Category: Blog

In the 1950s, some members of the wealthy running group had come to accept the idea that it was impossible to run a hour in less than four hours. 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 surprise. 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 presently knew that the four-minute hour could be accomplished thanks to this change in the standard. Bannister’s history lasted just forty-six days, when it was snatched aside by American sprinter John Landy. Therefore, in the same race, three athletes managed to cross the four-minute challenge up. 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 man running speed, we also think there are the strictest requirements for how a website should do.

Establishing requirements for a green website

The essential environmental performance indicators for the majority of major industries 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. However, in the world of websites and apps, we aren’t held to any specific environmental standards, and we have only recently developed the tools and methods we need to actually conduct an environmental assessment.

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 sites produce far-away, invisible, and unremarkable pollutants when they leave fuel and gas-burning 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. So what do we accomplish then?

If we can‘t measure the actual carbon emissions, then we need to get what we can estimate. The following are the main elements that could be used as measures of coal pollution:

1. Transfer of data
2. Coal content of light

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

Transfer of data

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

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

The great thing about website weight as a parameter is that it allows us to compare the effectiveness of web pages on a level playing field without confusing the problem with frequently changing traffic volumes.

A large scope is required to reduce page weight. By early 2020, the median page weight was 1.97 MB for setups the HTTP Archive classifies as “desktop” and 1.77 MB for “mobile”, with desktop increasing 36 percent since January 2016 and mobile page weights nearly doubling in the same period ( Fig 2.2 ). Image files account for the majority of this data transfer, making them the single biggest contributor to carbon emissions on a 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 idea behind performance budgeting as a method for directing a project team to deliver faster user experiences. For example, we might specify that the website must load in a maximum of one second on a broadband connection and three seconds on a 3G connection. Performance budgets are upper limits rather than 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, whereas web performance is frequently more about the subjective perception of load times than it is about the underlying system’s actual efficiency.

We can set a page weight budget in reference to a benchmark of industry averages, using data from sources like HTTP Archive. We can also use 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.

If we want to take it to the next level, we could start looking at how much more popular our web pages are when people visit them frequently. 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 will likely have a high percentage of the files cached in their browser, which means they won’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. We can learn even more about how to optimize efficiency for users who regularly visit our pages by measuring transfer size at this next level of detail, which will also enable us to establish page weight budgets for situations that extend beyond the initial visit.

Page weight budgets are easy to track throughout a design and development process. Although they don’t actually provide direct information on carbon emissions and energy consumption, 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 power.

Coal content of light

Regardless of energy efficiency, the level of pollution caused by digital products depends on the carbon intensity of the energy being used to power them. The term” carbon intensity” (gCO₂/k Wh ) is used to describe how much carbon dioxide is produced for each kilowatt-hour of electricity 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, which combine energy from a variety of sources with different carbon intensity levels. The distributed nature of the internet means that a single user of a website or app might be using energy from multiple different grids simultaneously, a website user in Paris uses electricity from the French national grid to power their home internet and devices, but the website’s data center could be in Dallas, USA, pulling electricity from the Texas grid, while the telecoms networks use energy from everywhere between Dallas and Paris.

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

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

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

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

Reverting it to carbon emissions

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

The Energy and Emissions Worksheet that comes with this book teaches you how to take it one step further and tailor the data more precisely to the unique aspects of your project.

With the ability to calculate carbon emissions for our projects, we could actually expand our page weight budget and establish carbon budgets as well. 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 make it possible to create applications where the” thinking” process is performed either partially or completely in the browser.

All of these advances are exciting and open up new possibilities for what the web can do to serve society and create positive experiences. However, more data is processed in a web browser, which means more energy is used by the user’s devices. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a lot of processing power on a user’s device unintentionally make them use older, slower devices and make their phones and laptops ‘ batteries discharge more quickly. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. This not only 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 Safari browser’s developer console ( Fig. 2.5 ) is one of the tools we currently use.

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

It uses these figures to create an energy impact rating 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.

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

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

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

Control the program

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

What steps can we take to alter this?

