Category: Blog

I’ve lost count of the times when promising ideas go from being useless in a few months to being useless after working as a solution designer for too long to notice.

Financial goods, which is my area of expertise, 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 will lead to disaster. Why, you see this:

The perils 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. You might be thinking,” If I can only put one more thing that solves this particular person problem, they’ll appreciate me”! But what happens if you eventually encounter a roadblock as a result of your safety team’s negligence? don’t like it? When a difficult-fought film fails to win over viewers or fails owing to unanticipated 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 significance to your users to keep them interested without becoming too hard or frustrating to use. 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 many features and functionalities as possible in order to satisfy the requirements and wishes of competing internal departments as opposed to crafting a compelling value statement 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 may we create products that are user-friendly, firm, 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. It’s the fundamental building block that creates price and maintains relevance over time.

The core 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 account once every blue moon, but they do so daily. They purchase a credit card every year or every other year, but they at least once a month examine their stability and pay their bills.

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

How can you reach the foundation, though? By focusing on the” MVP” strategy, giving convenience precedence, and working incrementally toward a clear value proposition. This means avoiding unnecessary functions and putting your users first, and adding real value.

It also requires some fortitude, as your coworkers might not always agree on your vision at first. And dubiously, occasionally it can even suggest making it clear to customers that you won’t be coming to their house and making their breakfast. 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 reliable economic items

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

1. What trouble are you trying to solve first and foremost with a distinct “why”? Whom? Make sure your goal is unmistakable before beginning any work. 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 on what matters most.
4. Accept constant iteration as Bedrock is a powerful process rather than a fixed destination. Continuously collect customer opinions, make improvements to your product, and move toward that foundation.
5. Stop, look, and listen: Don’t just go through with testing your product as part of the delivery process; test it frequently in the field. Use it for yourself. Move the A/B testing. User opinions on Gear. Speak to users and make adjustments accordingly.

The foundational conundrum

Building towards rock implies sacrificing some short-term growth prospective in favor of long-term balance, which is an interesting paradox at play here. But the reward is worthwhile because products created with a concentrate on core will outlive and outperform their competitors and provide people with ongoing value over time.

How do you begin your quest for rock, then? Taking it one step at a time. Start by identifying the underlying factors that your customers actually care about. Concentrate on developing and improving a second, potent have that delivers real value. And most importantly, make an obsessive effort because, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker ( whew! The best way to foretell the future is to make it, he said.

Nearly 20 years after the first Dexter show’s debut in 2006, the franchise has regained unexpected relevancy. Startup line such as the prologue, Dexter: Original Sin, and the ongoing movie, Dexter: Ascension, have placed the company in the pop social crosshairs once again. However, just as The Walking Dead has discovered that a myriad of […]…

The article How James Doakes Internet Memes Are Converting New Dexter Fans appeared first on Den of Geek.

Episode 6 of Star Trek: Strange New World winter 3 is spoiler-free in this article.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds year 3 show 6″ The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” concluded with one the excellent traditional science fiction curls. The feared and almost mythical hunter ship that the Business encounters, the one that had been destroying planets and spacecraft with impunity, was in truth a long-lost space mission that was actually launched from Earth.

It&#8217, 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. You might have been wondering if Kirk would have been so unhappy about those 7, 000 deaths if the room hat had opened to reveal a brand-new slippery forehead.

But it also gave us a picture into a exciting time in Star Trek‘s potential story. The Star Trek universe’s 21st century is riddled with abandoned and destined place operations. In Kirk’s very first trip on display,” Where No Man Has Gone Before”, he encountered the journey record of the SS Valiant, and later the area sensor Wanderer. The team of Next Generation discovered the body of the stricken NASA spacecraft Charybdis, as well as the body of its sole remaining crewmember, who had been buried in a restoration of an ancient 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.

Yet among these galaxy-spanning journeys, this hunter ship stands out thanks to what we can see when the viewscreen zooms in on the remaining Earth-originating functions.

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”. That ship receives a heritage that is unique to the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself thanks to those numbers.

” All these ships were called Business”

In Star Trek: The Motion Image, those numbers initially appear together on camera ( though they are too small for you to really examine ). 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 ). The Enterprise is given a tour of the Enterprise in search of peace and understanding, including the ship’s recreation room ( not to be confused with the holodeck, which was also known as the recreation room in Star Trek: The Animated Series and the most 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. One more, never-seen-before spacecraft, some of which had never been seen before, was located in the ships that were in between those spaceships.

A small, circular spacecraft on the end of a long pole, surrounded by a pair of large circle shapes. The title Enterprise XCV 330 may have appeared if viewers had been able to look carefully enough. It was a small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it aspect, but obviously Trekkies have been obsessing over it for years.

