Category: Blog

I am imaginative. What I do involves science. It is a puzzle. I prefer to let it be done through me rather than through me.

I am imaginative. Not all aspiring artists approve of this tag. Not everyone see themselves in this manner. Some innovative persons incorporate technology into their work. That is the way they are, and I take that into account. Perhaps I also have a little bit of fear for them. However, my method is different; my being is unique.

It distracts you to apologize and qualify in progress. That’s what my mind does to destroy me. I’ll leave it alone for today. I may regret and then qualify. after I’ve said what I should have. which is difficult enough.

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

Sometimes it does. Maybe what I need to make arrives right away. I’ve learned to avoid saying it right away because people think you don’t work hard enough when you know it’s the best idea when you’re on the go and you know it’s the best idea.

Sometimes I just work until the thought strikes me. It occasionally arrives right away, but I don’t remind people for three weeks. Sometimes I get so excited about an thought that just came along that I blurt it out and didn’t stop myself. like a child who discovered a medal in one of his Cracker Jacks. Often I get away with this. Yes, that is the best plan, but sometimes another people disagree. The majority of the time, they don’t, and I regret that joy has faded.

Joy should be saved for the meeting, where it will matter. not the informal gathering that two different gatherings precede that appointment. Nothing understands why we hold these gatherings. We keep saying we’re getting rid of them, but we keep discovering new ways to get them. They occasionally yet are good. But occasionally they detract from the actual job. Depending on what you do and where you do it, the ratio between when conferences are valuable and when they are a sad distraction vary. And who you are and how you go about doing it. I’ll go over it once more. I am imaginative. That is the design.

Sometimes, despite many hours of diligent effort, someone is hardly useful. Often I have to accept that and move on to the next task.

Don’t inquire about the procedure. I am imaginative.

I am imaginative. I have no control over my goals. And I have no control over my best tips.

I can nail ahead, fill in the blanks, or use images or information, which occasionally works. I can go for a move, which occasionally works. There is a Eureka that has nothing to do with sizzling fuel and flowing pots. I may be making dinner. I frequently know what to do when I awaken. The idea that may have saved me disappears almost as frequently as I become aware and part of the world once more in a senseless wind of oblivion. For inventiveness, in my opinion, originates in that other world. the one that we enter in ambitions and, possibly, before and after death. I’m not a writer, so that’s up to authors to think about. I am imaginative. Theologians are encouraged to build massive armies in their artistic globe, which they insist is real. That is yet another diversion, though. And a sad one. Possibly on a much bigger issue than whether or not I am creative. But that’s not how I came around, though.

Often the outcome is evasion. also suffering. Do you know the actor who is tortured by the cliché? Even when the artist is trying to write a soft drink song, a call in a worn-out comedy, or a budget ask, that word is correct.

Some individuals who detest the idea of being called artistic perhaps been closeted artists, but that’s between them and their gods. No offence here, that’s meant. Your assertions are also accurate. My needs are own, though.

Artists acknowledge their work.

Disadvantages are aware of cons, just like queers are aware of queers, just like real rappers are aware of actual rappers are aware of cons. People have a lot of regard for designers. We respect, follow, and nearly deify the excellent ones. Of course, it is dreadful to revere any person. We’ve been given a warning. We are more knowledgeable. We are aware of this. Because they are clay, like us, they squabble, they are depressed, they regret making the most important decisions, they are weak and hungry, they can be cruel, and they can be as ridiculous as we can. But. But. However, they produce this incredible point. They give birth to something that may not occur before them and couldn’t exist without. They are the inspirations ‘ parents. And since it’s only lying there, I suppose I should add that they are the inventor’s parents. Ba ho backside! That’s done, I suppose. Continue.

Because we compare our personal small accomplishments to those of the great ones, designers denigrate them. Wonderful video I‘m not Miyazaki, so I‘m not. That is glory right then. That is glory straight out of the Bible. I created this drained small issue. It essentially fell off the back of the pumpkin truck. The carrots weren’t actually new, either.

Artists is aware that they are at best Salieri. Yet Mozart’s original artists believe that.

I am imaginative. I haven’t worked in advertising in 30 years, but my former artistic managers have been the ones who make my decisions. They are correct in doing so. When it really counts, my brain goes flat because I am too lazy and simplistic. No medication is available to treat artistic function.

I am imaginative. Every project I create has a goal that makes Indiana Jones appear to be a retiree snoring in a balcony head. The more I pursue creativity, the faster I can finish my work, and the longer I brood and circle and gaze blankly before I can finish that work.

I can move ten times more quickly than those who aren’t innovative, those who have just been creative for a short while, and those who have just had a short time of creative work. Only that I spend twice as long as they do putting the job off before I work ten times as quickly as they do. When I put my mind to it, I am so confident in my ability to do a wonderful career. I have an addiction to the delay jump. The climb also terrifies me.

I am hardly a painter.

I am imaginative. never a performer. Though as a child, I had a dream that I would one day become that. Some of us fear and criticize our talents because we are not Michelangelos and Warhols. That is narcissism, but at least we aren’t in elections.

I am imaginative. Despite my belief in reason and science, my decisions are based on my own senses. and accept both the successes and the calamities that come with them.

I am imaginative. Every term I’ve said these may irritate another artists who have different viewpoints. Ask a question to two designers, and you’ll find three responses. Our dispute, our interest in it, and our responsibility to our own truth, at least in my opinion, are the proof that we are creative, no matter how we does think about it.

I am imaginative. I lament my lack of taste in almost all of the areas of human understanding that I know very little about. And I put my taste before all other things in the areas that are most dear to my soul, or perhaps more precisely, to my passions. Without my passions, I had probably have to spend time staring living in the eye, which almost none of us can do for very long. No seriously. No truly. Because so much in existence is intolerable if you really look at it.

I am imaginative. I think that when I’m gone, some of the good parts of me will stay in the head of at least one additional person, just like a family does.

Working frees me from worrying about my job.

I am imaginative. I worry that my little product will disappear unexpectedly.

I am imaginative. I spend way too much time making the next thing, given that almost nothing I create did achieve the level of brilliance I conceive of.

I am imaginative. I think there is the greatest secret in the process. I think I have to consider it so strongly that I actually made the foolish decision to publish an essay I wrote without having to go through or edit. I swear I didn’t accomplish this frequently. But I did it right away because I was even more frightened of forgetting what I was saying because I was afraid of you seeing through my sad gestures toward the beautiful.

There. I believe I said it correctly.

Humility, a writer’s most important quality, has a great circle to it. What about sincerity, an business manager’s important value? Or a doctor’s? Or a teacher’s? They all have fantastic sounds. When humility is our guiding light, the course is usually available for fulfillment, development, relation, and commitment. We’ll discuss why in this section.

That said, this is a guide for developers, and to that conclusion, I’d like to begin with a story—well, a voyage, actually. Along the way, I’m going to render myself a little vulnerable. I call it:

The Absurd Pate of Justin: The Tale of Justin

When I was coming out of arts school, a long-haired, goateed novice, write was a known quantity to me, design on the web, however, was riddled with complexities to understand and learn, a problem to be solved. Although I had formal training in typography, layout, and creative design, how could these fundamental skills be applied to a developing electric landscape was what piqued my interest. This theme may eventually form the rest of my job.

But I drained HTML and JavaScript publications until the early hours of the morning and self-taught myself how to code during my freshman year rather than student and go into write like many of my friends. I wanted—nay, needed—to better understand the underlying relevance of what my design decisions may think when rendered in a website.

The so-called” Wild West” of website design existed in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Manufacturers at the time were all figuring out how to use layout and visual connection to the online environment. What regulations were in place? How may we break them and also engage, entertain, and present information? How was my values, which include modesty, respect, and connection, coincide with that on a more general level? I was eager to find out.

Even though I’m referring to a different time, those are amazing factors between non-career relationships and the world of layout. What are your main passions, or ideals, that elevate medium? The main elements are all the same, basically the same as what we previously discussed earlier on the immediate parallels between what fulfills you, independent of the visible or online domains.