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

At the lowest level of effectiveness, you can change numbers such as accessibility results or the number of layout views. However, none of that will alter a company’s manner.
• Similarly, affecting buffers ( such as team budgets ), stocks ( such as the number of designers ), flows ( such as the number of new hires ), and delays ( such as the time that it takes to hear about the effect of design ) won’t significantly affect a company.
• Focusing rather on feedback rings such as management power, staff identification, or design-system purchases can help a business become better at achieving its objectives. But that doesn’t alter the goals themselves, which means that the business will also work against your ethical-design ideals.
• The next level, data flows, is what most ethical-design activities focus on then: the transfer of moral techniques, toolkits, articles, conferences, workshops, and so on. This is where ethical design has largely remained theoretical. We’ve been focusing all of this time on the wrong system level.
• Take rules, for example—they beat knowledge every time. There can be widely accepted rules, such as how finance works, or a scrum team’s definition of done. However, unofficial rules meant to keep profits, frequently revealed through comments like” the client didn’t ask for it” or “don’t make it too big” can also smother ethical design.
• It is very difficult to change the rules without retaining official authority. That’s why the next level is so influential: self-organization. Experimentation, bottom-up initiatives, passion projects, self-steering teams—all of these are examples of self-organization that improve the resilience and creativity of a company. It’s exactly this diversity of viewpoints that’s needed to structurally tackle big systemic issues like consumerism, wealth inequality, and climate change.
• Yet even stronger than self-organization are objectives and metrics. Our businesses strive to increase their profits, which means that everyone in the company makes an effort to increase that profit. And once I realized that profit is merely a measure, I realized how crucial a very specific, defined metric can be in the direction of a company.

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

Redefine success

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

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

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

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

However, it is not enough to substitute viable for desirable for achieve an ethical result. Consumption is still associated with desirability because the associated activities aim to determine what people want, regardless of whether or not it benefits them. Desirability objectives, such as user satisfaction or conversion, don’t consider whether a product is healthy for people. They don’t stop us from developing products that deceive or deceive people, or do they prevent us from reducing the wealth gap in society. They are unsuitable for striking a healthy balance with the natural world.

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

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

Pursue well-being, equity, and sustainability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Measure impact

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additionally, choosing the right metric is enormously helpful in focusing the design team. You are forced to consider what success looks like in real life and how you can demonstrate that you have met your ethical goals once you have chosen the metrics to use. It also makes you think about what we as designers have control over: what can I add or change in my design process to achieve the desired level of success? The response to this query is very concise and focused.

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

Practice daily ethical design

Only then do you have the opportunity to structurally practice ethical design once you have defined your goals and have a reasonable idea of the potential metrics for your design project. It” simply” turns into a matter of using your imagination and sprinkling from the knowledge and tools that are already at your disposal.

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

The definition of success will fundamentally alter what it means to do good design.

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

Start it off or return to the pre-existing

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

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

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

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

You need to be sure that you can trust success at this early stage because it will determine the project’s future. The design team can use diversity as a specific success factor during the kickoff if they want to create an inclusive app for a diverse user base, for instance. The team can follow-up on that promise throughout the project if the client consents. As we agreed in our first meeting, having A and B’s diverse user group is essential to creating a successful product. So we perform activity X and follow the research procedure Y. Compare those odds to a situation where the team had to ask for permission halfway through the project and didn’t agree to it in advance. The client might argue that that was in excess of the agreed scope, and she would be correct.

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

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

After the kickoff, we rehashed our ideas and agreed on common ground in a project brief that adequately described these details:

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Containers are used to style CSS. In fact, the whole website is made of containers, from the website viewport to components on a webpage. However, every now and then a new function emerges that prompts us to reevaluate our design philosophy.

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

These new evolutions of the internet system made it both more demanding and more exciting to design products. They give us a fantastic opportunity to leave our triangular containers.

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

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

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

PWAs on desktops are ultimately limited to the top of a square with a name bar.

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

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

What if we could consider other ways and reclaim the whole screen in the app? Doing so would give us a chance to create our programs more wonderful and feel more included in the operating system.

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

About the window and title bar controls

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

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

Window Controls Overlay removes the physical constraint of the title bar and window controls areas. It frees up the entire app window’s height, allowing the overlay of the title bar and window control buttons on top of the application’s web content.

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

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

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

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

Let’s use the feature

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

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

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

The second page enables the creation and editing of CSS designs:

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

And on Windows:

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

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

Enabling Window Controls Overlay

The film is still in its experimental phase. To try it, you need to enable it in one of the supported browsers.

