Category: Blog

Picture this: You’re in a meeting room at your tech company, and two people are having what looks like the same conversation about the same design problem. One is talking about whether the team has the right skills to tackle it. The other is diving deep into whether the solution actually solves the user’s problem. Same room, same problem, completely different lenses.

This is the beautiful, sometimes messy reality of having both a Design Manager and a Lead Designer on the same team. And if you’re wondering how to make this work without creating confusion, overlap, or the dreaded “too many cooks” scenario, you’re asking the right question.

The traditional answer has been to draw clean lines on an org chart. The Design Manager handles people, the Lead Designer handles craft. Problem solved, right? Except clean org charts are fantasy. In reality, both roles care deeply about team health, design quality, and shipping great work. 

The magic happens when you embrace the overlap instead of fighting it—when you start thinking of your design org as a design organism.

The Anatomy of a Healthy Design Team

Here’s what I’ve learned from years of being on both sides of this equation: think of your design team as a living organism. The Design Manager tends to the mind (the psychological safety, the career growth, the team dynamics). The Lead Designer tends to the body (the craft skills, the design standards, the hands-on work that ships to users).

But just like mind and body aren’t completely separate systems, so, too, do these roles overlap in important ways. You can’t have a healthy person without both working in harmony. The trick is knowing where those overlaps are and how to navigate them gracefully.

When we look at how healthy teams actually function, three critical systems emerge. Each requires both roles to work together, but with one taking primary responsibility for keeping that system strong.

The Nervous System: People & Psychology

Primary caretaker: Design Manager
Supporting role: Lead Designer

The nervous system is all about signals, feedback, and psychological safety. When this system is healthy, information flows freely, people feel safe to take risks, and the team can adapt quickly to new challenges.

The Design Manager is the primary caretaker here. They’re monitoring the team’s psychological pulse, ensuring feedback loops are healthy, and creating the conditions for people to grow. They’re hosting career conversations, managing workload, and making sure no one burns out.

But the Lead Designer plays a crucial supporting role. They’re providing sensory input about craft development needs, spotting when someone’s design skills are stagnating, and helping identify growth opportunities that the Design Manager might miss.

Design Manager tends to:

• Career conversations and growth planning
• Team psychological safety and dynamics
• Workload management and resource allocation
• Performance reviews and feedback systems
• Creating learning opportunities

Lead Designer supports by:

• Providing craft-specific feedback on team member development
• Identifying design skill gaps and growth opportunities
• Offering design mentorship and guidance
• Signaling when team members are ready for more complex challenges

The Muscular System: Craft & Execution

Primary caretaker: Lead Designer
Supporting role: Design Manager

The muscular system is about strength, coordination, and skill development. When this system is healthy, the team can execute complex design work with precision, maintain consistent quality, and adapt their craft to new challenges.

The Lead Designer is the primary caretaker here. They’re setting design standards, providing craft coaching, and ensuring that shipping work meets the quality bar. They’re the ones who can tell you if a design decision is sound or if we’re solving the right problem.

But the Design Manager plays a crucial supporting role. They’re ensuring the team has the resources and support to do their best craft work, like proper nutrition and recovery time for an athlete.

Lead Designer tends to:

• Definition of design standards and system usage
• Feedback on what design work meets the standard
• Experience direction for the product
• Design decisions and product-wide alignment
• Innovation and craft advancement

Design Manager supports by:

• Ensuring design standards are understood and adopted across the team
• Confirming experience direction is being followed
• Supporting practices and systems that scale without bottlenecking
• Facilitating design alignment across teams
• Providing resources and removing obstacles to great craft work

The Circulatory System: Strategy & Flow

Shared caretakers: Both Design Manager and Lead Designer

The circulatory system is about how information, decisions, and energy flow through the team. When this system is healthy, strategic direction is clear, priorities are aligned, and the team can respond quickly to new opportunities or challenges.

This is where true partnership happens. Both roles are responsible for keeping the circulation strong, but they’re bringing different perspectives to the table.

Lead Designer contributes:

• User needs are met by the product
• Overall product quality and experience
• Strategic design initiatives
• Research-based user needs for each initiative

Design Manager contributes:

• Communication to team and stakeholders
• Stakeholder management and alignment
• Cross-functional team accountability
• Strategic business initiatives

Both collaborate on:

• Co-creation of strategy with leadership
• Team goals and prioritization approach
• Organizational structure decisions
• Success measures and frameworks

Keeping the Organism Healthy

The key to making this partnership sing is understanding that all three systems need to work together. A team with great craft skills but poor psychological safety will burn out. A team with great culture but weak craft execution will ship mediocre work. A team with both but poor strategic circulation will work hard on the wrong things.

Be Explicit About Which System You’re Tending

When you’re in a meeting about a design problem, it helps to acknowledge which system you’re primarily focused on. “I’m thinking about this from a team capacity perspective” (nervous system) or “I’m looking at this through the lens of user needs” (muscular system) gives everyone context for your input.

This isn’t about staying in your lane. It’s about being transparent as to which lens you’re using, so the other person knows how to best add their perspective.

Create Healthy Feedback Loops

The most successful partnerships I’ve seen establish clear feedback loops between the systems:

Nervous system signals to muscular system: “The team is struggling with confidence in their design skills” → Lead Designer provides more craft coaching and clearer standards.

Muscular system signals to nervous system: “The team’s craft skills are advancing faster than their project complexity” → Design Manager finds more challenging growth opportunities.

Both systems signal to circulatory system: “We’re seeing patterns in team health and craft development that suggest we need to adjust our strategic priorities.”

Handle Handoffs Gracefully

The most critical moments in this partnership are when something moves from one system to another. This might be when a design standard (muscular system) needs to be rolled out across the team (nervous system), or when a strategic initiative (circulatory system) needs specific craft execution (muscular system).

Make these transitions explicit. “I’ve defined the new component standards. Can you help me think through how to get the team up to speed?” or “We’ve agreed on this strategic direction. I’m going to focus on the specific user experience approach from here.”

Stay Curious, Not Territorial

The Design Manager who never thinks about craft, or the Lead Designer who never considers team dynamics, is like a doctor who only looks at one body system. Great design leadership requires both people to care about the whole organism, even when they’re not the primary caretaker.

This means asking questions rather than making assumptions. “What do you think about the team’s craft development in this area?” or “How do you see this impacting team morale and workload?” keeps both perspectives active in every decision.

