkits, articles, conferences, workshops, and so on. This is where ethical design has largely remained theoretical. We’ve been focusing on the wrong system level all this time.
• Take rules, for example—they beat knowledge every time. There can be widely accepted rules, such as how finance works, or a scrum team’s definition of done. However, unofficial rules intended to maintain profits can also smother ethical design, which are frequently revealed through statements like” the client didn’t ask for it” or “don’t make it too big.”
• 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 nothing more than a measure, I realized just how crucial a very specific, defined metric can be in terms of moving a business in a certain direction.

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

Redefine success

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is hardly a new idea. Many similar models exist, some calling the fourth dimension accountability, integrity, or responsibility. What I’ve never seen before, however, is the necessary step that comes after: to influence the system as designers and to make ethical design more practical, we must create objectives for ethical design that are achievable and inspirational. There’s no one way to do this because it highly depends on your culture, values, and industry. However, I’ll 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 a personal level teaches us that success transcends the typical area of user experience and satisfaction, taking into account factors like how much time and effort are required of users. We pursued well-being:

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

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

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

Finally, the global goal of maintaining harmony with humanity’s sole home is the ultimate goal. 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 well-being for 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. Donella Meadows once provided this illustration:

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 focus and clarity.

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

Practice daily ethical design

Only then do you have the opportunity to structurally practice ethical design once you have defined your goals and 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 simple illustration suffice, or should you go with that energizing 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 affected 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.

Start it off or return to the pre-existing

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

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

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

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

It is crucial to reach an understanding of what success means at this early stage because you can rely on it for the duration of the project. 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 follow-up on that promise throughout the project if the client consents. As we agreed in our first meeting, having a diverse user group that includes A and B 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 the platform’s success depends heavily on sustainability and progressive enhancement. 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 followed up our discussions and agreed on them.

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

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

Conclusion

Over the past year, quite a few colleagues have asked me,” Where do I start with ethical design”? My response has always been the same: hold a meeting with your stakeholders to ( re)define success. Even though you might not always be entirely successful in coming to terms with goals that address all responsibility goals, that consistently beats the situation ( the status quo ) in the end. 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 first understand how your industry influences consumerism and inequality, how finance drives business, and how to think creatively about how to best influence the system. Then redefine success to give people the ability to use those tools.

And for those who identify as service designers, UX designers, or UI designers, stay away from the 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 of ways to accomplish and evaluate those ethical goals. 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”? A product manager once questioned why ethics couldn’t just be a set process for design, avoiding having to put forth an 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 keep talking about ethical design and it continues to be at the level of articles and toolkits, for those of us who have the chance to speak up and be heard, we are not designing ethically. It’s just theory. By challenging them to redefine success in business, we must actively engage with our colleagues and clients.

With a bit of courage, determination, and focus, we can break out of this cage that finance and business-as-usual have built around us and become facilitators of a new type of business that can see beyond financial value. We simply need to come to terms with the right goals when starting each design project, identify the appropriate metrics, and acknowledge that we already have everything in place. 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 tasks, but you need to first determine whether it is appropriate in light of the physical design and user interactions you’re creating. To help you get started, here’s how I go about tackling the elements you need to watch for, and I’ll discuss some alternative remedies if mobile-first doesn’t seem to fit your job.

Benefits of mobile-first

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

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

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

Prioritizes the portable watch. 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 ) ).

Stops desktop-centric growth. It can be tempting to first focus on the desktop perspective because enhancement is done using pc servers. No one wants to spend their time retrofitting a desktop-centric website to function on mobile devices, but thinking about smart from the beginning prevents us from getting stuck in the future!

Drawbacks of mobile-first

Model declarations can be set at lower breakpoints and finally overwritten at higher breakpoints:

More richness. The more pointless script you inherit from lower baselines the higher you go in the hierarchy.

Higher CSS sensitivity. A school name declaration’s default style has then a higher specificity that has been returned to the browser’s default value. 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 modifications to CSS at a lower watch ( such as adding a new style ) are required.

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 overrides

There is no intrinsically wrong with overwriting principles; CSS was created to accomplish 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, having a thorough understanding of any given component in all breakpoints upfront is necessary for developing simultaneously. This can help identify issues in the design more quickly during the development process. We don’t want to travel down the rabbit hole while creating complex mobile components, only to discover that the desktop designs are just as complex and incompatible with the HTML we created for the mobile view!

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

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

Closed media query ranges in practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

The goal is to: 

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

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

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

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

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

separating the CSS 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. This enables us to use a media query to break CSS into multiple 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, select 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 development milestone because it allowed front-end developers to concentrate on mobile web applications rather than creating websites for desktop use and attempting to convert 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 the CSS I write for myself as well as other developers, and that the testing and maintenance work is also a little more organized and effective.

In the end, simplifying CSS rule creation whenever possible is a more effective strategy than circling around with 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 systematic personalization framework especially for UX practitioners after finishing dozens of personalization tasks over the past few years. The Personalization Pyramid is a designer-centric model for standing up human-centered 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 know enough to get started ).

Getting Started

For the sake of this article, we’ll suppose you’re already familiar with the basics of online personalization. A nice guide can be found these: Website Personalization Planning. Although Graphic jobs 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 of a content management system ( CMS ), marketing automation platform ( MAP ), or other related technology.
• The CMO, CDO, or CIO has identified personalisation as a target
• User data is disjointed or confusing
• You are conducting some sporadic targeting or A/B tests.
• On personalization method, participants disagree.
• 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 corporate goal is driving the personalization system?
1. Objectives: What are the specific, tangible benefits of the system?
2. Touchpoints: Where will the personalized experience been served?
3. Contexts and Campaigns: What personalization information does the person view?
4. User Divisions: What constitutes a special, suitable market?
5. Actionable Data: What trustworthy and credible information is collected by our specialized software to improve personalization?
6. Natural Data: What wider set of data is potentially available ( now in our environment ) allowing you to optimize?