Place a Ring on It

That image has its origins straight at the very beginning of Star Trek‘s history, when Matt Jefferies ( the man who the popular” Jefferies Tubes” are named after ) was sketching out possible details for what would later become the Enterprise. A ship with a large set of rings at the back, sometimes with a saucer at the front, and occasionally with other shapes, was a concept that kept recurring, even after you looked through those sketches and discovered some cool outlines for a dozen new sci-fi shows. But one of those discarded sketches, sketch” 22L” would go on to have a far longer continuing mission.

Mark Rademaker, a digital artist, has contributed to a wide range of Star Trek projects, including some that were entirely based on that 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 was never realized. But for that series Matt Jefferies did make some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork of the’ 22L ‘ version”.

Even if the interior of this new show turned out to be more cosmetic, because it wasn’t going to be Star Trek, it would still have some significant differences.

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 travel to a planet,” Rademaker says,” but rather they would enter the “metafier” ( the dome on the right side of the command module ) and “project themselves” onto a planet.” ” I assume this was another cost saving mechanic, just like a transporter”.

When Starship failed, a second attempt to relaunch Star Trek with the spinoff Phase II was turned into a movie production, and that concept eventually made its way into the 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. The Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology served as the only additional information fans would have on the ship for decades. 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.

The ring-ship Enterprise was referred to 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, according to this chronology, which ran from the earliest days of spaceflight to the Enterprise as depicted in the Star Trek movies. The book also claimed it was the first kind of ship to be equipped with a subspace radio.

Up until 2001, when a new show showcasing the adventures of the Enterprise that were previously untold in the Original Series, the ship remained in canon there for decades.

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.

Return to 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. Vulcan starships would play a significant role in the show for the first time, 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 later stated,” My main goal was to create a signature ship for another classic Matthew Jeffries concept from Star Trek.” So the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic came from Matt Jeffries ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s Starship“!

With the episode” First Flight,” Enterprise would go a step further in establishing the ring ship’s place in the canon. 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 are introduced to Club 602, a San Francisco bar where all the Starfleet flyboys hang out, after we saw Jonathan Archer’s young competitor competing for the title of first to command an actual starship. 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.

This again raises the question 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’m assuming the XCV-330 was a human design that was based on some sub-light XCV platform but that was engineered to work 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 design with a thin internal design, and a long neck, keeping the crew far from the danger areas.

Relaunching the XCV-330

Rademaker has had plenty of time to consider 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.

Rademaker recalls that Andrew and I emailed back and forth about the general shapes and a lot of details, with Andrew drawing over my renders to show us the best course of action. ” This collab with Andrew really opened my eyes, I improved a lot because of it”.

The work received a lot of attention, including that from the modeling firm 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 theater, I discovered that QMx used the model to make a prop for Into Darkness“! Rademaker says.

Between Zefram Cochrane’s experimental warp ship” The Phoenix” and the real-life Ares V rocket, the miniature appears on Admiral Marcus ‘ desk. This places it before humans achieve lightspeed. This Enterprise was” Earth&#8217, s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle,” according to the QMx website ( which is unfortunately no longer online ).

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

” 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 performance Rademaker says.

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

The model even gave the ship its first actual appearance, depicting its eventual demise in the short film” Memory Wall”. Ragemaker has also kept working on the shape of the ring ship for NASA. You see, the workings of Star Trek‘s warp drive are very close to the ideas of physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His” Alcubierre drive” is thought to be driven by an engine that is most likely, you might say, 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 ultimately made the decision to create a completely different ringship that would be more in line with his theory. ( The IXS-110 aka IXS Enterprise. ) The media later came up with the idea to portray that ship as an actual new NASA Starship rather than a useful motivator for STEM/STEAM students, but the idea was never to do so. 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. With what is now a Hugo award-winning finale, Star Trek: Lower Decks came to a close last year. The story featured an alternate 21st century, parallel universe traversing ship called the USS Beagle. Its design, which included some extra solar panels, added details, and a clever new landing mechanism, was undoubtedly an evolution of the Enterprise XCV-330.

And finally, we come to the XCV-100 in last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds. It provides a lot of details about how the Enterprise ring ship 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’s mission required a larger ship because it was not a warp ship. 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 perhaps they simply created this shape in a few 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”.

The ID number, the American flag, and the iconic Starfleet delta are visible in the ship’s brief glimpse, which is significant considering that Starfleet was a long time in the making.

” The 100 probably was constructed somewhere between 2055 and 2063. Therefore, it still appears alongside an UESPA logo, which we also see on the Friendship One probe launched in 2067, according to Rademaker. ” However, that probe does not carry any nation flags on the outside. That makes me think that 2067 will mark the beginning of UESPA’s successful integration in terms of space-related issues.

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 serves as a missing link, a direct link between Pike’s spacecraft Enterprise and NASA’s ( however long that may go ) future.

Look closer though, and there’s a bit more to it than that. We are informed of the legends and rumors surrounding this scavenger ship through” The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail.” Even the Gorn call it a monster.