When the Organism Gets Sick

Even with clear roles, this partnership can go sideways. Here are the most common failure modes I’ve seen:

System Isolation

The Design Manager focuses only on the nervous system and ignores craft development. The Lead Designer focuses only on the muscular system and ignores team dynamics. Both people retreat to their comfort zones and stop collaborating.

The symptoms: Team members get mixed messages, work quality suffers, morale drops.

The treatment: Reconnect around shared outcomes. What are you both trying to achieve? Usually it’s great design work that ships on time from a healthy team. Figure out how both systems serve that goal.

Poor Circulation

Strategic direction is unclear, priorities keep shifting, and neither role is taking responsibility for keeping information flowing.

The symptoms: Team members are confused about priorities, work gets duplicated or dropped, deadlines are missed.

The treatment: Explicitly assign responsibility for circulation. Who’s communicating what to whom? How often? What’s the feedback loop?

Autoimmune Response

One person feels threatened by the other’s expertise. The Design Manager thinks the Lead Designer is undermining their authority. The Lead Designer thinks the Design Manager doesn’t understand craft.

The symptoms: Defensive behavior, territorial disputes, team members caught in the middle.

The treatment: Remember that you’re both caretakers of the same organism. When one system fails, the whole team suffers. When both systems are healthy, the team thrives.

The Payoff

Yes, this model requires more communication. Yes, it requires both people to be secure enough to share responsibility for team health. But the payoff is worth it: better decisions, stronger teams, and design work that’s both excellent and sustainable.

When both roles are healthy and working well together, you get the best of both worlds: deep craft expertise and strong people leadership. When one person is out sick, on vacation, or overwhelmed, the other can help maintain the team’s health. When a decision requires both the people perspective and the craft perspective, you’ve got both right there in the room.

Most importantly, the framework scales. As your team grows, you can apply the same system thinking to new challenges. Need to launch a design system? Lead Designer tends to the muscular system (standards and implementation), Design Manager tends to the nervous system (team adoption and change management), and both tend to circulation (communication and stakeholder alignment).

The Bottom Line

The relationship between a Design Manager and Lead Designer isn’t about dividing territories. It’s about multiplying impact. When both roles understand they’re tending to different aspects of the same healthy organism, magic happens.

The mind and body work together. The team gets both the strategic thinking and the craft excellence they need. And most importantly, the work that ships to users benefits from both perspectives.

So the next time you’re in that meeting room, wondering why two people are talking about the same problem from different angles, remember: you’re watching shared leadership in action. And if it’s working well, both the mind and body of your design team are getting stronger.

As a product builder over too many years to mention, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen promising ideas go from zero to hero in a few weeks, only to fizzle out within months.

Financial products, which is the field I work in, are no exception. With people’s real hard-earned money on the line, user expectations running high, and a crowded market, it’s tempting to throw as many features at the wall as possible and hope something sticks. But this approach is a recipe for disaster. Here’s why:

The pitfalls of feature-first development

When you start building a financial product from the ground up, or are migrating existing customer journeys from paper or telephony channels onto online banking or mobile apps, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of creating new features. You might think, “If I can just add one more thing that solves this particular user problem, they’ll love me!” But what happens when you inevitably hit a roadblock because the narcs (your security team!) don’t like it? When a hard-fought feature isn’t as popular as you thought, or it breaks due to unforeseen complexity?

This is where the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) comes in. Jason Fried’s book Getting Real and his podcast Rework often touch on this idea, even if he doesn’t always call it that. An MVP is a product that provides just enough value to your users to keep them engaged, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming or difficult to maintain. It sounds like an easy concept but it requires a razor sharp eye, a ruthless edge and having the courage to stick by your opinion because it is easy to be seduced by “the Columbo Effect”… when there’s always “just one more thing…” that someone wants to add.

The problem with most finance apps, however, is that they often become a reflection of the internal politics of the business rather than an experience solely designed around the customer. This means that the focus is on delivering as many features and functionalities as possible to satisfy the needs and desires of competing internal departments, rather than providing a clear value proposition that is focused on what the people out there in the real world want. As a result, these products can very easily bloat to become a mixed bag of confusing, unrelated and ultimately unlovable customer experiences—a feature salad, you might say.

The importance of bedrock

So what’s a better approach? How can we build products that are stable, user-friendly, and—most importantly—stick?

That’s where the concept of “bedrock” comes in. Bedrock is the core element of your product that truly matters to users. It’s the fundamental building block that provides value and stays relevant over time.

In the world of retail banking, which is where I work, the bedrock has got to be in and around the regular servicing journeys. People open their current account once in a blue moon but they look at it every day. They sign up for a credit card every year or two, but they check their balance and pay their bill at least once a month.

Identifying the core tasks that people want to do and then relentlessly striving to make them easy to do, dependable, and trustworthy is where the gravy’s at.

But how do you get to bedrock? By focusing on the “MVP” approach, prioritizing simplicity, and iterating towards a clear value proposition. This means cutting out unnecessary features and focusing on delivering real value to your users.

It also means having some guts, because your colleagues might not always instantly share your vision to start with. And controversially, sometimes it can even mean making it clear to customers that you’re not going to come to their house and make their dinner. The occasional “opinionated user interface design” (i.e. clunky workaround for edge cases) might sometimes be what you need to use to test a concept or buy you space to work on something more important.

Practical strategies for building financial products that stick

So what are the key strategies I’ve learned from my own experience and research?

1. Start with a clear “why”: What problem are you trying to solve? For whom? Make sure your mission is crystal clear before building anything. Make sure it aligns with your company’s objectives, too.
2. Focus on a single, core feature and obsess on getting that right before moving on to something else: Resist the temptation to add too many features at once. Instead, choose one that delivers real value and iterate from there.
3. Prioritize simplicity over complexity: Less is often more when it comes to financial products. Cut out unnecessary bells and whistles and keep the focus on what matters most.
4. Embrace continuous iteration: Bedrock isn’t a fixed destination—it’s a dynamic process. Continuously gather user feedback, refine your product, and iterate towards that bedrock state.
5. Stop, look and listen: Don’t just test your product as part of your delivery process—test it repeatedly in the field. Use it yourself. Run A/B tests. Gather user feedback. Talk to people who use it, and refine accordingly.

