Category: Blog

We concur that computer-generated heads may make excellent personas, but not for the reason you might think. Ironically, the website highlights the core issue of this very common design method: the person ( a ) does not exist. Personas are deliberately created, just like in the photos. Data is combined with natural environment to create a singular, unrealized preview.

But strangely enough, manufacturers use personalities to encourage their style for the real world.

Personas: A action up

Most manufacturers have at least once in their careers created, used, or encountered identities. In their content” Personas- A Plain Introduction”, the Interaction Design Foundation defines profile as “fictional characters, which you create based upon your study in order to reflect the unique user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand”. Personas typically consist of a name, profile picture, quotes, demographics, goals, needs, behavior in relation to a particular service/product, emotions, and motivations ( for example, see Creative Companion’s Persona Core Poster ). According to design firm Designit, the goal of personas is to “make the research relateable, ]and ] easy to communicate, digest, reference, and apply to product and service development.”

The decontextualization of identities

Personalities are well-known because they make “dry” research information more realistic and people. However, this approach places a cap on the author’s ability to analyze the data in a way that excludes the subjects from their particular contexts. As a result, personalities don’t describe important factors that make you realize their decision-making method or allow you to connect to users ‘ thoughts and behavior, they lack stories. You are aware of the persona’s actions, but you lack the knowledge to know why. You end up with less human-like user images.

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

People are assumed to be dynamic, according to people.

Here’s a painfully obvious truth: people are not a fixed set of features. Although many businesses still try to box in their employees and customers with outdated personality tests ( referring to you, Myers-Briggs ), You act, think, and feel different according to the situations you experience. You may behave helpful to some people and harshly to others because you come across as different from everyone. And you constantly refute the selections you’ve made.

Modern psychology agree that while persons usually behave according to certain styles, it’s actually a combination of history and culture that determines how people act and take decisions. The context determines the kind of person you are at each particular time, including the environment, the effect of other persons, your mood, and the whole story that led up to a situation.

Personas do not account for this variability in their attempt to simplify reality; instead, they present a user as a fixed set of features. Like personality tests, personas snatch people away from real life. Even worse, people are labeled as” that kind of person” with no means to exercise their natural flexibility. This behavior defies stereotypes, diminishes diversity, and doesn’t reflect reality.

Personas focus on individuals, not the environment

You’re designing for a context, not an individual, in the real world. There are environmental, political, and social factors to consider when a person lives in a family, a community, or an ecosystem. A design is never meant for a single user. Instead, you create a design for one or more specific situations where a large number of people might use that product. However, personas don’t explicitly describe how a user feels about the environment, rather than show the user.

Would you always make the same decision over and over again? Despite your pledge to eat vegan, you may still choose to purchase some meat when your relatives visit. Your decisions, including your behavior, opinions, and statements, are not only completely accurate but highly contextual because they depend on a range of circumstances and variables. The persona that “represents” you wouldn’t take into account this dependency, because it doesn’t specify the premises of your decisions. It doesn’t give a justification for your behavior. People practice the well-known attribution error, which states that they too often attribute others ‘ behavior to their personalities and not to the circumstances.

As mentioned by the Interaction Design Foundation, personas are usually placed in a scenario that’s a” specific context with a problem they want to or have to solve “—does that mean context actually is considered? Unfortunately, what frequently occurs is that you choose a fictional character to play with a particular circumstance based on the fiction. How could you possibly comprehend how someone you want to represent behave in new circumstances given that you haven’t even fully investigated and understood the current context of the people you want to represent?

Personas are meaningless averages

A persona is depicted as a specific person but is not a real person, as stated in Shlomo Goltz’s introduction article on Smashing Magazine; rather, it is synthesized from observations of many people. The famous USA Air Force design planes were designed based on the average of 140 of their pilots ‘ physical dimensions, with not a single pilot actually fit within that average seat, is a well-known criticism of this aspect of personas.

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

But personas go a step further, extracting a decontextualized finding and joining it with another decontextualized finding from somebody else. The resultant set of findings frequently lacks clarity and even contrast because it lacks the fundamental justifications for and how that finding came about. It lacks any significance. And the persona doesn’t give you the full background of the person ( s ) to uncover this meaning: you would need to dive into the raw data for each single persona item to find it. What then is the persona’s usefulness?

The validity of personas can be deceiving.

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

It’s the finishing touch of a persona’s decontextualization: after having assumed that people’s personalities are fixed, dismissed the importance of their environment, and hidden meaning by joining isolated, non-generalizable findings, designers invent new context to create ( their own ) meaning. As with everything they produce, they do so by introducing a lot of biases. As Designit suggests, as designers, we can” contextualize]the persona” based on our experience and reality. We create connections that are familiar to us“. With each new detail added, this practice deviates from people’s actual reality, reinforces stereotypes, and doesn’t reflect real-world diversity.

To conduct effective design research, we must report the “as-is” reality and make it relatable for our audience so that everyone can use their own empathy and formula for their own interpretation and emotional response.

Dynamic Selves: The alternative to personas

What should we do instead of using personas?

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

Another option is provided by Margaret P., the author of the article” Kill Your Personas,” who has argued for replacing personas with persona spectrums that include a range of user abilities. For example, a visual impairment could be permanent ( blindness ), temporary ( recovery from eye surgery ), or situational (screen glare ). Because they recognize that the context is the pattern, not the personality, Persona spectrums are extremely useful for more inclusive and context-based design. However, their only drawback is that they have a very functional perspective on users that misses the relatability of a real person viewed from within a spectrum.

In developing an alternative to personas, we aim to transform the standard design process to be context-based. Contexts are generalizable and have patterns that we can recognize, just like we tried to do this with people before. How do we find these patterns, then? How do we ensure truly context-based design?

Understand real people in a variety of contexts

Nothing about reality can be more relatable and inspiring. Therefore, we have to understand real individuals in their multi-faceted contexts, and use this understanding to fuel our design. Dynamic Selves is how we define it.

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

1. Select the appropriate sample.

When we argue against personas, we’re often challenged with quotes such as” Where are you going to find a single person that encapsulates all the information from one of these advanced personas]? ]” The answer is straightforward: you don’t have to. Your insights need not be extensive and meaningful, as you don’t need to know much about everyone.

In qualitative research, validity does not derive from quantity but from accurate sampling. You pick the people who best fit the “population” you’re designing for. If you select the right sample and have a deep understanding of the sampled people, you can infer how the rest of the population thinks and acts. There’s no need to study seven Susans and five Yuriys, one of each will do.

In the same way, you don’t need to comprehend Susan in fifteen different ways. You have understood Susan’s plan of action once you have seen her in a few different settings. Not Susan as an atomic being but Susan in relation to the surrounding environment: how she might act, feel, and think in different situations.

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

However, the question remains: how do you select a sample representative? First of all, you must consider who the target market is for the product or service you are designing. It might be helpful to take into account the company’s objectives and strategy, the current customer base, and/or a potential future target audience.

In our example project, we were designing an application for those who own a smart thermostat. Everyone in their home could have a smart thermostat in the future. However, only early adopters currently own one. To build a significant sample, we needed to understand the reason why these early adopters became such. We then recruited by enticing customers to explain their needs and sources of purchase. There were those who had made the decision to purchase it, those who had been influenced by other people’s decisions, and those who had discovered it in their homes. So we selected representatives of these three situations, from different age groups and geographical locations, with an equal balance of tech savvy and non-tech savvy participants.

2. Conduct your research

After having chosen and recruited your sample, conduct your research using ethnographic methodologies. This will give you more examples and anecdotes to enrich your qualitative data. Given COVID-19 restrictions, we turned an internal ethnographic research project into home-based remote family interviews that were followed by diary research in our example project.