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

Using the overlay of Window Controls

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

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

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

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

Here is what the app looks like now:

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

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

CSS to stay away from window controls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the function we’ll use:

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

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

Dragging the window

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

Users can drag and click their way to a sizable area in the title bar, but when using the Window Controls Overlay feature, they are limited to where the control buttons are, and must carefully place their fingers in between these buttons to move the window.

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

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

-webkit-app-region: drag;

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

-webkit-app-region: no-drag; 

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

adapting to window resizing

It may be useful for an app to know both whether the window controls overlay is visible and when its size changes. The search field, logo, and button would need to be pushed down a little bit if the user made the window very narrow.

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

Three intriguing things are provided by the API:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirty pixel of creative pixie dust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A gauntlet between research and screen design

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

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

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

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

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

Getting in the same curiosity-boat

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

Mark Twain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So are caregivers in scope for this redesign?”

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

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

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

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

The two questions

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

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

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

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

Prep work: Noun foraging

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

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

Here are just a few great noun foraging sources:

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

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

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

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

1. Structure
2. Instances
3. Purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drumroll, please…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facilitate an Object Definition Workshop

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

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

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

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

1. What is this thing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, moving on. 

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

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

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

Stakeholder 1: Yes! Definitely.

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

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

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

4. What’s the relationship between these objects?

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

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

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

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

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

5. Is this object in scope?

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Create a visual representation of the objects’ relationships

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

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

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

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

Light the fuse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final words: Hold the screen design!

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

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

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

All the best of luck! Now go sell research!

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

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

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

Benefits of mobile-first

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

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

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

Prioritizes the portable watch. The smart see is the simplest and arguably the most significant because it covers all of the crucial consumer journeys and frequently accounts for more user visits ( depending on the project ) in terms of complexity.

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

Drawbacks of mobile-first

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

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

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

Requires more analysis assessment. All higher thresholds must be regression tested if CSS changes at lower views ( such as adding a new design ).

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

The issue of home value surpasses

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

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

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

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

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

Closed media query ranges in practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

The goal is to: 

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

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

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

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

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

separating the CSS from combining it

Back in the day, keeping the number of requests to a minimum was very important because the browser's concurrent request limit (typically around six ) was high. As a consequence, the use of image sprites and CSS bundling was the norm, with all the CSS being downloaded in one go, as one stylesheet with highest priority.

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

Which HTTP version are you using?

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

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

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

Splitting the CSS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving on

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

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

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

I’ve been fascinated by shows since I was a child. I loved the heroes and the excitement—but most of all the stories. I aspired to be an artist. And I figured out that I would be able to embark on exciting activities in the same way that Indiana Jones did. I also dreamed up suggestions for videos that my friends and I could create and sun in. But they never advanced. However, I did end up working in user experience ( UI). Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer analysis is story. And to get the most out of customer studies, you must tell a compelling story that involves stakeholders, including the product team and decision-makers, and piques their interest in learning more.

Think about your favourite film. More than likely it follows a three-act construction that’s frequently seen in story: the layout, the fight, and the quality. The second act provides an overview of the current events and allows you to understand the characters, their difficulties, and problems. The fight begins in Act 2, which introduces the issue. Here, difficulties grow or get worse. And the solution is the third and final work. The figures learn and change as a result of the resolutions and issues are resolved. I believe that this architecture is also a great way to think about customer study, and I think that it can be particularly helpful in explaining person exploration to others.

Use story as a framework for conducting research

It’s unfortunate to suggest that many people now view studies as being unprofitable. If finances or timelines are strong, analysis tends to be one of the first points to go. Some goods managers rely on developers or, worse, their own mind to make the “right” decisions for customers based on their experience or accepted best practices rather than investing in research. That may get groups a little bit out of the way, but that approach is therefore easily miss out on resolving people ‘ real issues. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. User study improves pattern. It provides opportunities and problems while keeping it on record. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay away of your competition.

Each action in the three-act composition corresponds to a specific stage of the process, and each stage is crucial to delivering the full narrative. Let’s examine the various functions and how they relate to consumer study.

Act one: layout

The basic study comes in handy because the layout is all about understanding the background. Foundational research aids in understanding people and identifying their issues ( also known as relational, discovery, or preliminary research ). You’re learning about what exists now, the obstacles people have, and how the problems affect them—just like in the videos. You can conduct contextual inquiries or diary studies ( or both! ) to conduct foundational research. ), which may assist you in identifying both challenges and opportunities. It doesn’t need to get a great investment in time or money.

