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This article contains spoilers through Yellowjackets season 3 episode 4. Yellowjackets’ most recent death has surprised fans and the cast alike. Season 3 episode 4 “12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis” ended with the reveal that adult Lottie (Simone Kessell) had been found dead in the present at the foot of some creepy looking […]

The post Yellowjackets Teased Season 3’s Big Character Death A Long Time Ago appeared first on Den of Geek.

Look out, here comes Daredevil, the Man Without Fear! Seven years after the Netflix series ended with its third season, Daredevil: Born Again brings back stars Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio, this time for Disney+.

Daredevil’s journey from star of a canceled, violent Netflix series to new entry completely in the Marvel Cinematic Universe highlights the strange case of Marvel shows. Although Marvel has been a constant presence on television since the cartoons of the 1960s, the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe reinvigorated public interest in the characters.

Yet, while the movies boasted a shared universe, in which Captain America can drop by Asgard (albeit as a Loki projection) in Thor: The Dark World, the TV shows were strangely sequestered. Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones lived on Netflix. Cloak & Dagger and Runaways stayed on Freeform. Characters from the movies got spun off into shows on Disney+.

However, with Born Again bringing the Netflix series back, it’s time to look at all of the shows produced under the Marvel Cinematic Universe banner… mostly. A few shows that came out during the MCU era fall a bit outside the scope of this list. Legion and Gifted both deal with the X-Men, but they don’t even wink at the MCU and instead tell their own idiosyncratic stories. Likewise, the animated series Spidey and His Amazing Spider-Friends, Hit-Monkey, and M.O.D.O.K. might have some overlap with characters that appear in the MCU, but they have radically different takes and don’t even acknowledge the multiverse like shows that are on this list.

Even cutting out those shows leaves a ton of superhero action left to cover, some better than others. So let’s dive into the world of Marvel heroes that have been forever changed by the MCU.

28. Inhumans

Perhaps the least essential creation of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, the Inhumans work best as supporting characters within the Fantastic Four franchise. A messy royal family who support eugenics, the Inhumans are hardly the most likable characters from the House of Ideas. Yet, back when the X-Men adaptation rights were with 20th Century Fox instead of Disney/Marvel, then Marvel chief Ike Perlmutter pushed the Inhumans as replacements for the mutants.

To that end Perlmutter advocated an Inhumans movie, something that Kevin Feige resisted as much as he could, bumping the project to a short ABC miniseries. And what a terrible miniseries it was. Despite some likable actors such as Anson Mount and Ken Leung, Inhumans never justified its own existence. When Medusa (Serinda Swan), a character with the cool power of long hair she can control, gets her head shaved at the start of the series, smart people forgot about Inhuamans until Black Bolt’s delightful death in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

27. Marvel’s Runaways

Here’s the thing about the Runaways: they have to run away. By issue #2 of the acclaimed comic book series by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, the primary teens had escaped from home, upon learning that their parents were supervillains. For some reason, the television adaptation kept the kids in the house for almost the entirety of the series. Even when the kids officially left home, they kept breaking into one another’s houses for one reason or another.

Without actually much running away and with superpower usage limited by television budgets, Runaways only had generic teen angst let to portray. It portrayed the angst ably, but covered the same ground that other shows had done first and better, leaving us viewers wondering why anyone even bothered making Runaways.

26. Helstrom

The best shows on this list figure out a way to take concepts from Marvel Comics and translate them to the medium of television. The worst get that balance wrong, hoping that the slightest gestures at one end can make up for deficiancies on the other. Case in point, the supernatural crime series Helstrom, starring Tom Austen and Sydney Lemmon as Daimon and Ana Helstrom.

In the comics, Daimon and Satana Hellstrom are the literal children of Satan and a human woman, who struggle to make sense of their conflicting heritages. The television show turns the two into children of a demon-possessed serial killer and send them to investigate spiritual mysteries, not unlike Supernatural or Lucifer (a show that does a much better job adapting a comic book to procedural television). The result is a show that trades in tired tv tropes that it’s occasional concessions to the comics cannot overcome.

25. Secret Invasion

The most damning thing that anyone can say about Secret Invasion is that it doesn’t matter at all. You could skip it and not be confused at all when Nick Fury shows up again in The Marvels, seemingly unfazed by what happened in his own show — a show that included the deaths of strong supporting characters Maria Hill and Talos and revealed that Fury had a wife who was a Skrull.

Frankly, those who skipped Secret Invasion were probably the happiest with the show. Despite strong work from the reliably great Samuel L. Jackson and Olivia Colman being Olivia Colman, the show couldn’t decide if it was a sci-fi show about aliens, a spy thriller, or a political satire, resulting in a forgettable, sloppy mess.

24. The Defenders

As this list will show, the Netflix Marvel series were a mixed bag, never able to balance the superheroics of the characters with the more grounded tone the shows wanted to achieve. It’s fitting, then, that the crossover miniseries The Defenders exemplifies all of the other shows’ problems.

The eight-episode mini wisely builds out of Daredevil, the strongest of the Netflix shows, with a plot that involves Hand ninjas trying to gain control of a super weapon called Black Sky, which turns out to be Daredevil’s girlfriend Elektra. As much as the Hand leader Alexandria, played by a disinterested Sigourney Weaver, talks about the end of the world, The Defenders feels shockingly tiny, mostly a bunch of people in business suits having conversations in officers.

23. Iron Fist

Like The Defenders, Iron Fist also confuses conversations in office buildings with compelling genre television. Somehow, a comic book series about a young man who becomes kung fu master after thrusting his hands into a dragon’s heart transformed into a show about corporate intrigue. Then again, given star Finn Jones’s nothing of a take on the main character Danny Rand, maybe producers didn’t have faith that he could carry the action scenes.

The show’s second season benefits from a change in showrunner and more of a focus on the strong supporting cast, which includes an outstanding turn by Jessica Henwick as Colleen Wing. However, it was too little too late, and very people even cared enough to tune in for a second season.

22. Echo

Unlike the aforementioned Helstrom siblings, at least Maya Lopez had a strong MCU showing before getting spun off into her own miniseries Echo. As portrayed by Alaqua Cox, Lopez made for a compelling antagonist to Clint Barton in Hawkeye. But Maya’s connection to Wilson Fisk, which does exist in the Daredevil comics in which she debuted, overshadowed the character, making her feel like a supporting character in her own show.

Then again, there’s not much to the show itself. Despite gathering some of the best Native actors working today (including most of the cast of the far superior Reservation Dogs), Echo drags across its five episodes, biding time until Maya can finally face off with Fisk. At least creative leads Marion Dayre, Amy Rardin, and Sydney Freeland work in enough underseen elements of Choctaw culture to give Echo some flavor it would otherwise lack.

21. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law

Easily the most divisive show on this list, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law will certainly rank much higher for some and perhaps even lower for others. No one would place the show in the middle. On one hand, the strong reactions speak to the show’s willingness to break the MCU model, something to be applauded. Harnessing the irreverent humor of writer and artist John Byrne’s comic run, She-Hulk stars Tatiana Maslany in a self-aware legal comedy.

However, the show’s success relies entirely on how much the audience finds the jokes actually funny. If watching She-Hulk twerk with Megan Thee Stallion is the height of comedy, then you probably enjoyed the show. If the series felt like watching the charming Maslany try to sell sub-UCB improv, then everything about the show — including the terrible effects and awkward MCU connections — felt like a drag.

20. Cloak and Dagger

Cloak and Dagger are two of the trickier characters to bring out of their genesis as moralizing characters from the “Just Say No” 1980s. Not only does the story of teenage runaways Tyrone Johnson and Tandy Bowen, who gain powers after being subjected to flawed street drugs, feel preachy, but Dagger has one of the most improbable costumes in comics history.

The television adaptation, starring Aubrey Joseph and Olivia Holt, ditches the costumes and instead plays up the teen drama. As a result, the show works as a melodrama with supernatural elements, gaining a solid following across its two seasons. Fans of weird Marvel characters might be disappointed with the series’ downplaying of the superhero aspects, but those who wanted off-kilter YA tales were pleased.

19. I Am Groot

Kids love Groot, so what would be better than a kids’ series about baby Groot getting into misadventures? I Am Groot is beautifully animated and each show’s six-minute runtime meant that the adventures had to stay small and focused.

And yet, even members of the target demographic get bored after one or two episodes. Ten episodes of the series feel like far too many, especially in the second season, which adds characters like the Watcher and alienates young children even more.

18. Marvel’s What If…? 

What If…? might be the most perfect adaptation of a comic book series. Like the long-running comic series, What If…? features alternate reality versions of familiar characters, playing out various thought experiments. And like the comic series, What If…? was occasionally interesting and mostly dull.

Which isn’t to say that the entire show was a waste of time. What If…? gave us one more chance to see/hear Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa and the series recently featured Storm in her Asgardian armor, a fan favorite from the comics. Moreover, Jeffrey Wright proved to be the ideal person to voice the all-powerful Watcher, thanks to his ability to keep tongue in cheek without sacrificing gravitas. Still, it’s hard to believe that anyone remembers the episodes as soon as the credits roll.

17. Moon Knight

One’s enjoyment of Moon Knight might depend entirely on one’s feelings about Oscar Isaac. For those who like Isaac, but see the actor’s limitations, then Moon Knight drags every time he deploys his goofy English accent to portray Steven Grant, and depictions of his alternate (and American) identity Marc Spector didn’t help things. By the time the show ended with a television CG equivalent of a kaiju battle, Moon Knight was a lost cause.

Yet, for those who love everything that Isaac’s handing out, Moon Knight is a lot of fun. The series wisely adapts the great Moon Knight run by Jeff Lemire and Greg Smallwood, combining psychological exploration with archeological adventure. Even better, May Calamawy steals every single scene she’s in as Layla El-Faouly, leaving us still clamoring for more Silver Scarab.

16. Luke Cage

The tragedy of the Neftlix Marvel shows is that they could have been really, really good. Luke Cage brims with potential, thanks to a captivating performance by Mike Colter in the lead and ambitious storytelling from showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker, who did not shy away from the social relevance of the characters. Add in ringers such as Mahershala Ali and Alfre Woodard as villains, and Luke Cage was set to match Daredevil for excitement and intensity.

Yet, the Netflix shows were mired by some requirement instituted by Marvel, most notably a mandatory minimum of 13 episodes per season. As a result, most of the Netflix shows felt oddly paced, none worse than Luke Cage. The electric charge of the first season fizzled out, even before the show unwisely killed off Ali’s character and replaced him with the much sillier Diamondback (Erik LaRay Harvey). Coming out of The Defenders, the show lost any direction, saddling the series with uninspired team ups and a generic mystery plot.

15. The Punisher

The Punisher might be one of the most popular characters in the Marvel Universe, but he’s not one of the richest. The entire appeal of the Punisher comes from the misery of watching broken man Frank Castle inflict all manner of pain on the worst of the worst. So it’s remarkable that the MCU has wrung two seasons of compelling television out of the character and that we’re excited to see the Punisher return for Daredevil: Born Again.

A lot of the show’s success can be attributed to Jon Bernthal, who first played the character in Daredevil. Bernthal finds empathy for Castle, ensuring that he feels human, even when he goes to incredibly dark lengths in his war on crime. Then again, the show didn’t always match Bernthal’s efforts, too often falling back into the standard doom and gloom of the Punisher’s world. That said, it does have Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Frank’s usual sidekick Microchip, which will probably come up with some wacky multiverse shenanigans in the Fantastic Four.

14. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

At times, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier pays off the promise of the MCU shows. Where the movies have to tell big stories that leave little room for proper character development, the shows could take their time and flesh out the person behind the mask. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, intended to be the first of the Disney+ series, devotes its best parts to Sam Wilson wrestling with the idea of becoming the next Captain America and to Bucky dealing with the fallout of his crimes as the Winter Soldier.

And yet, the show doesn’t seem to trust the characters enough to really focus on them. Instead, it borrows from excellent Mark Gruenwald-written Captain America comics from the 1980s to tell a thriller dealing with refugees from the Blip who call themselves the Flag Smashers. Throw in Wyatt Russell as an unstable new Captain America, and there’s very little room left over for character growth. Still, the stuff that’s there is pretty compelling, and the series ends with Sam fully grown into the Captain America role.

13. Jessica Jones

Nowhere was the 13-episode requirement of the Netflix shows felt more keenly than midway through the first season of Jessica Jones. The series had a fantastic hook, with a perfectly cast Krysten Ritter as the acerbic private investigator facing off against David Tennant as Kilgrave, the mind-controlling Purple Man. And yet, all of the tension dissipated midway through the first season, when a subplot involving Jessica’s best pal and an unstable cop took the center stage while Jones and Kilgrave bided their time.

Jessica Jones settled into a better rhythm for its second and third seasons, and Ritter remained strong throughout. But without Tennant’s Kilgrave as the main villain, those later seasons feel solid if unremarkable. Still, that’s all a testament to what a remarkable show Jessica Jones was with Kilgrave as the antagonist, adding a level true menace to the procedural structure and adding true pathos to Ritter’s disaffected exterior.

12. Agatha All Along

For its first few episodes Agatha All Along felt like Marvel at its least essential. The draw to the series seemed to be watching the always-delightful Kathryn Hahn pal around with other great actors, including Patti LuPone, Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, and Debra Jo Rupp as back-biting witches, alongside Joe Locke as a mysterious magic user mostly just called “Teen” and Aubrey Plaza as a flirtatious enemy.

But by the time that the second half of the season kicks in, Agatha All Along finds surprising pathos. It’s not just the depths to Agatha’s backstory, but especially a Doctor Who style twist to LuPone’s time-displaced witch and a tale of displacement and found family with the Teen. What began as a lackluster spin-off became a starting point for one of the Young Avengers, giving the MCU a shared universe boost that once was the franchise’s calling card.

11. Agents of SHIELD

It’s hard to judge Agents of SHIELD for what it was, not what it could have been. Agents of SHIELD debuted at the height of Marvel mania, promising more MCU action by following fan-favorite Phil Coulson and his secret agents as they do superhero espionage. Yet, that first season quickly revealed itself as a pretty by-the-numbers procedural with only the slightest MCU trappings. When the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier ended by completely recreating SHIELD, it seemed like the series would find its footing in season two, but that didn’t happen either.

And yet, once expectations fell away (and, frankly, a lot of people stopped watching), Agents of SHIELD got room to breathe. It’s likable ensemble cast settled into their roles and the show got room to be more experimental and fun. Kree soldiers, Ghost Rider, and actual supervillains became part of the story. The less that people paid attention to Agents of SHIELD, the more it got to be itself, and the show was better for it.

10. Werewolf by Night

By this point, readers have certainly noticed a reoccurring complaint across this list, that some shows waste even good ideas because they stretch their stories across too many episodes. The first of two specials created for Disney+, Werewolf by Night fills every one of its 53 minutes with delightful detail, not wasting a second.

Directed by composer turned first-time filmmaker Michael Giacchino, Werewolf by Night pairs Gael García Bernal at his most lovable with a flinty Laura Donnelly, the former playing a good man cursed with lycanthropy and the latter the unwilling scion of monster hunters. Giacchino channels the gothic thrills of Universal Horror and even manages to put Man-Thing on screen without generating any guffaws. By the time Werewolf by Night ends, we’re still hungry for more, a rarity among MCU shows.

9. Agent Carter

Obviously, Agent Carter isn’t the best show on this list. But Agent Carter does the best job at translating the Marvel Universe to television. The series spun-off Hayley Atwell‘s scene-stealing Peggy Carter from Captain America: The First Avenger and lets her be so much more than the long-lost girlfriend of Steve Rogers.

Even better, the World War II setting protected Agent Carter from the expectations that hobbled Agents of SHIELD, letting it play in its own corner of the universe. Yes, Edwin Jarvis and Howard Stark show up, but Agent Carter mostly got to be a high-energy spy show. The fact that it lasted just two seasons proves that Marvel didn’t always know what to do with its shows.

8. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man

Given all of the changes that the show experienced in pre-production, given its cast overstuffed with Marvel supporting characters, its remarkable that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man managed to be as breezy and fresh as it is. Showrunner Jeff Trammell remixes over-familiar story beats to give us a modern-day take on Peter Parker, unlike any version seen in movies, comics, or television.

All of the changes work. Perennial B-list villain Tombstone gets a tragic arc, Harry feels like proper 2024 rich boy, and Colman Domingo gives us one of the most compelling takes on Norman Osborn ever seen. The entire show comes via stylized animation that recalls both the Spider-Verse films and Steve Ditko’s pop art, capturing the timeless quality of Spider-Man.

7. Hawkeye

No one in their right mind would pick Clint Barton as their favorite Avenger. Although played well by Jeremy Renner, he could never shake the fact that he was just a normal guy with bows and arrows among gods. Avengers: Age of Ultron effectively turned Clint’s weaknesses as strengths, but no one expected him to carry a television series.

Hawkeye works, in part, because he doesn’t have to carry it. The MCU gets a shot in the arm by adding Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop, a rich girl who takes up the mantle of Hawkeye. Bishop’s tangled life, which includes a dashing Tony Dalton as a potential villain and a cameo by Florence Pugh as the White Widow, pairs nicely with Clint’s domestic stress. Plus, the series uses its Christmas setting and gives us Rogers: The Musical. What more could you want?

6. Loki

If Loki didn’t come back for a second season, it would have ranked much lower. The first series gave fans more of the MCU’s first real breakout Tom Hiddleston and paired him with the only person he could love, a variation of himself called Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) as well as a perfectly-cast Owen Wilson as company man Mobius. M. Mobius. Fun, yes, but the multiverse shenanigans muted the show’s emotional stakes.

To the shock of everyone, Loki’s second season did the exact opposite, amping up the emotional power by leaning into the multiversal elements. Even adding Jonathan Majors, then burdened with scandal and failed franchise plans, doesn’t slow things down, as the second show combines the end of all realities as an existential crisis for the God of Lies. The show sticks the landing, giving Loki something so rare among Marvel characters: a proper ending.

5. Ms. Marvel

After Avengers: Endgame, Marvel hoped that younger characters could fill the gaps left by Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. The execution of these new characters has been hit or miss, but Marvel absolutely scored a home run when they got Iman Vellani to play Kamala Khan, the fangirl who becomes superhero Ms. Marvel.

The idea of making a Marvel superfan into a superhero could be self-congratulatory, but Villani plays it with such a lack of guile that no one feels upset. Grounded by a great ensemble cast playing her friends and family, Ms. Marvel takes surprising chances, from the pop art look of the first two episodes to an episode that depicts the Partition of India to an unexpected X-Men twist. Ms. Marvel could be the future of MCU, if only the franchise would let her lead.

4. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special

Leaving aside the fact that the only holiday celebrated in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special is Christmas, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect use of the MCU’s Disney+ connection. After two movies and supporting parts in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, the Guardians of the Galaxy had become some of the most beloved characters in the Marvel Universe, and that affection helps us forgive some of the clunky setups in the special.

Even better, the Holiday Special shows off what James Gunn does best, finding an unexpected genuine pathos in what seems like a goofy, somewhat metatextual tale, in which Mantis and Drax kidnap Kevin Bacon to give Starlord some Christmas cheer. And, of course, it has a killer soundtrack.

3. Daredevil

Daredevil isn’t exempt from the problems that plagued the other Netflix series. The second season in particular sags under the weight of too many plots and characters, and even the mostly-great first season spends way too much time with Matt Murdock recovering from his injuries. But when Daredevil is working, it’s among the best in superhero television.

The show establishes itself within its first three episodes. We meet Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, an endlessly charming man whose tragic history and complicated Catholicism drive him to dress up as a devil and pummel baddies. He’s matched by the Kingpin of Crime Wilson Fisk, whom Vincent D’Onofrio plays as a hurt child in the body of a massive killer. The electricity between the two powered the series not just through its low points, but through seven years after its cancelation, making Daredevil: Born Again the most anticipated show of the year.

2. X-Men ’97

X-Men ’97 didn’t have to be this good. It could have just brought back the characters and cast from the ’90s show and make us all feel like kids again. It could have been fantasy escapism, letting us grown ups ignore the problems in the real world.

X-Men ’97 does the exact opposite. Yes, we have the same characters from the ’90s show, many of whom have the same voice actors. And yes, the series continues to adapt stories from the incredibly popular but artistically questionable X-Men comics of the era. But the series leans hard into our current situation, making the mutant as minority metaphor more explicit than ever before and offering a thrilling vision of resistance.

1. WandaVision

For a minute, it seemed like Marvel television would be something truly special. Intended to air after The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision ended up making it to Disney+ first and announced itself as the ideal television adaptation. For its first two thirds, WandaVision took favorites from the MCU, namely Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany as her robot husband Vision, and put them in riffs on classic television.

One could argue that the drops in quality toward the end, when the television aspect falls away and traditional Marvel heroics take over. But the show does an excellent job weaving larger universe mystery throughout those early episodes, earning its big ending. Plus, the show wisely balances Wanda’s CGI off against Agatha with Vision having a deep conversation with himself. By the time it finished, WandaVision set a standard no other MCU show has been able to match. Yet.

The post Every Marvel TV Show in the MCU Era Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

In Mickey 17, Robert Pattinson plays a frozen meat-sickle. Those are not my words; they’re Pattinson’s inside of the first 60 seconds of the movie, and they’re delivered to the audience with a nasally, conversational voiceover that sounds adrift somewhere between Steve Buscemi and Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny. Absolutely everything about this performance […]

The post Mickey 17 Review: See Robert Pattinson Die, Repeat, and Make You Laugh appeared first on Den of Geek.

Look out, here comes Daredevil, the Man Without Fear! Seven years after the Netflix series ended with its third season, Daredevil: Born Again brings back stars Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio, this time for Disney+.

Daredevil’s journey from star of a canceled, violent Netflix series to new entry completely in the Marvel Cinematic Universe highlights the strange case of Marvel shows. Although Marvel has been a constant presence on television since the cartoons of the 1960s, the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe reinvigorated public interest in the characters.

Yet, while the movies boasted a shared universe, in which Captain America can drop by Asgard (albeit as a Loki projection) in Thor: The Dark World, the TV shows were strangely sequestered. Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones lived on Netflix. Cloak & Dagger and Runaways stayed on Freeform. Characters from the movies got spun off into shows on Disney+.

However, with Born Again bringing the Netflix series back, it’s time to look at all of the shows produced under the Marvel Cinematic Universe banner… mostly. A few shows that came out during the MCU era fall a bit outside the scope of this list. Legion and Gifted both deal with the X-Men, but they don’t even wink at the MCU and instead tell their own idiosyncratic stories. Likewise, the animated series Spidey and His Amazing Spider-Friends, Hit-Monkey, and M.O.D.O.K. might have some overlap with characters that appear in the MCU, but they have radically different takes and don’t even acknowledge the multiverse like shows that are on this list.

Even cutting out those shows leaves a ton of superhero action left to cover, some better than others. So let’s dive into the world of Marvel heroes that have been forever changed by the MCU.

28. Inhumans

Perhaps the least essential creation of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, the Inhumans work best as supporting characters within the Fantastic Four franchise. A messy royal family who support eugenics, the Inhumans are hardly the most likable characters from the House of Ideas. Yet, back when the X-Men adaptation rights were with 20th Century Fox instead of Disney/Marvel, then Marvel chief Ike Perlmutter pushed the Inhumans as replacements for the mutants.

To that end Perlmutter advocated an Inhumans movie, something that Kevin Feige resisted as much as he could, bumping the project to a short ABC miniseries. And what a terrible miniseries it was. Despite some likable actors such as Anson Mount and Ken Leung, Inhumans never justified its own existence. When Medusa (Serinda Swan), a character with the cool power of long hair she can control, gets her head shaved at the start of the series, smart people forgot about Inhuamans until Black Bolt’s delightful death in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

27. Marvel’s Runaways

Here’s the thing about the Runaways: they have to run away. By issue #2 of the acclaimed comic book series by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, the primary teens had escaped from home, upon learning that their parents were supervillains. For some reason, the television adaptation kept the kids in the house for almost the entirety of the series. Even when the kids officially left home, they kept breaking into one another’s houses for one reason or another.

Without actually much running away and with superpower usage limited by television budgets, Runaways only had generic teen angst let to portray. It portrayed the angst ably, but covered the same ground that other shows had done first and better, leaving us viewers wondering why anyone even bothered making Runaways.

26. Helstrom

The best shows on this list figure out a way to take concepts from Marvel Comics and translate them to the medium of television. The worst get that balance wrong, hoping that the slightest gestures at one end can make up for deficiancies on the other. Case in point, the supernatural crime series Helstrom, starring Tom Austen and Sydney Lemmon as Daimon and Ana Helstrom.

In the comics, Daimon and Satana Hellstrom are the literal children of Satan and a human woman, who struggle to make sense of their conflicting heritages. The television show turns the two into children of a demon-possessed serial killer and send them to investigate spiritual mysteries, not unlike Supernatural or Lucifer (a show that does a much better job adapting a comic book to procedural television). The result is a show that trades in tired tv tropes that it’s occasional concessions to the comics cannot overcome.

25. Secret Invasion

The most damning thing that anyone can say about Secret Invasion is that it doesn’t matter at all. You could skip it and not be confused at all when Nick Fury shows up again in The Marvels, seemingly unfazed by what happened in his own show — a show that included the deaths of strong supporting characters Maria Hill and Talos and revealed that Fury had a wife who was a Skrull.

Frankly, those who skipped Secret Invasion were probably the happiest with the show. Despite strong work from the reliably great Samuel L. Jackson and Olivia Colman being Olivia Colman, the show couldn’t decide if it was a sci-fi show about aliens, a spy thriller, or a political satire, resulting in a forgettable, sloppy mess.

24. The Defenders

As this list will show, the Netflix Marvel series were a mixed bag, never able to balance the superheroics of the characters with the more grounded tone the shows wanted to achieve. It’s fitting, then, that the crossover miniseries The Defenders exemplifies all of the other shows’ problems.

The eight-episode mini wisely builds out of Daredevil, the strongest of the Netflix shows, with a plot that involves Hand ninjas trying to gain control of a super weapon called Black Sky, which turns out to be Daredevil’s girlfriend Elektra. As much as the Hand leader Alexandria, played by a disinterested Sigourney Weaver, talks about the end of the world, The Defenders feels shockingly tiny, mostly a bunch of people in business suits having conversations in officers.

23. Iron Fist

Like The Defenders, Iron Fist also confuses conversations in office buildings with compelling genre television. Somehow, a comic book series about a young man who becomes kung fu master after thrusting his hands into a dragon’s heart transformed into a show about corporate intrigue. Then again, given star Finn Jones’s nothing of a take on the main character Danny Rand, maybe producers didn’t have faith that he could carry the action scenes.

The show’s second season benefits from a change in showrunner and more of a focus on the strong supporting cast, which includes an outstanding turn by Jessica Henwick as Colleen Wing. However, it was too little too late, and very people even cared enough to tune in for a second season.

22. Echo

Unlike the aforementioned Helstrom siblings, at least Maya Lopez had a strong MCU showing before getting spun off into her own miniseries Echo. As portrayed by Alaqua Cox, Lopez made for a compelling antagonist to Clint Barton in Hawkeye. But Maya’s connection to Wilson Fisk, which does exist in the Daredevil comics in which she debuted, overshadowed the character, making her feel like a supporting character in her own show.

Then again, there’s not much to the show itself. Despite gathering some of the best Native actors working today (including most of the cast of the far superior Reservation Dogs), Echo drags across its five episodes, biding time until Maya can finally face off with Fisk. At least creative leads Marion Dayre, Amy Rardin, and Sydney Freeland work in enough underseen elements of Choctaw culture to give Echo some flavor it would otherwise lack.

21. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law

Easily the most divisive show on this list, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law will certainly rank much higher for some and perhaps even lower for others. No one would place the show in the middle. On one hand, the strong reactions speak to the show’s willingness to break the MCU model, something to be applauded. Harnessing the irreverent humor of writer and artist John Byrne’s comic run, She-Hulk stars Tatiana Maslany in a self-aware legal comedy.

However, the show’s success relies entirely on how much the audience finds the jokes actually funny. If watching She-Hulk twerk with Megan Thee Stallion is the height of comedy, then you probably enjoyed the show. If the series felt like watching the charming Maslany try to sell sub-UCB improv, then everything about the show — including the terrible effects and awkward MCU connections — felt like a drag.

20. Cloak and Dagger

Cloak and Dagger are two of the trickier characters to bring out of their genesis as moralizing characters from the “Just Say No” 1980s. Not only does the story of teenage runaways Tyrone Johnson and Tandy Bowen, who gain powers after being subjected to flawed street drugs, feel preachy, but Dagger has one of the most improbable costumes in comics history.

The television adaptation, starring Aubrey Joseph and Olivia Holt, ditches the costumes and instead plays up the teen drama. As a result, the show works as a melodrama with supernatural elements, gaining a solid following across its two seasons. Fans of weird Marvel characters might be disappointed with the series’ downplaying of the superhero aspects, but those who wanted off-kilter YA tales were pleased.

19. I Am Groot

Kids love Groot, so what would be better than a kids’ series about baby Groot getting into misadventures? I Am Groot is beautifully animated and each show’s six-minute runtime meant that the adventures had to stay small and focused.

And yet, even members of the target demographic get bored after one or two episodes. Ten episodes of the series feel like far too many, especially in the second season, which adds characters like the Watcher and alienates young children even more.

18. Marvel’s What If…? 

What If…? might be the most perfect adaptation of a comic book series. Like the long-running comic series, What If…? features alternate reality versions of familiar characters, playing out various thought experiments. And like the comic series, What If…? was occasionally interesting and mostly dull.

Which isn’t to say that the entire show was a waste of time. What If…? gave us one more chance to see/hear Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa and the series recently featured Storm in her Asgardian armor, a fan favorite from the comics. Moreover, Jeffrey Wright proved to be the ideal person to voice the all-powerful Watcher, thanks to his ability to keep tongue in cheek without sacrificing gravitas. Still, it’s hard to believe that anyone remembers the episodes as soon as the credits roll.

17. Moon Knight

One’s enjoyment of Moon Knight might depend entirely on one’s feelings about Oscar Isaac. For those who like Isaac, but see the actor’s limitations, then Moon Knight drags every time he deploys his goofy English accent to portray Steven Grant, and depictions of his alternate (and American) identity Marc Spector didn’t help things. By the time the show ended with a television CG equivalent of a kaiju battle, Moon Knight was a lost cause.

Yet, for those who love everything that Isaac’s handing out, Moon Knight is a lot of fun. The series wisely adapts the great Moon Knight run by Jeff Lemire and Greg Smallwood, combining psychological exploration with archeological adventure. Even better, May Calamawy steals every single scene she’s in as Layla El-Faouly, leaving us still clamoring for more Silver Scarab.

16. Luke Cage

The tragedy of the Neftlix Marvel shows is that they could have been really, really good. Luke Cage brims with potential, thanks to a captivating performance by Mike Colter in the lead and ambitious storytelling from showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker, who did not shy away from the social relevance of the characters. Add in ringers such as Mahershala Ali and Alfre Woodard as villains, and Luke Cage was set to match Daredevil for excitement and intensity.

Yet, the Netflix shows were mired by some requirement instituted by Marvel, most notably a mandatory minimum of 13 episodes per season. As a result, most of the Netflix shows felt oddly paced, none worse than Luke Cage. The electric charge of the first season fizzled out, even before the show unwisely killed off Ali’s character and replaced him with the much sillier Diamondback (Erik LaRay Harvey). Coming out of The Defenders, the show lost any direction, saddling the series with uninspired team ups and a generic mystery plot.

15. The Punisher

The Punisher might be one of the most popular characters in the Marvel Universe, but he’s not one of the richest. The entire appeal of the Punisher comes from the misery of watching broken man Frank Castle inflict all manner of pain on the worst of the worst. So it’s remarkable that the MCU has wrung two seasons of compelling television out of the character and that we’re excited to see the Punisher return for Daredevil: Born Again.