First within tables, animated GIFs, Flash, then with Web Standards, divs, and CSS, there was personality, raw unbridled creativity, and unique means of presentment that often defied any semblance of a visible grid. Splash screens and “browser requirement” pages aplenty. Usability and accessibility were typically victims of such a creation, but such paramount facets of any digital design were largely (and, in hindsight, unfairly) disregarded at the expense of experimentation.

For instance, this iteration of my personal portfolio site (” the pseudoroom” ) from that time was experimental if not a little overt with regard to how the idea of a living sketchbook was conveyed visually. Very skeuomorphic. On this one, we would first sketch and then pass a Photoshop file back and forth to trick things out and play with various user interactions. I co-founded the creative project organizing app Milanote and my dear friend, fellow designer Marc Clancy. Then, I’d break it down and code it into a digital layout.

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

GUI Galaxy was a design, pixel art, and Mac-centric news portal that my friends and I conceptualized, designed, developed, and deployed around the same time.

Design news portals were incredibly popular at the time, and they now accept tweet-sized, small-format excerpts from relevant news from the categories I previously covered. If you took Twitter, curated it to a few categories, and wrapped it in a custom-branded experience, you’d have a design news portal from the late 90s / early 2000s.

We had evolved into a bandwidth-sensitive, award-winning, much more accessibility-conscious website using web standards. Still ripe with experimentation, yet more mindful of equitable engagement. There are a few content panes here, with both Mac-focused news and general news (tech, design ) to be seen. We also offered many of the custom downloads I cited before as present on my folio site but branded and themed to GUI Galaxy.

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

Collaboration and connection transcend medium in their impact, immensely fulfilling me as a designer.

Why am I taking you on this journey of design memory lane, now? Two reasons.

First, there’s a reason for the nostalgia for that design era ( the” Wild West” era, as I put it ): the inherent exploration, personality, and creativity that dominated many design portals and personal portfolio websites. Ultra-finely detailed pixel art UI, custom illustration, bespoke vector graphics, all underpinned by a strong design community.

The web design industry has experienced a period of stagnation in recent years. I suspect there’s a strong chance you’ve seen a site whose structure looks something like this: a hero image / banner with text overlaid, perhaps with a lovely rotating carousel of images ( laying the snark on heavy there ), a call to action, and three columns of sub-content directly beneath. Perhaps an icon library is used with selections that only vaguely relate to their respective content is used.

Design, as it’s applied to the digital landscape, is in dire need of thoughtful layout, typography, and visual engagement that goes hand-in-hand with all the modern considerations we now know are paramount: usability. accessibility. Load times and bandwidth- sensitive content delivery. A user-friendly presentation that connects with people wherever they are. We must be mindful of, and respectful toward, those concerns—but not at the expense of creativity of visual communication or via replicating cookie-cutter layouts.

Pixel Issues

Websites during this period were often designed and built on Macs whose OS and desktops looked something like this. Although Mac OS 7.5 is available, 8 and 9 are not very different.

How could any single icon, at any given moment, stand out and grab my attention? That is a fascinating question. In this example, the user’s desktop is tidy, but think of a more realistic example with icon pandemonium. Or, let’s say an icon was a part of a larger system grouping ( fonts, extensions, control panels ): how did it maintain cohesion within a group as well?

These were 32 x 32 pixel creations, utilizing a 256-color palette, designed pixel-by-pixel as mini mosaics. Under such absurd constraints, this seemed to me to be the embodiment of digital visual communication. And often, ridiculous restrictions can yield the purification of concept and theme.

So I started doing my homework and conducting research. I was a student of this new medium, hungry to dissect, process, discover, and make it my own.

I wanted to see how I could use that 256-color palette to push the boundaries of a 32×32 pixel grid, expanding upon the idea of exploration. Those ridiculous constraints forced a clarity of concept and presentation that I found incredibly appealing. I was thrust into the digital gauntlet because of it. And so, in my dorm room into the wee hours of the morning, I toiled away, bringing conceptual sketches into mini mosaic fruition.

These are some of my creations that I made using ResEdit, the only program I had at the time, to create icons. ResEdit was a clunky, built-in Mac OS utility not really made for exactly what we were using it for. Research is at the center of all of this endeavor. Challenge. Problem-solving Again, these core connection-based values are agnostic of medium.

There’s one more design portal I want to talk about, which also serves as the second reason for my story to bring this all together.

This is the Kaliber 1000, or K10k, short for. K10k was founded in 1998 by Michael Schmidt and Toke Nygaard, and was the design news portal on the web during this period. It was the ideal setting for me, my friend, with its pixel art-filled presentation, meticulous attention to detail, and many of the site’s more well-known designers who were invited to be news authors. With respect where respect is due, GUI Galaxy’s concept was inspired by what these folks were doing.

For my part, the combination of my web design work and pixel art exploration began to get me some notoriety in the design scene. K10k eventually figured out that I was one of their very limited group of news writers who could contribute content to the website.

Amongst my personal work and side projects —and now with this inclusion—in the design community, this put me on the map. My design work has also begun to appear on other design news portals, as well as in publications abroad and domestically as well as in various printed collections. With that degree of success while in my early twenties, something else happened:

I actually changed into a massive asshole in about a year of high school, not less. The press and the praise became what fulfilled me, and they went straight to my head. They inflated my ego. I actually felt somewhat superior to my fellow designers.

The casualties? My design stagnated. My evolution has stagnated, as is my evolution.

I felt so supremely confident in my abilities that I effectively stopped researching and discovering. When I used to lead myself to iterate through concepts or sketches, I leaped right into Photoshop. I drew my inspiration from the smallest of sources ( and with blinders on ). Any criticism of my work from my fellow students was frequently vehemently dissented. The most tragic loss: I had lost touch with my values.

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

Although it was something I initially rejected, I eventually had a chance to reflect on it in depth. I was soon able to accept, and process, and course correct. Although the re-awakening was necessary, the realization let me down. I let go of the “reward” of adulation and re-centered upon what stoked the fire for me in art school. Most importantly, I returned to my fundamental values.

Always Students

Following that temporary regression, I was able to advance in both my personal and professional design. And I could self-reflect as I got older to facilitate further growth and course correction as needed.

Let’s use the Large Hadron Collider as an example. The LHC was designed” to help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, which concern the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the interrelation between quantum mechanics and general relativity”. Thank you, Wikipedia.

Around fifteen years ago, in one of my earlier professional roles, I designed the interface for the application that generated the LHC’s particle collision diagrams. These diagrams are often regarded as works of art by themselves because they depict what is actually happening inside the Collider during any given particle collision event.

Designing the interface for this application was a fascinating process for me, in that I worked with Fermilab physicists to understand what the application was trying to achieve, but also how the physicists themselves would be using it. In order to accomplish this, this role requires,

I cut my teeth on usability testing, working with the Fermilab team to iterate and improve the interface. To me, their language and the topics they discussed seemed foreign. And by making myself humble and working under the mindset that I was but a student, I made myself available to be a part of their world to generate that vital connection.

I also had my first ethnographic observational experience, where I observed how the physicists used the tool in their own environments, on their own terminals. For example, one takeaway was that due to the level of ambient light-driven contrast within the facility, the data columns ended up using white text on a dark gray background instead of black text-on-white. They were able to focus on their eyes while working during the day while poring over enormous amounts of data. And Fermilab and CERN are government entities with rigorous accessibility standards, so my knowledge in that realm also grew. Another crucial form of connection was the barrier-free design.

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

An evergreen willingness to listen, learn, understand, grow, evolve, and connect yields our best work. I want to pay attention to the words “grow” and “evolve” in that statement in particular. If we are always students of our craft, we are also continually making ourselves available to evolve. Yes, we have years of practical design experience behind us. Or the focused lab sessions from a UX bootcamp. Or the monogrammed portfolio of our work. Or, ultimately, decades of a career behind us.

However, with all that being said, “experience” does not equate to “expert.”