To gain an in-depth understanding of attitudes and decision-making trade-offs, the research focus was not limited to the interviewee alone but deliberately included the whole family. With the additions or corrections made by wives, husbands, children, or occasionally even pets, each interviewee would tell a story that would then become much more engaging and precise. We also paid attention to the behaviors that came from having relationships with other meaningful people ( such as coworkers or distant relatives ) and the relationships that came from those relationships. This wide research focus allowed us to shape a vivid mental image of dynamic situations with multiple actors.

It’s crucial that the scope of the study remain broad enough to cover all potential actors. Therefore, it typically works best to define broad research areas with broad questions. Interviews are best set up in a semi-structured way, where follow-up questions will dive into topics mentioned spontaneously by the interviewee. The most insightful findings will be made with this open-minded “plan to be surprised.” One of our participants responded to our question about how his family controlled the house temperature by saying,” My wife has not installed the thermostat’s app; she uses WhatsApp instead. If she wants to turn on the heater and she is not home, she will text me. I serve as her thermostat.

3. Analysis: Create the Dynamic Selves

You begin to represent each individual as a series of dynamic selves during the research analysis, each” Self” representing a particular context. A quote serves as the foundation of each Dynamic Self, which is supported by a photo and a few relevant demographics that serve as examples of the larger picture. The research findings themselves will show which demographics are relevant to show. In our case, the important demographics were family type, number and type of houses owned, economic status, and technological maturity because our research focused on families and their way of life to understand their needs for thermal regulation. The individuals ‘ names and ages are optional, but they were included to facilitate the stakeholders ‘ transition from personas and allow them to connect multiple actions and contexts to the same person.

To capture exact quotes, interviews need to be video-recorded and notes need to be taken verbatim as much as possible. This is crucial to ensuring that each participant’s various selves are truthful. Photos of the setting and anonymized actors are necessary to create authentic selves in ethnographic research conducted in real life. Ideally, these photos should come directly from field research, but an evocative and representative image will work, too, as long as it’s realistic and depicts meaningful actions that you associate with your participants. One of our interviewees, for instance, shared a story of how he used to spend weekends with his family in his mountain home. We depicted him hiking with his young daughter as a result.

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

4. Identify creative uses

You will start to notice patterns once you have taken all of the main quotes from the interview transcripts and diaries and written them down as self-cards. These patterns will highlight the opportunity areas for new product creation, new functionalities, and new services—for new design.

There was a particularly intriguing insight around the concept of humidity in our example project. We became aware of the importance of humidity monitoring for health and how an environment that is too dry or wet can cause respiratory problems or worsen already existing ones. This highlighted a big opportunity for our client to educate users on this concept and become a health advisor.

Benefits of Dynamic Selves

When you conduct your research using the Dynamic Selves method, you start to notice peculiar social relations, peculiar circumstances that people face, and the consequences of their actions, as well as the fact that people are surrounded by constantly changing environments. In our thermostat project, we have come to know one of the participants, Davide, as a boyfriend, dog-lover, and tech enthusiast.

Davide is a person we might have once referred to as a “tech enthusiast.” However, there are also those who are wealthy or poor who are tech enthusiasts, whether they are single or have families. Their motivations and priorities when deciding to purchase a new thermostat can be opposite according to these different frames.

You can then generalize how Davide would act in a different situation once you have understood him in more detail and have fully grasped the underlying causes of his behavior for each circumstance. You can use your understanding of him to predict what he would think and act in the situations ( or scenarios ) you create.

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

If you take a real person as inspiration for your design, you no longer need to create an artificial character. No more creating new plot devices to “realize” the character, no more implausible bias. Simply put, this is how they are in real life. In fact, in our experience, personas quickly become nothing more than a name in our priority guides and prototype screens, as we all know that these characters don’t really exist.

Another significant benefit of the Dynamic Selves approach is that it raises the stakes of your work: if you ruin your design, someone you and the team know and have met will suffer the consequences. It might prompt you to perform daily design checks and may prevent you from taking shortcuts.

And finally, real people in their specific contexts are a better basis for anecdotal storytelling and therefore are more effective in persuasion. In order to obtain this result, documentation of real research is necessary. It reinforces your design arguments by adding more weight and urgency:” When I met Alessandra, the conditions of her workplace struck me. Noise, bad ergonomics, lack of light, you name it. I’m afraid that if we choose to use this functionality, she’ll find her life more complicated.

Conclusion

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

Design needs to be simplified, but not to be a generalization. You have to look at the research elements that stand out: the sentences that captured your attention, the images that struck you, the sounds that linger. Use those to characterize the person in all of their contexts, and portray them. People and insights are subject to a context, but they cannot be removed because it would detract from the context’s meaning.

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

” Any opinion”? is perhaps one of the worst ways to ask for suggestions. It’s obscure and unfocused, and it doesn’t give us a sense of what we’re looking for. Great comments begins sooner than we might anticipate: it begins with the demand.

It might seem contradictory to start the process of receiving feedback with a problem, but that makes sense if we realize that getting feedback can be thought of as a form of design study. The best way to ask for feedback is also to build strong questions, just like we wouldn’t do any studies without the correct questions to get the insight we need.

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

Lastly, we need to review what we received, get to the heart of its conclusions, and take action, like with any good research. Problem, generation, and evaluation. Let’s take a closer look at each of those.

The query

Being available to input is important, but we need to be specific about what we’re looking for. Any comments,” What do you think,” or” I’d love to hear your opinion” at the conclusion of a presentation are likely to generate a lot of divergent ideas, or worse, to make people follow the lead of the first speaker. And finally, we become irritated because ambiguous queries like those can result in people leaving reviews that don’t even consider keys. Which might be a savory matter, so it might be hard at that point to divert the crew to the topics that you had wanted to focus on.

But how do we enter this circumstance? It’s a combination of various components. One is that we don’t often consider asking as a part of the input method. Another is how healthy it is to assume that everyone else will agree with the problem and leave it alone. Another is that being extremely precise is frequently not necessary in non-professional debate. In short, we tend to underestimate the importance of the issues, so we don’t work on improving them.

Great questioning helps to guide and concentrate the criticism. It also serves as a form of acceptance, outlining your willingness to make remarks and the types of comments you want to receive. It puts people in the right emotional state, especially in situations when they weren’t expecting to give opinions.

There isn’t a second best method to request comments. It only needs to be certain, which can take many forms. A design for design critique that I’ve found especially helpful in my training is the one of stage over depth.

The term” level” refers to each stage of the process, which is, in our case, the design phase. The type of input changes as the consumer research moves on to the final design. But within a single stage, one might also examine whether some assumptions are correct and whether there’s been a suitable language of the amassed input into updated designs as the job has evolved. The levels of customer experience may serve as a starting point for future inquiries. What do you want to learn about venture goals? User requirements? Funnality? Material? Contact design? Data layout Interface style Navigation style? Visual layout Brand?

Here’re a some example questions that are specific and to the place that refer to different levels:

• Features: Is it desired to automate accounts creation?
• Contact design: Please review the updated movement and let me know if there are any steps or error points I may have missed.
• Information infrastructure: We have two competing bits of information on this site. Does the construction work to effectively communicate both of them?
• User interface design: What do you think about the top-of-the-page error counter, which makes sure you can see the future error even when the error is outside the viewport?
• Navigation style: From study, we identified these second-level routing items, but when you’re on the webpage, the list feels very long and hard to understand. Are there any ways to deal with this?
• The bottom-right corner’s slippery messages are clearly visible, but are they sufficient?

The another plane of sensitivity is about how heavy you’d like to go on what’s being presented. For instance, we may have introduced a new end-to-end movement, but you might want to know more about a particular viewpoint you found especially hard. This can be particularly helpful when switching between iterations because it’s crucial to identify the changes made.

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

A quick fix is to get rid of the general qualifiers from issues like “good”, “well,” “nice,” “bad,” “okay,” and” cool.” For instance, what is the question” When the wall opens and the switches appear, is this connection good”? may seem precise, but you can place the “good” tournament, and transfer it to an even better query:” When the wall opens and the buttons appear, is it clear what the next action is”?