A lot of the show’s success can be attributed to Jon Bernthal, who first played the character in Daredevil. Bernthal finds empathy for Castle, ensuring that he feels human, even when he goes to incredibly dark lengths in his war on crime. Then again, the show didn’t always match Bernthal’s efforts, too often falling back into the standard doom and gloom of the Punisher’s world. That said, it does have Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Frank’s usual sidekick Microchip, which will probably come up with some wacky multiverse shenanigans in the Fantastic Four.

14. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

At times, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier pays off the promise of the MCU shows. Where the movies have to tell big stories that leave little room for proper character development, the shows could take their time and flesh out the person behind the mask. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, intended to be the first of the Disney+ series, devotes its best parts to Sam Wilson wrestling with the idea of becoming the next Captain America and to Bucky dealing with the fallout of his crimes as the Winter Soldier.

And yet, the show doesn’t seem to trust the characters enough to really focus on them. Instead, it borrows from excellent Mark Gruenwald-written Captain America comics from the 1980s to tell a thriller dealing with refugees from the Blip who call themselves the Flag Smashers. Throw in Wyatt Russell as an unstable new Captain America, and there’s very little room left over for character growth. Still, the stuff that’s there is pretty compelling, and the series ends with Sam fully grown into the Captain America role.

13. Jessica Jones

Nowhere was the 13-episode requirement of the Netflix shows felt more keenly than midway through the first season of Jessica Jones. The series had a fantastic hook, with a perfectly cast Krysten Ritter as the acerbic private investigator facing off against David Tennant as Kilgrave, the mind-controlling Purple Man. And yet, all of the tension dissipated midway through the first season, when a subplot involving Jessica’s best pal and an unstable cop took the center stage while Jones and Kilgrave bided their time.

Jessica Jones settled into a better rhythm for its second and third seasons, and Ritter remained strong throughout. But without Tennant’s Kilgrave as the main villain, those later seasons feel solid if unremarkable. Still, that’s all a testament to what a remarkable show Jessica Jones was with Kilgrave as the antagonist, adding a level true menace to the procedural structure and adding true pathos to Ritter’s disaffected exterior.

12. Agatha All Along

For its first few episodes Agatha All Along felt like Marvel at its least essential. The draw to the series seemed to be watching the always-delightful Kathryn Hahn pal around with other great actors, including Patti LuPone, Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, and Debra Jo Rupp as back-biting witches, alongside Joe Locke as a mysterious magic user mostly just called “Teen” and Aubrey Plaza as a flirtatious enemy.

But by the time that the second half of the season kicks in, Agatha All Along finds surprising pathos. It’s not just the depths to Agatha’s backstory, but especially a Doctor Who style twist to LuPone’s time-displaced witch and a tale of displacement and found family with the Teen. What began as a lackluster spin-off became a starting point for one of the Young Avengers, giving the MCU a shared universe boost that once was the franchise’s calling card.

11. Agents of SHIELD

It’s hard to judge Agents of SHIELD for what it was, not what it could have been. Agents of SHIELD debuted at the height of Marvel mania, promising more MCU action by following fan-favorite Phil Coulson and his secret agents as they do superhero espionage. Yet, that first season quickly revealed itself as a pretty by-the-numbers procedural with only the slightest MCU trappings. When the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier ended by completely recreating SHIELD, it seemed like the series would find its footing in season two, but that didn’t happen either.

And yet, once expectations fell away (and, frankly, a lot of people stopped watching), Agents of SHIELD got room to breathe. It’s likable ensemble cast settled into their roles and the show got room to be more experimental and fun. Kree soldiers, Ghost Rider, and actual supervillains became part of the story. The less that people paid attention to Agents of SHIELD, the more it got to be itself, and the show was better for it.

10. Werewolf by Night

By this point, readers have certainly noticed a reoccurring complaint across this list, that some shows waste even good ideas because they stretch their stories across too many episodes. The first of two specials created for Disney+, Werewolf by Night fills every one of its 53 minutes with delightful detail, not wasting a second.

Directed by composer turned first-time filmmaker Michael Giacchino, Werewolf by Night pairs Gael García Bernal at his most lovable with a flinty Laura Donnelly, the former playing a good man cursed with lycanthropy and the latter the unwilling scion of monster hunters. Giacchino channels the gothic thrills of Universal Horror and even manages to put Man-Thing on screen without generating any guffaws. By the time Werewolf by Night ends, we’re still hungry for more, a rarity among MCU shows.

9. Agent Carter

Obviously, Agent Carter isn’t the best show on this list. But Agent Carter does the best job at translating the Marvel Universe to television. The series spun-off Hayley Atwell‘s scene-stealing Peggy Carter from Captain America: The First Avenger and lets her be so much more than the long-lost girlfriend of Steve Rogers.

Even better, the World War II setting protected Agent Carter from the expectations that hobbled Agents of SHIELD, letting it play in its own corner of the universe. Yes, Edwin Jarvis and Howard Stark show up, but Agent Carter mostly got to be a high-energy spy show. The fact that it lasted just two seasons proves that Marvel didn’t always know what to do with its shows.

8. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man

Given all of the changes that the show experienced in pre-production, given its cast overstuffed with Marvel supporting characters, its remarkable that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man managed to be as breezy and fresh as it is. Showrunner Jeff Trammell remixes over-familiar story beats to give us a modern-day take on Peter Parker, unlike any version seen in movies, comics, or television.

All of the changes work. Perennial B-list villain Tombstone gets a tragic arc, Harry feels like proper 2024 rich boy, and Colman Domingo gives us one of the most compelling takes on Norman Osborn ever seen. The entire show comes via stylized animation that recalls both the Spider-Verse films and Steve Ditko’s pop art, capturing the timeless quality of Spider-Man.

7. Hawkeye

No one in their right mind would pick Clint Barton as their favorite Avenger. Although played well by Jeremy Renner, he could never shake the fact that he was just a normal guy with bows and arrows among gods. Avengers: Age of Ultron effectively turned Clint’s weaknesses as strengths, but no one expected him to carry a television series.

Hawkeye works, in part, because he doesn’t have to carry it. The MCU gets a shot in the arm by adding Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop, a rich girl who takes up the mantle of Hawkeye. Bishop’s tangled life, which includes a dashing Tony Dalton as a potential villain and a cameo by Florence Pugh as the White Widow, pairs nicely with Clint’s domestic stress. Plus, the series uses its Christmas setting and gives us Rogers: The Musical. What more could you want?

6. Loki

If Loki didn’t come back for a second season, it would have ranked much lower. The first series gave fans more of the MCU’s first real breakout Tom Hiddleston and paired him with the only person he could love, a variation of himself called Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) as well as a perfectly-cast Owen Wilson as company man Mobius. M. Mobius. Fun, yes, but the multiverse shenanigans muted the show’s emotional stakes.

To the shock of everyone, Loki’s second season did the exact opposite, amping up the emotional power by leaning into the multiversal elements. Even adding Jonathan Majors, then burdened with scandal and failed franchise plans, doesn’t slow things down, as the second show combines the end of all realities as an existential crisis for the God of Lies. The show sticks the landing, giving Loki something so rare among Marvel characters: a proper ending.

5. Ms. Marvel

After Avengers: Endgame, Marvel hoped that younger characters could fill the gaps left by Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. The execution of these new characters has been hit or miss, but Marvel absolutely scored a home run when they got Iman Vellani to play Kamala Khan, the fangirl who becomes superhero Ms. Marvel.

The idea of making a Marvel superfan into a superhero could be self-congratulatory, but Villani plays it with such a lack of guile that no one feels upset. Grounded by a great ensemble cast playing her friends and family, Ms. Marvel takes surprising chances, from the pop art look of the first two episodes to an episode that depicts the Partition of India to an unexpected X-Men twist. Ms. Marvel could be the future of MCU, if only the franchise would let her lead.

4. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special

Leaving aside the fact that the only holiday celebrated in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special is Christmas, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect use of the MCU’s Disney+ connection. After two movies and supporting parts in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, the Guardians of the Galaxy had become some of the most beloved characters in the Marvel Universe, and that affection helps us forgive some of the clunky setups in the special.

Even better, the Holiday Special shows off what James Gunn does best, finding an unexpected genuine pathos in what seems like a goofy, somewhat metatextual tale, in which Mantis and Drax kidnap Kevin Bacon to give Starlord some Christmas cheer. And, of course, it has a killer soundtrack.

3. Daredevil

Daredevil isn’t exempt from the problems that plagued the other Netflix series. The second season in particular sags under the weight of too many plots and characters, and even the mostly-great first season spends way too much time with Matt Murdock recovering from his injuries. But when Daredevil is working, it’s among the best in superhero television.

The show establishes itself within its first three episodes. We meet Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, an endlessly charming man whose tragic history and complicated Catholicism drive him to dress up as a devil and pummel baddies. He’s matched by the Kingpin of Crime Wilson Fisk, whom Vincent D’Onofrio plays as a hurt child in the body of a massive killer. The electricity between the two powered the series not just through its low points, but through seven years after its cancelation, making Daredevil: Born Again the most anticipated show of the year.

2. X-Men ’97

X-Men ’97 didn’t have to be this good. It could have just brought back the characters and cast from the ’90s show and make us all feel like kids again. It could have been fantasy escapism, letting us grown ups ignore the problems in the real world.

X-Men ’97 does the exact opposite. Yes, we have the same characters from the ’90s show, many of whom have the same voice actors. And yes, the series continues to adapt stories from the incredibly popular but artistically questionable X-Men comics of the era. But the series leans hard into our current situation, making the mutant as minority metaphor more explicit than ever before and offering a thrilling vision of resistance.

1. WandaVision

For a minute, it seemed like Marvel television would be something truly special. Intended to air after The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision ended up making it to Disney+ first and announced itself as the ideal television adaptation. For its first two thirds, WandaVision took favorites from the MCU, namely Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany as her robot husband Vision, and put them in riffs on classic television.

One could argue that the drops in quality toward the end, when the television aspect falls away and traditional Marvel heroics take over. But the show does an excellent job weaving larger universe mystery throughout those early episodes, earning its big ending. Plus, the show wisely balances Wanda’s CGI off against Agatha with Vision having a deep conversation with himself. By the time it finished, WandaVision set a standard no other MCU show has been able to match. Yet.

The post Every Marvel TV Show in the MCU Era Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

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

However, it’s odd that designers use personalities to guide their style in the real world.

Personas: A action up

Most manufacturers have created, used, or come across personalities at least once in their profession. The Interaction Design Foundation defines profile as “fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the various consumer types that might use your company, product, page, or brand” in their article” Personas- A Simple Introduction.” In their most complete expression, personas typically consist of a name, profile picture, quotes, demographics, goals, needs, behavior in relation to a certain service/product, emotions, and motivations ( for example, see Creative Companion’s Persona Core Poster ). According to design firm Designit, the goal of personas is to “make the research relateable, ]and ] easy to communicate, digest, reference, and apply to product and service development.”

The decontextualization of personalities

Personas are common because they make “dry” research information more realistic, more people. However, this approach places a cap on the author’s data analysis, making it impossible for the investigated users to be excluded from their particular contexts. As a result, personalities don’t describe important factors that make you know their decision-making method or allow you to connect to users ‘ thoughts and behavior, they lack stories. You are aware of the persona’s actions, but you lack the knowledge to know why. You end up with images of people that are really less people.

This “decontextualization” we see in identities happens in four way, which we’ll discuss below.

People are assumed to be dynamic, according to people.

Although many companies still try to box in their employees and customers with outdated personality tests ( referring to you, Myers-Briggs ), here’s a painfully obvious truth: people are not a fixed set of features. Depending on how you feel, how you act, think, and feeling, you go about doing things. You appear distinct to different people, you may act helpful to some, tough to others. And you change your mind all the time about selections you’ve taken.

Modern psychology agree that while people typically act in accordance with specific patterns, how they act and make decisions is influenced by a combination of both their environment and background. The context—the atmosphere, the effect of other people, your feelings, the whole story that led up to a situation—determines the kind of person you are in each particular time.

Personas provide a consumer as a predetermined set of features in an effort to improve reality, but do so without taking this variability into account. Like character testing, personas seize people away from real life. Even worse, individuals are reduced to a brand and categorized as” that kind of guy” with no means to practice their inherent flexibility. This behavior defies stereotypes, diminishes diversity, and doesn’t reveal reality.

Personas rely on people, not the environment

In the real world, you’re creating content for a situation, not an entity. Each individual lives in a community, a group, an habitat, where there are environmental, social, and cultural factors you need to consider. A pattern is not meant for a single customer. Instead, you create a product that is intended to be used by a certain number of people. Personas, but, show the customer alone rather than explain how the consumer relates to the environment.

Do you make the same choice over and over again? Maybe you’re a dedicated vegan but also decide to buy some meats when your family are coming across. As they depend on various situations and characteristics, your decisions—and behavior, thoughts, and comments —are no absolute but extremely contextual. Because it doesn’t explain the grounds for your decisions, the persona that “represents” you doesn’t take into account this interdependence. It doesn’t provide a rationale of why you act the way you do. People practice the well-known attribution error, which states that they too often attribute others ‘ behavior to their personalities and not to the circumstances.

As mentioned by the Interaction Design Foundation, identities are often placed in a situation that’s a” specific environment with a problem they want to or have to solve “—does that mean environment actually is considered? However, what frequently happens is that you take a hypothetical figure and based on that fiction decide how this character may deal with a specific situation. How could you possibly understand how someone you want to represent behave in new circumstances if you hadn’t even fully investigated and understood the current context of the people you want to represent?

Personas are meaningless averages

A persona is depicted as a specific person in Shlomo Goltz’s introduction to Smashing Magazine, according to Shlomo Goltz’s introduction article. It is instead made up of observations from numerous people. A well-known critique to this aspect of personas is that the average person does not exist, as per the famous example of the USA Air Force designing planes based on the average of 140 of their pilots ‘ physical dimensions and not a single pilot actually fitting within that average seat.

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

However, personas go a step further, combining a decontextualized finding with another decontextualized finding from someone else. The resulting set of findings often does not make sense: it’s unclear, or even contrasting, because it lacks the underlying reasons on why and how that finding has arisen. It lacks any significance. And the persona doesn’t give you the full background of the person ( s ) to uncover this meaning: you would need to dive into the raw data for each single persona item to find it. What, then, is the usefulness of the persona?

The validity of personas is deceiving.

To a certain extent, designers realize that a persona is a lifeless average. Designers create “relatable” personas to make them appear like real people in order to overcome this. Nothing captures the absurdity of this better than a sentence by the Interaction Design Foundation:” Add a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character”. In other words, you add non-realism in an attempt to create more realism. Wouldn’t it be much more responsible to emphasize that John is only an abstraction while deliberately obscuring the fact that” John Doe” is an abstract representation of research findings? If something is artificial, let’s present it as such.

After accepting that people’s personalities are fixed, ignored the importance of their environment, and hidden meaning by joining isolated, non-generalizable findings, designers create new context to create ( their own ) meaning. In doing so, as with everything they create, they introduce a host of biases. As phrased by Designit, as designers we can” contextualize]the persona ] based on our reality and experience. We make connections that are well-known to us. This practice reinforces stereotypes, doesn’t reflect real-world diversity, and gets further away from people’s actual reality with every detail added.

Everyone should use their own empathy and develop their own interpretation and emotional response if we want to conduct good design research by reporting the reality “as-is” and making it relatable for our audience.

Dynamic Selves: The alternative to personas

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

Designit suggested utilizing mindsets rather than personas. Each Mindset is a” spectrum of attitudes and emotional responses that different people have within the same context or life experience”. It challenges designers to avoid becoming fixated on just one person’s way of being. Unfortunately, while being a step in the right direction, this proposal doesn’t take into account that people are part of an environment that determines their personality, their behavior, and, yes, their mindset. Therefore, Mindsets are also not absolute but change in regard to the situation. What determines a particular Mindset, remains to be seen.