As soon as we close our minds via an inner monologue of’ knowing it all’ or branding ourselves a” #thoughtleader” on social media, the designer we are is our final form. There will never be a designer like us.

I’ve been fascinated by movies since I was a child. I loved the heroes and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I aspired to be an artist. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting activities. Yet my friends and I had movie ideas to make and sky in. But they never went any farther. However, I did end up working in user experience ( UI). Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer research is story. And to get the most out of customer studies, you must tell a compelling story that involves stakeholders, including the product team and decision-makers, and piques their interest in learning more.

Think of your favorite film. It more than likely follows a three-act construction that’s frequently seen in movies: the layout, the conflict, and the resolution. The second act shows what exists now, and it helps you get to know the figures and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two sets the scene for the fight and the activity begins. Here, difficulties grow or get worse. And the solution is the third and final work. This is where the issues are resolved and the figures learn and change. This construction, in my opinion, is also a fantastic way to think about consumer research, and it might be particularly useful for introducing user research to others.

Use story as a framework for conducting analysis

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see studies as being inconsequential. Research is typically one of the first things to go when finances or deadlines are tight. Instead of investing in study, some goods professionals rely on manufacturers or—worse—their personal judgment to make the “right” options for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That might lead to some groups getting in the way, but it’s too easy to overlook the real problems facing users. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. User study improves style. It keeps it on trail, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of problems with your goods and taking corrective actions can help you keep ahead of your competition.

In the three-act structure, each action corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is important to telling the whole story. Let’s take a look at the various functions and how they relate to consumer research.

Act one: layout

The fundamental research comes in handy because the layout is all about understanding the background. Basic research ( also called relational, discovery, or preliminary research ) helps you understand people and identify their problems. Just like in the movies, you’re learning about the difficulties customers face, what options are available, and how those challenges impact them. To do basic research, you may conduct cultural inquiries or journal studies ( or both! ), which may assist you in identifying both challenges and opportunities. It doesn’t need to be a great investment in time or money.

Erika Hall discusses the most effective anthropology, which can be as straightforward as spending 15 hours with a customer and asking them to” Walk me through your morning yesterday.” That’s it. Provide that one ask. Opened up and listen to them for 15 days. Do everything in your power to protect both your objectives and yourself. Bam, you’re doing ethnography”. Hall predicts that “[This ] will definitely prove quite fascinating. In the very unlikely event that you didn’t learn anything new or helpful, carry on with increased confidence in your way”.

This makes sense to me in all its entirety. And I love that this makes consumer research so visible. You don’t need to make a lot of paperwork; you can only attract people and do it! This can offer a wealth of knowledge about your customers, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their life. That’s exactly what work one is all about: understanding where people are coming from.

Maybe Spool talks about the importance of basic research and how it may type the bulk of your research. If you can complement what you’ve heard in the fundamental studies by using any more user data that you can obtain, such as surveys or analytics, or if you can identify areas that need more investigation. Together, all this information creates a clearer picture of the state of things and all its deficiencies. And that’s the start of a gripping tale. It’s the place in the story where you realize that the principal characters—or the people in this case—are facing issues that they need to conquer. This is where you begin to develop compassion for the characters and support their success, much like in films. And finally participants are now doing the same. Their concern may be with their company, which could be losing money because consumers are unable to complete specific tasks. Or probably they do connect with people ‘ problems. In any case, work one serves as your main strategy to pique the interest and interest of the participants.

When partners begin to understand the value of basic research, that is open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making approach. And that can influence product team ‘ focus on improving. This gains everyone—users, the goods, and partners. It’s similar to winning an Oscar for a film; it frequently results in a favorable reception and success for your item. And this can be an opportunity for participants to repeat this process with different products. The secret to this method is storytelling, and knowing how to tell a compelling story is the only way to entice partners to do more research.

This brings us to work two, where you incrementally review a design or idea to see whether it addresses the problems.

Act two: issue

Act two is all about digging deeper into the issues that you identified in operate one. In order to evaluate a potential alternative ( such as a design ), you typically conduct vertical research, such as usability tests, to see if it addresses the problems you identified. The issues may include unfulfilled needs or problems with a circulation or procedure that’s tripping users off. Additional problems will arise in the course of action two of a film. It’s ok that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this work.

Usability tests should generally consist of five participants, according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can usually identify the majority of the issues:” As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the second user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings regularly but hardly learning much new.”

There are parallels with storytelling here too, if you try to tell a story with too many characters, the plot may get lost. With fewer participants, each user’s struggles will be more easily recalled and shared with other parties when discussing the research. This can help convey the issues that need to be addressed while also highlighting the value of doing the research in the first place.

Usability tests have been conducted in person for decades, but you can also do them remotely using software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You might interpret in-person usability tests as a form of theater watching as opposed to remote testing. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Much more in-depth research is conducted on user experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. You also get real-time feedback on what they’re seeing, including surprises, disagreements, and discussions about them. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors ‘ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.

If conducting usability testing in the field is like watching a play that is staged and controlled, where any two sessions may be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can meet users at their location to conduct your research. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that wouldn’t have in a lab environment—and conversion can shift in entirely different directions. You have less control over how these sessions end as researchers, but this can occasionally help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. Usability tests in person offer a level of detail that is frequently absent from remote testing.

That’s not to say that the “movies” —remote sessions—aren’t a good option. A wider audience can be obtained from remote sessions. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see what’s going on. Additionally, they make the doors accessible to a much wider range of users. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working.

You can ask real users questions to understand their thoughts and understanding of the solution as a result of usability testing, whether it is done remotely or in person. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. You can also test your own ideas and determine whether they are true. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. The excitement is in the second act, but there are also potential surprises in the third. This is equally true of usability tests. Unexpected things that participants say frequently alter the way you look at things, and these unexpected revelations can lead to unexpected turns in the narrative.

Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. Usability testing is also frequently the only research technique that some stakeholders believe they ever need, and too frequently. In fact, if the designs that you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a solid understanding of your users ( foundational research ), there’s not much to be gained by doing usability testing in the first place. Because you narrow down the subject matter of your feedback without understanding the needs of the users. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. In the context of a usability test, it’s just feedback on a particular design.

On the other hand, if you only do foundational research, while you might have set out to solve the right problem, you won’t know whether the thing that you’re building will actually solve that. This demonstrates the value of conducting both directional and foundational research.

In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can encourage stakeholders to take action on the issues that arise.

Act three: resolution

The third act is about resolving the issues from the first two acts, while the first two acts are about understanding the background and the tensions that can compel stakeholders to take action. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That includes all members of the product team, including developers, UX experts, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other interested parties. It allows the whole team to hear users ‘ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. And it gives the UX design and research teams more time to clarify, suggest alternatives, or provide more context for their choices. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

Voiceover narration of this act is typically used with audience input. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They offer the stakeholders their suggestions and suggestions for how to create this vision.

Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. The most effective presenters employ the same methods as great storytellers: they create a conflict that needs to be settled by reminding people of the status quo and then revealing a better way, according to Duarte. ” That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently”.

This type of structure aligns well with research results, and particularly results from usability tests. It provides proof for “what is “—the issues you’ve identified. And “what could be “—your recommendations on how to address them. And so forth.

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be visual, like quick sketches of how a new design could look that solves a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the session is over when you’ve concluded by bridging the gaps and offering suggestions for improvement. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. The stakeholders will now have the opportunity to take the next steps, and hopefully the will-power to do so!

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

Act one: You meet the protagonists ( the users ) and the antagonists ( the problems affecting users ). The plot begins here. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. These techniques can produce personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards as output.

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

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

The researcher performs a number of tasks: they are the producer, the director, and the storyteller. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters ( in the research ). And the audience are the stakeholders. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users ‘ stories through research. By the end, the parties should have a goal and a desire to solve the product’s flaws.

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

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

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

But you can ensure that your group has packed its carriers rationally.

There’s a DIY method to increase your chances for victory. You’ll at least at least disarm your boss ‘ irrational exuberance. Before the group you’ll need to properly plan.