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

This makes total sense to me. And I adore how consumer research is made so simple. You can only attract participants and do it! You don’t need to create a lot of documentation. This can offer a wealth of knowledge about your customers, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their life. That’s what work one is really all about: understanding where people are coming from.

Jared Spool discusses the significance of basic research and how it should comprise the majority of your study. If you can pick from any further user data that you can get your hands on, such as surveys or analytics, that can complement what you’ve heard in the fundamental studies or even time to areas that need more research. All of this information along provides a more in-depth understanding of the state of things and all of its flaws. And that’s the start of a gripping tale. It’s the place in the story where you realize that the principal characters—or the people in this case—are facing issues that they need to conquer. This is where you begin to develop compassion for the heroes and support their success, much like in the movies. And presumably, partners are now doing the same. Their love may be with their company, which could be losing wealth because people didn’t complete certain tasks. Or perhaps they feel the challenges of the users. In any case, action one serves as your main strategy to pique the interest and interest of the participants.

When partners begin to understand the value of basic research, that is open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making approach. And that can help product teams become more user-centric. Everyone benefits from this, including the product, users, and stakeholders. It’s like winning an Oscar in movie terms—it often leads to your product being well received and successful. And this might encourage stakeholders to carry out this process with additional products. Knowing how to tell a good story is the only way to convince stakeholders to care about doing more research, and storytelling is the key to this process.

This brings us to act two, where you iteratively evaluate a design or concept to see whether it addresses the issues.

Act two: conflict

Act two is all about approving the issues you raised in act one. This usually involves directional research, such as usability tests, where you assess a potential solution ( such as a design ) to see whether it addresses the issues that you found. The issues might be caused by unmet needs or issues with a flow or process that is causing users to fall asleep. Additional problems will arise in the course of act two of a film. It’s here that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this act.

Usability tests should typically consist of five participants, according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can typically identify the majority of the issues:” As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.”

The plot may get lost if you try to tell a story with too many characters, which also applies to storytelling. Having fewer participants means that each user’s struggles will be more memorable and easier to relay to other stakeholders when talking about the research. This can help convey the problems that need to be solved while also highlighting the worth of conducting the research in the first place.

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

If conducting usability testing in the field is like watching a play that is staged and controlled, where any two sessions may be very different from one another. You can conduct usability testing in the real world by creating a replica of the environment where users interact with the product and conducting your research there. Or you can go out to meet users at their location to do your research. With either option, you can see how things work in context, how things develop in ways that wouldn’t have in a lab setting, and how conversion can occur in completely different ways. You have less control over how these sessions end as researchers, but this can occasionally help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests add a level of detail that remote usability tests frequently lack.

That’s not to say that the “movies” —remote sessions—aren’t a good option. Remote sessions can reach a wider audience. They make it possible for much more people to participate in the research and to observe what is happening. And they make access to a much wider range of users in their own country. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working.

You can ask real users questions to understand their thoughts and understanding of the solution as a result of usability testing, whether it is conducted remotely or in person. This can assist you in both identifying issues and understanding why they were initially issues. Furthermore, you can test hypotheses and gauge whether your thinking is correct. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer understanding of how useful the designs are and whether or not they fulfill their intended purpose. The excitement centers on Act 2, but there are also potential surprises in that Act. This is equally true of usability tests. Unexpected things that are said by participants frequently alter how you view things, and these unexpected developments in the story can lead to unexpected turns in your perception.

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

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

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

Act three: resolution

The third act is about resolving the issues from the first two acts, while the first two acts are about understanding the background and the tensions that can compel stakeholders to take action. While it’s crucial to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stay for the final act. That means the whole product team, including developers, UX practitioners, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other stakeholders that have a say in the next steps. It allows the entire team to discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints, ask questions, and discuss user feedback together. And it gives the UX design and research teams more time to clarify, suggest alternatives, or provide more context for their choices. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

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

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

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

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be visual, like quick sketches of how a new design could function to solve a problem. These can help create momentum and conversation. And this continues until the end of the session when you’ve wrapped everything up in the conclusion by summarizing the main issues and suggesting a way forward. The part where you make a second or third reference to the main themes or issues or concerns for the product is when you make the denouement of the story. This stage provides stakeholders with the next steps, and hopefully, the motivation to take those steps as well!