The bedrock paradox

There’s an interesting paradox at play here: building towards bedrock means sacrificing some short-term growth potential in favour of long-term stability. But the payoff is worth it—products built with a focus on bedrock will outlast and outperform their competitors, and deliver sustained value to users over time.

So, how do you start your journey towards bedrock? Take it one step at a time. Start by identifying those core elements that truly matter to your users. Focus on building and refining a single, powerful feature that delivers real value. And above all, test obsessively—for, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker (whomever you believe!!), “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

This article contains spoilers for The Pitt season 2 episode 1.  “A miracle what a little soap, water, and human decency can do sometimes,” says Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center ER charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) near the end of The Pitt season 2 premiere. The “miracle” she’s referring to is the freshly clean condition […]

The post The Pitt Season 2 Episode 1 Review: The Hilum Flip appeared first on Den of Geek.

Even before the first episode has released, the promotional material for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has been generating a lot of buzz. There’s been talk about Paul Giamatti getting to indulge his inner-Trekkie while chewing scenery, whether CW-style teen drama belongs in Star Trek, and about still not giving us Star Trek: Legacy. But there’s one part of the early Starfleet Academy footage we’ve seen that deserves more attention: the fact that Captain Nahla Ake of the USS Athena, chancellor of Starfleet Academy, wears glasses.

In the first scene released from the show, Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) deals with a sudden threat in classic Star Trek fashion, getting information from her bridge crew. To take a better look at a monitor, Ake pulls on a pair of peepers. That’s a surprising choice, one that tells us everything we need to know about this new leader.

Seeing the Future

Eyeglasses may be common in our world, but they rarely show up in Trek. There are two famous examples of people with eyewear in the Star Trek franchise. One, of course, is Geordi LaForge, who wore a VISOR (Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement) across all seven seasons ofStar Trek: The Next Generation.

But those weren’t glasses. They fed Geordi’s brain different types of sensory impulses, which were similar to those of eyesight, but functioned differently. Not only did they pick up things that human eyes could not, such as UV light, but the signals produced images that made no sense to sighted people. When Picard looks through Geordi’s VISOR in season 1’s “The Heart of Glory,” the images make no sense to them because he’s interpreting them through different processes. Thus, when Geordi starts wearing ocular implants in Star Trek: First Contact, effectively gaining a new set of eyes, he stops wearing the VISOR.

The technological advancements of Geordi’s VISOR and implants underscore a point made by the second most pronounced use of glasses in Star Trek, the pair that Bones gives Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The glasses are McCoy’s way of ribbing Jim about his advancing age (a topic they’ll revisit in each of the next four movies). It’s not just that Kirk is old and his eyesight is failing; it’s also that they are an antique, a relic of the past, just like the Captain-turned-Admiral himself. In fact, Bones even states that he usually prescribes something called Retinax V for vision loss.

Between the reference to Retinax V and the gift, McCoy highlights a fact about the 24th Century and beyond: people don’t need glasses. Of course, Trek has always tried to be forward-looking, finding a balance between celebrating scientific achievements and not erasing different abilities or modes of expression. As Stephanie Roehler wrote for StarTrek.com, Geordi keeps his VISOR and implants (and Picard stays bald) because “accommodations, function, and acceptance are prized over being more ‘normal.’”

An Intentional Look

Which brings us back to Nahla Ake’s decision to strap on a pair of spectacles. She obviously puts them on to serve a purpose, getting a better look at the screen. And she seems to treat them like any other piece of ship’s equipment, as demonstrated by the way she hands them to her XO Lura Thok (Gina Yashere) before dispensing orders.

Thus, her decision to wear glasses isn’t a mere fashion choice. Rather, it’s a strategic choice, part of the mentality that makes her a captain and a teacher. Nahla Ake is part Lanthanite, a new species introduced with Pelia in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. While we still don’t know much about Lanthanites, we do know this: they live for a very long time and they develop attachments to the chotchkes they collect. Sometimes, these collections can help out in a jam, as when Pelia had to run landline phones throughout the Enterprise in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” from season 3. But usually, Lanthanites collect things to remember the past, to keep record of the connections they make to people who have come in gone in their long lifetimes.

When Nahla Ake puts on a pair of glasses, she’s making a connection to the past. She’s grounding herself in some long gone moment before making a decision like the orders she gives. That connection to the past is particularly important when one remembers that Starfleet Academy takes place after the final seasons of Discovery, in the 32nd century. The connection she made may very well go all the way back to before The Original Series, possibly even Enterprise.

We can read two things from Nahla Ake’s decision to wear glasses. One, that she cares about people. Presumably, she keeps the glasses because they remind her of someone from the past, someone now long since expired. The fact that she, a person who lives so long and forms so many relationships would prioritize a single person, tells us that she’s not going to be one who too quickly puts the needs of the many before the needs of the few.

Second, the decision tells us that she trusts what she knows. She’s certainly not a luddite and will make use of modern technology. She’s the captain of a 32nd century starship, after all. But she clearly has faith in a simple pair of eyeglasses that she doesn’t extend to a VISOR or ocular implants. This tells us that she’s not the type of captain who will go chasing after the latest fad. She makes her decisions slowly and thoughtfully.

The Captain’s Style

These two qualities of Nahla Ake matter precisely because there are so many questions around Starfleet Academy. Trek has never done teen drama before and there are legitimate concerns about melding a genre known for big emotions and bad decisions with a franchise that prioritizes reason and professionalism.

It’s still too early to say if Starfleet Academy will work as a Star Trek show, but when Nahla Ake puts on her glasses, we can plainly see she’s the right type of captain.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres on Paramount+ on January 15, 2026.

The post Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s Captain Wears Glasses and That Matters appeared first on Den of Geek.

Where the first three teasers for Avengers: Doomsday have been about returning favorites from the start of the MCU and before, the fourth release goes no further back than 2018’s Black Panther. As the current Black Panther Shuri monologues about the duties of a king, we see not just her fellow Wakandan M’Baku but also […]

The post Avengers: Doomsday Teaser Sets Up Marvel’s Most Infamous Love Triangle appeared first on Den of Geek.

Even before the first episode has released, the promotional material for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has been generating a lot of buzz. There’s been talk about Paul Giamatti getting to indulge his inner-Trekkie while chewing scenery, whether CW-style teen drama belongs in Star Trek, and about still not giving us Star Trek: Legacy. But there’s one part of the early Starfleet Academy footage we’ve seen that deserves more attention: the fact that Captain Nahla Ake of the USS Athena, chancellor of Starfleet Academy, wears glasses.