It’s known as prepersonalization.

Behind the audio

Take into account Spotify’s DJ element, which debuted this year.

We’re used to seeing the polished final outcome of a personalization have. A personal have had to be conceived, budgeted, and prioritized before the year-end prize, the making-of-backstory, or the behind-the-scenes success chest. Before any customisation have goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a delay of valuable ideas for expressing consumer experiences more automatically.

How do you decide where to position personalization wagers? How do you design regular interactions that didn’t journey up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve found that for many well-known budgeted programs to support their continued investments, they initially required one or more workshops to join vital technologies users and stakeholders. Make it matter.

We’ve closely monitored the same evolution with our consumers, from major software to young companies. In our experience with working on small and large personalization work, a program’s best monitor record—and its capacity to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and manage its design and engineering efforts—turns on how successfully these prepersonalization activities play out.

Effective workshops consistently distinguish successful future endeavors from unsuccessful ones, saving countless hours of time, resources, and overall well-being in the process.

A personalization practice involves a multiyear effort of testing and feature development. It’s not a tech stack switch-flip. It’s best managed as a backlog that often evolves through three steps:

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

This is why we created our progressive personalization framework and why we’re field-testing an accompanying deck of cards: we believe that there’s a base grammar, a set of “nouns and verbs” that your organization can use to design experiences that are customized, personalized, or automated. These cards are not necessary for you. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.

Set the timer for your kitchen.

How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The evaluation activities that we suggest including can ( and frequently do ) last for weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Here are a summary of our broad approach and information on the most crucial first-day activities.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

Kickstart: This specifies the terms of engagement as you concentrate on the potential, the readiness and drive of your team, and your leadership.
1. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
2. Work your plan: This stage consists of making it possible for team members to individually pitch their own pilots that each include a proof-of-concept project, business case, and operating model.

Give yourself at least a day, split into two large time blocks, to power through a concentrated version of those first two phases.

Kickstart: Apt your appetite

We call the first lesson the “landscape of connected experience“. It looks at the possibilities for personalization at your company. A connected experience, in our parlance, is any UX requiring the orchestration of multiple systems of record on the backend. A marketing-automation platform and a content-management system could be used together. It could be a digital-asset manager combined with a customer-data platform.

Create a conversation by mentioning consumer and business-to-business examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions ( such as onboarding sequences or wizards ), notifications, and recommenders. These are in the cards, which we have a catalog of. Here’s a list of 142 different interactions to jog your thinking.

It’s all about setting the tone. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? Here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework for a broader perspective.

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature ( or something similar ). We categorize connected experiences in our cards according to their functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to draw attention to both the benefits of ongoing investment and the difference between what you currently offer and what you intend to deliver in the future.

Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is crucial because it emphasizes how personalization can affect your own methods of working as well as your external customers. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Each team member should decide where they would like to place your company’s emphasis on your product or service. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. Here, the goal is to show how various departments may view their own benefits from the effort, which can vary from one department to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final KickStart activity is about filling in the personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will compliance with data and privacy be a significant challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? It’s just a matter of acknowledging the magnitude of that need and finding a solution ( we’re fairly certain that you do ). In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. For instance, our Detractor card lists six protracted behavior that is harmful to the development of our country.

Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential obstacles to your advancement in the future. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. According to research, personalization initiatives face a number of common obstacles.

At this point, you’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? Good, you’re ready to go on.

Hit that test kitchen

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

The key here is to avoid treating the installed software ( as one of our client executives humorously put it ) like some sort of dream kitchen. These software engines are more like test kitchens where your team can begin devising, tasting, and refining the snacks and meals that will become a part of your personalization program’s regularly evolving menu.

Over the course of the workshop, the ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together. And creating “dishes” is the way that you’ll have individual team stakeholders construct personalized interactions that serve their needs or the needs of others.

The dishes will be made using recipes that have predetermined ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

Like a good product manager, you’ll make sure you have everything you need to make your desired interaction ( or that you can figure out what needs to be added to your pantry ) and that you validate with the right stakeholders present. These ingredients include the audience that you’re targeting, content and design elements, the context for the interaction, and your measure for how it’ll come together.

Not just discovering requirements, it is. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team:

1. compare findings to a common method for developing features, similar to how artists paint with the same color palette,
2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar,
3. and establish parity among performance indicators and key performance indicators as well.

This helps you streamline your designs and your technical efforts while you deliver a shared palette of core motifs of your personalized or automated experience.

Create a recipe.

What ingredients are important to you? Consider the construct of a who-what-when-why

• Who are your key audience segments or groups?
• What kind of content will you offer them, what design elements, and under what circumstances?
• And for which business and user benefits?

Five years ago, we created these cards and card categories. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And we still come across fresh possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

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

1. Nurture personalization: When a guest or an unknown visitor interacts with a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it easier for them to encounter a related title they may want to read, saving them time.
2. Welcome automation: An email is sent when a newly registered user is a subscriber and is able to highlight the breadth of the content catalog.
3. Winback automation: Before their subscription lapses or after a recent failed renewal, a user is sent an email that gives them a promotional offer to suggest that they reconsider renewing or to remind them to renew.

We’ve also found that cocreating the recipes themselves can sometimes be the most effective way to start brainstorming about what these cards might be for your organization. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

The later stages of the workshop could be characterized as moving from focusing on a cookbook to a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual” cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.

Better architecture is required for better kitchens.

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

When a team overfits: they aren’t designing with their best data, personalization turns into a laughing line. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. For instance, your AI’s output quality is in fact impacted by your IA. Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture.

You can’t stand the heat, unquestionably…

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach will produce the necessary concentration and intention for success. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, head to the test kitchen to save time, preserve job security, and avoid imagining the creative concepts that come from your organization’s masters. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.

You have a better chance of lasting success and sound beginnings with this workshop framework. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. However, if you use the same cookbook and the same recipe combination, you’ll have solid ground for success. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.

Although there are associated costs associated with purchasing this kind of technology and product design, your time well spent is on sizing up and confronting your unique situation and digital skills. Don’t squander it. The pudding is the proof, as they say.

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

How we got below

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

the development of online standards

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

Server-side language like PHP, Java, and.NET took Perl as the primary back-end computers, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the garbage bin. The first age of internet programs started with content-management systems (especially those used in blogs like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress ), with these better server-side equipment. In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened gates for sequential interaction between the front end and back finish. Pages was now revise their content without having to reload it. A grain of Script frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and ruby arose to aid developers develop more credible client-side conversation across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like photo alternative enable skilled manufacturers and designers to use fonts of their choosing. And technology like Flash made it possible to include movies, sports, and even more engagement.

These new methods, requirements, and solutions greatly reenergized the sector. Web style flourished as creators and designers explored more different styles and designs. However, we also relied heavily on numerous tricks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes ( such as rounded or angled corners ) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks ). All kinds of nested floats or absolute positioning ( or both ) were necessary for complicated layouts. Display and photo substitute for specialty styles was a excellent start toward varying the designs from the big five, but both tricks introduced convenience and efficiency issues. Additionally, JavaScript libraries made it simple to add a dash of interaction to pages without having to spend the money to double or even quadruple the download size for basic websites.

The web as software platform

The front-end and back-end symbiosis continued to improve, leading to the development of the modern web application. Between expanded server-side programming languages ( which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others ) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Along with these tools, there were additional options, such as shared package libraries, build automation, and collaborative version control. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.

Mobile devices increased in their capabilities as well, and they gave us access to the internet in our pockets at the same time. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.

The development of social media and other centralized tools for people to connect and use resulted from this combination of potent mobile devices and potent development tools. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media provided connections on a global scale, with both positive and negative outcomes.

Want a much more extensive history of how we got here, with some other takes on ways that we can improve? ” Of Time and the Web” was written by Jeremy Keith. Or check out the” Web Design History Timeline” at the Web Design Museum. Additionally, Neal Agarwal takes a fascinating tour of” Internet Artifacts.”