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

Sometimes the project is particularly expansive, and some areas may have already been explored in detail. In these circumstances, it might be helpful to state explicitly that some parts are already locked in and aren’t accessible for feedback. Although it’s not something I’d recommend in general, I’ve found it helpful in avoiding getting back into rabbit holes like those that could lead to even more refinement if what’s important right now isn’t.

Asking specific questions can completely change the quality of the feedback that you receive. Even experienced designers will appreciate the clarity and efficiency gained from concentrating solely on what is required, and those with less refined critique skills will now be able to offer more actionable feedback. It can save a lot of time and frustration.

The iteration

Design iterations are probably the most recognizable component of the design process, and they act as a natural checkpoint for feedback. Many design tools have inline commenting, but many of them only display changes as a single fluid stream in the same file. In addition, these kinds of design tools automatically update shared UI components, make conversations disappear and require designs to always display the most recent version, unless these would-be useful features were manually disabled. The implied goal that these design tools seem to have is to arrive at just one final copy with all discussions closed, probably because they inherited patterns from how written documents are collaboratively edited. That approach to design critiques is probably not the best approach, but some teams might benefit from it even if I don’t want to be too prescriptive.

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

There are many benefits to using iteration posts:

It establishes a rhythm in the design process, allowing the designer to review the feedback from each iteration and get ready for the following.
• It makes decisions visible for future review, and conversations are likewise always available.
• It keeps track of how the design evolved over time.
• It might also make it simpler to collect and act on feedback depending on the tool.

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

There isn’t, in my opinion, a common format for iteration posts. But there are a few high-level elements that make sense to include as a baseline:

1. The objective is.
2. The layout
3. The list of changes
4. The querys

Each project is likely to have a goal, and it should most likely be one that has already been summarized in one sentence elsewhere, such as the client brief, the product manager’s outline, or the request of the project owner. So this is something that I’d repeat in every iteration post—literally copy and pasting it. The goal is to provide context and repeat what is necessary to complete each iteration post so that there is no need to search for information in different posts. The most recent iteration post will have everything I need if I want to know about the most recent design.

This copy-and-paste part introduces another relevant concept: alignment comes from repetition. Therefore, repeating information in posts helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

The actual series of information-architecture outlines, diagrams, flows, maps, wireframes, screens, visuals, and any other design work that has been done is what the design is then called. In short, it’s any design artifact. In the work’s final stages, I prefer to use the term “blank” to emphasize that I’ll be displaying complete flows rather than individual screens to facilitate comprehension of the larger picture.

It might also be helpful to have clear names on the artifacts so that it is easier to refer to them. Write the post in a way that helps people understand the work. It’s not much different from creating a strong live presentation.

For a successful discussion, you should also include a bullet list of the changes made in the previous iteration to help people concentrate on what’s changed. This can be especially useful for larger pieces of work where keeping track, iteration after iteration, may prove difficult.

And finally, as noted earlier, it’s essential that you include a list of the questions to drive the design critique in the direction you want. Creating a numbered list of questions can also make it simpler to refer to each one by its number.

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

Even if these iteration posts are written and intended as checkpoints, I want to point out that they are not by any means exhaustive. A post might be a draft—just a concept to get a conversation going—or it could be a cumulative list of each feature that was added over the course of each iteration until the full picture is done.

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

• Unique—It’s a clear unique marker. Everyone knows where to go to review things, and it’s simple to say” This was discussed in i4″ with each project.
• Unassuming—It functions like versions ( such as v1, v2, and v3 ), but versions give the impression of something big, exhausting, and complete. Iterations must be able to be exploratory, incomplete, partial.
• Future proof—It resolves the “final” naming issue that you might encounter with variations. No more files with the title “final final complete no-really-its-done” Within each project, the largest number always represents the latest iteration.

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

The evaluation

What usually happens during a design critique is an open discussion, with a back and forth between people that can be very productive. This strategy is particularly successful when synchronous feedback is being received live. However, when we work asynchronously, it is more effective to adopt a different strategy: we can adopt a user-research mindset. Written feedback from teammates, stakeholders, or others can be treated as if it were the result of user interviews and surveys, and we can analyze it accordingly.

This shift has some significant advantages, making asynchronous feedback particularly effective, especially around these friction points:

It makes it easier to respond to everyone.
1. It reduces the frustration from swoop-by comments.
2. It lessens our own worth.

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

One is to let the next iteration speak for itself. When the design changes and we publish a follow-up iteration, that’s the response. You could tag everyone in the previous discussion, but that’s just a choice, not a requirement.
• Another is to briefly reply to acknowledge each comment, such as” Understood. Thank you,”” Good points— I’ll review,” or” Thanks. These will be included in the upcoming iteration. In some cases, this could also be just a single top-level comment along the lines of” Thanks for all the feedback everyone—the next iteration is coming soon”!
• Another option is to quickly summarize the comments before moving on. This may be particularly helpful if your workflow uses a simplified checklist to refer to for the following iteration.

The second friction point is the swoop-by comment, which is the kind of feedback that comes from someone outside the project or team who might not be aware of the context, restrictions, decisions, or requirements —or of the previous iterations ‘ discussions. On their side, there is something that one can hope to learn: they could begin to acknowledge that they are doing this and they could be more aware of where they are coming from. Swoop-by comments frequently prompt the simple thought,” We’ve already discussed this,” and it can be frustrating to have to keep saying the same thing over and over.

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

Swoop-by commenting can still be useful for two reasons: they might point out something that still isn’t clear, and they also have the potential to stand in for the point of view of a user who’s seeing the design for the first time. Yes, you’ll still be frustrated, but that might at least make things better for you.

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

Remember to always remember that you don’t have to accept every piece of feedback, even though you need to listen to stakeholders, project owners, and specific advice. You have to analyze it and make a decision that you can justify, but sometimes “no” is the right answer.

You are in charge of making that choice as the designer who is in charge of the project. In the end, everyone has their area of expertise, and as a designer, you are the one with the most background and knowledge to make the right choice. And by listening to the feedback that you’ve received, you’re making sure that it’s also the best and most balanced decision.

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

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

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

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

On the web, we may discover a long history of sequential suggestions: from the early weeks of open source, script was shared and discussed on email addresses. Developers and sprint masters discuss ideas on tickets, designers post on their favourite design tools, and so on.

Design criticism is frequently used as the term for a type of input that is given to improve our work jointly. So it shares a lot of the rules with comments in public, but it also has some variations.

The information

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

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

Here is a comment that could be given as a part of some feedback, and it might look reasonable at a first glance: it seems to superficially fulfill the elements in the equation. Does it, though?

Not sure about the hierarchy and styles of the buttons; it seems off. Can you change them?

Finding a perspective that is as specific as possible when conducting design feedback refers to more than just pointing out which area of the interface. Do you offer the user’s viewpoint? Your expert perspective? from a business perspective? The perspective of the project manager A first-time user’s perspective?

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

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

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

By provoking the designer’s critical thinking while receiving the feedback, the question approach is intended to provide open guidance. Notably, Lara’s equation includes a second approach: request, which instead provides instructions on how to find a particular solution. While that’s a viable option for feedback in general, for design critiques, in my experience, defaulting to the question approach usually reaches the best solutions because designers are generally more comfortable in being given an open space to explore.

For the question approach, the difference between the two can be demonstrated as an illustration:

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

Or, for the request approach:

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

In some situations, it might be helpful to include an additional reason why: why you think the suggestion is better.

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

Choosing between the request and question approaches can occasionally be influenced by one’s personal preferences. I spent a while working on improving my feedback, conducting anonymous feedback reviews and sharing feedback with others. After a few rounds of this work and a year later, I got a positive response: my feedback came across as effective and grounded. until I switched teams. Surprise surprise, my next round of criticism from a specific person wasn’t very positive. The reason is that I had previously tried not to be prescriptive in my advice—because the people who I was previously working with preferred the open-ended question format over the request style of suggestions. However, there was one person in this other team who now preferred specific guidance. So I changed my feedback so that it included requests.