Another alternative comes from Margaret P., author of the article” Kill Your Personas“, who has argued for replacing personas with persona spectrums that consist of a range of user abilities. For instance, a visual impairment could be permanent ( blindness ), temporary ( recovery from eye surgery ), or situational (screen glare ). Persona spectrums are highly useful for more inclusive and context-based design, as they’re based on the understanding that the context is the pattern, not the personality. Their limitation, however, is that they have a very functional take on users that misses the relatability of a real person taken from within a spectrum.

We want to change the traditional design process to be context-based by creating an alternative to personas. Contexts are generalizable and have patterns that we can identify, just like we tried to do previously with people. So how do we learn these patterns? How do we ensure truly context-based design?

Understand real individuals in multiple contexts

Nothing can be more relatable and inspiring than reality. Therefore, we have to understand real individuals in their multi-faceted contexts, and use this understanding to fuel our design. This approach is known as Dynamic Selves.

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

1. Choose the right sample

We frequently get slammed for saying,” Where are you going to find a single person that encapsulates all the information from one of these advanced personas ]” when we debate personas. The answer is simple: you don’t have to. You don’t need to have information about many people for your insights to be deep and meaningful.

In qualitative research, accuracy comes from accurate sampling rather than quantity. You select the people that best represent the “population” you’re designing for. If this sample is chosen wisely and you have a deep understanding of the sampled people, you can infer how the rest of the population thinks and acts. There’s no need to study seven Susans and five Yuriys, one of each will do.

Similarly, you don’t need to understand Susan in fifteen different contexts. Once you’ve seen her in a few different settings, you’ve come to understand how Susan responds to various circumstances. Not Susan as an atomic being but Susan in relation to the surrounding environment: how she might act, feel, and think in different situations.

It becomes clear why each person should be portrayed as an individual because each already represents an abstraction of a larger group of people in similar circumstances because each person is representative of a portion of the population you’re researching. You don’t want abstractions of abstractions! These selected people need to be understood and shown in their full expression, remaining in their microcosmos—and if you want to identify patterns you can focus on identifying patterns in contexts.

However, the question persists: how do you choose a sample representative? First of all, you have to consider what’s the target audience of the product or service you are designing: it might be useful to look at the company’s goals and strategy, the current customer base, and/or a possible future target audience.

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

2. Conduct your research

After having chosen and recruited your sample, conduct your research using ethnographic methodologies. This will give you more examples and anecdotes to enrich your qualitative data. In our example project, given COVID-19 restrictions, we converted an in-house ethnographic research effort into remote family interviews, conducted from home and accompanied by diary studies.

To gain an in-depth understanding of attitudes and decision-making trade-offs, the research focus was not limited to the interviewee alone but deliberately included the whole family. Each interviewee would provide a story that would later become much more interesting and precise with the additions made by their spouses, partners, kids, or occasionally even pets. We also focused on the relationships with other meaningful people ( such as colleagues or distant family ) and all the behaviors that resulted from those relationships. This extensive field of study gave us the ability to create a vivid mental image of dynamic situations involving multiple actors.

It’s essential that the scope of the research remains broad enough to be able to include all possible actors. Therefore, it normally works best to define broad research areas with macro questions. Interviews should be conducted in a semi-structured manner, with follow-up questions delve into subjects that the interviewee has blatantly mentioned. This open-minded “plan to be surprised” will yield the most insightful findings. One of our participants responded to our question about how his family controlled the house temperature by saying,” My wife has not installed the thermostat’s app; she uses WhatsApp instead. If she wants to turn on the heater and she is not home, she will text me. I am her thermostat”.

3. Analysis: Create the Dynamic Selves

You begin to represent each individual with several Dynamic Selves, each” Self” representing one of the circumstances you have examined throughout the research analysis. The core of each Dynamic Self is a quote, which comes supported by a photo and a few relevant demographics that illustrate the wider context. The research findings themselves will show which demographics are relevant to show. The important demographics were family type, number and type of houses owned, economic status, and technological maturity in our case because our research focused on families and their way of life to understand their needs for thermal regulation. ( We also included the individual’s name and age, but they’re optional—we included them to ease the stakeholders ‘ transition from personas and be able to connect multiple actions and contexts to the same person ).

Interviews must be recorded on video and verbatim whenever possible in order to capture precise quotations. This is essential to the truthfulness of the several Selves of each participant. In the case of real-life ethnographic research, photos of the context and anonymized actors are essential to build realistic Selves. As long as these photos are realistic and depict meaningful actions that you associate with your participants, they should be taken directly from field research, but an evocative and representative image can also work. For example, one of our interviewees told us about his mountain home where he used to spend every weekend with his family. We depicted him hiking with his young daughter as a result.

At the end of the research analysis, we displayed all of the Selves ‘” cards” on a single canvas, categorized by activities. Each card displayed a situation, represented by a quote and a unique photo. Each participant had several cards about themselves.

4. Identify potential designs

Once you have collected all main quotes from the interview transcripts and diaries, and laid them all down as Self cards, you will see patterns emerge. These patterns will highlight the opportunity areas for new product creation, new functionalities, and new services—for new design.

There was a particularly intriguing insight around the concept of humidity in our example project. We realized that people don’t know what humidity is and why it is important to monitor it for health: an environment that’s too dry or too wet can cause respiratory problems or worsen existing ones. This made clear that our client had a significant opportunity to train users about the concept and work as a health advisor.

Benefits of Dynamic Selves

When you use the Dynamic Selves approach in your research, you start to notice unique social relations, peculiar situations real people face and the actions that follow, and that people are surrounded by changing environments. One of the participants in our thermostat project, Davide, is described as a boyfriend, dog lover, and tech nut.

Davide is an individual we might have once reduced to a persona called “tech enthusiast”. However, there are also those who love technology who have families or are single, who are wealthy or poor. Their motivations and priorities when deciding to purchase a new thermostat can be opposite according to these different frames.

Once you have understood Davide in multiple situations, and for each situation have understood in sufficient depth the underlying reasons for his behavior, you’re able to generalize how he would act in another situation. You can infer what he would think and do in the circumstances ( or scenarios ) you design for using your understanding of him.

The Dynamic Selves approach aims to dismiss the conflicted dual purpose of personas—to summarize and empathize at the same time—by separating your research summary from the people you’re seeking to empathize with. This is crucial because scale affects how we feel empathy for people and how difficult it is to do so with other people. We feel the strongest empathy for individuals we can personally relate to.

If you take a real person as inspiration for your design, you no longer need to create an artificial character. No more creating new plot devices to “realize” the character, no more implausible biases. It’s simply how this person is in real life. We all know that these characters don’t really exist, so in our experience personas quickly turn into nothing more than a name in our priority guides and prototype screens.

Another powerful benefit of the Dynamic Selves approach is that it raises the stakes of your work: if you mess up your design, someone real, a person you and the team know and have met, is going to feel the consequences. It might stop you from taking shortcuts and will remind you to conduct daily checks on your designs.

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

Conclusion

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

Design needs simplification but not generalization. You have to look at the research elements that stand out: the sentences that captured your attention, the images that struck you, the sounds that linger. Use those to characterize the person in all of their contexts, and portray them. Both insights and people come with a context, they cannot be cut from that context because it would remove meaning.

It’s high time for design to break away from fiction and use reality as our guide and inspiration, in its messy, surprising, and unquantifiable beauty.

I’m not sure when I first heard this quote, but it’s something that has stayed with me over the years. How do you create services for situations you can’t imagine? Or design products that work on devices yet to be invented?

Flash, Photoshop, and responsive design

When I first started designing websites, my go-to software was Photoshop. I created a 960px canvas and set about creating a layout that I would later drop content in. The development phase was about attaining pixel-perfect accuracy using fixed widths, fixed heights, and absolute positioning.

Ethan Marcotte’s talk at An Event Apart and subsequent article “Responsive Web Design” in A List Apart in 2010 changed all this. I was sold on responsive design as soon as I heard about it, but I was also terrified. The pixel-perfect designs full of magic numbers that I had previously prided myself on producing were no longer good enough.

The fear wasn’t helped by my first experience with responsive design. My first project was to take an existing fixed-width website and make it responsive. What I learned the hard way was that you can’t just add responsiveness at the end of a project. To create fluid layouts, you need to plan throughout the design phase.

A new way to design

Designing responsive or fluid sites has always been about removing limitations, producing content that can be viewed on any device. It relies on the use of percentage-based layouts, which I initially achieved with native CSS and utility classes:

.column-span-6 {
  width: 49%;
  float: left;
  margin-right: 0.5%;
  margin-left: 0.5%;
}


.column-span-4 {
  width: 32%;
  float: left;
  margin-right: 0.5%;
  margin-left: 0.5%;
}

.column-span-3 {
  width: 24%;
  float: left;
  margin-right: 0.5%;
  margin-left: 0.5%;
}

Then with Sass so I could take advantage of @includes to re-use repeated blocks of code and move back to more semantic markup:

.logo {
  @include colSpan(6);
}

.search {
  @include colSpan(3);
}

.social-share {
  @include colSpan(3);
}

Media queries

The second ingredient for responsive design is media queries. Without them, content would shrink to fit the available space regardless of whether that content remained readable (The exact opposite problem occurred with the introduction of a mobile-first approach).

Media queries prevented this by allowing us to add breakpoints where the design could adapt. Like most people, I started out with three breakpoints: one for desktop, one for tablets, and one for mobile. Over the years, I added more and more for phablets, wide screens, and so on. 

For years, I happily worked this way and improved both my design and front-end skills in the process. The only problem I encountered was making changes to content, since with our Sass grid system in place, there was no way for the site owners to add content without amending the markup—something a small business owner might struggle with. This is because each row in the grid was defined using a div as a container. Adding content meant creating new row markup, which requires a level of HTML knowledge.

Row markup was a staple of early responsive design, present in all the widely used frameworks like Bootstrap and Skeleton.

  
1 of 7
  
2 of 7
  
3 of 7



  
4 of 7
  
5 of 7
  
6 of 7



  
7 of 7

Another problem arose as I moved from a design agency building websites for small- to medium-sized businesses, to larger in-house teams where I worked across a suite of related sites. In those roles I started to work much more with reusable components. 

Our reliance on media queries resulted in components that were tied to common viewport sizes. If the goal of component libraries is reuse, then this is a real problem because you can only use these components if the devices you’re designing for correspond to the viewport sizes used in the pattern library—in the process not really hitting that “devices that don’t yet exist”  goal.

Then there’s the problem of space. Media queries allow components to adapt based on the viewport size, but what if I put a component into a sidebar, like in the figure below?

Container queries: our savior or a false dawn?

Container queries have long been touted as an improvement upon media queries, but at the time of writing are unsupported in most browsers. There are JavaScript workarounds, but they can create dependency and compatibility issues. The basic theory underlying container queries is that elements should change based on the size of their parent container and not the viewport width, as seen in the following illustrations.

One of the biggest arguments in favor of container queries is that they help us create components or design patterns that are truly reusable because they can be picked up and placed anywhere in a layout. This is an important step in moving toward a form of component-based design that works at any size on any device.

In other words, responsive components to replace responsive layouts.

Container queries will help us move from designing pages that respond to the browser or device size to designing components that can be placed in a sidebar or in the main content, and respond accordingly.

My concern is that we are still using layout to determine when a design needs to adapt. This approach will always be restrictive, as we will still need pre-defined breakpoints. For this reason, my main question with container queries is, How would we decide when to change the CSS used by a component? 

A component library removed from context and real content is probably not the best place for that decision. 

As the diagrams below illustrate, we can use container queries to create designs for specific container widths, but what if I want to change the design based on the image size or ratio?

In this example, the dimensions of the container are not what should dictate the design; rather, the image is.

It’s hard to say for sure whether container queries will be a success story until we have solid cross-browser support for them. Responsive component libraries would definitely evolve how we design and would improve the possibilities for reuse and design at scale. But maybe we will always need to adjust these components to suit our content.

CSS is changing

Whilst the container query debate rumbles on, there have been numerous advances in CSS that change the way we think about design. The days of fixed-width elements measured in pixels and floated div elements used to cobble layouts together are long gone, consigned to history along with table layouts. Flexbox and CSS Grid have revolutionized layouts for the web. We can now create elements that wrap onto new rows when they run out of space, not when the device changes.

.wrapper {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, 450px);
  gap: 10px;
}

The repeat() function paired with auto-fit or auto-fill allows us to specify how much space each column should use while leaving it up to the browser to decide when to spill the columns onto a new line. Similar things can be achieved with Flexbox, as elements can wrap over multiple rows and “flex” to fill available space. 

.wrapper {
  display: flex;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
  justify-content: space-between;
}

.child {
  flex-basis: 32%;
  margin-bottom: 20px;
}

The biggest benefit of all this is you don’t need to wrap elements in container rows. Without rows, content isn’t tied to page markup in quite the same way, allowing for removals or additions of content without additional development.

This is a big step forward when it comes to creating designs that allow for evolving content, but the real game changer for flexible designs is CSS Subgrid. 

Remember the days of crafting perfectly aligned interfaces, only for the customer to add an unbelievably long header almost as soon as they’re given CMS access, like the illustration below?

Subgrid allows elements to respond to adjustments in their own content and in the content of sibling elements, helping us create designs more resilient to change.

.wrapper {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(150px, 1fr));
     grid-template-rows: auto 1fr auto;
  gap: 10px;
}

.sub-grid {
  display: grid;
  grid-row: span 3;
  grid-template-rows: subgrid; /* sets rows to parent grid */
}

CSS Grid allows us to separate layout and content, thereby enabling flexible designs. Meanwhile, Subgrid allows us to create designs that can adapt in order to suit morphing content. Subgrid at the time of writing is only supported in Firefox but the above code can be implemented behind an @supports feature query. 

Intrinsic layouts 

I’d be remiss not to mention intrinsic layouts, the term created by Jen Simmons to describe a mixture of new and old CSS features used to create layouts that respond to available space. 

Responsive layouts have flexible columns using percentages. Intrinsic layouts, on the other hand, use the fr unit to create flexible columns that won’t ever shrink so much that they render the content illegible.

fr units is a way to say I want you to distribute the extra space in this way, but…don’t ever make it smaller than the content that’s inside of it.

—Jen Simmons, “Designing Intrinsic Layouts”

Intrinsic layouts can also utilize a mixture of fixed and flexible units, allowing the content to dictate the space it takes up.

What makes intrinsic design stand out is that it not only creates designs that can withstand future devices but also helps scale design without losing flexibility. Components and patterns can be lifted and reused without the prerequisite of having the same breakpoints or the same amount of content as in the previous implementation. 

We can now create designs that adapt to the space they have, the content within them, and the content around them. With an intrinsic approach, we can construct responsive components without depending on container queries.

Another 2010 moment?

This intrinsic approach should in my view be every bit as groundbreaking as responsive web design was ten years ago. For me, it’s another “everything changed” moment. 

But it doesn’t seem to be moving quite as fast; I haven’t yet had that same career-changing moment I had with responsive design, despite the widely shared and brilliant talk that brought it to my attention. 

One reason for that could be that I now work in a large organization, which is quite different from the design agency role I had in 2010. In my agency days, every new project was a clean slate, a chance to try something new. Nowadays, projects use existing tools and frameworks and are often improvements to existing websites with an existing codebase. 

Another could be that I feel more prepared for change now. In 2010 I was new to design in general; the shift was frightening and required a lot of learning. Also, an intrinsic approach isn’t exactly all-new; it’s about using existing skills and existing CSS knowledge in a different way. 

You can’t framework your way out of a content problem

Another reason for the slightly slower adoption of intrinsic design could be the lack of quick-fix framework solutions available to kick-start the change. 

Responsive grid systems were all over the place ten years ago. With a framework like Bootstrap or Skeleton, you had a responsive design template at your fingertips.

Intrinsic design and frameworks do not go hand in hand quite so well because the benefit of having a selection of units is a hindrance when it comes to creating layout templates. The beauty of intrinsic design is combining different units and experimenting with techniques to get the best for your content.

And then there are design tools. We probably all, at some point in our careers, used Photoshop templates for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices to drop designs in and show how the site would look at all three stages.