Where we are now

It seems like we’ve been at a new significant inflection point over the past couple of years. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. From the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators and content management systems of all kinds, there are many different ways to create websites. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other IndieWeb tools can be useful in this regard, but they’re still largely underdeveloped and difficult to use for the less geeky. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.

Browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other web components has increased, particularly with initiatives like Interop. New technologies gain support across the board in a fraction of the time that they used to. I frequently find out about a new feature and check its browser support only to discover that its coverage is already over 80 %. Nowadays, the barrier to using newer techniques often isn’t browser support but simply the limits of how quickly designers and developers can learn what’s available and how to adopt it.

We can prototype almost any idea today with just a few commands and a few lines of code. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. However, as the initial cost of these frameworks may be saved in the beginning, it eventually becomes due as their upkeep and maintenance becomes a component of our technical debt.

If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks, which previously made it easier to adopt new techniques sooner, have since evolved into obstacles. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And frequently, when scripts fail ( whether due to poor code, network problems, or other environmental factors ), users are left with blank or broken pages.

Where do we go from here?

Hacks of today help to shape standards for tomorrow. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks —for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we refuse to acknowledge that they are hacks or when we choose not to replace them. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?

Build for the long haul. Optimize for performance, for accessibility, and for the user. weigh the price of those user-friendly tools. They may make your job a little easier today, but how do they affect everything else? What is the cost to the users? To future developers? To adoption of standards? Sometimes the convenience may be worth it. Sometimes it’s just a hack that you’ve gotten used to. And sometimes it’s holding you back from even better options.

Start with standards. Standards continue to evolve over time, but browsers have done a remarkably good job of continuing to support older standards. The same isn’t always the case with third-party frameworks. Sites built with even the hackiest of HTML from the’ 90s still work just fine today. Even after a few years, the same can’t be said about websites created with frameworks.

Design with care. Consider the effects of each choice, whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes. The convenience of many a modern tool comes at the cost of not always understanding the underlying decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the impact that those decisions can have. Use the time saved by modern tools to consider more carefully and design with consideration rather than rush to “move fast and break things”

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

Play, experiment, and be weird! The ultimate experiment is this web that we’ve created. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be brave and make new friends. Build a playground for ideas. Create absurd experiments in your own crazy science lab. Start your own small business. There has never been a place where we have more room to be creative, take risks, and discover our potential.

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

Go ahead and create.

As designers and developers for the web ( and beyond ), we’re responsible for building the future every day, whether that may take the shape of personal websites, social media tools used by billions, or anything in between. Let’s give everything we produce a positive vibe by infusing our values into everything we do. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then distribute it, improve it, re-use it, or create something new with it. Learn. Make. Share. Grow. Rinse and repeat. Everything will change whenever you believe you have mastered the web.

Marketing in the Era of Uber Trends written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode: Overview In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Michael Tchong, innovation expert, futurist, and founder of Uber Trends. Named “America’s most influential trend spotter” by Daily Telegraph, Michael has helped brands like Apple, Amex, and Mercedes-Benz anticipate seismic shifts in technology and consumer behavior. Michael […]

Marketing in the Era of Uber Trends written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve watched promising thoughts go from zero to warrior in a few days before failing to deliver within weeks as a product developer for very long.

Financial items, which is the area of my specialization, are no exception. It’s tempting to put as many features at the ceiling as possible and hope someone sticks because people’s true, hard-earned money is on the line, user expectations are high, and a crammed market. However, this strategy is a formula for disaster. Why, please:

The fatalities of feature-first growth

It’s easy to get swept up in the enthusiasm of developing innovative features when you start developing a financial product from scratch or are migrating existing user journeys from papers or telephony channels to online bank or mobile applications. They may think,” If I may only add one more thing that solves this particular person problem, they’ll appreciate me”! What happens, however, when you eventually encounter a roadblock caused by your security team? don’t like it? When a battle-tested film isn’t as well-known as you anticipated, or when it fails due to unforeseen difficulty?

The concept of Minimum Viable Product ( MVP ) comes into play in this area. Even if Jason Fried doesn’t usually refer to this concept, his book Getting Real and his audio Rework frequently discuss it. An MVP is a product that offers only enough value to your users to keep them interested, but not so much that it becomes difficult to keep up. Although it seems like an easy idea, it requires a razor-sharp eye, a ruthless edge, and the courage to stand up for your position because it is easy to fall for” the Columbo Effect” when there is always” just one more thing …” to add.

The issue with most fund apps is that they frequently turn out to be reflections of the company’s internal politics rather than an experience created purely for the customer. This implies that the priority should be given to delivering as some features and functionalities as possible in order to satisfy the requirements and wishes of competing internal departments as opposed to crafting a compelling value proposition that is focused on what people in the real world actually want. These products may therefore quickly become a muddled mess of confusing, related, and finally unlovable client experiences—a feature salad, you might say.

The significance of the foundation

What’s a better course of action then? How can we create items that are reliable, user-friendly, and most importantly, stick?

The concept of “bedrock” comes into play here. The main component of your item that really matters to people is Bedrock. The foundation of worth and relevance over time is built upon it.

The rock must be in and around the standard servicing journeys in the retail banking industry, which is where I work. People only look at their existing accounts once every five minutes, but they also look at it daily. They sign up for a credit card every year or two, but they check their balance and pay their bill at least once a quarter.

The key is in identifying the main tasks that individuals want to complete and therefore persistently striving to make them simple, reliable, and trustworthy.

But how do you reach the foundation? By focusing on the” MVP” strategy, giving convenience precedence, and working iteratively toward a clear value proposition. This entails removing unwanted functions and putting the emphasis on providing genuine value to your users.

It also requires having some nerve, as your coworkers might not always agree with you immediately. And in some cases, it might even mean making it clear to consumers that you won’t be coming over to their home and prepare their meal. Sometimes you need to use the sporadic “opinionated user interface design” ( i .e. clunky workaround for edge cases ) to test a concept or to give yourself some more time to work on something more crucial.

Functional methods for creating stick-like financial goods

What are the main learnings I’ve made from my own research and practice?

1. What issue are you attempting to resolve first, and why? Who is it for? Before beginning any construction, make sure your goal is completely clear. Make certain it also aligns with the goals of your business.
2. Avoid the temptation to put too many characteristics at once by focusing on one, key feature and focusing on getting that right before moving on to something else. Choose one that actually adds price, and work from that.
3. When it comes to financial goods, clarity is often more important than difficulty. Eliminate unwanted details and concentrate solely on what matters most.
4. Accept ongoing iteration as Bedrock is a powerful process rather than a fixed destination. Continuously collect customer feedback, make improvements to your product, and move toward that foundation.
5. Stop, appearance, and talk: You must test your product frequently in the field rather than just as part of the shipping process. Use it for yourself. A/B tests are run. User opinions on Gear. Speak to those who use it, and change things up correctly.

The foundational conundrum

This is an intriguing conundrum: sacrificing some of the potential for short-term growth in favor of long-term stability is at play. But the reward is worthwhile: products built with a focus on rock will outlive and surpass their rivals over time and provide users with long-term value.

How do you begin your quest to rock, then? Take it slowly. Start by identifying the underlying factors that your customers actually care about. Concentrate on developing and improving a second, potent function that delivers real value. And most importantly, make an obsessive effort because, whatever you think, Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker, you can’t deny it! The best way to foretell the future is to build it, he said.

“I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” When most people refer to that line, spoken by Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, they quote it to set up Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey’s thoughtful, resonate […]

The post Hunt for Gollum Movie Poised to Ask ‘What Does Frodo Do When He’s Happy?’ appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New World season 3 episode 6.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 episode 6 “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” concluded with one the great classic science fiction twists. The feared and near-mythical scavenger ship the Enterprise encounters, the one that had been flying through the galaxy wiping out planets and spaceships with abandon, was not a mysterious new alien threat, but in fact a long-lost space mission originally launched from Earth.