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

No, this style of feedback is actually efficient because the length here is a byproduct of clarity, and spending time giving this kind of feedback can provide exactly enough information for a good fix. Additionally, it can reduce misunderstandings and back-and-forth conversations in the future, boosting overall collaboration’s effectiveness and efficiency beyond the single comment. Consider the example above where the feedback would be simply” Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons.” The designer receiving this feedback wouldn’t have much to go by, so they might just apply the change. The interface might change in later iterations or new features might be introduced, and perhaps the change won’t make sense anymore. Without explaining the why, the designer might assume that the change is one of consistency, but what if it wasn’t? So there could now be an underlying concern that changing the buttons would be perceived as a regression.

Yes, this type of feedback is not always effective because some comments don’t always need to be thorough, some may be obvious because of the team’s internal knowledge, which may lead to some explanations of the whys.

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

The tone

Feedback forms the basis for well-developed content, but that’s not really enough. The soft skills of the person who’s providing the critique can multiply the likelihood that the feedback will be well received and understood. It has been demonstrated that only positive feedback can lead to sustained change in people. It can be determined by tone alone whether content is rejected or welcomed.

Tone is crucial to work on because our goal is to be understood and have a positive working environment. Over the years, I’ve tried to summarize the required soft skills in a formula that mirrors the one for content: the receptivity equation.

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

Timing refers to when the feedback happens. When given at the wrong time, to-the-point feedback has little chance of receiving favorable reception. When a new feature’s entire high-level information architecture is about to go on sale, it might still be relevant if the questioning raises a significant blocker that no one saw, but those concerns are much more likely to have to wait for a later revision. So in general, attune your feedback to the stage of the project. Iteration in the early stages? Iteration that was later? Polishing work in progress? Each of these needs varies. The ideal setting will increase the likelihood that your feedback will be appreciated.

Attitude is the equivalent of intent, and in the context of person-to-person feedback, it can be referred to as radical candor. That entails checking whether what we have in mind will actually help the person and improve the overall project before writing. Sometimes it might be difficult to reflect on this because we might not want to admit our deep appreciation for that person. Hopefully that’s not the case, but that can happen, and that’s okay. How would I write if I really cared about them? Acknowledging that and owning that can help you make up for it. How can I stop acting aggressively? How can I be more constructive?

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

A few years ago, I asked for some feedback on how I respond. I was given some sound advice, but I also got a surprise comment. They pointed out that when I wrote” Oh, ]… ]”, I made them feel stupid. That wasn’t my intention at all! I just realized that I had been giving them feedback for months and that I had always made them feel foolish. I was horrified … but also thankful. I quickly changed my spelling mistake by adding “oh” to my list of replaced words (your choice between aText, TextExpander, or others ) so that when I typed “oh,” it was immediately deleted.

Something to keep in mind is that people frequently beat around the bush, especially in teams with strong group spirit. It’s important to remember here that a positive attitude doesn’t mean going light on the feedback—it just means that even when you provide hard, difficult, or challenging feedback, you do so in a way that’s respectful and constructive. You can help someone grow the best way you can.

Giving feedback in written form can be reviewed by someone else who isn’t directly involved, which can help to reduce or eliminate any bias that might exist. I found that the best, most insightful moments for me have happened when I’ve shared a comment and I’ve asked someone who I highly trusted,” How does this sound”?,” How can I do it better”, and even” How would you have written it” ?—and I’ve learned a lot by seeing the two versions side by side.

The format

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

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

In terms of clarity, start by grounding the critique that you’re about to give by providing context. This includes specifically describing where you’re coming from: do you have a thorough understanding of the project, or is this your first time seeing it? Are you bringing in a high-level perspective, or are you just learning the ins and outs? Are there regressions? Which user’s point of view do you consider when providing feedback? Is the design iteration at a point where it would be acceptable to ship this, or are there significant issues that need to be addressed first?

Providing context is helpful even if you’re sharing feedback within a team that already has some information on the project. And context is absolutely necessary when providing cross-team feedback. If I were to review a design that might be directly connected to my work, and if I had no idea how the project might have come to that conclusion, I would say so, highlighting my opinion as external.

We often focus on the negatives, trying to outline all the things that could be done better. That is obviously important, but focusing on the positives, especially if you saw improvement in the previous iteration, is even more crucial. Although this may seem superfluous, it’s important to keep in mind that design is a field with hundreds of possible solutions for each problem. So pointing out that the design solution that was chosen is good and explaining why it’s good has two major benefits: it confirms that the approach taken was solid, and it helps to ground your negative feedback. Sharing positive feedback can help prevent regressions on things that are going well because those things will have been identified as crucial in the long run. Positive feedback can also help, as an added bonus, prevent impostor syndrome.

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

Depersonalizing your feedback is another way to make it better: it should never be about the creator of the piece of art. It’s” This button isn’t well aligned” versus” You haven’t aligned this button well”. This can be changed in your writing very quickly by reviewing it just before sending.

One of the best ways to assist the designer who is reading your feedback is to divide it into bullet points or paragraphs, which are simpler to review and analyze one by one, in terms of actionability. For longer pieces of feedback, you might also consider splitting it into sections or even across multiple comments. Of course, it’s also possible to include screenshots or indicators for the specific area of the interface you’re referring to.

I’ve personally used emojis to enhance the bullet points in some situations. So a red square � � means that it’s something that I consider blocking, a yellow diamond � � is something that I can be convinced otherwise, but it seems to me that it should be changed, and a green circle � � is a detailed, positive confirmation. A blue spiral is also used for either something I’m uncertain about, an exploration, an open alternative, or just a note. However, I’d only use this strategy on teams where I’ve already established a high level of trust because the impact could be quite demoralizing if I had to deliver a lot of red squares, and I’d change how I’d communicate that a little.

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

• 🔶 Navigation—I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons so that users don’t get confused.
• Overall, I believe the page is strong, and this is a good candidate for our version 1. 1.0 release candidate.
• � � Metrics—Good improvement in the buttons on the metrics area, the improved contrast and new focus style make them more accessible.
• Button Style: Using the green accent in this context gives the impression that it’s a positive action because green is typically seen as a confirmation color. Do we need to look for a different shade?
• 🔶Tiles—Given the number of items on the page, and the overall page hierarchy, it seems to me that the tiles shouldn’t be using the Subtitle 1 style but the Subtitle 2 style. This will maintain consistency in the visual hierarchy.
• Background: Using a light texture is effective, but I’m not sure if doing so will cause too much noise on this kind of page. What is the thinking in using that?

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

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

Another benefit of asynchronous feedback is that written feedback automatically monitors decisions. Why did we do this, especially in large projects? could be a question that pops up from time to time, and there’s nothing better than open, transparent discussions that can be reviewed at any time. I advise using software to save these discussions so they can be hidden once they are resolved, for this reason.

Content, tone, and format. Each one of these subjects provides a useful model, but working to improve eight areas—observation, impact, question, timing, attitude, form, clarity, and actionability—is a lot of work to put in all at once. One way to take them one by one is to first identify the area you most need from both your own perspective and feedback from others. Then the second, followed by the third, and so on. At first you’ll have to put in extra time for every piece of feedback that you give, but after a while, it’ll become second nature, and your impact on the work will multiply.

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

What on earth is a passionate fatigue, then?

Envision a person determined to accomplish it all. She has two wonderful children whom she, along with her father who is also working mildly, is homeschooling during a crisis. She loves everyone at work because of how demanding her work is. She wakes up early to get some movement in ( or frequently catch up on work ), prepares dinner while the kids are having breakfast, and works while positioning herself near the end of her “fourth grade” to watch as she balances clients, tasks, and budgets. Sound like a bit? It is, even with a friendly group at home and at work.

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

Instantly she KNOWS what she needs to do! She ought to do more.