How do you do that now, with each component responding to content and layouts flexing as and when they need to? This type of design must happen in the browser, which personally I’m a big fan of. 

The debate about “whether designers should code” is another that has rumbled on for years. When designing a digital product, we should, at the very least, design for a best- and worst-case scenario when it comes to content. To do this in a graphics-based software package is far from ideal. In code, we can add longer sentences, more radio buttons, and extra tabs, and watch in real time as the design adapts. Does it still work? Is the design too reliant on the current content?

Personally, I look forward to the day intrinsic design is the standard for design, when a design component can be truly flexible and adapt to both its space and content with no reliance on device or container dimensions.

Content first 

Content is not constant. After all, to design for the unknown or unexpected we need to account for content changes like our earlier Subgrid card example that allowed the cards to respond to adjustments to their own content and the content of sibling elements.

Thankfully, there’s more to CSS than layout, and plenty of properties and values can help us put content first. Subgrid and pseudo-elements like ::first-line and ::first-letter help to separate design from markup so we can create designs that allow for changes.

Instead of old markup hacks like this—

  First line of text with different styling...

—we can target content based on where it appears.

.element::first-line {
  font-size: 1.4em;
}

.element::first-letter {
  color: red;
}

Much bigger additions to CSS include logical properties, which change the way we construct designs using logical dimensions (start and end) instead of physical ones (left and right), something CSS Grid also does with functions like min(), max(), and clamp().

This flexibility allows for directional changes according to content, a common requirement when we need to present content in multiple languages. In the past, this was often achieved with Sass mixins but was often limited to switching from left-to-right to right-to-left orientation.

In the Sass version, directional variables need to be set.

$direction: rtl;
$opposite-direction: ltr;

$start-direction: right;
$end-direction: left;

These variables can be used as values—

body {
  direction: $direction;
  text-align: $start-direction;
}

—or as properties.

margin-#{$end-direction}: 10px;
padding-#{$start-direction}: 10px;

However, now we have native logical properties, removing the reliance on both Sass (or a similar tool) and pre-planning that necessitated using variables throughout a codebase. These properties also start to break apart the tight coupling between a design and strict physical dimensions, creating more flexibility for changes in language and in direction.

margin-block-end: 10px;
padding-block-start: 10px;

There are also native start and end values for properties like text-align, which means we can replace text-align: right with text-align: start.

Like the earlier examples, these properties help to build out designs that aren’t constrained to one language; the design will reflect the content’s needs.

Fixed and fluid 

We briefly covered the power of combining fixed widths with fluid widths with intrinsic layouts. The min() and max() functions are a similar concept, allowing you to specify a fixed value with a flexible alternative. 

For min() this means setting a fluid minimum value and a maximum fixed value.

.element {
  width: min(50%, 300px);
}

The element in the figure above will be 50% of its container as long as the element’s width doesn’t exceed 300px.

For max() we can set a flexible max value and a minimum fixed value.

.element {
  width: max(50%, 300px);
}

Now the element will be 50% of its container as long as the element’s width is at least 300px. This means we can set limits but allow content to react to the available space. 

The clamp() function builds on this by allowing us to set a preferred value with a third parameter. Now we can allow the element to shrink or grow if it needs to without getting to a point where it becomes unusable.

.element {
  width: clamp(300px, 50%, 600px);
}

This time, the element’s width will be 50% (the preferred value) of its container but never less than 300px and never more than 600px.

With these techniques, we have a content-first approach to responsive design. We can separate content from markup, meaning the changes users make will not affect the design. We can start to future-proof designs by planning for unexpected changes in language or direction. And we can increase flexibility by setting desired dimensions alongside flexible alternatives, allowing for more or less content to be displayed correctly.

Situation first

Thanks to what we’ve discussed so far, we can cover device flexibility by changing our approach, designing around content and space instead of catering to devices. But what about that last bit of Jeffrey Zeldman’s quote, “…situations you haven’t imagined”?

It’s a very different thing to design for someone seated at a desktop computer as opposed to someone using a mobile phone and moving through a crowded street in glaring sunshine. Situations and environments are hard to plan for or predict because they change as people react to their own unique challenges and tasks.

This is why choice is so important. One size never fits all, so we need to design for multiple scenarios to create equal experiences for all our users.

Thankfully, there is a lot we can do to provide choice.

Responsible design 

“There are parts of the world where mobile data is prohibitively expensive, and where there is little or no broadband infrastructure.”

“I Used the Web for a Day on a 50 MB Budget”

Chris Ashton

One of the biggest assumptions we make is that people interacting with our designs have a good wifi connection and a wide screen monitor. But in the real world, our users may be commuters traveling on trains or other forms of transport using smaller mobile devices that can experience drops in connectivity. There is nothing more frustrating than a web page that won’t load, but there are ways we can help users use less data or deal with sporadic connectivity.

The srcset attribute allows the browser to decide which image to serve. This means we can create smaller ‘cropped’ images to display on mobile devices in turn using less bandwidth and less data.

The preload attribute can also help us to think about how and when media is downloaded. It can be used to tell a browser about any critical assets that need to be downloaded with high priority, improving perceived performance and the user experience. 

There’s also native lazy loading, which indicates assets that should only be downloaded when they are needed.

With srcset, preload, and lazy loading, we can start to tailor a user’s experience based on the situation they find themselves in. What none of this does, however, is allow the user themselves to decide what they want downloaded, as the decision is usually the browser’s to make. 

So how can we put users in control?

The return of media queries 

Media queries have always been about much more than device sizes. They allow content to adapt to different situations, with screen size being just one of them.

We’ve long been able to check for media types like print and speech and features such as hover, resolution, and color. These checks allow us to provide options that suit more than one scenario; it’s less about one-size-fits-all and more about serving adaptable content. 

As of this writing, the Media Queries Level 5 spec is still under development. It introduces some really exciting queries that in the future will help us design for multiple other unexpected situations.

For example, there’s a light-level feature that allows you to modify styles if a user is in sunlight or darkness. Paired with custom properties, these features allow us to quickly create designs or themes for specific environments.

@media (light-level: normal) {
  --background-color: #fff;
  --text-color: #0b0c0c;  
}

@media (light-level: dim) {
  --background-color: #efd226;
  --text-color: #0b0c0c;
}

Another key feature of the Level 5 spec is personalization. Instead of creating designs that are the same for everyone, users can choose what works for them. This is achieved by using features like prefers-reduced-data, prefers-color-scheme, and prefers-reduced-motion, the latter two of which already enjoy broad browser support. These features tap into preferences set via the operating system or browser so people don’t have to spend time making each site they visit more usable. 

Media queries like this go beyond choices made by a browser to grant more control to the user.

Expect the unexpected

In the end, the one thing we should always expect is for things to change. Devices in particular change faster than we can keep up, with foldable screens already on the market.

We can’t design the same way we have for this ever-changing landscape, but we can design for content. By putting content first and allowing that content to adapt to whatever space surrounds it, we can create more robust, flexible designs that increase the longevity of our products. 

A lot of the CSS discussed here is about moving away from layouts and putting content at the heart of design. From responsive components to fixed and fluid units, there is so much more we can do to take a more intrinsic approach. Even better, we can test these techniques during the design phase by designing in-browser and watching how our designs adapt in real-time.

When it comes to unexpected situations, we need to make sure our products are usable when people need them, whenever and wherever that might be. We can move closer to achieving this by involving users in our design decisions, by creating choice via browsers, and by giving control to our users with user-preference-based media queries. 

Good design for the unexpected should allow for change, provide choice, and give control to those we serve: our users themselves.

” Any post” you might have? is perhaps one of the worst ways to ask for opinions. It’s obscure and unfocused, and it doesn’t give us a sense of what we’re looking for. Getting good opinions starts sooner than we might hope: it starts with the demand.

Starting the process of receiving feedback with a question may seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense if we consider that receiving input can be considered a form of pattern research. In the same way that we wouldn’t perform any studies without the correct questions to get the insight that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to build strong issues.

Design criticism is never a one-time procedure. Sure, any great comments process continues until the project is finished, but this is especially true for layout because architecture work continues iteration after iteration, from a high level to the finest details. Each stage requires its unique set of questions.

And suddenly, as with any great research, we need to examine what we got up, get to the base of its perspectives, and take action. Topic, generation, and analysis. This look at each of those.

The query

Being available to input is important, but we need to be specific about what we’re looking for. Any comments,” What do you think,” or” I’d love to hear your mind” at the conclusion of a presentation are likely to garner a lot of different ideas, or worse, to make everyone follow the lead of the first speaker. And next… we get frustrated because vague issues like those can change a high-level moves review into folks rather commenting on the borders of buttons. Which issue may be important, so it might be difficult to get the team to pay attention to it.

But how do we get into this scenario? A number of elements are involved. One is that we don’t often consider asking as a part of the input approach. Another is how healthy it is to assume that everyone else will agree with the problem and leave it alone. Another is that in nonprofessional debate, there’s usually no need to be that exact. In summary, we tend to undervalue the value of the concerns, so we don’t work to make them better.

The work of asking good questions guidelines and focuses the criticism. It’s even a form of acceptance because it specifies what kind of comments you’d like to receive and how you’re open to them. It puts people in the right emotional position, especially in situations when they weren’t expecting to provide feedback.

There isn’t a second best method to request comments. It simply needs to be certain, and sensitivity can take several shapes. The one of stage over level is a concept for design critique that I’ve found to be particularly helpful in my coaching.

” Stage” refers to each of the steps of the process—in our case, the design process. The kind of feedback changes as the user research moves forward to the final design. But within a single step, one might still review whether some assumptions are correct and whether there’s been a proper translation of the amassed feedback into updated designs as the project has evolved. The layers of user experience could serve as a starting point for future inquiries. What do you want to know: Project objectives? user requirements? Functionality? Content? Interaction design? a system of information architecture UI design? navigation planning Visual design? branding?

Here’re a few example questions that are precise and to the point that refer to different layers:

• Functionality: Is it desirable to automate account creation?
• Interaction design: Take a look through the updated flow and let me know whether you see any steps or error states that I might’ve missed.
• Information architecture: This page contains two competing pieces of information. Is the structure effective in communicating them both?
• User interface design: What do you think about the top-of-the-page error counter, which makes sure you can see the next error even when the error is outside the viewport?
• Navigation design: From research, we identified these second-level navigation items, but once you’re on the page, the list feels too long and hard to navigate. Are there any ways to deal with this?
• Visual design: Are the sticky notifications in the bottom-right corner visible enough?

The other axis of specificity is determined by how far you would like to go with the presentation. For example, we might have introduced a new end-to-end flow, but there was a specific view that you found particularly challenging and you’d like a detailed review of that. This can be especially helpful from one iteration to the next when it’s crucial to highlight the areas that have changed.

There are other things that we can consider when we want to achieve more specific—and more effective—questions.

A quick fix is to get rid of the generic qualifiers from questions like “good”, “well,” “nice,” “bad,” “okay,” and” cool.” For example, asking,” When the block opens and the buttons appear, is this interaction good”? is it possible to look specific, but you can spot the “good” qualifier and make the question” When the block opens and the buttons appear, is it clear what the next action is” look like?

Sometimes we actually do want broad feedback. That’s uncommon, but it can occur. In that sense, you might still make it explicit that you’re looking for a wide range of opinions, whether at a high level or with details. Or perhaps just say,” At first glance, what do you think”? so that it’s clear that what you’re asking is open ended but focused on someone’s impression after their first five seconds of looking at it.

Sometimes the project is particularly broad, and some areas may have already been thoroughly explored. In these situations, it might be useful to explicitly say that some parts are already locked in and aren’t open to feedback. Although it’s not something I’d recommend in general, I’ve found it helpful in avoiding falling into rabbit holes like those that could lead to further refinement but aren’t what’s important right now.

Asking specific questions can completely change the quality of the feedback that you receive. People with less refined criticism will now be able to provide more actionable feedback, and even expert designers will appreciate the clarity and effectiveness gained from concentrating solely on what’s needed. It can save a lot of time and frustration.

The iteration

Design iterations are probably the most visible part of the design work, and they provide a natural checkpoint for feedback. Many design tools have inline commenting, but many of them only display changes as a single fluid stream in the same file. These types of design tools cause conversations to end after they are resolved, update shared UI components automatically, and require designers to always display the most recent version unless these would-be useful features were manually disabled. The implied goal that these design tools seem to have is to arrive at just one final copy with all discussions closed, probably because they inherited patterns from how written documents are collaboratively edited. That’s probably not the most effective way to go about designing critiques, but even if I don’t want to be too prescriptive, it might work for some teams.

The asynchronous design-critique approach that I find most effective is to create explicit checkpoints for discussion. I’m going to use the term iteration post for this. It refers to a write-up or presentation of the design iteration followed by a discussion thread of some kind. Any platform that can accommodate this type of structure can use this. By the way, when I refer to a “write-up or presentation“, I’m including video recordings or other media too: as long as it’s asynchronous, it works.

Using iteration posts has a number of benefits:

• It creates a rhythm in the design work so that the designer can review feedback from each iteration and prepare for the next.
• Decisions are made immediately available for future review, and conversations are also always available.
• It creates a record of how the design changed over time.
• It might also make it simpler to collect and act on feedback depending on the tool.

These posts of course don’t mean that no other feedback approach should be used, just that iteration posts could be the primary rhythm for a remote design team to use. From there, there can be additional feedback techniques ( such as live critique, pair designing, or inline comments ).

I don’t think there’s a standard format for iteration posts. However, there are a few high-level components that make sense as a baseline:

1. The goal
2. The layout
3. The list of changes
4. The querys

Each project is likely to have a goal, and hopefully it’s something that’s already been summarized in a single sentence somewhere else, such as the client brief, the product manager’s outline, or the project owner’s request. Therefore, I would repeat this in every iteration post, literally copy and pasting it. The idea is to provide context and to repeat what’s essential to make each iteration post complete so that there’s no need to find information spread across multiple posts. The most recent iteration post will have everything I need if I want to know about the most recent design.

This copy-and-paste part introduces another relevant concept: alignment comes from repetition. Therefore, repeating information in posts is actually very effective at ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

The design is then the actual series of information-architecture outlines, diagrams, flows, maps, wireframes, screens, visuals, and any other kind of design work that’s been done. In essence, it’s any design work. For the final stages of work, I prefer the term blueprint to emphasize that I’ll be showing full flows instead of individual screens to make it easier to understand the bigger picture.

It might also be helpful to have clear names on the objects since it makes them look better to refer to. Write the post in a way that helps people understand the work. It’s not much different from creating a strong live presentation.

For an efficient discussion, you should also include a bullet list of the changes from the previous iteration to let people focus on what’s new, which can be especially useful for larger pieces of work where keeping track, iteration after iteration, could become a challenge.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, it’s crucial that you include a list of the questions to help you guide the design critique in the desired direction. Doing this as a numbered list can also help make it easier to refer to each question by its number.

Not every iteration is the same. Earlier iterations don’t need to be as tightly focused—they can be more exploratory and experimental, maybe even breaking some of the design-language guidelines to see what’s possible. Then, later, the iterations begin coming to a decision and improving it until the feature development is complete.

I want to highlight that even if these iteration posts are written and conceived as checkpoints, by no means do they need to be exhaustive. A post might be a draft, just a concept to start a discussion, or it might be a cumulative list of all the features that have been added over the course of each iteration until the full picture is achieved.

Over time, I also started using specific labels for incremental iterations: i1, i2, i3, and so on. Although this may seem like a minor labeling tip, it can be useful in many ways:

• Unique—It’s a clear unique marker. One can quickly say,” This was discussed in i4″ with each project, and everyone knows where to go to review things.
• Unassuming—It works like versions ( such as v1, v2, and v3 ) but in contrast, versions create the impression of something that’s big, exhaustive, and complete. Attempts must be exploratory, incomplete, or partial.
• Future proof—It resolves the “final” naming problem that you can run into with versions. No more files with the title “final final complete no-really-its-done” Within each project, the largest number always represents the latest iteration.