It’s not exactly a new twist (even before Planet of the Apes did a variant on it, numerous versions of it had appeared in The Twilight Zone and beyond), and in this installment it even bordered on being a little problematic. The episode did leave you wondering if Kirk would have been quite so upset about those 7,000 deaths if the space helmet had opened to reveal a new kind of bumpy forehead.

But it also gave us a glimpse into a fascinating period in Star Trek’s future history. The 21st century of the Star Trek universe is littered with lost and doomed space missions. In Kirk’s very first adventure on screen, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” he encountered the flight recorder of the SS Valiant, and later the space probe Nomad. The Next Generation’s crew came across the wreckage of the doomed NASA spacecraft Charybdis (as well as the corpse of its sole surviving crewmember trapped in a reconstruction of an old pulp novel). Even Voyager ran into the long-lost Mars mission Ares IV (presumably making The Martian movie’s Ares III mission Trek canon), and the experiment warp probe Friendship One.

But even among these jaunts into the galaxy, this scavenger ship stands out thanks to what we see when the viewscreen zooms in on the remaining Earth-originating features of the ship.

We see a familiar emblem now known as the “Starfleet Delta” (there’s a whole other article to be written about the history of that) and the letters and numbers “XCV-100.” Those numbers give that ship a lineage that leads to none other than the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself.

“All these ships were called Enterprise”

The first time those numbers appear together on screen (although too small for you to actually read) are in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An alien entity has possessed a member of the ship’s crew (later it would turn out this entity was yet another Earth probe that had gone astray, this time the Voyager VI probe). In search of peace and understanding, the entity is given a tour of the Enterprise, including the ship’s recreation room (not to be confused with the holodeck, which was also called the recreation room in Star Trek: The Animated Series and the recent “A Space Adventure Hour.” Here the entity is shown a wall of pictures, including a sailing ship, the real-world aircraft carrier the crew would eventually break into in Star Trek IV, the prototype NASA space shuttle (which in real life was named after the fictional starship), and the Enterprise we know and love. Between those spaceships was another, never-seen-before spaceship, some previously unseen part of the Enterprise lineage.

A small, cylindrical capsule on the end of a long rod, surrounded by a pair of large ring shapes. If viewers had been able to look closely enough, they would have seen the name Enterprise XCV 330. It was a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail, so naturally Trekkies have been obsessing over it for decades.

Put a Ring on It

That picture has its origins right at the very beginning of Star Trek’s story, when Matt Jefferies (the man who the famous “Jefferies Tubes” are named after) was sketching out potential outlines for what would eventually become the Enterprise. You could go through those sketches and find cool outlines for a dozen new sci-fi shows, but one shape that kept recurring was the idea of a ship with a large set of rings at the back – sometimes with a saucer at the front, sometimes with other shapes. But one of those discarded sketches, sketch “22L” would go on to have a far longer continuing mission.

Mark Rademaker is a digital artist who has worked on a wide range of Star Trek projects, including several based around that very sketch.

“About 10 years later sketch 22L got picked up again when Gene was developing a new series called ‘Starship’,” Rademaker tells us. “That series never came to fruition. But for that series Matt Jefferies did make some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork of the ‘22L’ version.”

This new show was not going to be Star Trek, which meant its interior would have some extensive differences, even if ultimately those differences might turn out to be more cosmetic.

Instead of a bridge based around one man in a chair, it was based around people sitting in a circle around a computer console – a design with ideas that would still find their way into Star Trek: The Next Generation’s early set designs.

“People would not transport to a planet, but step into the ‘metafier’ (The dome on the right side of the command module) and ‘project’ themselves onto a planet,” Rademaker says. “I assume this was another cost saving mechanic, just like a transporter.”

When Starship failed to materialize, another attempt to relaunch Star Trek with the spinoff Phase II turned into a movie production and that design finally found its way into Star Trek canon.

“When they were building the ship wall in the rec room, Gene [Roddenberry] asked Rick Sternbach to do a high contrast ink version of a Matt Jefferies’ painting, to add onto this wall,” says Rademaker.

The Space Cruise Liner

For a long time that detail would remain a tantalizing tidbit of canon. For decades the only further information fans would have on the ship was the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology. Published in 1980, written and edited by Stan Goldstein and Fred Goldstein, and illustrated by Rick Sternbach, this book was for years the “official” history of the Star Trek universe.

This chronology, which ran from the earliest days of spaceflight to the Enterprise as depicted in the Star Trek movies, described the ring-ship Enterprise as “Declaration Class,” operating from 2123 to 2165 as an interstellar cruise liner, with three theaters, three nightclubs, and a zero-gravity gymnasium, among other things. The book also claimed it was the first kind of ship to be equipped with a subspace radio.

That was where the ship remained in canon for decades, until 2001, with the launch of a new show chronicling the adventures of the Enterprise that came before the one in the Original Series.

Probably correctly deciding that the show’s hero ship would need to be more recognizably “Star Trek” than the historic ring ship, the show opted for a different design, one that for some reason never made it to the rec room wall of the 1701.

Back into the Canon

But while the Enterprise that would appear in Star Trek: Enterprise was reassuringly saucer-and-warp-nacelle based, the show would also need other ship designs. For the first time, Vulcan starships would play a major role in the show, and such iconic aliens needed an iconic starship design.

Like many designers before and since, their first idea was to dive into Matt Jefferies’ wastepaper basket.

As designer Doug Drexler said later, “My main impetus was to get another classic [Matt] Jeffries concept on Star Trek as a signature ship. So the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic came from Matt Jeffries ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s Starship!”

Enterprise would go a step further in cementing the ring ship’s place in the canon with the episode “First Flight.” This episode provided a flashback to the early days of the warp program, where 80 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved Warp 1, Earth was still trying to get to Warp 2. We saw young Jonathan Archer competing to be the first person to command an actual starship, and are introduced to Club 602, the San Francisco bar where all the Starfleet flyboys hang out. The bar is decorated with various photos and insignias celebrating the history of flight and spaceflight, and in another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance, the Enterprise XCV-330 mission patch, with a picture of the enigmatic ring ship, is right up there on the board.

Which raises the question, once again, of how the XCV-330 fits into Star Trek’s chronology.

“My personal theory: Somewhere between 2055 and 2110, XCV ships were developed,” suggests Rademaker. “I assume the XCV-330 was a human design based on some sub-light XCV platform but engineered to combine it with a Vulcan low warp ring template. It might be a later and perhaps even the final version of this line of ships. This would explain the rings, a rather dated cylindrical and thin internal layout, and a long neck so the crew is far away from the danger bits.”

Relaunching the XCV-330

Rademaker has had plenty of time to think about this. He first came into contact with the ship in a professional capacity when he met Andrew Probert, who among other things designed the Enterprise for The Motion Picture and The Next Generation, as well as the XCV-330 for Star Trek’s “Ships of the Line” calendar.

“Andrew and I mailed back and forth about the general shapes and a lot about the details, with Andrew sketching over my renders to illustrate what direction to take,” Rademaker remembers. “This collab with Andrew really opened my eyes, I improved a lot because of it.”

The work caught a few eyes, including that of modeling company QMx. They asked Rademaker for a file of the 3D model so that they could use it to create an “Artisan model”.

“Later, when I sat in the cinema, I found out that QMx used the model to do a prop for Into Darkness!” Rademaker says.

The miniature appears on Admiral Marcus’s desk, between the real-life Ares V rocket and Zefram Cochrane’s experimental warp ship “The Phoenix.” This places it before humans achieve lightspeed. According to the QMx website (which is sadly no longer online), this Enterprise was “Earth’s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle.”

Rakemaker’s model would continue its voyages, with Eaglemoss using it as the basis for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature. Most recently, in 2023, 100 years before the launch of this Enterprise according to the Spaceflight Chronology, Rademaker was recruited to work on the ring ship once again.

“I was just about to do a refit on this ship to make it compatible with my current render software when Mike Okuda reached out and asked me if I could model the bridge for the Roddenberry Archive. Great gig!” Rademaker says.