Its needs are bottomless, as Scott puts it. All it does is consume and make itself bigger. The more it demands, the bigger it becomes. Then it moves on to devour the next resource, like it will never stop. &#8221,

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

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.

It’s a long journey to get from here to there, to quote another old Enterprise.

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

The first post on Den of Geek: Strange New Worlds &#8217, XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History appeared first.

Spoilers appear in this Star Trek: Strange New World year 3 episode 6. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds year 3 show 6″ The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” concluded with one the excellent traditional science fiction curls. The Enterprise encounters a feared and almost mythical scavenger ship, which had been [ …] flying through the ship.

The article Weird New Worlds ‘ XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History appeared initially on Den of Geek.

Episode 6 of Star Trek: Strange New World year 3 is spoiler-free in this article.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds year 3 show 6″ The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” concluded with one the excellent traditional science fiction curls. The feared and almost mythical scavenger ship that the Business encounters, the one that had been destroying planets and spacecraft with impunity, was in truth a long-lost space mission that was initially launched from Earth.

It&#8217, 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. You might have been wondering if Kirk would have been quite so unhappy about those 7, 000 incidents if the room hat had opened to reveal a new kind of slippery face.

But it also gave us a picture into a exciting time in Star Trek‘s potential story. The Star Trek universe’s 21st century is riddled with abandoned and destined place operations. In Kirk’s very first trip on monitor,” Where No Man Has Gone Before”, he encountered the journey record of the SS Valiant, and later the area sensor Wanderer. The staff of Next Generation discovered the body of the stricken NASA spacecraft Charybdis, as well as the body of its sole remaining crewmember, who had been buried in a restoration of an ancient 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.

This hunter fleet stands out despite these galaxy-spanning journeys thanks to what we can see on the viewscreen when the ship’s remaining Earth-originating features are zoomed in.

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”. That send receives a heritage that is unlike the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself thanks to those figures.

” All these ships were called Business”

In Star Trek: The Motion Image, those numbers initially appear together on camera ( though they are too small for you to really examine ). 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 ). The Enterprise is given a tour of the Enterprise in search of peace and understanding, including the ship’s recreation room ( not to be confused with the holodeck, which was also known as the recreation room in Star Trek: The Animated Series and the most 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. Another, never-seen-before spacecraft, some previously unknown part of the Organization lineage, was located in between those spaceships.

A small, circular spacecraft on the end of a long pole, surrounded by a pair of large circle shapes. The title Enterprise XCV 330 would have appeared if viewers had been able to look carefully enough. It was a small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it aspect, but obviously Trekkies have been obsessing over it for years.

Set a Ring on It

That image has its origins straight at the very beginning of Star Trek‘s narrative, when Matt Jefferies ( the man who the popular” Jefferies Tubes” are named after ) was sketching out possible details for what would later become the Enterprise. A ship with a large set of rings at the back, sometimes with a saucer at the front, and occasionally with other shapes, would be one of those sketches and yield some interesting outlines for a dozen new sci-fi shows. But one of those discarded sketches, sketch” 22L” would go on to have a far longer continuing mission.

A wide range of Star Trek projects have been based on that sketch, including some that Mark Rademaker has created as his own digital artist.

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

Because this new series wasn’t going to be Star Trek, the interior would have some significant differences, even if those differences might end up being 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 travel to a planet, but rather” 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”.

Another attempt to relaunch Star Trek with the spinoff Phase II was unsuccessful, and the resultant movie production was the 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. The Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology served as the only additional information fans could have on the ship for decades. 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.

The ring-ship Enterprise was referred to 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, according to this chronology, which ran from the earliest days of spaceflight to the Enterprise as depicted in the Star Trek movies. The book also claimed it was the first kind of ship to be equipped with a subspace radio.

Up until 2001, the launch of a new show showcasing the adventures of the Enterprise that came before the one in the Original Series, that is where the ship remained in canon for decades.

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.

Return to 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. Vulcan starships, for the first time, would be required for such iconic aliens to have 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 later stated,” My main goal was to create a new classic Matthew Jeffries concept for Star Trek as a signature ship.” So the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic came from Matt Jeffries ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s Starship“!

With the episode” First Flight,” Enterprise would go a step further in establishing the ring ship’s place in the canon. 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 are introduced to Club 602, a San Francisco bar where all the Starfleet flyboys hang out, after we saw Jonathan Archer’s young competitor competing for the title of first to command an actual starship. 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.

This again raises the question 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 created using a Vulcan low warp ring template from a sub-light XCV platform. It might be a later and perhaps even the final version of this line of ships. This would explain the crew’s long neck, dated cylindrical design, and thin internal layout, all of which are due to the crew being far from the danger areas.

Relaunching the XCV-330

Rademaker has had ample time to consider 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.