This loop is challenging and risky. Hear why? Because when she doesn’t complete that new purpose, the narrative will only get worse. She immediately starts failing. She isn’t doing much. She is insufficient. She’ll discover more she may do because she might neglect, or perhaps her home. She doesn’t nap as much, proceed because much, all in the attempts to do more. caught in this pattern of attempting to prove herself to herself without ever succeeding. Always feeling “enough”

But, yeah, that’s what zealous burnout looks like for me. It develops gradually over the course of several weeks and months rather than immediately as a big sign. My using process appears to be moving more quickly than one’s target loss. I rate up and up and up… and therefore I simply stop.

I am the only person who has the potential.

The things that shape us are interesting. Through the camera of youth, I viewed the worries, problems, and sacrifices of someone who had to make it all work without having much. I always went without and occasionally received extras thanks to my mother’s tremendous resourcefulness and my father’s generosity.

When my mother gave me food stamps as a child, I didn’t think shame; rather, I would have good started any debates about the subject, orally eviscerating anyone who dared to criticize the handicapped girl who was attempting to ensure all of our needs were met with so little. As a child, I watched the way the worry of not making those ends meet impacted persons I love. Because I was” the one who was” make our lives a little easier, I would take on many of the physical things as the non-disabled man in my house. I soon realized that I had to put more of myself into it because I was the one who could. I learned first that when something frightens me, I may double down and work harder to make it better. I am in charge of the problem. I’ve been told that I seem courageous when people have seen this in me as an adult, but truth be told, I’m not. If I seem courageous, it’s because this conduct was forged from other people’s worries.

And here I am, surrounded by enormous tasks ahead of me, assuming that I am the one who is and therefore should, more than 30 times afterward, still feeling the urge to aimlessly drive myself forward. I feel more motivated to demonstrate that I can influence things if I put in more effort, put on more responsibilities, and demonstrate that I can influence issues.

I do not see people who struggle financially as problems, because I have seen how powerful that tide is be—it takes you along the way. I really believe I have had the opportunity to avoid many of the difficulties that came with my children. Having said that, I am also” the one who can” who believes she should, so I would think I had failed if I had to struggle to make ends meet for my own home. Though I am supported and educated, most of this is due to great wealth. But, I’ll give myself the haughtiness of claiming that my choices were wise and that they had sparked that success. I believe I am” the one who can,” so I feel compelled to do the most because of this. I can choose to halt, and with some pretty precise warm water splashed in my face, I’ve made the choice to previously. However, I don’t always choose to stop; instead, I move forward, driven by a fear that is so present that I hardly notice until I’m completely worn out.

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

The perilous invisibility of zealous burnout

In many workplaces, extra work, extra effort, and overall focused commitment are seen as an asset ( and sometimes that’s all it is ). They see someone trying to rise to challenges, not someone stuck in their fear. Many well-intentioned organizations have procedures in place to safeguard their teams from burnout. However, in situations like this, those alarms don’t always go off, and some organization members are surprised and depressed when the inevitable stop occurs. And sometimes maybe even betrayed.

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

Women and burnout

I cherish men. And despite the fact that I don’t love every man ( heads up, I don’t love every woman or nonbinary person either ), I think there is a wonderful range of people who fit that particular binary gender.

That said, women are still more often at risk of burnout than their male counterparts, especially in these COVID stressed times. Mothers at work experience the pressure to do everything “mom” while giving 100 %. Mothers who are not employed feel they need to do more to” justify” their lack of traditional employment. Women who are not mothers often feel the need to do even more because they don’t have that extra pressure at home. We are frequently unaware of the magnitude of the pressures we place on ourselves and others because it is vicious and systemic and a part of our culture.

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

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

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

That might not be you either. After all, we are all unique, and so is our way of responding to stress. It’s part of what makes us human. Don’t put too much emphasis on how burnout looks; instead, learn to recognize it in yourself. What are a few questions I occasionally ask my friends if they worry about them.

Are you happy? This straightforward query ought to be your first inquiry. Even if you’re burning out doing all the things you love, you’ll probably stop enjoying yourself as you approach burnout.

Do you feel empowered to say no? I’ve observed in myself and others that when someone is going out, they no longer feel like they can say no to things. Even those who don’t” speed up” feel pressured to say “yes” to avoid apprehension.

What are three things you’ve done for yourself? We all have a tendency to stop doing things for ourselves, according to another observation. anything from avoiding conversations with friends to skipping showers and eating poorly. These can be red flags.

Are you using justifications? Many of us make an effort to avoid feeling burned out. Over and over I have heard,” It’s just crunch time”,” As soon as I do this one thing, it will all be better”, and” Well I should be able to handle this, so I’ll figure it out”. And it might actually be crunch time, a single objective, and/or a set of skills you need to master. Life happens because of that. BUT if this doesn’t stop, be honest with yourself. If you’ve worked more than 50 hours of work since January, then perhaps it’s not crunch time; perhaps it’s a bad situation you’re finding yourself in.

Do you have a strategy for overcoming this feeling? If something is truly temporary and you do need to just push through, then it has an exit route with a
defined conclusion

Take the time to listen to your friend in the same way. Be honest, allow yourself to be uncomfortable, and break the thought cycles that prevent you from healing.

So what do we do now?

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

• Get enough sleep.
• Eat well.
• Work out.
• Go outside.
• Take a break.
• Overall, practice self-care.

These are challenging for me because they seem like more tasks. Doing any of the above for me feels like a waste if I’m in the burnout cycle. The narrative is that if I’m already failing, why would I take care of myself when I’m dropping all those other balls? People need me, don’t they?

Your inner voice might already be pretty bad if you’re deeply in the cycle. If you need to, tell yourself you need to take care of the person your people depend on. Use your roles to help facilitate healing by justifying the amount of time you spend working on you if they are making you burn out.

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

Cook an elaborate meal for someone!

Okay, since I’m a “food-focused” person, I’ve always been a fan of cooking for people. In my home, there are countless tales of people coming into the kitchen, turning right, and leaving when they noticed I was” chopping angrily.” But it’s more than that, and you should give it a try. Seriously. If you don’t feel like giving time for yourself, make it a priority for someone else. Most of us work in a digital world, so cooking can fill all of your senses and force you to be in the moment with all the ways you perceive the world. It can help you get a better perspective and clear your head. I’ve always had the ability to locate a location on a map and prepare food from it ( thanks, Pinterest ). I love cooking Indian food, as the smells are warm, the bread needs just enough kneading to keep my hands busy, and the process takes real attention for me because it’s not what I was brought up making. And ultimately, we all triumph!

Vent like a sniveling jerk.

Be careful with this one!

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

When that is required, approach a trusted friend and express your concerns verbally. You must have faith in this friend not to judge you, to feel your pain, and, most importantly, to advise you to get your cranium removed from your own rectal cavity. Seriously, it’s about getting a reality check here! One of the things that I admire most about my husband is how he can simplify things down to the simplest of terms, even though sometimes after the fact. We’re spending our lives together, and I can’t wait to get over it. I’m so grateful for his words of dedication, love, and acceptance of me. It also, of course, has meant that I needed to remove my head from that rectal cavity. Again, those instances are typically appreciated in retrospect.

Grab a book, please!

There are many books out there that aren’t so much self-help as they are people just like you sharing their stories and how they’ve come to find greater balance. You might discover something that appeals to you. Among the titles that have stood out to me are:

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

Or, if I love to read or listen to a book that doesn’t have anything to do with my work-life balance, I can use another tactic. I’ve read the following books, and I think they helped to balance me out because my mind was thinking about the subjects they were interested in rather than whizzing around:

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

If you’re not interested in reading, pick up a topic on YouTube or subscribe to a podcast. In addition to learning about raising chickens and ducks, I’ve watched countless permaculture and gardening topics. For the record, I do not have a particularly large food garden, nor do I own livestock of any kind… yet. I just find the subject fascinating, and it’s unrelated to anything that needs to be done in my life.

Give yourself a break.