We’ll go through each of these amounts sequentially. An associated deck of cards serves as an example of each level’s specific examples to make this more meaningful. We’ve found them useful in brainstorming about customisation, so we’ll provide cases 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 program ( big or small ) is a northern star. The personalisation program’s entire 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 contain:

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 personalisation 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. The goals are the military and tangible indicators that will support the success of the entire program. Start with your existing analytics and calculation system, as well as indicators you can benchmark against. In some cases, new targets may be ideal. The most important thing to remember is that personalisation is more of a means of achieving an objective than a desired result. Popular targets include:

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

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 bar
• Web symbol
• Web content wall
• Web restaurant

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

Contexts and Campaigns

After you’ve outlined some touchpoints, you may consider the actual personal information a user may acquire. Many personalization tools will refer to these as” campaigns” ( so, for example, a campaign on a web banner for new visitors to the website ). These will be displayed automatically to specific customer 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 environment helps you consider whether a consumer is engaging with the personalization process at the moment, such as when they are simply browsing the web or engaging in a deep dive. Think of it in terms of behavior in data recovery. The content model can then guide you in deciding what kind of personalization to use in 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 Divisions

Based on customer research, user segments can be created prescriptively or dynamically ( 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 unidentified or first-time visitor, the guest or returning visitor for whom you may have a stateful cookie ( or an equivalent post-cookie identifier ), or the logged-in visitor who is authenticated. Using the personalisation pyramids, here are some examples:

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

Actionable Data

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

First-party information represents multiple benefits on the UX before, including being relatively simple to acquire, more likely to be accurate, and less susceptible to the” creep issue” of third-party information. 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. These approaches, however, should be taken into account as part of the overall plan and may in fact help to speed up the organization’s progress overall. At this point, you will typically work with important stakeholders and product owners to create a profiling model. The profiling model includes a defining framework 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 a starting point for an inventory of sorts ( we offer blanks for you to customize your own ), a set of potential levers and motivations for the personalization activities you aspire to deliver, but they are more valuable when grouped together.

One can begin to chart the entire course of a card’s “hand” from leadership focus to a 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 informed choices about who, where, when, and how, will be made these choices.

Lay Down Your Cards

Any sustainable personalization strategy must consider near, mid and long-term goals. There is simply no “easy button” where a personalization program can be 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 vital value? Or a doctor’s? Or a student’s? They all good wonderful. When humility is our guiding light, the course is usually available for fulfillment, development, relation, and commitment. In this section, 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 susceptible as well. I call it:

The Tale of Justin’s Preposterous Pate

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

But I drained HTML and JavaScript publications until the early hours of the morning and self-taught myself how to code during my freshman year rather than student and go into write like many of my friends. I needed to understand the main ramifications of what my style choices may ultimately result in when rendered in a website.

The later ‘ 90s and early 2000s were the so-called” Wild West” of web design. 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 eager to learn more.

Even though I’m referring to a different time, those are amazing factors between non-career relationships and the world of layout. What are your main passions, or ideals, that elevate medium? The main 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. On this one, I worked with fellow designer and dear friend Marc Clancy, who is now a co-founder of the creative project organizing app Milanote, to sketch and then play with various user interactions. Then, I’d break it down and code it into a digital layout.

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

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

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

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

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

Collaboration and connection transcend media, which have a huge impact on my design career.

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 you’ve seen a website with a hero image or banner with text overlay ( possibly with a lovely rotating carousel of images ), a call to action, and three columns of sub-content directly beneath. Perhaps an icon library is used with selections that only vaguely relate to their respective content is used.

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 were frequently built and built on Macs whose desktops and OSs looked something like 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 absurd restrictions imposed a clarity of concept and presentation that I found incredibly appealing. I was thrust into the digital gauntlet because of it. And so, in my dorm room into the wee hours of the morning, I toiled away, bringing conceptual sketches into mini mosaic fruition.

These are some of my creations that made use of ResEdit, the only program I had at the time, to create icons. ResEdit was a clunky, built-in Mac OS utility that was not specifically designed for our needs. At the core of all of this work: Research. Challenge. Problem- solving. Again, these core connection-based values are agnostic of medium.

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

This is K10k, short for Kaliber 1000. Michael Schmidt and Toke Nygaard founded K10k in 1998, which was the design news website during that time. With its pixel art-fueled presentation, ultra-focused care given to every facet and detail, and with many of the more influential designers of the time who were invited to be news authors on the site, well… it was the place to be, my friend. The 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 that I was one of their very limited group of news writers who could contribute content to the website.

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

I evolved—devolved, really—into a colossal asshole ( and in just about a year out of art school, no less ). 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 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 ). Any criticism of my work from my fellow students was frequently vehemently dissented. The most tragic loss: I had lost touch with my values.

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

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

Always Students

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

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

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

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

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

I also had my first ethnographic observational experience, where I observed how the physicists used the tool in their own environments, on their own terminals. One takeaway was that the 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. This made it easier for them to pore over a lot of data during the day and lessen their strain on their eyes. Additionally, since Fermilab and CERN are government entities with strict accessibility requirements, my knowledge in that field also expanded. The barrier-free design was another essential form of connection.

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

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

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

The designer we are is our final form when we close our minds with an inner monologue of “knowing it all” or branding ourselves a” #thoughtleader” on social media. There will never be a designer like us.