In the first scene released from the show, Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) deals with a sudden threat in classic Star Trek fashion, getting information from her bridge crew. To take a better look at a monitor, Ake pulls on a pair of peepers. That’s a surprising choice, one that tells us everything we need to know about this new leader.

Seeing the Future

Eyeglasses may be common in our world, but they rarely show up in Trek. There are two famous examples of people with eyewear in the Star Trek franchise. One, of course, is Geordi LaForge, who wore a VISOR (Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement) across all seven seasons ofStar Trek: The Next Generation.

But those weren’t glasses. They fed Geordi’s brain different types of sensory impulses, which were similar to those of eyesight, but functioned differently. Not only did they pick up things that human eyes could not, such as UV light, but the signals produced images that made no sense to sighted people. When Picard looks through Geordi’s VISOR in season 1’s “The Heart of Glory,” the images make no sense to them because he’s interpreting them through different processes. Thus, when Geordi starts wearing ocular implants in Star Trek: First Contact, effectively gaining a new set of eyes, he stops wearing the VISOR.

The technological advancements of Geordi’s VISOR and implants underscore a point made by the second most pronounced use of glasses in Star Trek, the pair that Bones gives Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The glasses are McCoy’s way of ribbing Jim about his advancing age (a topic they’ll revisit in each of the next four movies). It’s not just that Kirk is old and his eyesight is failing; it’s also that they are an antique, a relic of the past, just like the Captain-turned-Admiral himself. In fact, Bones even states that he usually prescribes something called Retinax V for vision loss.

Between the reference to Retinax V and the gift, McCoy highlights a fact about the 24th Century and beyond: people don’t need glasses. Of course, Trek has always tried to be forward-looking, finding a balance between celebrating scientific achievements and not erasing different abilities or modes of expression. As Stephanie Roehler wrote for StarTrek.com, Geordi keeps his VISOR and implants (and Picard stays bald) because “accommodations, function, and acceptance are prized over being more ‘normal.’”

An Intentional Look

Which brings us back to Nahla Ake’s decision to strap on a pair of spectacles. She obviously puts them on to serve a purpose, getting a better look at the screen. And she seems to treat them like any other piece of ship’s equipment, as demonstrated by the way she hands them to her XO Lura Thok (Gina Yashere) before dispensing orders.

Thus, her decision to wear glasses isn’t a mere fashion choice. Rather, it’s a strategic choice, part of the mentality that makes her a captain and a teacher. Nahla Ake is part Lanthanite, a new species introduced with Pelia in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. While we still don’t know much about Lanthanites, we do know this: they live for a very long time and they develop attachments to the chotchkes they collect. Sometimes, these collections can help out in a jam, as when Pelia had to run landline phones throughout the Enterprise in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” from season 3. But usually, Lanthanites collect things to remember the past, to keep record of the connections they make to people who have come in gone in their long lifetimes.

When Nahla Ake puts on a pair of glasses, she’s making a connection to the past. She’s grounding herself in some long gone moment before making a decision like the orders she gives. That connection to the past is particularly important when one remembers that Starfleet Academy takes place after the final seasons of Discovery, in the 32nd century. The connection she made may very well go all the way back to before The Original Series, possibly even Enterprise.

We can read two things from Nahla Ake’s decision to wear glasses. One, that she cares about people. Presumably, she keeps the glasses because they remind her of someone from the past, someone now long since expired. The fact that she, a person who lives so long and forms so many relationships would prioritize a single person, tells us that she’s not going to be one who too quickly puts the needs of the many before the needs of the few.

Second, the decision tells us that she trusts what she knows. She’s certainly not a luddite and will make use of modern technology. She’s the captain of a 32nd century starship, after all. But she clearly has faith in a simple pair of eyeglasses that she doesn’t extend to a VISOR or ocular implants. This tells us that she’s not the type of captain who will go chasing after the latest fad. She makes her decisions slowly and thoughtfully.

The Captain’s Style

These two qualities of Nahla Ake matter precisely because there are so many questions around Starfleet Academy. Trek has never done teen drama before and there are legitimate concerns about melding a genre known for big emotions and bad decisions with a franchise that prioritizes reason and professionalism.

It’s still too early to say if Starfleet Academy will work as a Star Trek show, but when Nahla Ake puts on her glasses, we can plainly see she’s the right type of captain.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres on Paramount+ on January 15, 2026.

The post Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s Captain Wears Glasses and That Matters appeared first on Den of Geek.

Even before the first episode has released, the promotional material for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has been generating a lot of buzz. There’s been talk about Paul Giamatti getting to indulge his inner-Trekkie while chewing scenery, whether CW-style teen drama belongs in Star Trek, and about still not giving us Star Trek: Legacy. But there’s […]

The post Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s Captain Wears Glasses and That Matters appeared first on Den of Geek.

Even before the first episode has released, the promotional material for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has been generating a lot of buzz. There’s been talk about Paul Giamatti getting to indulge his inner-Trekkie while chewing scenery, whether CW-style teen drama belongs in Star Trek, and about still not giving us Star Trek: Legacy. But there’s one part of the early Starfleet Academy footage we’ve seen that deserves more attention: the fact that Captain Nahla Ake of the USS Athena, chancellor of Starfleet Academy, wears glasses.

In the first scene released from the show, Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) deals with a sudden threat in classic Star Trek fashion, getting information from her bridge crew. To take a better look at a monitor, Ake pulls on a pair of peepers. That’s a surprising choice, one that tells us everything we need to know about this new leader.

Seeing the Future

Eyeglasses may be common in our world, but they rarely show up in Trek. There are two famous examples of people with eyewear in the Star Trek franchise. One, of course, is Geordi LaForge, who wore a VISOR (Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement) across all seven seasons ofStar Trek: The Next Generation.

But those weren’t glasses. They fed Geordi’s brain different types of sensory impulses, which were similar to those of eyesight, but functioned differently. Not only did they pick up things that human eyes could not, such as UV light, but the signals produced images that made no sense to sighted people. When Picard looks through Geordi’s VISOR in season 1’s “The Heart of Glory,” the images make no sense to them because he’s interpreting them through different processes. Thus, when Geordi starts wearing ocular implants in Star Trek: First Contact, effectively gaining a new set of eyes, he stops wearing the VISOR.