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

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

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

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

The researcher plays a variety of roles, including producer, director, and storyteller. The participants only have a small part in the study, but they are significant characters ( in it ). And the stakeholders are the audience. However, the most crucial thing is to create the right narrative and use storytelling to research user stories. By the end, the parties should have a goal and a desire to solve the product’s flaws.

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

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

There are no Lonely Planet and some tour guides for those of you who want to personalize because powerful customisation is so dependent on each group’s talent, technology, and market position.

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

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

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the audio

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

We’re used to seeing the polished final outcome of a personalization function. A personal have had to be developed, budgeted, and given priority before the year-end prize, the making-of-backstory, or the behind-the-scenes success chest. A delay of thought-provoking tips to enhance customer experiences is present before any personalization function is implemented in your product or service.

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

We’ve closely observed the same evolution with our consumers, from major software to young companies. How successfully these prepersonalization actions work out, based on our experience working on small and large personalisation initiatives, and how successful these programs are.

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

A personalization process involves a year-long process of testing and characteristic creation. It’s never a technical load switch-flip. It’s ideal managed as a queue that usually evolves through three actions:

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

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

Set the timer for your house.

How much time does it take to prepare a prepersonalization studio? The surrounding assessment activities that we recommend including can ( and often do ) span weeks. We suggest aiming for two to three days for the primary workshop. Information on the important first-day activities are included in a summary of our broad strategy.

The whole episode of the wider studio is twofold:

Kickstart: This specifies the terms of your wedding as you concentrate on both your team’s and your team’s readiness and travel.
1. The card-based factory actions center on a plan of attack and the scope of work, which is outlined in the plan of action.
2. Work your plan: This stage is all about creating a competitive environment for staff participants to singularly pitch their personal pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept task, its business situation, and its operating model.

Give yourself at least two days, divided into two long time periods, to work through those initial two phases more effectively.

Kickstart: Apt your appetite

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

Give examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike, as examples of consumer and business-to-business examples. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions ( such as onboarding sequences or wizards ), notifications, and recommenders. We have a list of these in the cards. To jog your mind, here is a list of 142 different interactions.

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

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

The following 2 2 grid, which lists the four enduring justifications for a personalized experience, should be used as the starting point for each idea. This is crucial because it emphasizes how personalization can affect your own methods of working as well as your external customers. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

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

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

Your success depends on collaborating effectively and managing expectations. Consider the potential barriers to your future progress. Give the participants a list of specific steps you can take to overcome or reduce those obstacles in your organization. As research has shown, personalization initiatives face a number of common obstacles.

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

Hit the test kitchen

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

What’s important here is to avoid treating the installed software like it were a dream kitchen from some fantasy remodeling project ( as one of our client executives memorably put it ). Your team can begin creating, testing, and improving the snacks and meals that will be included on your personalizedization program’s regularly evolving menu by using these software engines.

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

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

Verify your ingredients

Like a good product manager, you’ll make sure you have everything ready to cook up your desired interaction ( or figure out what needs to be added to your pantry ) and that you validate with the right stakeholders present. These elements include the audience you’re targeting, the content and design elements, the interaction’s context, and your overall ensemble.

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

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

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

Compose your recipe

What elements are significant to you? Consider the construct “what-what-when-why”

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

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

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

1. When a visitor or an unidentified visitor interacts with a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it simpler for them to find a related title they might like to read, saving them time.
2. Welcome automation: When there’s a newly registered user, an email is generated to call out the breadth of the content catalog and to make them a happier subscriber.
3. A user receives an email requesting a promotional offer to suggest they reconsider renewing or to remind them to renew before their subscription expires or after a recent failed renewal.

We’ve also found that sometimes this process comes together more effectively by cocreating the recipes themselves, so a good preworkshop activity might be to think about what these cards might be for your organization. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

The workshop’s later stages, which shift from focusing on cookbooks to focusing on customers, might seem more nuanced. Individual” cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team using a standard jobs-to-be-done format, which will allow for measurement and outcomes, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and production delivery.

Better kitchens require better architecture

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

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

You can’t stand the heat, in fact…

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a deliberate and cooperative approach will produce the desired outcome. Banish your ideal kitchen. Instead, hit the test kitchen to save time, preserve job satisfaction and security, and safely dispense with the fanciful ideas that originate upstairs of the doers in your organization. Both food and mouths must be fed.