You can visit Rademaker’s reconstruction of this Enterprise, inside and out, at the Rodenberry Archive, including an explorable 3D reconstruction of its bridge and “metafier” room, based on Jefferies’ blueprints from the defunct Starship show.

The model even gave the ship its first actual appearance, depicting its eventual demise in the short film “Memory Wall.” Rademaker has also continued working with the ring ship shape for NASA. You see, the workings of Star Trek’s warp drive are very close to the ideas of physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His theoretical “Alcubierre drive” would be driven by an engine that is most likely, you guessed it, ring shaped.

“In 2011 Dr. Harold ‘Sonny’ White (Then working at NASA) asked me to modify the XCV-330 to create a ship for STEM outreach,” Rademaker shares. “We eventually decided to do a whole new ringship that would conform better to his theory. (The IXS-110 aka IXS Enterprise.)  The idea was never to present that ship as an actual new NASA Starship, more like a good motivator for students to get into STEM/STEAM, but the media decided otherwise. It was good fun.”

The Continuing Voyages

The ring ship design is finding its way into Star Trek shows for the first time as well. As Star Trek: Lower Decks drew to a close last year, with what is now a Hugo award-winning finale. The story featured an alternate 21st century, parallel universe traversing ship called the USS Beagle. Its design was clearly a variation of the Enterprise XCV-330, with some extra solar panels and added details, and a nifty new landing mechanism.

And finally, we come to the XCV-100 in last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds. It gives us a lot of clues about how the ring ship Enterprise fits into Star Trek history. If this ship has a ring like the Enterprise, that is obscured, and the ship appears much bigger than the ship in Rademaker’s models.

“The XCV-100 was not a warp capable ship, and the larger size was a requirement for their mission. The XCV-330 compared to the 100 seems to be a scaled down version but with very similar parameters of the nose/front end, like that was an optimized shape for some reason,” Rademaker hypothesizes. “Or maybe they just made this shape in a couple of sizes. Not unheard of in shipbuilding, some hulls in terms of hydrodynamics can be scaled up from for example 60 to 120 meters, without significant changes in characteristics.”

In the brief glimpse we get of the ship, we notice the ID number, the American flag, and the iconic Starfleet delta (many decades before Starfleet could have actually been established).

“The 100 probably was constructed somewhere between 2055 and 2063. Hence it still shows a US like flag alongside an UESPA logo that we also see on the Friendship One probe that was launched in 2067,” Rademaker suggests. “However, that probe does not carry any nation flags on the outside. That makes me assume that 2067 is when UESPA is well established and Earth’s unification in terms of space related things has been formalized.”

We even see the crew’s spacesuits, which are clearly based on the prototype of NASA’s “Z2” spacesuit being developed for a potential Mars mission. In that way, the XCV-100 is a missing link, a very concrete connection between Pike’s starship Enterprise, and our own time’s NASA space program (however much longer that might last).

Look closer though, and there’s a bit more to it than that. Through “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” we are told the legends and rumors about this scavenger ship. Even the Gorn call it a monster.

As Scott describes it, “Its needs are bottomless. All it does is consume and make itself bigger. The bigger it gets, the more it requires. Then it moves on to devour the next resource, like it will never stop.”

When he says it, we think he’s describing an alien monster. Something consumes, destroys and assimilates everything it encounters, like the Doomsday Machine from TOS, or the Borg.

But of course, it turns out he’s describing us – humans as they exist in the 21st century, viewed by the inhabitants of Star Trek’s perfect future.

To a paraphrase another old Enterprise, it’s a long road getting from here to there…

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with a finale on Sept. 11.

The post Strange New Worlds’ XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History appeared first on Den of Geek.

When James Gunn unveiled the “Gods and Monsters” slate for the new DC Universe in early 2023, it signaled more than a relaunch. It was a commitment to cinematic storytelling that could be mythic, grounded, tragic, uplifting, and courageous. Within that bold vision, however, one name was still absent. Virgil Hawkins.  Virgil is the young […]

The post Static Shock Deserves a Live-Action Future in the DC Universe appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New World season 3 episode 6.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 episode 6 “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” concluded with one the great classic science fiction twists. The feared and near-mythical scavenger ship the Enterprise encounters, the one that had been flying through the galaxy wiping out planets and spaceships with abandon, was not a mysterious new alien threat, but in fact a long-lost space mission originally launched from Earth.

It’s not exactly a new twist (even before Planet of the Apes did a variant on it, numerous versions of it had appeared in The Twilight Zone and beyond), and in this installment it even bordered on being a little problematic. The episode did leave you wondering if Kirk would have been quite so upset about those 7,000 deaths if the space helmet had opened to reveal a new kind of bumpy forehead.

But it also gave us a glimpse into a fascinating period in Star Trek’s future history. The 21st century of the Star Trek universe is littered with lost and doomed space missions. In Kirk’s very first adventure on screen, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” he encountered the flight recorder of the SS Valiant, and later the space probe Nomad. The Next Generation’s crew came across the wreckage of the doomed NASA spacecraft Charybdis (as well as the corpse of its sole surviving crewmember trapped in a reconstruction of an old pulp novel). Even Voyager ran into the long-lost Mars mission Ares IV (presumably making The Martian movie’s Ares III mission Trek canon), and the experiment warp probe Friendship One.

But even among these jaunts into the galaxy, this scavenger ship stands out thanks to what we see when the viewscreen zooms in on the remaining Earth-originating features of the ship.

We see a familiar emblem now known as the “Starfleet Delta” (there’s a whole other article to be written about the history of that) and the letters and numbers “XCV-100.” Those numbers give that ship a lineage that leads to none other than the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself.

“All these ships were called Enterprise”

The first time those numbers appear together on screen (although too small for you to actually read) are in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An alien entity has possessed a member of the ship’s crew (later it would turn out this entity was yet another Earth probe that had gone astray, this time the Voyager VI probe). In search of peace and understanding, the entity is given a tour of the Enterprise, including the ship’s recreation room (not to be confused with the holodeck, which was also called the recreation room in Star Trek: The Animated Series and the recent “A Space Adventure Hour.” Here the entity is shown a wall of pictures, including a sailing ship, the real-world aircraft carrier the crew would eventually break into in Star Trek IV, the prototype NASA space shuttle (which in real life was named after the fictional starship), and the Enterprise we know and love. Between those spaceships was another, never-seen-before spaceship, some previously unseen part of the Enterprise lineage.

A small, cylindrical capsule on the end of a long rod, surrounded by a pair of large ring shapes. If viewers had been able to look closely enough, they would have seen the name Enterprise XCV 330. It was a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail, so naturally Trekkies have been obsessing over it for decades.

Put a Ring on It

That picture has its origins right at the very beginning of Star Trek’s story, when Matt Jefferies (the man who the famous “Jefferies Tubes” are named after) was sketching out potential outlines for what would eventually become the Enterprise. You could go through those sketches and find cool outlines for a dozen new sci-fi shows, but one shape that kept recurring was the idea of a ship with a large set of rings at the back – sometimes with a saucer at the front, sometimes with other shapes. But one of those discarded sketches, sketch “22L” would go on to have a far longer continuing mission.

Mark Rademaker is a digital artist who has worked on a wide range of Star Trek projects, including several based around that very sketch.

“About 10 years later sketch 22L got picked up again when Gene was developing a new series called ‘Starship’,” Rademaker tells us. “That series never came to fruition. But for that series Matt Jefferies did make some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork of the ‘22L’ version.”

This new show was not going to be Star Trek, which meant its interior would have some extensive differences, even if ultimately those differences might turn out to be more cosmetic.

Instead of a bridge based around one man in a chair, it was based around people sitting in a circle around a computer console – a design with ideas that would still find their way into Star Trek: The Next Generation’s early set designs.

“People would not transport to a planet, but step into the ‘metafier’ (The dome on the right side of the command module) and ‘project’ themselves onto a planet,” Rademaker says. “I assume this was another cost saving mechanic, just like a transporter.”