The technological advancements of Geordi’s VISOR and implants underscore a point made by the second most pronounced use of glasses in Star Trek, the pair that Bones gives Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The glasses are McCoy’s way of ribbing Jim about his advancing age (a topic they’ll revisit in each of the next four movies). It’s not just that Kirk is old and his eyesight is failing; it’s also that they are an antique, a relic of the past, just like the Captain-turned-Admiral himself. In fact, Bones even states that he usually prescribes something called Retinax V for vision loss.

Between the reference to Retinax V and the gift, McCoy highlights a fact about the 24th Century and beyond: people don’t need glasses. Of course, Trek has always tried to be forward-looking, finding a balance between celebrating scientific achievements and not erasing different abilities or modes of expression. As Stephanie Roehler wrote for StarTrek.com, Geordi keeps his VISOR and implants (and Picard stays bald) because “accommodations, function, and acceptance are prized over being more ‘normal.’”

An Intentional Look

Which brings us back to Nahla Ake’s decision to strap on a pair of spectacles. She obviously puts them on to serve a purpose, getting a better look at the screen. And she seems to treat them like any other piece of ship’s equipment, as demonstrated by the way she hands them to her XO Lura Thok (Gina Yashere) before dispensing orders.

Thus, her decision to wear glasses isn’t a mere fashion choice. Rather, it’s a strategic choice, part of the mentality that makes her a captain and a teacher. Nahla Ake is part Lanthanite, a new species introduced with Pelia in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. While we still don’t know much about Lanthanites, we do know this: they live for a very long time and they develop attachments to the chotchkes they collect. Sometimes, these collections can help out in a jam, as when Pelia had to run landline phones throughout the Enterprise in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” from season 3. But usually, Lanthanites collect things to remember the past, to keep record of the connections they make to people who have come in gone in their long lifetimes.

When Nahla Ake puts on a pair of glasses, she’s making a connection to the past. She’s grounding herself in some long gone moment before making a decision like the orders she gives. That connection to the past is particularly important when one remembers that Starfleet Academy takes place after the final seasons of Discovery, in the 32nd century. The connection she made may very well go all the way back to before The Original Series, possibly even Enterprise.

We can read two things from Nahla Ake’s decision to wear glasses. One, that she cares about people. Presumably, she keeps the glasses because they remind her of someone from the past, someone now long since expired. The fact that she, a person who lives so long and forms so many relationships would prioritize a single person, tells us that she’s not going to be one who too quickly puts the needs of the many before the needs of the few.

Second, the decision tells us that she trusts what she knows. She’s certainly not a luddite and will make use of modern technology. She’s the captain of a 32nd century starship, after all. But she clearly has faith in a simple pair of eyeglasses that she doesn’t extend to a VISOR or ocular implants. This tells us that she’s not the type of captain who will go chasing after the latest fad. She makes her decisions slowly and thoughtfully.

The Captain’s Style

These two qualities of Nahla Ake matter precisely because there are so many questions around Starfleet Academy. Trek has never done teen drama before and there are legitimate concerns about melding a genre known for big emotions and bad decisions with a franchise that prioritizes reason and professionalism.

It’s still too early to say if Starfleet Academy will work as a Star Trek show, but when Nahla Ake puts on her glasses, we can plainly see she’s the right type of captain.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres on Paramount+ on January 15, 2026.

The post Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s Captain Wears Glasses and That Matters appeared first on Den of Geek.

Professor Charles Xavier is back! The third teaser for Avengers: Doomsday shows Patrick Stewart in his Professor X digs once again, sitting in the Xavier Mansion alongside his old frenemy Magneto, once again portrayed by Ian McKellan. While the teaser boasts the return of the cast of the 2000s X-Men movies, including James Marsden as […]

The post X-Men: The On-Screen Deaths of Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Even before the first episode has released, the promotional material for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has been generating a lot of buzz. There’s been talk about Paul Giamatti getting to indulge his inner-Trekkie while chewing scenery, whether CW-style teen drama belongs in Star Trek, and about still not giving us Star Trek: Legacy. But there’s one part of the early Starfleet Academy footage we’ve seen that deserves more attention: the fact that Captain Nahla Ake of the USS Athena, chancellor of Starfleet Academy, wears glasses.

In the first scene released from the show, Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) deals with a sudden threat in classic Star Trek fashion, getting information from her bridge crew. To take a better look at a monitor, Ake pulls on a pair of peepers. That’s a surprising choice, one that tells us everything we need to know about this new leader.

Seeing the Future

Eyeglasses may be common in our world, but they rarely show up in Trek. There are two famous examples of people with eyewear in the Star Trek franchise. One, of course, is Geordi LaForge, who wore a VISOR (Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement) across all seven seasons ofStar Trek: The Next Generation.

But those weren’t glasses. They fed Geordi’s brain different types of sensory impulses, which were similar to those of eyesight, but functioned differently. Not only did they pick up things that human eyes could not, such as UV light, but the signals produced images that made no sense to sighted people. When Picard looks through Geordi’s VISOR in season 1’s “The Heart of Glory,” the images make no sense to them because he’s interpreting them through different processes. Thus, when Geordi starts wearing ocular implants in Star Trek: First Contact, effectively gaining a new set of eyes, he stops wearing the VISOR.

The technological advancements of Geordi’s VISOR and implants underscore a point made by the second most pronounced use of glasses in Star Trek, the pair that Bones gives Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The glasses are McCoy’s way of ribbing Jim about his advancing age (a topic they’ll revisit in each of the next four movies). It’s not just that Kirk is old and his eyesight is failing; it’s also that they are an antique, a relic of the past, just like the Captain-turned-Admiral himself. In fact, Bones even states that he usually prescribes something called Retinax V for vision loss.

Between the reference to Retinax V and the gift, McCoy highlights a fact about the 24th Century and beyond: people don’t need glasses. Of course, Trek has always tried to be forward-looking, finding a balance between celebrating scientific achievements and not erasing different abilities or modes of expression. As Stephanie Roehler wrote for StarTrek.com, Geordi keeps his VISOR and implants (and Picard stays bald) because “accommodations, function, and acceptance are prized over being more ‘normal.’”

An Intentional Look

Which brings us back to Nahla Ake’s decision to strap on a pair of spectacles. She obviously puts them on to serve a purpose, getting a better look at the screen. And she seems to treat them like any other piece of ship’s equipment, as demonstrated by the way she hands them to her XO Lura Thok (Gina Yashere) before dispensing orders.