The wording release candidate (RC ) could be used to indicate when a design is finished enough to be worked on, even if there are some areas that still need improvement and, in turn, require more iterations, such as” with i8 we reached RC” or “i12 is an RC” to indicate when it is finished.

The review

What typically occurs during a design critique is an open discussion that can be very productive between two people. This approach is particularly effective during live, synchronous feedback. However, using a different approach when we work asynchronously is more effective: adopting a user-research mindset. Written feedback from teammates, stakeholders, or others can be treated as if it were the result of user interviews and surveys, and we can analyze it accordingly.

Asynchronous feedback is particularly effective around these friction points because of this shift’s significant benefits:

1. It removes the pressure to reply to everyone.
2. It lessens the annoyance of snoop-by comments.
3. It lessens our personal stake.

The first friction point is having to feel pressured to respond to each and every comment. Sometimes we write the iteration post, and we get replies from our team. It’s simple, straightforward, and doesn’t cause any issues. But other times, some solutions might require more in-depth discussions, and the amount of replies can quickly increase, which can create a tension between trying to be a good team player by replying to everyone and doing the next design iteration. This might be especially true if the respondent is a stakeholder or someone directly involved in the project who we feel we need to speak with. We need to accept that this pressure is absolutely normal, and it’s human nature to try to accommodate people who we care about. When responding to all comments, it can be effective, but when we consider a design critique more like user research, we realize that we don’t need to respond to every comment, and there are alternatives in asynchronous spaces:

One is to let the next iteration speak for itself. That is the response when the design changes and we publish a follow-up iteration. You might tag all the people who were involved in the previous discussion, but even that’s a choice, not a requirement.
• Another option is to respond politely to acknowledge each comment, such as” Understood. Thank you”,” Good points— I’ll review”, or” Thanks. In the upcoming iteration, I’ll include these. In some cases, this could also be just a single top-level comment along the lines of” Thanks for all the feedback everyone—the next iteration is coming soon”!
• Another option is to quickly summarize the comments before moving on. Depending on your workflow, this can be particularly useful as it can provide a simplified checklist that you can then use for the next iteration.

The swoop-by comment, which is the kind of feedback that comes from a member of the project or team who might not be aware of the context, restrictions, decisions, or requirements —or of the discussions from earlier iterations. On their side, there’s something that one can hope that they might learn: they could start to acknowledge that they’re doing this and they could be more conscious in outlining where they’re coming from. Swoop-by comments frequently prompt the simple thought,” We’ve already discussed this,” and it can be frustrating to have to keep coming back and forth.

Let’s begin by acknowledging again that there’s no need to reply to every comment. However, if responding to a previously litigated point might be helpful, a brief response with a link to the previous discussion for additional information is typically sufficient. Remember, alignment comes from repetition, so it’s okay to repeat things sometimes!

Swoop-by commenting can still be useful for two reasons: first, they might point out something that isn’t clear, and second, they might have the power to fit in with a user’s perspective when they are seeing the design for the first time. Sure, you’ll still be frustrated, but that might at least help in dealing with it.

The personal stake we might have in the design could be the third friction point, which might cause us to feel defensive if the review turned into a discussion. Treating feedback as user research helps us create a healthy distance between the people giving us feedback and our ego ( because yes, even if we don’t want to admit it, it’s there ). And in the end, presenting everything in aggregated form helps us to prioritize our work more.

Always remember that while you need to listen to stakeholders, project owners, and specific advice, you don’t have to accept every piece of feedback. You must examine it and come up with a conclusion that you can support, but sometimes “no” is the best choice.

As the designer leading the project, you’re in charge of that decision. In the end, everyone has their area of specialization, and the designer has the most background and knowledge to make the best choice. And by listening to the feedback that you’ve received, you’re making sure that it’s also the best and most balanced decision.

Thanks to Mike Shelton and Brie Anne Demkiw for their contributions to the initial draft of this article.

One of the most powerful gentle abilities we have at our disposal is the ability to work together to improve our designs while developing our own abilities and perspectives, regardless of how it is used or what it might be called.

Feedback is also one of the most underestimated equipment, and generally by assuming that we’re now great at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a skill that can be trained, grown, and improved. Bad comments can lead to conflict on projects, lower confidence, and long-term, undermine trust and teamwork. Quality opinions can be a revolutionary force.

Practicing our knowledge is absolutely a good way to enhance, but the learning gets yet faster when it’s paired with a good base that programs and focuses the exercise. What are some fundamental components of providing effective opinions? And how can comments be adjusted for rural and distributed job settings?

On the web, we may find a long history of sequential comments: code was written and discussed on mailing lists since the beginning of open source. Currently, engineers engage on pull calls, developers post in their favourite design tools, project managers and sprint masters exchange ideas on tickets, and so on.

Design analysis is often the label used for a type of input that’s provided to make our job better, jointly. So it generally adheres to many of the concepts with comments, but it also has some differences.

The information

The material of the feedback serves as the foundation for all effective critiques, so we need to start there. There are many versions that you can use to design your information. The one that I personally like best—because it’s obvious and actionable—is this one from Lara Hogan.

This formula is typically used to provide feedback to people, but it also fits really well in a pattern criticism because it finally addresses one of the main inquiries that we work on: What? Where? Why? How? Imagine that you’re giving some comments about some pattern function that spans several screens, like an onboard movement: there are some pages shown, a stream blueprint, and an outline of the decisions made. You notice things that needs to be improved. If you keep the three components of the equation in mind, you’ll have a mental unit that can help you become more precise and effective.

Here is a reply that could be included in some feedback, and it might appear fair at first glance because it appears to partially fulfill the requirements. But does it?

Not confident about the keys ‘ patterns and hierarchy—it feels off. May you alter them?

Observation for style feedback doesn’t really mean pointing out which part of the software your input refers to, but it also refers to offering a viewpoint that’s as specific as possible. Do you offer the user’s viewpoint? Your expert perspective? A business perspective? From the perspective of the project manager? A first-time user’s perspective?

I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons.

Impact is about the why. Just pointing out a UI element might sometimes be enough if the issue may be obvious, but more often than not, you should add an explanation of what you’re pointing out.

I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow.

The question approach is meant to provide open guidance by eliciting the critical thinking in the designer receiving the feedback. Notably, in Lara’s equation she provides a second approach: request, which instead provides guidance toward a specific solution. While that’s generally a viable option for feedback, I’ve found that going back to the question approach typically leads to the best solutions for design critiques because designers are generally more open to experiment in a space.

The difference between the two can be exemplified with, for the question approach:

I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Would it make sense to unify them?

Or, for the request approach:

I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same pair of forward and back buttons.

At this point in some situations, it might be useful to integrate with an extra why: why you consider the given suggestion to be better.

I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons so that users don’t get confused.

Choosing the question approach or the request approach can also at times be a matter of personal preference. I spent a while working on improving my feedback, conducting anonymous feedback reviews and sharing feedback with others. After a few rounds of this work and a year later, I got a positive response: my feedback came across as effective and grounded. Until I changed teams. Surprise surprise, my next round of criticism from a specific person wasn’t very positive. The reason is that I had previously tried not to be prescriptive in my advice—because the people who I was previously working with preferred the open-ended question format over the request style of suggestions. However, there was a member of this other team who preferred specific guidance. So I adapted my feedback for them to include requests.

One comment that I heard come up a few times is that this kind of feedback is quite long, and it doesn’t seem very efficient. Yes, but also no. Let’s explore both sides.

No, this kind of feedback is actually effective because the length is a byproduct of clarity, and giving this kind of feedback can provide precisely enough information for a sound fix. Also if we zoom out, it can reduce future back-and-forth conversations and misunderstandings, improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of collaboration beyond the single comment. Imagine that in the example above the feedback were instead just,” Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons”. Since the designer receiving this feedback wouldn’t have much to go by, they might just make the change. In later iterations, the interface might change or they might introduce new features—and maybe that change might not make sense anymore. The designer might assume that the change is about consistency without the explanation, but what if it wasn’t? So there could now be an underlying concern that changing the buttons would be perceived as a regression.

Yes, this style of feedback is not always efficient because the points in some comments don’t always need to be exhaustive, sometimes because certain changes may be obvious (” The font used doesn’t follow our guidelines” ) and sometimes because the team may have a lot of internal knowledge such that some of the whys may be implied.

Therefore, the above equation serves as a mnemonic to reflect and enhance the practice rather than a strict template for feedback. Even after years of active work on my critiques, I still from time to time go back to this formula and reflect on whether what I just wrote is effective.

The atmosphere

Well-grounded content is the foundation of feedback, but that’s not really enough. The soft skills of the person who’s providing the critique can multiply the likelihood that the feedback will be well received and understood. It has been demonstrated that only positive feedback can lead to lasting change in people, and tone alone can determine whether content is rejected or welcomed.

Since our goal is to be understood and to have a positive working environment, tone is essential to work on. Over the years, I’ve tried to summarize the necessary soft skills in a formula that resembles the one for content: the receptivity equation.

Respectful feedback comes across as grounded, solid, and constructive. It’s the kind of feedback that, whether it’s positive or negative, is perceived as useful and fair.

Timing refers to the moment when the feedback occurs. To-the-point feedback doesn’t have much hope of being well received if it’s given at the wrong time. When a new feature’s entire high-level information architecture is about to go live, it might still be relevant if the questioning raises a significant blocker that no one saw, but those concerns are much more likely to have to wait for a later revision. So in general, attune your feedback to the stage of the project. Early iteration? Iteration later? Polishing work in progress? Each of these needs a different one. The right timing will make it more likely that your feedback will be well received.

Attitude is the equivalent of intent, and in the context of person-to-person feedback, it can be referred to as radical candor. Before writing, it’s important to make sure the person we’re writing will actually benefit them and improve the overall project. This might be a hard reflection at times because maybe we don’t want to admit that we don’t really appreciate that person. Hopefully that’s not the case, but it can happen, which is fine. Acknowledging and owning that can help you make up for that: how would I write if I really cared about them? How can I avoid being passive aggressive? How can I encourage constructive behavior?

Form is relevant especially in a diverse and cross-cultural work environments because having great content, perfect timing, and the right attitude might not come across if the way that we write creates misunderstandings. There could be many reasons for this: some words might cause particular reactions, some non-native speakers might not understand all the nuances of some sentences, and other times our brains might be different and we might perceive the world differently. Neurodiversity must be taken into account. Whatever the reason, it’s important to review not just what we write but how.

A few years back, I was asking for some feedback on how I give feedback. I was given some helpful advice, but I also found a surprise in my comment. They pointed out that when I wrote” Oh, ]… ]”, I made them feel stupid. That wasn’t my intention at all! I felt really bad, and I just realized that I provided feedback to them for months, and every time I might have made them feel stupid. I was horrified … but also thankful. I quickly changed my spelling mistake by adding “oh” to my list of replaced words (your choice between aText, TextExpander, or others ) so that when I typed “oh,” it was immediately deleted.

Something to highlight because it’s quite frequent—especially in teams that have a strong group spirit—is that people tend to beat around the bush. It’s important to keep in mind that having a positive attitude doesn’t necessarily mean passing judgment on the feedback; rather, it simply means that you give it constructive and respectful feedback, whether it be difficult or positive. The nicest thing that you can do for someone is to help them grow.

We have a great advantage in giving feedback in written form: it can be reviewed by another person who isn’t directly involved, which can help to reduce or remove any bias that might be there. The best, most insightful moments for me came when I shared a comment and asked a trusted person how it sounds, how can I do it better, or even” How would you have written it”? I discovered that by seeing the two versions side by side, I’ve learned a lot.

The format

Asynchronous feedback also has a significant inherent benefit: we can devote more time to making sure that the suggestions ‘ clarity of communication and actionability fulfill two main objectives.

Let’s imagine that someone shared a design iteration for a project. You are reviewing it and leaving a comment. There are many ways to accomplish this, and context is of course important, but let’s try to think about some things that might be worthwhile to take into account.

In terms of clarity, start by grounding the critique that you’re about to give by providing context. This includes specifically describing where you’re coming from: do you know the project well, or do you just see it for the first time? Are you coming from a high-level perspective, or are you figuring out the details? Are there regressions? Which user’s point of view are you addressing when offering your feedback? Is the design iteration at a point where it would be okay to ship this, or are there major things that need to be addressed first?

Even if you’re giving feedback to a team that already has some project information, providing context is helpful. And context is absolutely essential when giving cross-team feedback. If I were to review a design that might be indirectly related to my work, and if I had no knowledge about how the project arrived at that point, I would say so, highlighting my take as external.

We frequently concentrate on the negatives and attempt to list every possible improvement. That’s of course important, but it’s just as important—if not more—to focus on the positives, especially if you saw progress from the previous iteration. Although this may seem superfluous, it’s important to keep in mind that design is a field with hundreds of possible solutions for each problem. So pointing out that the design solution that was chosen is good and explaining why it’s good has two major benefits: it confirms that the approach taken was solid, and it helps to ground your negative feedback. In the longer term, sharing positive feedback can help prevent regressions on things that are going well because those things will have been highlighted as important. Positive feedback can also help, as an added bonus, prevent impostor syndrome.

There’s one powerful approach that combines both context and a focus on the positives: frame how the design is better than the status quo ( compared to a previous iteration, competitors, or benchmarks ) and why, and then on that foundation, you can add what could be improved. This is powerful because there is a big difference between a critique of a design that is already in good shape and one that is critiqued for a design that isn’t quite there yet.

Another way that you can improve your feedback is to depersonalize the feedback: the comments should always be about the work, never about the person who made it. It’s” This button isn’t well aligned” versus” You haven’t aligned this button well”. This can be changed in your writing very quickly by reviewing it just before sending.

In terms of actionability, one of the best approaches to help the designer who’s reading through your feedback is to split it into bullet points or paragraphs, which are easier to review and analyze one by one. You might also think about breaking up the feedback into sections or even across multiple comments if it is longer. Of course, adding screenshots or signifying markers of the specific part of the interface you’re referring to can also be especially useful.

One approach that I’ve personally used effectively in some contexts is to enhance the bullet points with four markers using emojis. A red square indicates that it is something I consider blocking, a yellow diamond indicates that it needs to be changed, and a green circle provides a thorough, positive confirmation. I also use a blue spiral � � for either something that I’m not sure about, an exploration, an open alternative, or just a note. However, I’d only use this strategy on teams where I’ve already established a high level of trust because it might turn out to be quite demoralizing if I deliver a lot of red squares, and I’d have to reframe how I’d communicate that.

Let’s see how this would work by reusing the example that we used earlier as the first bullet point in this list:

• 🔶 Navigation—I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons so that users don’t get confused.
• � � Overall— I think the page is solid, and this is good enough to be our release candidate for a version 1.0.
• � � Metrics—Good improvement in the buttons on the metrics area, the improved contrast and new focus style make them more accessible.
• Button Style: Using the green accent in this context, which conveys a positive action because green is typically seen as a confirmation color. Do we need to explore a different color?
• Given the number of items on the page and the overall page hierarchy, it seems to me that the tiles should use Subtitle 2 instead of Subtitle 1. This will keep the visual hierarchy more consistent.
• � � Background—Using a light texture works well, but I wonder whether it adds too much noise in this kind of page. What is the purpose of using that?

What about giving feedback directly in Figma or another design tool that allows in-place feedback? These are generally difficult to use because they conceal discussions and are harder to follow, but in the right setting, they can be very effective. Just make sure that each of the comments is separate so that it’s easier to match each discussion to a single task, similar to the idea of splitting mentioned above.

One final note: say the obvious. Sometimes we might feel good or bad about something, so we don’t say it. Or sometimes we might have a doubt that we don’t express because the question might sound stupid. Say it, that’s fine. You might have to reword it a little bit to make the reader feel more comfortable, but don’t hold it back. Good feedback is transparent, even when it may be obvious.

Asynchronous feedback also has the benefit of automatically guiding decisions, according to writing. Especially in large projects,” Why did we do this”? There’s nothing better than open, transparent discussions that can be reviewed at any time, which could be a question that arises from time to time. For this reason, I recommend using software that saves these discussions, without hiding them once they are resolved.