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

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

It’s challenging. It is hard for me. That it’s okay to stop is what inspired me to write this. It’s acceptable that you have to stop an unhealthy habit that could even help you and those around you. You can still be successful in life.

We are all eulogizing how we live, according to a recent article I read. What will your professional accomplishments say, knowing that yours won’t be mentioned in that speech? What do you want it to say?

Look, I understand that none of these concepts will “fix it,” and that’s not their intention. None of us has complete control over what happens in our environment, but only how we react to it. These suggestions are to help stop the spiral effect so that you are empowered to address the underlying issues and choose your response. They are things that most of the time work for me. They might be able to work for you.

Does this sound familiar?

If something resounds familiar to you, it’s not just you. Don’t let your negative self-talk indicate that you “even burn out wrong.” It’s not wrong. Even if I’m rooted in fear like my own drivers, I think this need to do more comes from a place of love, determination, motivation, and other wonderful qualities that contribute to your incredible persona. We’re going to be fine, you see. The lives that unfold before us might never look like that story in our head—that idea of “perfect” or “done” we’re looking for, but that’s OK. Really, when we stop and look around, usually the only eyes that judge us are in the mirror.

Do you recall the Winnie the Pooh cartoon where Pooh ate so much at Rabbit’s house that his buttocks were unable to pass through the door? It came as no surprise when he abruptly declared that this was unacceptable because I already associate a lot with Rabbit. But do you recall what happened next? The big butt in his kitchen was made up of poor Pooh’s ankles and decorations, and he made the most of it.

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

So, if you’re anywhere right now, take a deep breath. Do what you need to do to get out of your head. Give thanks and take precaution.

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

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

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

Spoken language lacks this luxury. There are also verbal cues and vocal behaviors that modulate conversation in nuanced ways: how something is said, not what. These are also nonverbal cues that decorate conversations with emphasis and emotional context. Whether rapid-fire, low-pitched, or high-decibel, whether sarcastic, stilted, or sighing, our spoken language conveys much more than the written word could ever muster. So as designers and content strategists, we face exciting challenges when it comes to voice interfaces, the machines we use to conduct spoken conversations.

Voice Compositions

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

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

A single conversation from beginning to end that achieves some outcome for the user, starting with the voice interface’s first greeting and ending with the user exiting the interface, also fits into these three categories, which I refer to as transactional, informational, and prosocial. Note here that a conversation in our human sense—a chat between people that leads to some result and lasts an arbitrary length of time—could encompass multiple transactional, informational, and prosocial voice interactions in succession. In other words, a voice interaction is a conversation, but it is not always just one voice interaction.

Purely prosocial exchanges are more gimmicky than captivating in the majority of voice interfaces because machines are unable to yet have the capability to truly understand how we are doing and engage in the kind of glad-handing behavior that people crave. There’s also ongoing debate as to whether users actually prefer the sort of organic human conversation that begins with a prosocial voice interaction and shifts seamlessly into other types. In Voice User Interface Design, Michael Cohen, James Giangola, and Jennifer Balogh advise sticking to user expectations by imitating how they interact with other voice interfaces, which might lead to alienating them ( ).

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

Transactional voice interactions

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

Alison: Hey, how’s it going?

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

Alison, can I get a pineapple-onion pizza in Hawaii?

Burhan: Yes, but what size?

Alison: Large.

Burhan: Anything else?

Alison: No thanks, that’s it.

Burhan: Something to drink?

Alison: I’ll have a bottle of Coke.

Burhan: You are aware of it. That’ll be$ 13.55 and about fifteen minutes.

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

Informational voice interactions

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

Alison: Hey, how’s it going?

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

Alison: Can I ask a few questions?

Burhan: Of course! Continue straight ahead.

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

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

Alison: What about pizzas that are gluten-free?

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

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

Burhan: Anytime, please.

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

Voice Interfaces

At their core, voice interfaces employ speech to support users in reaching their goals. However, just because an interface has a voice component doesn’t mean that every user interacts with it through voice. We’re most concerned in this book with pure voice interfaces because multimodal voice interfaces can lean on visual components like screens as crutches, which are completely dependent on spoken conversation and lack any visual component, making them much more nuanced and challenging to deal with.

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

IVR ( interactive voice response ) systems

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

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

IVR systems have a reputation for having less scintillating conversations than we’re used to in real life ( or even in science fiction ), despite being extremely repetitive and monotonous conversations that typically don’t veer from a single format.

Screen readers

Parallel to the evolution of IVR systems was the invention of the screen reader, a tool that transcribes visual content into synthesized speech. It’s the most popular way to interact with text, multimedia, or form elements for website users who are blind or visually impaired. Perhaps the closest thing we have today to an out-of-the-box delivery of content via voice is represented by screen readers.

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

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

There is a big draw for screen readers: they’re challenging to use and relentlessly verbose, despite being incredibly instructive for voice interface designers. Screen readers may not be able to read websites ‘ visual structures, which can occasionally lead to awkward pronouncements that list every manipulable HTML element and make an announcement about every formatting change. For many screen reader users, working with web-based interfaces exacts a cognitive toll.

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

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

Well-designed voice interfaces can often beat lengthy screen reader monologues in terms of speeding up users ‘ movements. After all, users of the visual interface have the advantage of freely scurrying around the viewport to find information without worrying about it. Blind users, meanwhile, are obligated to listen to every utterance synthesized into speech and therefore prize brevity and efficiency. Users with disabilities who have long had no choice but to use clumsy screen readers might find that voice interfaces, especially more contemporary voice assistants, provide a more streamlined experience.

Voice-activated devices

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

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

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

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

As businesses like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google continue to dominate their markets, they are also selling and open-sourcing an unmatched range of tools and frameworks for designers and developers, aiming to make creating voice interfaces as simple as possible, even without the use of any code.

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

Voice Content

Simply put, voice content is content that is delivered through voice. Voice content must be free-flowing, organic, contextless, and concise in order to preserve what makes human conversation so compelling in the first place.

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

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

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

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

I would update Dash’s definition of microcontent to include all instances of bite-sized content that transcends written communiqués. After all, today we encounter microcontent in interfaces where a small snippet of copy is displayed alone, unmoored from the browser, like a textbot confirmation of a restaurant reservation. Informing delivery channels both established and novel, Microcontent provides the best opportunity to find out how your content can be stretched to the limits of its potential.

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

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

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

Although I’m not sure when I first heard this statement, it has over the centuries stuck in my mind. How do you generate solutions for scenarios you can’t think? Or create products that are functional on products that have not yet been created?

Flash, Photoshop, and flexible pattern

My go-to program when I first started designing websites was Photoshop. I created a 960px paint and set about creating a design that I would eventually lose information in. The growth phase aimed to achieve pixel-perfect accuracy by using set widths, fixed heights, and absolute setting.

Ethan Marcotte’s speak at An Event Off and subsequent content” Responsive Web Design” in A List Off in 2010 changed all this. As soon as I learned about flexible style, I was convinced, but I also was terrified. The pixel-perfect models full of special figures that I had formerly prided myself on producing were no longer good enough.

My first encounter with flexible design didn’t help my fear. My second project was to get an active fixed-width website and make it reactive. I quickly realized that you didn’t just put responsiveness at the end of a job. To make smooth design, you need to prepare throughout the style phase.

A novel method of architecture

Developing flexible or smooth sites has always been about removing limitations, producing material that can be viewed on any system. I originally used local CSS and utility classes, but it now relies on percentage-based layouts:

.column-span-6 { width: 49%; float: left; margin-right: 0.5%; margin-left: 0.5%;}.column-span-4 { width: 32%; float: left; margin-right: 0.5%; margin-left: 0.5%;}.column-span-3 { width: 24%; float: left; margin-right: 0.5%; margin-left: 0.5%;}

Then with Sass so I could take advantage of @includes to re-use repeated slabs of script and walk up to more semantic html:

.logo { @include colSpan(6);}.search { @include colSpan(3);}.social-share { @include colSpan(3);}

Media inquiries

The next ingredient for flexible design is press queries. Without them, regardless of whether the information was still readable, may shrink to fit the available storage.