Thus, her decision to wear glasses isn’t a mere fashion choice. Rather, it’s a strategic choice, part of the mentality that makes her a captain and a teacher. Nahla Ake is part Lanthanite, a new species introduced with Pelia in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. While we still don’t know much about Lanthanites, we do know this: they live for a very long time and they develop attachments to the chotchkes they collect. Sometimes, these collections can help out in a jam, as when Pelia had to run landline phones throughout the Enterprise in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” from season 3. But usually, Lanthanites collect things to remember the past, to keep record of the connections they make to people who have come in gone in their long lifetimes.

When Nahla Ake puts on a pair of glasses, she’s making a connection to the past. She’s grounding herself in some long gone moment before making a decision like the orders she gives. That connection to the past is particularly important when one remembers that Starfleet Academy takes place after the final seasons of Discovery, in the 32nd century. The connection she made may very well go all the way back to before The Original Series, possibly even Enterprise.

We can read two things from Nahla Ake’s decision to wear glasses. One, that she cares about people. Presumably, she keeps the glasses because they remind her of someone from the past, someone now long since expired. The fact that she, a person who lives so long and forms so many relationships would prioritize a single person, tells us that she’s not going to be one who too quickly puts the needs of the many before the needs of the few.

Second, the decision tells us that she trusts what she knows. She’s certainly not a luddite and will make use of modern technology. She’s the captain of a 32nd century starship, after all. But she clearly has faith in a simple pair of eyeglasses that she doesn’t extend to a VISOR or ocular implants. This tells us that she’s not the type of captain who will go chasing after the latest fad. She makes her decisions slowly and thoughtfully.

The Captain’s Style

These two qualities of Nahla Ake matter precisely because there are so many questions around Starfleet Academy. Trek has never done teen drama before and there are legitimate concerns about melding a genre known for big emotions and bad decisions with a franchise that prioritizes reason and professionalism.

It’s still too early to say if Starfleet Academy will work as a Star Trek show, but when Nahla Ake puts on her glasses, we can plainly see she’s the right type of captain.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres on Paramount+ on January 15, 2026.

The post Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s Captain Wears Glasses and That Matters appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for The Traitors season 4 episodes 1-3. The Traitors is back with another season packed with stars, lies, and strategy. And this time, it has introduced a secret traitor twist. It’s a clever idea in theory, but one that immediately fell apart thanks to one fatal flaw. For those uninitiated, The […]

The post Why The Traitors Season 4 Secret Twist Didn’t Work appeared first on Den of Geek.

Even before the first episode has released, the promotional material for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has been generating a lot of buzz. There’s been talk about Paul Giamatti getting to indulge his inner-Trekkie while chewing scenery, whether CW-style teen drama belongs in Star Trek, and about still not giving us Star Trek: Legacy. But there’s one part of the early Starfleet Academy footage we’ve seen that deserves more attention: the fact that Captain Nahla Ake of the USS Athena, chancellor of Starfleet Academy, wears glasses.

In the first scene released from the show, Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) deals with a sudden threat in classic Star Trek fashion, getting information from her bridge crew. To take a better look at a monitor, Ake pulls on a pair of peepers. That’s a surprising choice, one that tells us everything we need to know about this new leader.

Seeing the Future

Eyeglasses may be common in our world, but they rarely show up in Trek. There are two famous examples of people with eyewear in the Star Trek franchise. One, of course, is Geordi LaForge, who wore a VISOR (Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement) across all seven seasons ofStar Trek: The Next Generation.

But those weren’t glasses. They fed Geordi’s brain different types of sensory impulses, which were similar to those of eyesight, but functioned differently. Not only did they pick up things that human eyes could not, such as UV light, but the signals produced images that made no sense to sighted people. When Picard looks through Geordi’s VISOR in season 1’s “The Heart of Glory,” the images make no sense to them because he’s interpreting them through different processes. Thus, when Geordi starts wearing ocular implants in Star Trek: First Contact, effectively gaining a new set of eyes, he stops wearing the VISOR.

The technological advancements of Geordi’s VISOR and implants underscore a point made by the second most pronounced use of glasses in Star Trek, the pair that Bones gives Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The glasses are McCoy’s way of ribbing Jim about his advancing age (a topic they’ll revisit in each of the next four movies). It’s not just that Kirk is old and his eyesight is failing; it’s also that they are an antique, a relic of the past, just like the Captain-turned-Admiral himself. In fact, Bones even states that he usually prescribes something called Retinax V for vision loss.

Between the reference to Retinax V and the gift, McCoy highlights a fact about the 24th Century and beyond: people don’t need glasses. Of course, Trek has always tried to be forward-looking, finding a balance between celebrating scientific achievements and not erasing different abilities or modes of expression. As Stephanie Roehler wrote for StarTrek.com, Geordi keeps his VISOR and implants (and Picard stays bald) because “accommodations, function, and acceptance are prized over being more ‘normal.’”

An Intentional Look

Which brings us back to Nahla Ake’s decision to strap on a pair of spectacles. She obviously puts them on to serve a purpose, getting a better look at the screen. And she seems to treat them like any other piece of ship’s equipment, as demonstrated by the way she hands them to her XO Lura Thok (Gina Yashere) before dispensing orders.

Thus, her decision to wear glasses isn’t a mere fashion choice. Rather, it’s a strategic choice, part of the mentality that makes her a captain and a teacher. Nahla Ake is part Lanthanite, a new species introduced with Pelia in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. While we still don’t know much about Lanthanites, we do know this: they live for a very long time and they develop attachments to the chotchkes they collect. Sometimes, these collections can help out in a jam, as when Pelia had to run landline phones throughout the Enterprise in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” from season 3. But usually, Lanthanites collect things to remember the past, to keep record of the connections they make to people who have come in gone in their long lifetimes.

When Nahla Ake puts on a pair of glasses, she’s making a connection to the past. She’s grounding herself in some long gone moment before making a decision like the orders she gives. That connection to the past is particularly important when one remembers that Starfleet Academy takes place after the final seasons of Discovery, in the 32nd century. The connection she made may very well go all the way back to before The Original Series, possibly even Enterprise.