Rademaker recalls that Andrew and I mailed back and forth about the general shapes and a lot about the details, with Andrew sketching over my renders to help us decide which direction to take. ” This collab with Andrew really opened my eyes, I improved a lot because of it”.

The work received a lot of attention, including that from the modeling firm 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 theater, I discovered that QMx used the model to create an Into Darkness prop”! Rademaker says.

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

Rakemaker’s model would continue its voyages, with Eaglemoss using it as the basis for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature. According to the Spaceflight Chronology, Rademaker was hired to work on the ring ship once more until 2023, 100 years prior to the launch of this Enterprise.

” 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 performance”! Rademaker says.

At the Rodenberry Archive, you can visit Rademaker’s reconstruction of this Enterprise, both inside and out, 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”. Ragemaker has also continued to work with NASA’s ring ship shape. You see, the workings of Star Trek‘s warp drive are very close to the ideas of physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His” Alcubierre drive” is thought to be driven by an engine that is most likely, you might say, 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 ultimately made the decision to create a completely new ringship that would be more in line with his theory. ( The IXS-110 aka IXS Enterprise. ) The media chose not to present that ship as a genuine new NASA Starship, but rather as a useful tool for inspiring students to pursue STEM/STEAM, despite the fact that the idea never materialized. 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. With what is now a Hugo award-winning finale, Star Trek: Lower Decks came to a close last year. The story featured an alternate 21st century, parallel universe traversing ship called the USS Beagle. Its design was undoubtedly a variation of the Enterprise XCV-330, with some more solar panels, details, and a clever new landing mechanism.

And finally, we come to the XCV-100 in last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds. It provides a lot of insight into how the Enterprise ringed up in 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’s size was a requirement for their mission, and it was not a warp ship. 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 perhaps they simply created this shape in a few 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”.

The ID number, the American flag, and the iconic Starfleet delta are visible in the ship’s brief glimpse, which is significant considering that Starfleet was a long time in the making.

” The 100 probably was constructed somewhere between 2055 and 2063. Therefore, it still appears alongside an UESPA logo, which we also see on the Friendship One probe launched in 2067, according to Rademaker. ” However, that probe does not carry any nation flags on the outside. That makes me think that 2067 will mark the beginning of UESPA’s successful integration in terms of space-related issues.

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 serves as a missing link, a direct link between Pike’s spacecraft Enterprise and our own time’s NASA space program ( however long that might last ).

Look closer though, and there’s a bit more to it than that. We are informed of the legends and rumors surrounding this scavenger ship in” The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail.” Even the Gorn call it a monster.

Its needs are bottomless, according to Scott. All it does is consume and make itself bigger. More resources are required by it the larger it grows. Then it moves on to devour the next resource, like it will never stop. &#8221,

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

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.

It’s a long journey to get from here to there, to quote another old Enterprise.

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

The first post on Den of Geek: Strange New Worlds &#8217, XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History appeared first.

Ne Zha 2 was released in theaters around the world last February, and it marked the start of the Chinese New Year. It has since grossed more than$ 2.1 billion globally, including a select few on American screens. For context, that makes it not only the biggest movie of the]… ]

The first article on Den of Geek was Ne Zha 2: The Real Lore Behind the Biggest Movie of 2025 ( and Why You Haven’t Heard of It ).

This article contains trailers for Star Trek: Strange New World year 3 season 6.

The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail, the sixth season of Star Trek: Odd New Worlds year 3 finished off one of the excellent traditional science fiction turns. The feared and near-mythical hunter send the Organization encounters, the one that had been flying through the cosmos wiping out planets and spaceships with leave, was not a strange new mysterious threat, but in fact a long-lost space mission previously launched from Earth.

It’s not exactly a new spin ( there were numerous variations of it in The Twilight Zone and beyond before Planet of the Apes made one ), and in this episode it actually crossed the line of being a little difficult. The show did leave you wondering if Kirk would have been quite so unhappy about those 7, 000 incidents if the room hat had opened to reveal a new kind of slippery face.

However, it likewise provided a window into a exciting time in the future of Star Trek. The 21st era of the Star Trek universe is littered with misplaced and doomed space missions. In” Where No Man Has Gone Before,” Kirk’s quite first screen encounter, he ran into the flight record from the SS Valiant and the area probe Wanderer. The Next Generation’s team came across the wreckage of the doomed NASA spacecraft Charybdis ( as well as the dead of its sole surviving crew trapped in a restoration of an old pulp fiction ). The long-lost Mars mission Ares IV ( presumably creating the Ares III mission Trek canon ) and the experiment warp probe Friendship One collided with Voyager.

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

” Energy was the name of all of these ships.”

The first time those numbers appear together on screen ( although too small for you to actually read ) are in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. A member of the ship’s crew has been taken by an alien entity ( it would later turn out to be another Earth probe that had gone wrong, 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“. A sailing ship, the real-world aircraft carrier the crew would eventually use 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 are all depicted in this wall of pictures. Between those spaceships was another, never-seen-before spaceship, some previously unseen part of the Enterprise lineage.