Content, tone, and format. Although each of these subjects offers a useful model, improving eight of the subjects ‘ observation, impact, question, timing, attitude, form, clarity, and actionability is a lot of work to put in all at once. One effective approach is to take them one by one: first identify the area that you lack the most (either from your perspective or from feedback from others ) and start there. Then the second, followed by the third, and so on. At first you’ll have to put in extra time for every piece of feedback that you give, but after a while, it’ll become second nature, and your impact on the work will multiply.

Thanks to Brie Anne Demkiw and Mike Shelton for reviewing the first draft of this article.

But what on earth is a passionate burnout?

Envision a person determined to do it all. She is homeschooling two wonderful children while simultaneously working remotely with her husband. She has a demanding customer fill at work—all of whom she loves. She wakes up early to get some movement in ( or frequently catch up on work ), prepares dinner while the kids are having breakfast, and works while positioning herself near the end of her “fourth grade” to watch as she balances clients, tasks, and budgets. Sound like a bit? Yet with a supportive group both at home and at work, it is.

Sounds like this person needs self-care and has too much on her disk. But no, she doesn’t have occasion for that. She begins to feel as though she’s dropping pellets. No accomplishing enough. There’s not enough of her to be here and that, she is trying to divide her head in two all the time, all day, every day. She begins to question herself. And as those thoughts creep in more and more, her domestic tale becomes more and more important.

She instantly KNOWS what she needs to accomplish! She really Would MORE.

This is a challenging and dangerous period. Know the reasons. Because when she doesn’t end that new purpose, that storyline will get worse. She immediately starts failing. She isn’t doing much. SHE is not enough. She’ll discover more she may do because she might neglect, or perhaps her home. She doesn’t nap as much, proceed because much, all in the attempts to do more. Trying to prove herself to herself, but not succeeding in any endeavor. Always feeling “enough”.

But, yeah, that’s what zealous burnout looks like for me. It doesn’t develop immediately in a great sign; it develops gradually over the course of several weeks and months. My burning out process looks like speeding up, not a man losing target. I move quickly and steadily, but I really quit.

I am the one who had

It’s interesting the things that shape us. Through the camera of my youth, I witnessed the battles, sacrifices, and fears of a person who had to make it all work without having much. I was happy that my mom was so competent and my dad sympathetic, I never went without and also got an extra here or there.

When my mother gave me food stamps as a child, I didn’t think shame; rather, I would have good started any debates about the subject, orally eviscerating anyone who dared to criticize the handicapped girl who was attempting to ensure all of our needs were met with so little. As a child, I watched the way the worry of not making those begins meet impacted people I love. As the non-disabled people in my home, I did take on many of the real things because I was” the one who was” make our lives a little easier. I soon realized that I had to put more of myself into it because I am the one who is. I learned first that when something frightens me, I may double down and work harder to make it better. I am in charge of the problem. When individuals have seen this in me as an adult, I’ve been told I seem brave, but make no mistake, I’m not. If I seem courageous, it’s because this behavior was forged from another person’s fears.

And here I am, more than 30 years later, also feeling the urge to aimlessly force myself forward when faced with daunting tasks in front of me, assuming that I am the one who is and consequently does. I find myself driven to show that I may make things happen if I work longer hours, take on more responsibility, and do more.

Because I have seen how powerful a fiscally challenged person can be, I don’t think they are failures because they are pulled down by that flood. I really get that I have been privileged to be able to prevent many of the issues that were current in my children. That said, I am also” the one who can” who feels she does, but if I were faced with not having much to make ends meet for my own home, I do see myself as having failed. Despite my best efforts and education, the majority of this is due to great riches. I will, yet, permit myself the pride of saying I have been cautious with my options to have encouraged that success. My sense of self is the result of the notion that I am” the one who can” and feel compelled to accomplish the most. I can choose to halt, and with some pretty precise warm water splashed in my encounter, I’ve made the choice to previously. But that choosing to stop is not my go-to, I move forward, driven by a fear that is so a part of me that I barely notice it’s there until I’m feeling utterly worn away.

Why all this history, then? You see, burnout is a fickle thing. Over the years, I have read and heard a lot about burnout. Burnout is real. Especially now, with COVID, many of us are balancing more than we ever have before—all at once! It’s difficult, and the avoidance, shutting down, and procrastination have an impact on so many amazing professionals. There are important articles that relate to what I imagine must be the majority of people out there, but not me. That’s not how my burnout appears.

The dangerous invisibility of zealous burnout

A lot of work environments see the extra hours, extra effort, and overall focused commitment as an asset ( and sometimes that’s all it is ). They see someone attempting to overcome obstacles, not a person who is ensnared in fear. Many well-meaning organizations have safeguards in place to protect their teams from burnout. However, in situations like this, those alarms don’t always go off, and some organization members are surprised and depressed when the inevitable stop occurs. And sometimes maybe even betrayed.

Parents—more so mothers, statistically speaking—are praised as being so on top of it all when they can work, be involved in the after-school activities, practice self-care in the form of diet and exercise, and still meet friends for coffee or wine. Many of us watched endless streaming COVID episodes to see how challenging the female protagonist is, but she is strong, funny, and capable of doing it. It’s a “very special episode” when she breaks down, cries in the bathroom, woefully admits she needs help, and just stops for a bit. Truth be told, countless people are hidden in tears or doom-scrolling to escape. We know that the media is a lie to amuse us, but often the perception that it’s what we should strive for has penetrated much of society.

Women and burnout

I adore men. And though I don’t love every man ( heads up, I don’t love every woman or nonbinary person either ), I think there is a beautiful spectrum of individuals who represent that particular binary gender.

Despite this, especially in these COVID stressed out times, women are still more likely than their male counterparts to be burnout vulnerable. Mothers in the workplace feel the pressure to do all the “mom” things while giving 110 %. Mothers not in the workplace feel they need to do more to” justify” their lack of traditional employment. Women who are not mothers frequently feel the need to do even more because they don’t feel the pressure that comes with being a mother. It’s vicious and systemic and so a part of our culture that we’re often not even aware of the enormity of the pressures we put on ourselves and each other.

And there are costs that go beyond happiness. Harvard Health Publishing released a study a decade ago that “uncovered strong links between women’s job stress and cardiovascular disease”. The CDC noted,” Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, killing 299, 578 women in 2017—or about 1 in every 5 female deaths”.

According to what I’ve read, this connection between work stress and health is more dangerous for women than it is for their non-female counterparts.

But what if your burnout isn’t like that either?

That might not be you either. After all, each of us is so different and how we respond to stressors is too. It’s part of what makes us human. Don’t put too much emphasis on how burnout looks; instead, learn to recognize it in yourself. Here are a few questions I sometimes ask friends if I am concerned about them.

How are you feeling? This simple question should be the first thing you ask yourself. Chances are, even if you’re burning out doing all the things you love, as you approach burnout you’ll just stop taking as much joy from it all.

Do you feel like you have the authority to refuse? I have observed in myself and others that when someone is burning out, they no longer feel they can say no to things. Even those who don’t” speed up” feel pressured to say “yes” and not let the people around them be disappointed.

What are three things you’ve done for yourself? Another observance is that we all tend to stop doing things for ourselves. anything from avoiding conversations with friends to skipping showers and eating poorly. These can be red flags.

Are you using justifications? Many of us try to disregard feelings of burnout. Over and over I have heard,” It’s just crunch time”,” As soon as I do this one thing, it will all be better”, and” Well I should be able to handle this, so I’ll figure it out”. And it might actually be crunch time, a single objective, and/or a set of skills you need to master. That happens—life happens. Be open to yourself if this continues to happen. If you’ve worked more 50-hour weeks since January than not, maybe it’s not crunch time—maybe it’s a bad situation that you’re burning out from.

Do you have a plan to stop feeling this way? If something has an exit route with a pause button if it is truly temporary and you do need to simply push through, it does.
defined end.

Take the time to listen to yourself as you would a friend. Be honest, allow yourself to be uncomfortable, and break the thought cycles that prevent you from healing.

So now what?

What I just described has a different path to burnout, but it’s still burnout. There are well-established approaches to working through burnout:

• Get enough sleep.
• Eat healthy.
• Work out.
• Go outside.
• Take a break.
• Practice self-care in general.

Those are hard for me because they feel like more tasks. If I’m in the burnout cycle, doing any of the above for me feels like a waste. Why would I take care of myself when I’m dropping all those other balls if I’m already failing, as the narrative suggests? People need me, right?

Your inner voice might already be pretty bad if you’re deeply in the cycle. If you need to, tell yourself you need to take care of the person your people depend on. If your roles are pushing you toward burnout, use them to help make healing easier by justifying the time spent working on you.

I have come up with a few things that I do when I start to feel like I’m going into a zealous burnout to help remind myself of the airline attendant advice to put the mask on yourself first.

Cook an elaborate meal for someone!

Okay, since I’m a “food-focused” person, I’ve always been a fan. There are countless tales in my home of someone walking into the kitchen and turning right around and walking out when they noticed I was” chopping angrily”. But it’s more than that, and you should give it a try. Seriously. It’s the perfect go-to if you don’t feel worthy of taking time for yourself—do it for someone else. Because the majority of us work in a digital world, cooking can pique all of your senses and make you feel present in the moment in all your ways of seeing the world. It can break you out of your head and help you gain a better perspective. In my house, I’ve been known to pick a place on the map and cook food that comes from wherever that is ( thank you, Pinterest ). I enjoy making Indian food because the smells are warm, the bread needs just enough kneading to keep my hands engaged, and the process requires real attention for me because it’s not what I was raised making. And in the end, we all win!

Vent like a sniveling jerk.

Be careful with this one!

I have been making an effort to practice more gratitude over the past few years, and I recognize the true benefits of that. Having said that, sometimes you just need to let it all out, even the ugly ones. Hell, I’m a big fan of not sugarcoating our lives, and that sometimes means that to get past the big pile of poop, you’re gonna wanna complain about it a bit.

When that is required, turn to a trusted friend and give yourself some pure verbal diarrhea, yelling at you all the way through. You need to trust this friend not to judge, to see your pain, and, most importantly, to tell you to remove your cranium from your own rectal cavity. Seriously, it’s about getting a reality check here! One of the things that I admire most about my husband is how he manages to simplify things down to the simplest. ” We’re spending our lives together, of course you’re going to disappoint me from time to time, so get over it” has been his way of speaking his dedication, love, and acceptance of me—and I could not be more grateful. Of course, it required that I remove my head from that rectal cavity. So, again, usually those moments are appreciated in hindsight.

Pick up a book!

There are many books out there that are more like you sharing their stories and how they’ve come to find greater balance than they are self-help. Maybe you’ll find something that speaks to you. Among the titles that have stood out to me are:

• Thrive by Arianna Huffington
• Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
• Girl, Stop Apologizing by Rachel Hollis
• Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Or, a tactic I enjoy using is to read or listen to a book that is NOT related to my work-life balance. I’ve read the following books and found they helped balance me out because my mind was pondering their interesting topics instead of running in circles:

• The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart
• Darin Olien’s Superlife
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford
• Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden is available.

If you’re not into reading, pick up a topic on YouTube or choose a podcast to subscribe to. I’ve watched countless permaculture and gardening topics in addition to how to raise chickens and ducks. For the record, I don’t currently have a particularly large food garden or raise any kind of livestock. I just find the topic interesting, and it has nothing to do with any aspect of my life that needs anything from me.

Give yourself a break.

You are never going to be perfect—hell, it would be boring if you were. It’s OK to be broken and flawed. Being tired, depressed, and worried is human nature. It’s OK to not do it all. You can’t be brave without being imperfect, which is terrifying.

This last one is the most important: allow yourself permission to NOT do it all. You never promised to be everything to everyone at all times. We are stronger than the anxieties that motivate us.

This is hard. I struggle with it. It’s what’s driven me to write this—that it’s OK to stop. It’s OK that your unhealthy habit that might even benefit those around you needs to end. You can still succeed in life.

I recently read that we are all writing our eulogy in how we live. What will your professional accomplishments say, knowing that your speech won’t include them? What do you want it to say?

Look, I get that none of these ideas will “fix it”, and that’s not their purpose. None of us has complete control over our surroundings, but only how we react to them. These suggestions are to help stop the spiral effect so that you are empowered to address the underlying issues and choose your response. They are the things that largely work for me. Maybe they’ll work for you.

Does this sound familiar?

If this sounds familiar, you’re not just going to know about it. Don’t let your negative self-talk tell you that you “even burn out wrong”. It is not improper. Even if rooted in fear like my own drivers, I believe that this need to do more comes from a place of love, determination, motivation, and other wonderful attributes that make you the amazing person you are. We’re going to be OK, ya know. The lives that come before us might never appear to be the same as the one we’re picturing, or that we’re looking for, but that’s okay because the only way to judge us is in the mirror when we stop and look around.

Do you remember that Winnie the Pooh sketch that had Pooh eat so much at Rabbit’s house that his buttocks couldn’t fit through the door? It came as no surprise when he abruptly declared that this was unacceptable because I already associate a lot with Rabbit. But do you recall what happened next? He put a shelf across poor Pooh’s ankles and decorations on his back, and made the best of the big butt in his kitchen.

We are resourceful and aware that we can push ourselves when we are needed, even when we are exhausted to the core or have a ton of clutter in our room. None of us has to be afraid, as we can manage any obstacle put in front of us. And maybe that means we need to redefine success in order to make room for comfort for being uncomfortable human, but that doesn’t really sound that bad either.

So, wherever you are right now, please breathe. Do what you need to do to get out of your head. Give thanks and be considerate.

We’ve been having conversations for thousands of years. Whether to convey information, conduct transactions, or simply to check in on one another, people have yammered away, chattering and gesticulating, through spoken conversation for countless generations. Only in the last few millennia have we begun to commit our conversations to writing, and only in the last few decades have we begun to outsource them to the computer, a machine that shows much more affinity for written correspondence than for the slangy vagaries of spoken language.

Computers have trouble because between spoken and written language, speech is more primordial. To have successful conversations with us, machines must grapple with the messiness of human speech: the disfluencies and pauses, the gestures and body language, and the variations in word choice and spoken dialect that can stymie even the most carefully crafted human-computer interaction. In the human-to-human scenario, spoken language also has the privilege of face-to-face contact, where we can readily interpret nonverbal social cues.

In contrast, written language immediately concretizes as we commit it to record and retains usages long after they become obsolete in spoken communication (the salutation “To whom it may concern,” for example), generating its own fossil record of outdated terms and phrases. Because it tends to be more consistent, polished, and formal, written text is fundamentally much easier for machines to parse and understand.

Spoken language has no such luxury. Besides the nonverbal cues that decorate conversations with emphasis and emotional context, there are also verbal cues and vocal behaviors that modulate conversation in nuanced ways: how something is said, not what. 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. So when it comes to voice interfaces—the machines we conduct spoken conversations with—we face exciting challenges as designers and content strategists.

Voice Interactions

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 (). Generally, we start up a conversation because:

• we need something done (such as a transaction),
• we want to know something (information of some sort), or
• we are social beings and want someone to talk to (conversation for conversation’s sake).

These three categories—which I call transactional, informational, and prosocial—also characterize essentially every voice interaction: a single conversation from beginning to end that realizes some outcome for the user, starting with the voice interface’s first greeting and ending with the user exiting 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 a conversation is not necessarily a single voice interaction.

Purely prosocial conversations are more gimmicky than captivating in most voice interfaces, because machines don’t yet have the capacity to really want to know how we’re doing and to do the sort of glad-handing humans 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 fact, in Voice User Interface Design, Michael Cohen, James Giangola, and Jennifer Balogh recommend sticking to users’ expectations by mimicking how they interact with other voice interfaces rather than trying too hard to be human—potentially alienating them in the process ().

That leaves two genres of conversations we can have with one another that a voice interface can easily have with us, too: a transactional voice interaction realizing some outcome (“buy iced tea”) and an informational voice interaction teaching us something new (“discuss a musical”).