We can read two things from Nahla Ake’s decision to wear glasses. One, that she cares about people. Presumably, she keeps the glasses because they remind her of someone from the past, someone now long since expired. The fact that she, a person who lives so long and forms so many relationships would prioritize a single person, tells us that she’s not going to be one who too quickly puts the needs of the many before the needs of the few.

Second, the decision tells us that she trusts what she knows. She’s certainly not a luddite and will make use of modern technology. She’s the captain of a 32nd century starship, after all. But she clearly has faith in a simple pair of eyeglasses that she doesn’t extend to a VISOR or ocular implants. This tells us that she’s not the type of captain who will go chasing after the latest fad. She makes her decisions slowly and thoughtfully.

The Captain’s Style

These two qualities of Nahla Ake matter precisely because there are so many questions around Starfleet Academy. Trek has never done teen drama before and there are legitimate concerns about melding a genre known for big emotions and bad decisions with a franchise that prioritizes reason and professionalism.

It’s still too early to say if Starfleet Academy will work as a Star Trek show, but when Nahla Ake puts on her glasses, we can plainly see she’s the right type of captain.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres on Paramount+ on January 15, 2026.

The post Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s Captain Wears Glasses and That Matters appeared first on Den of Geek.

The following contains spoilers for A Thousand Blows season 2. Hulu series A Thousand Blows was one of last year’s most intriguing offerings, a Victorian-set period drama about bare-knuckle boxing and the vaguely criminal underworld at the heart of London’s gritty East End. From the mind of Steven Knight, the man behind such shows like […]

The post Breaking Down the Big Changes in A Thousand Blows Season 2 appeared first on Den of Geek.

Even before the first episode has released, the promotional material for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has been generating a lot of buzz. There’s been talk about Paul Giamatti getting to indulge his inner-Trekkie while chewing scenery, whether CW-style teen drama belongs in Star Trek, and about still not giving us Star Trek: Legacy. But there’s one part of the early Starfleet Academy footage we’ve seen that deserves more attention: the fact that Captain Nahla Ake of the USS Athena, chancellor of Starfleet Academy, wears glasses.

In the first scene released from the show, Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) deals with a sudden threat in classic Star Trek fashion, getting information from her bridge crew. To take a better look at a monitor, Ake pulls on a pair of peepers. That’s a surprising choice, one that tells us everything we need to know about this new leader.

Seeing the Future

Eyeglasses may be common in our world, but they rarely show up in Trek. There are two famous examples of people with eyewear in the Star Trek franchise. One, of course, is Geordi LaForge, who wore a VISOR (Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement) across all seven seasons ofStar Trek: The Next Generation.

But those weren’t glasses. They fed Geordi’s brain different types of sensory impulses, which were similar to those of eyesight, but functioned differently. Not only did they pick up things that human eyes could not, such as UV light, but the signals produced images that made no sense to sighted people. When Picard looks through Geordi’s VISOR in season 1’s “The Heart of Glory,” the images make no sense to them because he’s interpreting them through different processes. Thus, when Geordi starts wearing ocular implants in Star Trek: First Contact, effectively gaining a new set of eyes, he stops wearing the VISOR.

The technological advancements of Geordi’s VISOR and implants underscore a point made by the second most pronounced use of glasses in Star Trek, the pair that Bones gives Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The glasses are McCoy’s way of ribbing Jim about his advancing age (a topic they’ll revisit in each of the next four movies). It’s not just that Kirk is old and his eyesight is failing; it’s also that they are an antique, a relic of the past, just like the Captain-turned-Admiral himself. In fact, Bones even states that he usually prescribes something called Retinax V for vision loss.

Between the reference to Retinax V and the gift, McCoy highlights a fact about the 24th Century and beyond: people don’t need glasses. Of course, Trek has always tried to be forward-looking, finding a balance between celebrating scientific achievements and not erasing different abilities or modes of expression. As Stephanie Roehler wrote for StarTrek.com, Geordi keeps his VISOR and implants (and Picard stays bald) because “accommodations, function, and acceptance are prized over being more ‘normal.’”

An Intentional Look

Which brings us back to Nahla Ake’s decision to strap on a pair of spectacles. She obviously puts them on to serve a purpose, getting a better look at the screen. And she seems to treat them like any other piece of ship’s equipment, as demonstrated by the way she hands them to her XO Lura Thok (Gina Yashere) before dispensing orders.

Thus, her decision to wear glasses isn’t a mere fashion choice. Rather, it’s a strategic choice, part of the mentality that makes her a captain and a teacher. Nahla Ake is part Lanthanite, a new species introduced with Pelia in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. While we still don’t know much about Lanthanites, we do know this: they live for a very long time and they develop attachments to the chotchkes they collect. Sometimes, these collections can help out in a jam, as when Pelia had to run landline phones throughout the Enterprise in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” from season 3. But usually, Lanthanites collect things to remember the past, to keep record of the connections they make to people who have come in gone in their long lifetimes.

When Nahla Ake puts on a pair of glasses, she’s making a connection to the past. She’s grounding herself in some long gone moment before making a decision like the orders she gives. That connection to the past is particularly important when one remembers that Starfleet Academy takes place after the final seasons of Discovery, in the 32nd century. The connection she made may very well go all the way back to before The Original Series, possibly even Enterprise.

We can read two things from Nahla Ake’s decision to wear glasses. One, that she cares about people. Presumably, she keeps the glasses because they remind her of someone from the past, someone now long since expired. The fact that she, a person who lives so long and forms so many relationships would prioritize a single person, tells us that she’s not going to be one who too quickly puts the needs of the many before the needs of the few.

Second, the decision tells us that she trusts what she knows. She’s certainly not a luddite and will make use of modern technology. She’s the captain of a 32nd century starship, after all. But she clearly has faith in a simple pair of eyeglasses that she doesn’t extend to a VISOR or ocular implants. This tells us that she’s not the type of captain who will go chasing after the latest fad. She makes her decisions slowly and thoughtfully.

The Captain’s Style

These two qualities of Nahla Ake matter precisely because there are so many questions around Starfleet Academy. Trek has never done teen drama before and there are legitimate concerns about melding a genre known for big emotions and bad decisions with a franchise that prioritizes reason and professionalism.

It’s still too early to say if Starfleet Academy will work as a Star Trek show, but when Nahla Ake puts on her glasses, we can plainly see she’s the right type of captain.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres on Paramount+ on January 15, 2026.

The post Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s Captain Wears Glasses and That Matters appeared first on Den of Geek.