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

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

String premium was a mainstay of early flexible design, present in all the frequently used systems like Bootstrap and Skeleton.

 
1 of 7
 
2 of 7
 
3 of 7
 
4 of 7
 
5 of 7
 
6 of 7
 
7 of 7

Another difficulty arose as I moved from a design firm building websites for little- to medium-sized companies, to larger in-house teams where I worked across a collection of related sites. In those positions, I began to work more frequently with recyclable parts.

Our rely on multimedia queries resulted in parts that were tied to frequent window sizes. If modify is the goal of part libraries, then this is a real issue because you can just use these components if the devices you’re designing for match the window sizes in the design library, which prevents you from actually achieving the “devices that don’t already exist” goal.

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

Container queries: a false sun or our lord?

Container concerns have long been touted as an improvement upon advertising questions, but at the time of writing are unsupported in most computers. Although there are JavaScript workarounds, they can lead to dependability and compatibility issues. The basic theory underlying container queries is that elements should change based on the size of their parent container and not the viewport width, as seen in the following illustrations.

One of the biggest arguments in favor of container queries is that they help us create components or design patterns that are truly reusable because they can be picked up and placed anywhere in a layout. This is a significant step in the direction of a component-based design that can be used with any device, regardless of size.

In other words, responsive components to replace responsive layouts.

Container queries will enable us to design components that can be placed in a sidebar or in the main content rather than pages that respond to the browser or device size.

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

A component library that is disconnected from context and real content is probably not the best place to make that choice.

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

In this instance, the container’s dimensions are not what should be used to dictate the design; rather, the image is.

It’s hard to say for sure whether container queries will be a success story until we have solid cross-browser support for them. Responsive component libraries would undoubtedly change the way we design, enhancing reuse possibilities and scaling. But maybe we will always need to adjust these components to suit our content.

CSS is evolving.

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

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

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

.wrapper { display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; justify-content: space-between;}.child { flex-basis: 32%; margin-bottom: 20px;}

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

This is a significant improvement when it comes to developing designs that allow for dynamic content, but CSS Subgrid is the real game changer for flexible designs.

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

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

.wrapper { display: grid; grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(150px, 1fr)); grid-template-rows: auto 1fr auto; gap: 10px;}.sub-grid { display: grid; grid-row: span 3; grid-template-rows: subgrid; /* sets rows to parent grid */}

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

Intrinsic layouts

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

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

frunits is a statement that says,” I want you to distribute the extra space in this way, but… don’t ever make it smaller than the content that is inside of it.”

—Jen Simmons,” Designing Intrinsic Layouts”

Additionally, intrinsic layouts can mix and match both fixed and flexible units, letting the content choose how much space is taken up.

Intriguing design distinguishes itself because it not only creates designs that can withstand future devices but also helps scale designs without losing flexibility. Components and patterns can be lifted and reused without the prerequisite of having the same breakpoints or the same amount of content as in the previous implementation.

We can now make designs that can fit the content in them, the inside of them, and the content around them. With an intrinsic approach, we can construct responsive components without depending on container queries.

Another 2010 moment?

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

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

One possible explanation for that is that I now work for a sizable company, which is quite different from the role I held as a design agency in 2010! In my agency days, every new project was a clean slate, a chance to try something new. Modern projects frequently improve existing websites with an existing codebase and use existing tools and frameworks.

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

You can’t “frame” your way out of” a content issue.

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

Ten years ago, responsive grid systems were everywhere. With a framework like Bootstrap or Skeleton, you had a responsive design template at your fingertips.

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

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

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

Another ongoing debate centered on whether designers should code is ongoing. When designing a digital product, we should, at the very least, design for a best- and worst-case scenario when it comes to content. It’s not ideal to do this in a graphics-based software package. In code, we can add longer sentences, more radio buttons, and extra tabs, and watch in real time as the design adapts. Does it continue to function? Is the design too reliant on the current content?

I’m personally anticipating the day when a design component can truly be flexible and adapt to both its space and content without relying on the device or container dimensions.

Content first

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

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

This is not the same as previous markup hacks like this.

 First line of text with different styling...

—we can target content based on where it appears.

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

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

This flexibility allows for directional changes according to content, a common requirement when we need to present content in multiple languages. This was frequently accomplished with Sass mixins in the past, but it was frequently limited to a left-to-right or right-to-left orientation.

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

$direction: rtl;$opposite-direction: ltr;$start-direction: right;$end-direction: left;

These variables can be used as values.

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

—or as properties.

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

However, with native logical properties, we can now avoid relying on Sass ( or a similar tool ) and pre-planning, which meant using variables throughout a codebase. These properties also start to break apart the tight coupling between a design and strict physical dimensions, creating more flexibility for changes in language and in direction.

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

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

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

Fluid and fixed

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

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

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

As long as the element’s width is not greater than 300px, the element in the figure above will cover 50 % of its container.

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

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

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

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

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

This time, the element’s width will be 50 % of its container’s preferred value, with no exceptions for 300px and 600px.

With these techniques, we have a content-first approach to responsive design. We can distinguish between markup and content, which means that user modifications will not have an impact on the design. We can start to future-proof designs by planning for unexpected changes in language or direction. Additionally, we can increase flexibility by specifying desired dimensions alongside adaptable alternatives, which will allow for more or less content to be displayed correctly.

Situation first

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

Rather than someone using a mobile phone and moving through a crowded street in glaring sunshine, it’s a very different design to be done for someone using a desktop computer. Situations and environments are hard to plan for or predict because they change as people react to their own unique challenges and tasks.

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

Thankfully, there is a lot we can do to give people choices.

Responsible design

” Mobile data is prohibitively expensive in some places around the world, and broadband infrastructure is sparse or absent.”

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

Chris Ashton

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

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

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

Additionally, there is native lazy loading, which indicates that assets should only be downloaded when they are required.

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

So how can we put users in control?

The media queries are now being returned.

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

We’ve long been able to check for media types like print and speech and features such as hover, resolution, and color. Because of these checks, we can offer options that work for multiple situations, not just one-size-fits-all.

As of this writing, the Media Queries Level 5 spec is still under development. It brings up some really intriguing queries that will eventually help us design for a number of other unanticipated situations.

For example, there’s a light-level feature that allows you to modify styles if a user is in sunlight or darkness. These features, which have custom properties, make it simple to create designs or themes for particular environments.

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

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

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

Expect the Unexpected

In the end, the one thing we should always expect is for things to change. With foldable screens already available on the market, devices in particular change more quickly than we can keep up.

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

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

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

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

Some members of the elite running group were beginning to think it was impossible to run a hour in less than four hours in the 1950s. Riders had been attempting it since the later 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body just wasn’t built for the job.

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

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

We do a lot more when we think something is possible, and we only think it can be done when we see someone else doing it once more. As for individual running speed, we also think there are strict guidelines for how a website should do.

Establishing requirements for a green website

The key environmental performance indicators for the majority of major industries are very well established, such as power per square metre for homes and miles per gallon for cars. The tools and methods for calculating those measures are standardized as well, which keeps everyone on the same site when doing economic evaluations. However, 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 item produces. We can’t assess the pollutants coming out of the exhaust valves on our laptops. The pollution coming from power plants that burn coal and oil are considerably away, out of sight, and out of mind. We have no way to track the particles from a website or app up to the power station where the light is being generated and really know the exact amount of house oil produced. What then do we do?

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

1. Transfer of data
2. Coal content of light

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

Transfer of data

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

The webpage weight, or the page’s transfer size in kilobytes, can be most readily calculated for a second visit for web pages. 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 roughly half 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 underlying technology of the web like data centers and transmission networks, become more and more energy efficient, websites themselves become less effective as time goes on.

You 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 vague suggestions, much like speed limits while driving, so the goal should always be to come within budget.