When Starship failed to materialize, another attempt to relaunch Star Trek with the spinoff Phase II turned into a movie production and that design finally found its way into Star Trek canon.

“When they were building the ship wall in the rec room, Gene [Roddenberry] asked Rick Sternbach to do a high contrast ink version of a Matt Jefferies’ painting, to add onto this wall,” says Rademaker.

The Space Cruise Liner

For a long time that detail would remain a tantalizing tidbit of canon. For decades the only further information fans would have on the ship was the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology. Published in 1980, written and edited by Stan Goldstein and Fred Goldstein, and illustrated by Rick Sternbach, this book was for years the “official” history of the Star Trek universe.

This chronology, which ran from the earliest days of spaceflight to the Enterprise as depicted in the Star Trek movies, described the ring-ship Enterprise as “Declaration Class,” operating from 2123 to 2165 as an interstellar cruise liner, with three theaters, three nightclubs, and a zero-gravity gymnasium, among other things. The book also claimed it was the first kind of ship to be equipped with a subspace radio.

That was where the ship remained in canon for decades, until 2001, with the launch of a new show chronicling the adventures of the Enterprise that came before the one in the Original Series.

Probably correctly deciding that the show’s hero ship would need to be more recognizably “Star Trek” than the historic ring ship, the show opted for a different design, one that for some reason never made it to the rec room wall of the 1701.

Back into the Canon

But while the Enterprise that would appear in Star Trek: Enterprise was reassuringly saucer-and-warp-nacelle based, the show would also need other ship designs. For the first time, Vulcan starships would play a major role in the show, and such iconic aliens needed an iconic starship design.

Like many designers before and since, their first idea was to dive into Matt Jefferies’ wastepaper basket.

As designer Doug Drexler said later, “My main impetus was to get another classic [Matt] Jeffries concept on Star Trek as a signature ship. So the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic came from Matt Jeffries ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s Starship!”

Enterprise would go a step further in cementing the ring ship’s place in the canon with the episode “First Flight.” This episode provided a flashback to the early days of the warp program, where 80 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved Warp 1, Earth was still trying to get to Warp 2. We saw young Jonathan Archer competing to be the first person to command an actual starship, and are introduced to Club 602, the San Francisco bar where all the Starfleet flyboys hang out. The bar is decorated with various photos and insignias celebrating the history of flight and spaceflight, and in another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance, the Enterprise XCV-330 mission patch, with a picture of the enigmatic ring ship, is right up there on the board.

Which raises the question, once again, of how the XCV-330 fits into Star Trek’s chronology.

“My personal theory: Somewhere between 2055 and 2110, XCV ships were developed,” suggests Rademaker. “I assume the XCV-330 was a human design based on some sub-light XCV platform but engineered to combine it with a Vulcan low warp ring template. It might be a later and perhaps even the final version of this line of ships. This would explain the rings, a rather dated cylindrical and thin internal layout, and a long neck so the crew is far away from the danger bits.”

Relaunching the XCV-330

Rademaker has had plenty of time to think about this. He first came into contact with the ship in a professional capacity when he met Andrew Probert, who among other things designed the Enterprise for The Motion Picture and The Next Generation, as well as the XCV-330 for Star Trek’s “Ships of the Line” calendar.

“Andrew and I mailed back and forth about the general shapes and a lot about the details, with Andrew sketching over my renders to illustrate what direction to take,” Rademaker remembers. “This collab with Andrew really opened my eyes, I improved a lot because of it.”

The work caught a few eyes, including that of modeling company QMx. They asked Rademaker for a file of the 3D model so that they could use it to create an “Artisan model”.

“Later, when I sat in the cinema, I found out that QMx used the model to do a prop for Into Darkness!” Rademaker says.

The miniature appears on Admiral Marcus’s desk, between the real-life Ares V rocket and Zefram Cochrane’s experimental warp ship “The Phoenix.” This places it before humans achieve lightspeed. According to the QMx website (which is sadly no longer online), this Enterprise was “Earth’s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle.”

Rakemaker’s model would continue its voyages, with Eaglemoss using it as the basis for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature. Most recently, in 2023, 100 years before the launch of this Enterprise according to the Spaceflight Chronology, Rademaker was recruited to work on the ring ship once again.

“I was just about to do a refit on this ship to make it compatible with my current render software when Mike Okuda reached out and asked me if I could model the bridge for the Roddenberry Archive. Great gig!” Rademaker says.

You can visit Rademaker’s reconstruction of this Enterprise, inside and out, at the Rodenberry Archive, including an explorable 3D reconstruction of its bridge and “metafier” room, based on Jefferies’ blueprints from the defunct Starship show.

The model even gave the ship its first actual appearance, depicting its eventual demise in the short film “Memory Wall.” Rademaker has also continued working with the ring ship shape for NASA. You see, the workings of Star Trek’s warp drive are very close to the ideas of physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His theoretical “Alcubierre drive” would be driven by an engine that is most likely, you guessed it, ring shaped.

“In 2011 Dr. Harold ‘Sonny’ White (Then working at NASA) asked me to modify the XCV-330 to create a ship for STEM outreach,” Rademaker shares. “We eventually decided to do a whole new ringship that would conform better to his theory. (The IXS-110 aka IXS Enterprise.)  The idea was never to present that ship as an actual new NASA Starship, more like a good motivator for students to get into STEM/STEAM, but the media decided otherwise. It was good fun.”

The Continuing Voyages

The ring ship design is finding its way into Star Trek shows for the first time as well. As Star Trek: Lower Decks drew to a close last year, with what is now a Hugo award-winning finale. The story featured an alternate 21st century, parallel universe traversing ship called the USS Beagle. Its design was clearly a variation of the Enterprise XCV-330, with some extra solar panels and added details, and a nifty new landing mechanism.

And finally, we come to the XCV-100 in last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds. It gives us a lot of clues about how the ring ship Enterprise fits into Star Trek history. If this ship has a ring like the Enterprise, that is obscured, and the ship appears much bigger than the ship in Rademaker’s models.

“The XCV-100 was not a warp capable ship, and the larger size was a requirement for their mission. The XCV-330 compared to the 100 seems to be a scaled down version but with very similar parameters of the nose/front end, like that was an optimized shape for some reason,” Rademaker hypothesizes. “Or maybe they just made this shape in a couple of sizes. Not unheard of in shipbuilding, some hulls in terms of hydrodynamics can be scaled up from for example 60 to 120 meters, without significant changes in characteristics.”

In the brief glimpse we get of the ship, we notice the ID number, the American flag, and the iconic Starfleet delta (many decades before Starfleet could have actually been established).

“The 100 probably was constructed somewhere between 2055 and 2063. Hence it still shows a US like flag alongside an UESPA logo that we also see on the Friendship One probe that was launched in 2067,” Rademaker suggests. “However, that probe does not carry any nation flags on the outside. That makes me assume that 2067 is when UESPA is well established and Earth’s unification in terms of space related things has been formalized.”

We even see the crew’s spacesuits, which are clearly based on the prototype of NASA’s “Z2” spacesuit being developed for a potential Mars mission. In that way, the XCV-100 is a missing link, a very concrete connection between Pike’s starship Enterprise, and our own time’s NASA space program (however much longer that might last).

Look closer though, and there’s a bit more to it than that. Through “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” we are told the legends and rumors about this scavenger ship. Even the Gorn call it a monster.

As Scott describes it, “Its needs are bottomless. All it does is consume and make itself bigger. The bigger it gets, the more it requires. Then it moves on to devour the next resource, like it will never stop.”

When he says it, we think he’s describing an alien monster. Something consumes, destroys and assimilates everything it encounters, like the Doomsday Machine from TOS, or the Borg.

But of course, it turns out he’s describing us – humans as they exist in the 21st century, viewed by the inhabitants of Star Trek’s perfect future.

To a paraphrase another old Enterprise, it’s a long road getting from here to there…

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with a finale on Sept. 11.

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