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

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

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

Spoken language has no such luxury. Besides the nonverbal cues that decorate conversations with emphasis and emotional context, there are also verbal cues and vocal behaviors that modulate conversation in nuanced ways: how something is said, not what. Whether rapid-fire, low-pitched, or high-decibel, whether sarcastic, stilted, or sighing, our spoken language conveys much more than the written word could ever muster. So when it comes to voice interfaces—the machines we conduct spoken conversations with—we face exciting challenges as designers and content strategists.

Voice Interactions

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

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

These three categories—which I call transactional, informational, and prosocial—also characterize essentially every voice interaction: a single conversation from beginning to end that realizes some outcome for the user, starting with the voice interface’s first greeting and ending with the user exiting the interface. Note here that a conversation in our human sense—a chat between people that leads to some result and lasts an arbitrary length of time—could encompass multiple transactional, informational, and prosocial voice interactions in succession. In other words, a voice interaction is a conversation, but a conversation is not necessarily a single voice interaction.

Purely prosocial conversations are more gimmicky than captivating in most voice interfaces, because machines don’t yet have the capacity to really want to know how we’re doing and to do the sort of glad-handing humans crave. There’s also ongoing debate as to whether users actually prefer the sort of organic human conversation that begins with a prosocial voice interaction and shifts seamlessly into other types. In fact, in Voice User Interface Design, Michael Cohen, James Giangola, and Jennifer Balogh recommend sticking to users’ expectations by mimicking how they interact with other voice interfaces rather than trying too hard to be human—potentially alienating them in the process ().

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

Transactional voice interactions

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

Alison: Hey, how’s it going?

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

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

Burhan: Sure, what size?

Alison: Large.

Burhan: Anything else?

Alison: No thanks, that’s it.

Burhan: Something to drink?

Alison: I’ll have a bottle of Coke.

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

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

Informational voice interactions

Meanwhile, some conversations are primarily about obtaining information. Though Alison might visit Crust Deluxe with the sole purpose of placing an order, she might not actually want to walk out with a pizza at all. She might be just as interested in whether they serve halal or kosher dishes, gluten-free options, or something else. Here, though we again have a prosocial mini-conversation at the beginning to establish politeness, we’re after much more.

Alison: Hey, how’s it going?

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

Alison: Can I ask a few questions?

Burhan: Of course! Go right ahead.

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

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

Alison: What about gluten-free pizzas?

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

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

Burhan: Anytime, come back soon!

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

Voice Interfaces

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

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

Interactive voice response (IVR) systems

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

IVR systems allowed organizations to reduce their reliance on call centers but soon became notorious for their clunkiness. Commonplace in the corporate world, these systems were primarily designed as metaphorical switchboards to guide customers to a real phone agent (“Say Reservations to book a flight or check an itinerary”); chances are you will enter a conversation with one when you call an airline or hotel conglomerate. Despite their functional issues and users’ frustration with their inability to speak to an actual human right away, IVR systems proliferated in the early 1990s across a variety of industries (, PDF).

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

Screen readers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voice assistants

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

Before the earliest IVR systems found success in the enterprise, Apple published a demonstration video in 1987 depicting the Knowledge Navigator, a voice assistant that could transcribe spoken words and recognize human speech to a great degree of accuracy. Then, in 2001, Tim Berners-Lee and others formulated their vision for a Semantic Web “agent” that would perform typical errands like “checking calendars, making appointments, and finding locations” (, behind paywall). It wasn’t until 2011 that Apple’s Siri finally entered the picture, making voice assistants a tangible reality for consumers.

Thanks to the plethora of voice assistants available today, there is considerable variation in how programmable and customizable certain voice assistants are over others (Fig 1.1). At one extreme, everything except vendor-provided features is locked down; for example, at the time of their release, the core functionality of Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana couldn’t be extended beyond their existing capabilities. Even today, it isn’t possible to program Siri to perform arbitrary functions, because there’s no means by which developers can interact with Siri at a low level, apart from predefined categories of tasks like sending messages, hailing rideshares, making restaurant reservations, and certain others.

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

As corporations like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google continue to stake their territory, they’re also selling and open-sourcing an unprecedented array of tools and frameworks for designers and developers that aim to make building voice interfaces as easy as possible, even without code.

Often by necessity, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa tend to be monochannel—they’re tightly coupled to a device and can’t be accessed on a computer or smartphone instead. By contrast, many development platforms like Google’s Dialogflow have introduced omnichannel capabilities so users can build a single conversational interface that then manifests as a voice interface, textual chatbot, and IVR system upon deployment. I don’t prescribe any specific implementation approaches in this design-focused book, but in Chapter 4 we’ll get into some of the implications these variables might have on the way you build out your design artifacts.

Voice Content

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

Our world is replete with voice content in various forms: screen readers reciting website content, voice assistants rattling off a weather forecast, and automated phone hotline responses governed by IVR systems. In this book, we’re most concerned with content delivered auditorily—not as an option, but as a necessity.

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

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

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

I’d update Dash’s definition of microcontent to include all examples of bite-sized content that go well beyond written communiqués. After all, today we encounter microcontent in interfaces where a small snippet of copy is displayed alone, unmoored from the browser, like a textbot confirmation of a restaurant reservation. Microcontent offers the best opportunity to gauge how your content can be stretched to the very edges of its capabilities, informing delivery channels both established and novel.

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

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

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

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

Flash, Photoshop, and responsive design

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

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

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

A new way to design

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

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


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

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

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

.logo {
  @include colSpan(6);
}

.search {
  @include colSpan(3);
}

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

Media queries

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

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

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

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

  
1 of 7
  
2 of 7
  
3 of 7



  
4 of 7
  
5 of 7
  
6 of 7



  
7 of 7

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

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

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

Container queries: our savior or a false dawn?

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

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

In other words, responsive components to replace responsive layouts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CSS is changing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intrinsic layouts 

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

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

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

—Jen Simmons, “Designing Intrinsic Layouts”

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

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

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

Another 2010 moment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content first 

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

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

Instead of old markup hacks like this—

  First line of text with different styling...

—we can target content based on where it appears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These variables can be used as values—

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

—or as properties.

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

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

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

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

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

Fixed and fluid 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Situation first

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

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

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

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

Responsible design 

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

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

Chris Ashton

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

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

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

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

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

So how can we put users in control?

The return of media queries 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expect the unexpected

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

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

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

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

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