This organizational framework gives you a fighting chance at long-term success as well as solid ground. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. However, if you use the same cookbook and the same recipe combination, you’ll have solid ground for success. We created these activities to ensure that your organization’s needs are clear and concise before the risks start to accumulate.

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

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

How we got below

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

The beginning of website standards

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

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

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

The internet as technology platform

The front-end and back-end harmony continued to improve, leading to the development of the current online application. Between expanded server-side programming languages ( which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others ) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Alongside these equipment came others, including creative type control, build technology, and shared bundle libraries. What was once mainly a place for linked documents evolved into a world with endless possibilities.

At the same time, wireless equipment became more ready, and they gave us online access in our wallets. Reliable architecture and mobile apps opened up possibilities for fresh relationships anytime.

This fusion of potent portable devices and potent creation tools contributed to the growth of social media and other centralized resources for people to use and interact with. As it became easier and more popular to interact with others immediately on Twitter, Facebook, and yet Slack, the need for held private sites waned. Social media made connections on a global scale, with both positive and negative outcomes.

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

Where we are now

In the last couple of years, it’s felt like we’ve begun to reach another major inflection point. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. There are many different ways to create a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all varieties. Social media fracturing also has a price: we lose essential infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other tools of the IndieWeb can help with this, but they’re still relatively underimplemented and hard to use for the less nerdy. We can create incredible personal websites and update them frequently, but without discovery and connection, it can feel as though we should be yelling into the void.

Browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other standards like web components has accelerated, especially through efforts like Interop. In a fraction of the time that they once did, new technologies receive universal support. When I first learn about a new feature, I frequently discover that its coverage is already over 80 % when I check the browser support. The barrier to using more recent techniques isn’t browser support anymore; it’s more often the speed at which designers and developers can learn what’s available and how to adopt it.

Today, with a few commands and a couple of lines of code, we can prototype almost any idea. With today’s abundance of tools, starting something new is now simpler than ever. However, as the initial cost of these frameworks may be saved in the beginning, it eventually becomes due as their upkeep and maintenance becomes a component of our technical debt.

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

Where do we go from here?

Today’s hacks help to shape tomorrow’s standards. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks —for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we refuse to acknowledge that they are hacks or when we refuse to take their place. What can we do to create the web’s future that we want?

Build for the long haul. Optimize for performance, for accessibility, and for the user. Weigh the costs of those developer-friendly tools. They may make your job a little easier right now, but how do they affect everything else? What’s the cost to users? To future developers? To standards adoption? The convenience may be worthwhile at times. Sometimes it’s just a hack that you’ve gotten used to. And occasionally it’s preventing you from choosing better options.

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

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

Always be learning. If you’re always learning, you’re also growing. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. Even if you were to concentrate solely on learning standards, you might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year. ( Remember XHTML? ) However, ongoing learning opens up new neural connections in your brain, and the techniques you learn in one day may be used to inform different experiments in the future.

Play, experiment, and be weird! This web that we’ve built is the ultimate experiment. Despite being the single largest human endeavor in history, each of us has the ability to make our own money out of it. Be courageous and try new things. Build a playground for ideas. Create absurd experiments in your own crazy science lab. Start your own small business. There has never been a more empowering place to be creative, take risks, and explore what we’re capable of.

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

Go forth and make

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

I’d like you to consider this a “yes … and” piece to complement Joe’s post. I’m just trying to reject what he’s saying, but I’m just trying to give some context to initiatives and opportunities where AI can make a difference for people with disabilities. To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t true threats or pressing problems with AI that need to be addressed—there are, and we’ve needed to address them, like, yesterday—but I want to take a little time to talk about what’s possible in hope that we’ll get there one day.

Other words

Joe’s article spends a lot of time addressing computer-vision types ‘ ability to create alternative words. He raises a lot of appropriate points regarding the state of the world right now. And while computer-vision concepts continue to improve in the quality and complexity of information in their information, their benefits aren’t wonderful. He argues to be accurate that the state of image research is currently very poor, especially for some graphic types, in large part due to the absence of contextual contexts in which to look at images ( as a result of having separate “foundation” models for words analysis and image analysis ). Today’s models aren’t trained to distinguish between images that are contextually relevant ( that should probably have descriptions ) and those that are purely decorative ( which might not need a description ) either. Nonetheless, I still think there’s possible in this area.