A pair of large ring shapes surround a small, cylindrical capsule on the end of a long rod. If viewers had been able to look closely enough, they would have seen the name Enterprise XCV 330. Since it was a tiny, blink-and-you-ll-miss-it detail, Trekkies have undoubtedly spent years obsessing over it.

Put a Ring on It

That image was created when Matt Jefferies, the man behind the famous” Jefferies Tubes,” was drafting out ideas for what would eventually become the Enterprise, was sketching out its outlines right at the beginning of Star Trek‘s story. 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. However, one of those discarded sketches, sketch” 22L,” would go on to have a much longer-lasting 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 ten years later sketch 22L got picked up again when Gene was creating a new series called” Starship”,” Rademaker tells us. ” That series never came to fruition. However, Matt Jefferies did produce some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork for the” 22L” version for that series.

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 being based on a single man in a chair, the bridge was designed with concepts that would still be incorporated 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 that this was another low-cost mechanic, similar to 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.

Gene Roddenberry requested Rick Sternbach to create a high contrast ink version of a Matt Jefferies painting for the rec room wall when they were building the ship wall, Rademaker claims.

The Space Cruise Liner

That particular detail would continue to be a tantalizing piece of canon for a long time. For decades the only further information fans would have on the ship was the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology. This book, which was published in 1980 and was based on the “official” history of the Star Trek universe, was edited and written by Rick Sternbach and Stan Goldstein.

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. Additionally, the book asserted that it was the first ship of its kind to have 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.

The show chose a different design, one that for some reason never made it to the 1701 rec room wall, because it was probably correctly determined that the show’s hero ship would need to be more recognizably” Star Trek” than the historic ring ship.

Back into the Canon

However, the Star Trek: Enterprise based Enterprise was reassuringly saucer-and-warp-nacelle based, and the show would also require 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 thought 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 Matt Jeffries ‘ ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s” Starship” is where the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic originated.

Enterprise would go a step further in cementing the ring ship’s place in the canon with the episode” First Flight”. In the early days of the warp program, where Earth was still attempting to reach Warp 2 80 years after Zefram Cochrane’s victory, this episode gave a glimpse of the program’s beginnings. 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 Enterprise XCV-330 mission patch, which features a picture of the mysterious ring ship, is right up there on the board, and the bar is decorated with numerous photos and insignias that honor the history of flight and spaceflight.

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

XCV ships were developed somewhere between 2055 and 2110, according to 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. This line of ships may have been written in a later or perhaps even final form. 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. When he met Andrew Probert, who 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, he first made contact with the ship in a professional capacity.

” 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, and I greatly improved as a result.”

The work caught a few eyes, including that of modeling company QMx. In order to create an” Artisan model,” they requested a file of the 3D model from Rademaker.

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

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 people can travel at light speed. According to the QMx website ( which is sadly no longer online ), this Enterprise was” Earth&#8217, s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle”.

Eaglemoss would use Rakemaker’s model as the foundation for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature, and Rakemaker’s model would continue its journeys. 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.

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

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.

In the short film” Memory Wall,” the model even made its first real appearance on the ship, depicting its eventual demise. Rademaker has also continued working with the ring ship shape for NASA. You see, the theories of physicist Miguel Alcubierre are very similar to those of Star Trek‘s warp drive. His theoretical” Alcubierre drive” would be driven by an engine that is most likely, you guessed it, ring shaped.

” Dr. Harold ‘ Sonny’ White ( Then working at NASA ) requested in 2011 for me to modify the XCV-330 to make a ship for STEM outreach,” Rademaker says. ” We eventually decided to do a whole new ringship that would conform better to his theory. ( The IXS-110, also known as the 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 enjoyable.

The Continuing Voyages

For the first time, Star Trek‘s ring ship design is being featured. As Star Trek: Lower Decks drew to a close last year, with what is now a Hugo award-winning finale. The USS Beagle, a ship in the middle of the 21st century, was featured in the story. 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.

Finally, in last week’s Strange New Worlds episode, we come to the XCV-100. 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, it is obscured, and the ship appears much larger 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. In contrast to the 100, the XCV-330 appears to be a scaled down version with very similar nose/front end parameters, as if that was an optimal shape for some reason,” Rademaker suggests. ” Or maybe they just made this shape in a couple of sizes. Not uncommon in shipbuilding, some hulls can be increased from, say, 60 to 120 meters without making significant structural changes.

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 sometime 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. That probe does not, however, have any nation flags on the outside. That makes me assume that 2067 is when UESPA is well established and Earth &#8217, s unification in terms of space related things has been formalized”.

Even the crew’s spacesuits, which are clearly based on the” Z2″ spacesuit prototype being created for a potential Mars mission, are visible. 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 ).