Transactional voice interactions

Unless you’re tapping buttons on a food delivery app, you’re generally having a conversation—and therefore a voice interaction—when you order a Hawaiian pizza with extra pineapple. Even when we walk up to the counter and place an order, the conversation quickly pivots from an initial smattering of neighborly small talk to the real mission at hand: ordering a pizza (generously topped with pineapple, as it should be).

Alison: Hey, how’s it going?

Burhan: Hi, welcome to Crust Deluxe! It’s cold out there. How can I help you?

Alison: Can I get a Hawaiian pizza with extra pineapple?

Burhan: Sure, what size?

Alison: Large.

Burhan: Anything else?

Alison: No thanks, that’s it.

Burhan: Something to drink?

Alison: I’ll have a bottle of Coke.

Burhan: You got it. That’ll be $13.55 and about fifteen minutes.

Each progressive disclosure in this transactional conversation reveals more and more of the desired outcome of the transaction: a service rendered or a product delivered. Transactional conversations have certain key traits: they’re direct, to the point, and economical. They quickly dispense with pleasantries.

Informational voice interactions

Meanwhile, some conversations are primarily about obtaining 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 just as interested in whether they serve halal or kosher dishes, gluten-free options, or something else. Here, though we again have a prosocial mini-conversation at the beginning to establish politeness, we’re after much more.

Alison: Hey, how’s it going?

Burhan: Hi, welcome to Crust Deluxe! It’s cold out there. How can I help you?

Alison: Can I ask a few questions?

Burhan: Of course! Go right ahead.

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

Burhan: Absolutely! We can make any pie halal by request. We also have lots of vegetarian, ovo-lacto, and vegan options. Are you thinking about any other dietary restrictions?

Alison: What about gluten-free pizzas?

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 answer for you?

Alison: That’s it for now. Good to know. Thanks!

Burhan: Anytime, come back soon!

This is a very different dialogue. Here, the goal is to get a certain set of facts. Informational conversations are investigative quests for the truth—research expeditions to gather data, news, or facts. Voice interactions that are informational might be more long-winded than transactional conversations by necessity. Responses tend to be lengthier, more informative, and carefully communicated so the customer understands the key takeaways.

Voice Interfaces

At their core, voice interfaces employ speech to support users in reaching their goals. But simply because an interface has a voice component doesn’t mean that every user interaction with it is mediated through voice. Because multimodal voice interfaces can lean on visual components like screens as crutches, we’re most concerned in this book with pure voice interfaces, which depend entirely on spoken conversation, lack any visual component whatsoever, and are therefore much more nuanced and challenging to tackle.

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.

Interactive voice response (IVR) systems

Though written conversational interfaces have been fixtures of computing for many decades, voice interfaces first emerged in the early 1990s with text-to-speech (TTS) dictation programs that recited written text aloud, as well as 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 allowed organizations to reduce their reliance on call centers but soon became notorious for their clunkiness. Commonplace in the corporate world, these systems were primarily designed as metaphorical switchboards to guide customers to a real phone agent (“Say Reservations to book a flight or check an itinerary”); chances are you will enter a conversation with one when you call an airline or hotel conglomerate. 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).

While IVR systems are great for highly repetitive, monotonous conversations that generally don’t veer from a single format, they have a reputation for less scintillating conversation than we’re used to in real life (or even in science fiction).

Screen readers

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 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 (). That same year, Jim Thatcher created the first IBM Screen Reader for text-based computers, later recreated for computers with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) ().

With the rapid growth of the web in the 1990s, the demand for accessible tools for websites exploded. 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,” writes Aaron Gustafson in A List Apart. “At least they do when documents are authored thoughtfully” ().

Though deeply instructive for voice interface designers, there’s one significant problem with screen readers: they’re difficult to use and unremittingly verbose. The visual structures of websites and web navigation don’t translate well to screen readers, sometimes resulting in unwieldy pronouncements that name every manipulable HTML element and announce every formatting change. For many screen reader users, working with web-based interfaces exacts a cognitive toll.

In Wired, accessibility advocate and voice engineer Chris Maury considers why the screen reader experience is ill-suited to users relying on voice:

From the beginning, I hated the way that Screen Readers work. Why are they designed the way they are? It makes no sense to present information visually and then, and only then, translate that into audio. All of the time and energy that goes into creating the perfect user experience for an app is wasted, or even worse, adversely impacting the experience for blind users. ()

In many cases, well-designed voice interfaces can speed users to their destination better than long-winded screen reader monologues. After all, visual interface users have the benefit of darting around the viewport freely to find information, ignoring areas irrelevant to them. Blind users, meanwhile, are obligated to listen to every utterance synthesized into speech and therefore prize brevity and efficiency. Disabled users who have long had no choice but to employ clunky screen readers may find that voice interfaces, particularly more modern voice assistants, offer a more streamlined experience.

Voice assistants

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 assistants 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 formulated their vision for a Semantic Web “agent” that would perform typical errands like “checking calendars, making appointments, and finding locations” (, behind paywall). It wasn’t until 2011 that Apple’s Siri finally entered the picture, making voice assistants a tangible reality for consumers.

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 except vendor-provided features is locked down; for example, at the time of their release, the core functionality of Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana couldn’t be extended beyond their existing capabilities. Even today, it isn’t possible to program Siri to perform arbitrary functions, because there’s no means by which developers can interact with Siri at a low level, apart from predefined categories of tasks like sending messages, hailing rideshares, making restaurant reservations, and certain others.

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, programmable voice assistants that lend themselves to customization and extensibility are becoming increasingly popular for developers who feel stifled by the limitations of Siri and Cortana. Amazon offers the Alexa Skills Kit, a developer framework for building custom voice interfaces for Amazon Alexa, while Google Home offers the ability to program arbitrary Google Assistant skills. Today, users can choose from among thousands of custom-built skills within both the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant ecosystems.

As corporations like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google continue to stake their territory, they’re also selling and open-sourcing an unprecedented array of tools and frameworks for designers and developers that aim to make building voice interfaces as easy 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. By contrast, many development platforms like Google’s Dialogflow have introduced omnichannel capabilities so users can build a single conversational interface that then manifests as a voice interface, textual chatbot, and IVR system upon deployment. I don’t prescribe any specific implementation approaches in this design-focused book, but in Chapter 4 we’ll get into some of the implications these variables might have on the way you build out your design artifacts.

Voice Content

Simply put, voice content is content delivered through voice. To preserve what makes human conversation so compelling in the first place, voice content needs to be free-flowing and organic, contextless and concise—everything written content isn’t.

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. In this book, we’re most concerned with content delivered auditorily—not as an option, but as a necessity.

For many of us, our first foray into informational voice interfaces will be to deliver content to users. There’s only one problem: any content we already have isn’t in any way ready for this new habitat. So how do we make the content trapped on our websites more conversational? And how do we write new copy that lends itself to voice interactions?

Lately, we’ve begun slicing and dicing our content in unprecedented ways. Websites are, in many respects, colossal vaults of what I call macrocontent: lengthy prose that can extend for infinitely scrollable miles in a browser window, like microfilm viewers of newspaper archives. Back in 2002, well before the present-day ubiquity of voice assistants, technologist Anil Dash defined microcontent as permalinked pieces of content that stay legible regardless of environment, such as email or text messages:

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’d update Dash’s definition of microcontent to include all examples of bite-sized content that go well 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. Microcontent offers the best opportunity to gauge how your content can be stretched to the very edges of its capabilities, informing delivery channels both established and novel.

As microcontent, voice content is unique because it’s an example of how content is experienced in time rather than in space. 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.

Because microcontent is fundamentally made up of isolated blobs with no relation to the channels where they’ll eventually end up, we need to ensure that our microcontent truly performs well as voice content—and that means focusing on the two most important traits of robust voice content: voice content legibility and voice content discoverability.

Fundamentally, the legibility and discoverability of our voice content both have to do with how voice content manifests in perceived time and space.

Some members of the elite running group were beginning to think it was impossible to run a hour 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.

However, on May 6, 1956, Roger Bannister caught people by shock. 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 today knew that the four-minute hour could be accomplished thanks to this change in the criterion. Bannister’s history lasted just forty-six days, when it was snatched aside by American sprinter John Landy. Finally, a year later, three runners all managed to cross the four-minute hurdle in the same culture. 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 accomplish a lot more when we think something is possible, and we only think it can be done when we see someone else doing it after all. As for individual running speed, we also think there are the strictest requirements for how a website should do.

Establishing requirements for a green website

The key indicators of climate performance in most big companies are pretty 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. But, 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 amount of CO₂ that a website merchandise produces. We can’t assess the pollutants coming out of the exhaust valves on our laptops. Our websites ‘ emissions are far away, out of mind, and out of sight when fuel and oil are burned in power plants. 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 measures of coal emissions:

1. Transfer of data
2. Electricity’s carbon power

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 great example of how much energy is consumed and how much carbon is released. As a rule of thumb, the more data transferred, the more energy used in the data center, telecoms networks, and end user devices.

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, any web application’s overall data transfer statistics will be 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 necessary 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 the majority of technologies, including the web’s underlying technology like data centers and transmission networks, become more and more energy-efficient, websites themselves become less effective as time goes on.

You might be aware of the project team’s focus on creating faster user experiences using the concept of performance budgeting. 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 hazy ideas, much like speed limits while driving. As a result, the goal should always be to stay 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, but web performance is frequently more about the subjective perception of load times than it is about the underlying system’s true 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 competitor page weights and the website’s current layout to compare it to. 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, visitors who load the same page more frequently are likely to have a high percentage of the files cached in their browser, which means they don’t need to move all the files 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 reducing 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.

Electricity’s carbon power

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 produced. 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, where different levels of carbon intensity are combined with energy from a variety of sources. 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 have some control over where our projects are hosted, we do not have complete control over the energy supply of web services. 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. Danish startup Tomorrow reports and maps the user-provided data, 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 ).

Having said that, we don’t want to locate our servers too far away from our users; however, it takes 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 hosting it somewhere in North America, ideally on the West Coast, would significantly shorten the distance and the amount of energy needed to transmit the data. 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 data transferred over wire when loading a website into a CO₂ figure ( Fig. ₂.4), calculating the associated electricity, and then converting that data into a figure ( Fig. ₂.4). 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 one step further and tailor the data more precisely to the unique 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, and this is in line with 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 load is increasingly shifting from the data center to 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 allow us 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 exclude those who have older, slower devices and make the batteries on phones and laptops drain 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 hurts the environment, but it also places a disproportionate financial burden on society’s poorest.

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 developer console of the Safari browser is one of the tools we currently have ( Fig. 2.5 ).

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 and shows how much CPU is used and how long it takes to load the web page. 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.

How can a content management system ( CMS ) be set up to reach your current and future audience? 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 semantic and even join related content, you can avoid that result.

I just had the opportunity to direct the CMS application for a Fortune 500 company. 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 for an omnichannel articles strategy, and the model needed conceptual types, which are types of types that are categorized according to their meaning rather than their presentation. Our objective was to allow writers to write articles and use it where necessary. But as the job proceeded, I realized that supporting material utilize at the range that my client needed required the whole group to identify a new pattern.

Despite our best efforts, we remained influenced by design systems, which we were more comfortable with. An holistic content strategy cannot rely on WYSIWYG design and layout tools, unlike web-focused material strategies. Our tendency to approach the material model with our common design-system thinking frequently led us to veer away from one of the main purposes of a material model: delivering content to audiences on various marketing channels.

Two fundamental tenets govern a successful content model

We needed to explain to our designers, developers, and stakeholders that we were doing something completely different from their previous web projects, where everyone assumed that content would fit into layouts as visual building blocks. The previous approach was not only more familiar but also more intuitive—at least at first—because it made the designs feel more tangible. The team was able to understand how a content model differs from the design systems we were familiar with by discovering two principles:

1. Instead of layout, content models must define semantics.
2. And content models should connect content that belongs together.

Semantic content models

A semantic content model uses type and attribute names that reflect the content’s intended purpose and not its intended display. For example, in a nonsemantic model, teams might create types like teasers, media blocks, and cards. Although these types might make it simple to present content, they don’t aid in understanding the meaning of the content, which would have opened the door to the content presented in each marketing channel. To allow each delivery channel to comprehend the content and use it as it sees fit, a semantic content model uses type names like product, service, and testimonial.

When you’re creating a semantic content model, a great place to start is to look over the types and properties defined by Schema. a curated resource for type definitions that are understandable on platforms like Google search, type definitions .org

A semantic content model has a number of advantages:

Even if your team doesn’t care about omnichannel content, a semantic content model decouples content from its presentation so that teams can evolve the website’s design without needing to refactor its content. Content can withstand obtrusive website redesigns in this way.
• A semantic content model also gives you a competitive advantage. By adding structured data based on Schema. Using its types and properties, a website can provide hints to help Google understand the content, display it in search snippets or knowledge panels, and use it to respond to voice-interface user questions. Potential visitors could access your content without ever walking into your website.
• Beyond those practical benefits, you’ll also need a semantic content model if you want to deliver omnichannel content. 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 easily displayed on a frequently asked questions ( FAQ ) page as well, but it could also be used by a bot that answers frequently asked questions.

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 content that should remain together so that multiple delivery channels can use it without needing to first put those pieces back together.

Consider creating an essay or article. The piece of an article’s meaning and usefulness depend on how well it is organized. Would one of the headings or paragraphs be meaningful on their own without the context of the full article? 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. This had a similar effect to an article that had its headline removed. Because we were slicing content into standalone pieces based on layout, content that belonged together became difficult to manage and nearly impossible for multiple delivery channels to understand.

Let’s take a look at how connecting related content works in a real-world setting to illustrate. The client’s design team created a challenging layout for a software product page that included numerous tabs and sections. Our instincts were to follow suit with the content model. Shouldn’t we make adding multiple tabs in the future as simple and flexible as possible?

We felt like we needed a content type called “tab section” because our design-system instincts were so well-known, so that multiple tab sections could be added to a page. Each tab section would display various types of content. One tab might contain the software’s information or specifications. A second tab might provide a list of sources.

Our inclination to break down the content model into “tab section” pieces would have led to an unnecessarily complex model and a cumbersome editing experience, and it would have also created content that couldn’t have been understood by additional delivery channels. How would another system have resorted to counting tab sections and content blocks, for instance, if it had been able to identify a product’s “tab section” when referring to its specifications or resource list? 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. Furthermore, if the customer were to have no longer wanted to display this content in a tab layout, it would have been tedious to migrate to a new content model to reflect the new page redesign.

Our customer had a breakthrough when we realized that for each tab, a specific purpose in mind would be revealed, such as the software product’s overview, specifications, related resources, and pricing. Once implementation began, our inclination to focus on what’s visual and familiar had obscured the intent of the designs. It wasn’t long after a little digging that the idea of tabs wasn’t applicable to the content model. What was important was the meaning of the information that was intended to be displayed in the tabs.

In fact, the customer could have decided to display this content in a different way—without tabs—somewhere else. In response to this realization, we decided to create content types for the software product based on the meaningful qualities the client wanted to display on the web. There were rich attributes like screenshots, software requirements, and feature lists as well as obvious semantic attributes like name and description. 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. This content could be understood and presented by any delivery channel, including those that come up in the future.

Conclusion

In this omnichannel marketing project, we discovered that the best way to keep our content model on track was to ensure that it was semantic ( with type and attribute names that reflected the meaning of the content ) and that it kept content together that belonged together ( instead of fragmenting it ). These two ideas made it easier for us to decide what to do with 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 tempted to combine them and to make your content model resemble your design system. This will enable each delivery channel to consume the content without the need for a magic decoder ring.
• If your team is struggling to make this transition, you can still reap some of the benefits by using Schema. Your website uses structured data from org. The benefit of search engine optimization is a compelling reason on its own, even if additional delivery channels aren’t on the horizon in the near future.
• Additionally, remind the team that decoupling the content model from the design will let them update the designs more easily because they won’t be held back by the cost of content migrations. 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.

You’ll help your team understand these principles by firmly defending them in their efforts to give content the attention it deserves as both your most valuable resource and your most effective way to engage with your audience.