As Joe mentions, human-in-the-loop publishing of alt word should definitely be a factor. And if AI can intervene to provide a starting place for alt text, even if the swift may say What is this BS? That’s not correct at all … Let me try to offer a starting point— I think that’s a win.

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

Although complex images, such as graphs and charts, are challenging to summarize in any way ( even for humans ), the image example provided in the GPT4 announcement provides an intriguing opportunity as well. Let’s say you came across a map that merely stated the chart’s name and the type of representation it was:” Pie chart comparing smartphone use to have phone usage in US households making under$ 30, 000 annually.” ( That would be a pretty bad alt text for a chart because it would frequently leave many unanswered questions about the data, but let’s just assume that that was the description in place. ) Imagine a world where people could ask questions about the vivid if their browser knew that it was a pie chart ( because an onboard model determined this ).

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

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

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

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

Matching algorithms

When Safiya Umoja Noble chose to put her book Algorithms of Oppression, she hit the nail on the head. Although her book focused on the ways that search engines can foster racism, I believe it to be equally accurate to say that all computer models have the potential to amplify conflict, bias, and intolerance. We all know that poorly written and maintained algorithms are incredibly harmful, whether it’s Twitter constantly showing you the most recent tweet from a drowsy billionaire, YouTube sending us into a q-hole, or Instagram warping our ideas of what natural bodies look like. A large portion of this is attributable to the lack of diversity in those who create and shape them. When these platforms are built with inclusively baked in, however, there’s real potential for algorithm development to help people with disabilities.

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

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

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

Other ways that AI can helps people with disabilities

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

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

The value of various teams and sources of data

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

Want a model that doesn’t demean or patronize or objectify people with disabilities? Make sure that the training data includes information about disabilities written by people with a range of disabilities.

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

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

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

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

I am a artistic. What I do is alchemy. It is a puzzle. I prefer to let it be done through me rather than through me.

I am a artistic. Not all aspiring artists approve of this brand. Not all people see themselves in this manner. Some innovative persons incorporate technology into their work. That is their reality, and I regard it. Sometimes I even envy them, a minor. But my operation is different—my becoming is unique.

Apologizing and qualifying in progress is a diversion. That’s what my head does to destroy me. I put it off for the moment. I may forgive and be qualified at any time. after I’ve said what I should have. Which is challenging enough.

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

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

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

Joy should be saved for the meeting, where it will matter. Certainly the informal get-together that comes before that meeting with two more meetings. Anyone knows why we have all these discussions. We keep saying we’re going to get rid of them, but we end up really trying to. They occasionally yet excel. But occasionally they detract from the real job. The percentages between when conferences are important, and when they are a sad distraction, vary, depending on what you do and where you do it. also who you are and what you do. Suddenly I digress. I am a artistic. That is the design.

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

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

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

I can nail apart, surround myself with information or photos, and maybe that works. I can go for a walk, and maybe that works. There is a Eureka, which has nothing to do with boiling pots and sizzling petrol, and I may be making dinner. I frequently have a plan for action when I wake up. The idea that may have saved me disappears almost as frequently as I become aware and part of the world once more in a mindless breeze of oblivion. For imagination, I believe, comes from that other world. The one we enter in aspirations, and possibly, before conception and after death. But that’s for writers to know, and I am not a writer. I am a artistic. Theologians should circulate mass armies throughout their artistic globe, which they claim to be true. But that is another diversion. And it’s miserable. Possibly on a much bigger issue than whether or not I am creative. But that’s also a step backwards from what I’m trying to say.

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

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

Creatives understand artists.

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

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

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

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

I am a artistic. Every project I create has a goal that makes Indiana Jones appear older and snoring in a deck head. The more I pursue my creative endeavors, the faster I progress in my work, and the more I slog through lines and gaze blankly before beginning that task.

I can move ten times more quickly than those who aren’t creative, those who have just been creative for a short while, and those who have only been creative for a short time in their careers. Only that I spend twice as long putting the job off as they do before I work ten times as quickly as they do. When I put my mind to it, I am so confident in my ability to do a great career. I am that attached to the excitement rush of delay. I’m still so scared of jumping.

I am not an actor.

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

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

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

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

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

Working frees me from worrying about my job.

I am a artistic. I worry that my little product will disappear unexpectedly.

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

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

There. I think I’ve said it.