However, look closer, and there’s a little 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 refer to it as a monster.

As Scott describes it,” Its needs are bottomless. It only consumes and grows bigger. The bigger it gets, the more it requires. Then it moves on to eat the next resource, as if it never stops. &#8221,

We believe he is describing an alien monster when he says it. Something consumes, destroys and assimilates everything it encounters, like the Doomsday Machine from TOS, or the Borg.

However, it turns out he’s talking about us as humans are in the 21st century, as the Star Trek universe’s inhabitants see it.

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

On Paramount+, new episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds air on Thursdays, with the finale scheduled for September 11.

The post Strange New Worlds &#8217, XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History appeared first on Den of Geek.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which was released in 1971, was a must-see for Generation X and was both adored and unfortunately honed always thereafter. At the time, author Roald Dahl received a much publicized screenwriting credit, albeit that more reflected marketing concerns more than it ddid the actual work done ( David ]…]

The Tim Burton Willy Wonka film deserves more credit for being a Gen Z Touchstone, the article originally appeared on Den of Geek.

This article contains trailers for Star Trek: Strange New World year 3 season 6.

The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail, the sixth season of Star Trek: Odd New Worlds year 3 finished off one of the excellent traditional science fiction turns. The feared and near-mythical hunter send the Organization encounters, the one that had been flying through the cosmos wiping out planets and spaceships with leave, was not a strange new mysterious threat, but in fact a long-lost space mission previously launched from Earth.

It&#8217 is not exactly a new twist ( even before Planet of the Apes released a version of it, and it had been in numerous other films like The Twilight Zone and Beyond ), and in this episode it even came off as a little unfunny. The show did leave you wondering if Kirk would have been quite so unhappy about those 7, 000 incidents if the room hat had opened to reveal a new kind of slippery face.

However, it even provided a window into a exciting time in the future of Star Trek. The 21st era of the Star Trek universe is littered with misplaced and doomed space missions. In” Where No Man Has Gone Before,” Kirk’s first screen encounter, he ran into the area probe Wanderer and the flight record from the SS Valiant. The Next Generation’s team came across the shipwreck of the doomed NASA spacecraft Charybdis ( as well as the corpse of its sole surviving crew trapped in a restoration of an old pulp fiction ). The Mars mission Ares IV, which is thought to be the base for the Ares III mission Trek canon, and the experiment warp probe Friendship One, are both on board Voyager.

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

” Energy was the name of all of these ships.”

The first time those numbers appear together on screen ( although too small for you to actually read ) are in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. A member of the ship’s crew has been taken by an alien entity ( it would later turn out to be another Earth probe that had gone wrong, 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“. A sailing ship, the real-world aircraft carrier the crew of Star Trek IV would eventually use to transport goods, the prototype NASA space shuttle ( which was actually named after the fictional starship ) and the Enterprise we know and love are all depicted in this wall of images. Between those spaceships was another, never-seen-before spaceship, some previously unseen part of the Enterprise lineage.

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

Put a Ring on It

That image was created when Matt Jefferies, the man behind the famous” Jefferies Tubes,” was drafting out ideas for what would eventually become the Enterprise, was sketching out its outlines right at the beginning of Star Trek‘s story. 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. However, the sketch” 22L,” one of those discarded sketches, would continue to serve a much longer, ongoing purpose.

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

According to Rademaker, “Sketch 22L was picked up again about ten years later when Gene was creating a new series called” Starship.” ” That series never came to fruition. However, Matt Jefferies did produce some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork for the” 22L” version for that series.

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 being based on a single man in a chair, the bridge was designed with concepts that would still appear on 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 low-cost mechanic, similar to 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.

Gene [ Roddenberry ] requested Rick Sternbach to create a high contrast ink version of a Matt Jefferies ‘ painting to add to this wall when they were building the ship wall in the rec room, according to Rademaker.

The Space Cruise Liner

That particular detail would continue to be a canon’s tantalizing tidbit for a long time. For decades the only further information fans would have on the ship was the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology. This book, which was published in 1980 and was written and edited by Stan Goldstein and Fred Goldstein, served as the “official” history of the Star Trek universe for many years.

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. Additionally, the book claimed that it was the first ship to have 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.

The show chose a different design, one that for some reason never made it to the 1701’s rec room wall, because it was probably correctly determined that the show’s hero ship would need to be more recognizable as” Star Trek” than the historic ring ship.

Back into the Canon

However, the Star Trek: Enterprise would require other ship designs as well, which is reassuringly saucer-and-warp-nacelle-based. 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 thought 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 Matt Jeffries ‘ ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s Starship was the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic.

Enterprise would go a step further in cementing the ring ship’s place in the canon with the episode” First Flight”. In this episode, a flashback to the early days of the warp program was provided. 80 years after Zefram Cochrane won Warp 1, Earth was still attempting to reach 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 Enterprise XCV-330 mission patch, which features a picture of the mysterious ring ship, is right up there on the board, and the bar is decorated with various photos and insignias that honor the history of flight and spaceflight.