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

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

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 directly disclose carbon emissions and energy consumption data, they do provide a clear indicator of efficiency in comparison to other websites. And as transfer size is an effective analog for energy consumption, we can actually use it to estimate energy consumption too.

In summary, less data transfer leads to more energy efficiency, 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.

Coal content of light

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reverting it to carbon emissions

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

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

With the ability to calculate carbon emissions for our projects, we could even set up 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 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 energy is used by the user’s devices as a result of the user’s web browser’s increased computation. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a lot of processing power on a user’s device unintentionally exclude those who have older, slower devices and make the batteries on phones and laptops drain more quickly. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. The poorest members of society are also under disproportionate financial burdens due to this, which is not just bad for the environment.

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

You know what happens 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 the percentage of CPU used and how long the CPU used when loading the web page last. It doesn’t give us precise data for the amount of electricity used in kilowatts, but the information it does provide can be used to benchmark how efficiently your websites use energy and set targets for improvement.

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

The diverse safety procedure

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

• determine the best ways to abuse your solution.
• style ways to prevent the maltreatment, and
• offer assistance for harmed people to regain control and power.

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

• Conducting study
• Developing tropes
• Pondering problems
• creating answers
• Testing for health

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

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

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

Step 1: Conduct research

Design research should include a thorough analysis of how your technology might be used for abuse as well as specific insights into the experiences of those who have witnessed and perpetrated that kind of abuse. At this stage, you and your team will investigate issues of interpersonal harm and abuse, and explore any other safety, security, or inclusivity issues that might be a concern for your product or service, like data security, racist algorithms, and harassment.

broad-based research

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

Survivors as a specific field of study

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

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

Specific research: Abusers

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

Step 2: Create archetypes

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

The abuser archetype is someone who will look at the product as a tool to perform harm ( Fig 5.2 ). They may be attempting to harm someone they don’t know by using surveillance or anonymous harassment, or they may be trying to control, monitor, abuse, or otherwise torment someone they know.

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

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

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

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

Step 3: Brainstorm problems

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

How else could your product be used for any kind of abuse besides what you’ve already found in your research? I recommend setting aside at least a few hours with your team for this process.

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

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

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

4. Create solutions

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

Questions to yourself should you ask yourself to protect your archetypes and to support them

• Can you design your product in such a way that the identified harm cannot happen in the first place? What barriers can you place to stop the harm from occurring if not?
• How can you make the victim aware that abuse is happening through your product?
• How can you assist the victim in understanding what they need to do to stop the problem?
• Can you identify any types of user activity that would indicate some form of harm or abuse? Could your product provide support for the user?

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

Nevertheless, be careful: you don’t want to do anything that could harm a user if their devices are being watched. If you do offer some kind of proactive help, always make it voluntary, and think through other safety issues, such as the need to keep the user in-app in case an abuser is checking their search history. In the next chapter, we’ll examine a good illustration of this.

Step 5: Test for safety

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

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

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

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

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

Abuse testing

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

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

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

Testing for Survivors

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

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

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

Stress testing

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

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

I just had the opportunity to direct the CMS application for a Fortune 500 company. The customer was excited by the benefits of an holistic information plan, including material modify, multichannel marketing, and robot delivery—designing content to be comprehensible to bots, Google knowledge panels, snippets, and voice user interfaces.

For our information to be understood by many systems, the unit needed conceptual types, which are names given based on their meaning rather than their presentation. This is crucial for an multichannel content strategy. Our goal was to allow writers to produce original content that could be used wherever they felt was most useful. However, as the project progressed, I realized that the entire group had to be aware of a new design in order to support material reuse at the level that my customer needed.

Despite our best purposes, we kept drawing from what we were more common with: design techniques. Unlike web-focused material strategies, an holistic information strategy doesn’t rely on WYSIWYG equipment for design and structure. One of the main objectives of a material design was to deliver content to audiences across multiple marketing channels, which is a tendency that we have to approach the material model with.

Two fundamental tenets are necessary for a successful content type

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

1. Instead of design, content models may determine semantics.
2. And information that belongs together should be linked to material versions.

Conceptual articles models

A conceptual content type uses form and attribute names that reflect the content’s intended purpose and not its intended display. For instance, in a nonsemantic design, groups may make varieties like teasers, press blocks, and cards. Although these types may make it simple to present information, they don’t aid in understanding the meaning of the information, which would have opened the door to the information presented in each advertising channel. To allow each delivery channel to comprehend the content and use it as it sees fit, a semantic content model uses type names like product, service, and testimonial.

A great place to start when creating a semantic content model is by reviewing the types and properties that Schema has defined. org, a community-driven resource for type definitions that are intelligible to platforms like Google search.

A semantic content model has several benefits:

A semantic content model decouples content from its presentation so that teams can change the website’s design without having to refactor its content, even if your team doesn’t care about omnichannel content. In this way, content can withstand disruptive website redesigns.
• A semantic content model also gives you a competitive advantage. by including schema-based structured data. org’s types and properties, a website can provide hints to help Google understand the content, display it in search snippets or knowledge panels, and use it to answer voice-interface user questions. Potential visitors could access your content without ever walking into your website.
• A semantic content model is also necessary if you want to deliver omnichannel content in addition to those practical advantages. Delivery channels must be able to understand the same content in order to use it across multiple marketing channels. For instance, if your content model provided a list of questions and answers, it could be easily displayed on a frequently asked questions ( FAQ ) page as well as be used by a bot to answer frequently asked questions.

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

Content models that connect

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

Consider creating an essay or article. An article’s meaning and usefulness depends upon its parts being kept together. Would one of the headings or paragraphs have any significance on their own if the entire article were not included? Our well-versed in designing systems frequently led us to want to develop content models that would break content into smaller pieces to fit the web-centric layout. This had a similar effect to an article that had its headline removed. Content that belonged together became challenging to manage and nearly impossible for multiple delivery channels to understand because we were cutting content into separate pieces based on layout.

To illustrate, let’s look at how connecting related content applies in a real-world scenario. The client’s design team created a challenging layout for a software product page that included numerous tabs and sections. Our instincts were to follow the content model’s. Shouldn’t we make adding any number of tabs in the future as simple and flexible as possible?

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

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

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

In fact, the customer could have chosen to display this content elsewhere, without tabs. In response to this realization, we created content types for the software product based on the meaningful attributes the client wanted to display on the web. There were obvious semantic attributes like name and description as well as rich attributes like screenshots, software requirements, and feature lists. The software’s product information stayed together because it wasn’t sliced across separate components like “tab sections” that were derived from the content’s presentation. Any delivery channel—including future ones—could understand and present this content.

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Square features, for instance, make it fun to play with round picture areas. Mobile screen notches and electronic keyboards present difficulties in how to best manage content that stays out of 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 boxes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the window and title bar controls

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

The title bar, 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. The title bar and window control buttons can be overlayed on top of the application’s web content, allowing it to free up the entire height of the app window.

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

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

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

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

Let’s use the feature

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

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

The app has two pages. The first lists the CSS designs you’ve already created:

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

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

And on Windows:

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

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

Enabling Window Controls Overlay

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

It has currently been incorporated into 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 obscured by the window controls because our layout now begins at the top of the window, which is what we wanted.

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

CSS to stay away from window controls

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

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

You can 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 there are any afterthoughts to the window control buttons. 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.

We can remedy this by altering the app’s theme color. There are a couple of ways to define it:

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

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

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

Here is the function we’ll use:

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

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

Dragging the window

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

Users can 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 specify explicitly that an element be non-draggable:

-webkit-app-region: no-drag; 

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

Adapting to window resizing

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

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

Three intriguing things are provided by the API:

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the window is too small, we can use the above CSS code to move our header down and 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. Nowadays, web building enables us to think outside the rectangular box.

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

If you get a chance to try the Window Controls Overlay feature and have feedback about it, you can open issues on the spec’s repository. You can help 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.