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

According to Rademaker, “my personal theory is that XCV ships were developed somewhere between 2055 and 2110 ).” ” 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 the final and perhaps even 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”.

Resuming the XCV-330’s operation

Rademaker has had plenty of time to think about this. When he met Andrew Probert, who 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,” he first made contact with the ship in a professional capacity.

” 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, and I improved a lot as a result.”

The work caught a few eyes, including that of modeling company QMx. They requested a file of the 3D model from Rademaker so 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 asserts.

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 people can travel at light speed. According to the QMx website ( which is sadly no longer online ), this Enterprise was” Earth&#8217, s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle”.

Eaglemoss would use Rakemaker’s model as the foundation for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature, and Rakemaker’s model would continue its journeys. 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.

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

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.

In the short film” Memory Wall,” the model even made its first real appearance on the ship, depicting its eventual demise. Rademaker has also continued working with the ring ship shape for NASA. You see, the theories of physicist Miguel Alcubierre are very similar to those of Star Trek‘s warp drive. His theoretical” Alcubierre drive” would be driven by an engine that is most likely, you guessed it, ring shaped.

” Dr. Harold” Sonny” White, who was then employed by NASA, requested that I modify the XCV-330 to make a ship for STEM outreach,” Rademaker says. ” We eventually decided to do a whole new ringship that would conform better to his theory. ( The IXS-110, also known as the 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 enjoyable.

The Continuing Voyages

For the first time, Star Trek‘s ring ship design is being featured. As Star Trek: Lower Decks drew to a close last year, with what is now a Hugo award-winning finale. The USS Beagle, a ship in the middle of the 21st century, was featured in the story. 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.

Finally, we come to the XCV-100 in the episode from last week’s Strange New Worlds. It gives us a lot of clues about how the ring ship Enterprise fits into Star Trek history. The ship appears much larger than the ship in Rademaker’s models if it has a ring similar to the Enterprise, which is obscured.

” The XCV-100 was not a warp capable ship, and the larger size was a requirement for their mission. In contrast to the 100, the XCV-330 appears to be a scaled-down version with very similar nose/front end characteristics, as suggested by Rademaker. ” Or maybe they just made this shape in a couple of sizes. Not uncommon in shipbuilding, some hulls can be increased from, say, 60 to 120 meters without making significant structural changes.

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 sometime 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. That probe does not, however, have any nation flags on the outside. That makes me assume that 2067 is when UESPA is well established and Earth &#8217, s unification in terms of space related things has been formalized”.

Even the crew’s spacesuits, which are clearly based on the” Z2″ spacesuit prototype being created for a potential Mars mission, are visible. 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 ).

However, look closer, and you’ll discover a lot more. Through” The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” we are told the legends and rumors about this scavenger ship. Even the Gorn refer to it as a monster.

As Scott describes it,” Its needs are bottomless. It only consumes and grows bigger. The bigger it gets, the more it requires. Then it moves on to eat the next resource, as it never will. &#8221,

We believe he is describing an alien monster when he says it. Something consumes, destroys and assimilates everything it encounters, like the Doomsday Machine from TOS, or the Borg.

The inhabitants of Star Trek‘s ideal future, however, are presumably describing us as they are in the 21st century.

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

On Paramount+, new episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds air on Thursdays, with a finale set for September 11.

The post Strange New Worlds &#8217, XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History appeared first on Den of Geek.

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

Feedback is also one of the most underestimated equipment, and generally by assuming that we’re now great at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a skill that can be trained, grown, and improved. Bad feedback can cause conflict in jobs, lower motivation, and negatively impact faith and teamwork over the long term. Quality opinions can be a revolutionary force.

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

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

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

The material

The content of the feedback is the bedrock of every effective analysis, so where do we need to begin? There are many designs that you can use to form your content. The one that I personally like best—because it’s obvious and actionable—is this one from Lara Hogan.

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

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

Not confident about the keys ‘ patterns and hierarchy—it feels off. Can they be altered?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, for the request approach:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The equation above is not intended to provide a predetermined template for feedback, but rather a mnemonic to reflect and enhance the practice. Even after years of active work on my critiques, I still from time to time go back to this formula and reflect on whether what I just wrote is effective.

The atmosphere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something to highlight because it’s quite frequent—especially in teams that have a strong group spirit—is that people tend to beat around the bush. A positive attitude doesn’t necessarily mean giving in to criticism; it just means that you give it in a respectful and constructive manner, whether it be in the form of criticism or criticism. The nicest thing that you can do for someone is to help them grow.

We have a great advantage in giving feedback in written form: it can be reviewed by another person who isn’t directly involved, which can help to reduce or remove any bias that might be there. When I shared a comment with someone I knew,” How does this sound,”” How can I do it better,” or even” How would you have written it,” I discovered that the two versions had different meanings.

The format

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

Let’s imagine that someone shared a design iteration for a project. You are reviewing it and leaving a comment. Let’s try to think about some factors that might be helpful to consider, as there are many ways to accomplish this, and context is of course a factor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design analysis is not a one-time procedure. Sure, any great comments process continues until the project is finished, but this is especially true for layout because architecture work continues iteration after iteration, from a high level to the finest details. Each stage requires its unique set of questions.

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

The query

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

But how do we get into this scenario? It’s a combination of various aspects. One is that we don’t often consider asking as a part of the input approach. Another is how healthy it is to assume that everyone else will agree with the problem and leave it alone. Another is that in nonprofessional conversations, there’s usually no need to be that exact. In summary, we tend to undervalue the value of the issues, and we don’t work to improve them.

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

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

” Stage” refers to each of the actions of the process—in our event, the design process. The kind of feedback changes as the person research moves forward to the final design. But within a single stage, one might also examine whether some assumptions are correct and whether there’s been a suitable language of the amassed input into updated designs as the task has evolved. The layers of user experience could serve as a starting point for potential questions. What do you want to know: Project objectives? User requirements? Functionality? Content? Interaction design? Information architecture UI design? design of navigation Visual design? Branding?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The iteration

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

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

There are many benefits to using iteration posts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, as mentioned earlier, a list of the questions must be included in order to help you guide the design critique in the desired direction. Doing this as a numbered list can also help make it easier to refer to each question by its number.

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

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

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

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

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

The review

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

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

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

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

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

The swoop-by comment, which is the kind of feedback that comes from a member of a team or non-project who might not be aware of the context, restrictions, decisions, or requirements, or of the discussions from earlier iterations, is the second friction point. On their side, there’s something that one can hope that they might learn: they could start to acknowledge that they’re doing this and they could be more conscious in outlining where they’re coming from. It can be annoying to have to repeat the same response repeatedly in swoop-by comments.

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Mike Shelton and Brie Anne Demkiw for their initial review of this article.

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

Laptops have trouble because between spoken and written speech, talk is more primitive. Machines must wrestle with the complexity of human statement, including the pauses and pauses, the gestures and brain speech, and the word selection and spoken dialect variations that can impede even the most skillfully crafted human-computer interaction. In the human-to-human situation, spoken language also has the opportunity of face-to-face call, where we can easily interpret verbal interpersonal cues.

In contrast, written language develops its own fossil record of dated terms and phrases as we report it and keep utilization long after they are no longer needed in spoken communication ( for example, the welcome” To whom it may concern” ). Because it tends to be more consistent, smooth, and proper, written word is necessarily far easier for devices to interpret and know.

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

Voice Compositions

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

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

These three categories, which I refer to as transactional, informational, and prosocial, also apply to essentially every voice interaction: a single conversation that starts with the voice interface’s first greeting and ends with the user leaving the interface. Note here that a conversation in our human sense—a chat between people that leads to some result and lasts an arbitrary length of time—could encompass multiple transactional, informational, and prosocial voice interactions in succession. In other words, a voice interaction is a conversation, but it is not always just one voice interaction.

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

A voice interface can also have two types of conversations we can have with one another that are both transactional and informational, each learning something new ( “discuss a musical” ).

Transactional voice interactions

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

How are things going, Alison?

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

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

Burhan: Sure, what size?

Large, Alison.

Burhan: Anything else?

Alison: No, that’s it.

Burhan: Something to drink?

I’ll have a bottle of Coke, Alison.

Burhan: You got it. It will cost about$ 15 and take fifteen minutes to complete.

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

Informational voice interactions

Meanwhile, some conversations are primarily about obtaining information. Alison might visit Crust Deluxe with the sole intention of placing an order, but she might not want to leave with a pizza at all. She might be just as interested in whether they serve halal or kosher dishes, gluten-free options, or something else. We’re after much more than just a prosocial mini-conversation at the beginning, even though we do it once more to establish politeness.

How are things going, Alison?

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

Alison: Can I ask a few questions?

Burhan: Of course! Go right ahead.

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

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

Alison: What about gluten-free pizzas?

Burhan: For both our deep-dish and thin-crust pizzas, we can definitely make a gluten-free crust for you. Anything else I can answer for you?

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

Burhan: Anytime, come back soon!

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

Voice Interfaces

Voice interfaces, in essence, use speech to assist users in accomplishing their objectives. But simply because an interface has a voice component doesn’t mean that every user interaction with it is mediated through voice. We’re most concerned with pure voice interfaces, which are completely dependent on spoken conversation and lack any visual component, making them much more nuanced and challenging to deal with because multimodal voice interfaces can lean on visual components like screens as crutches.

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

IVR ( interactive voice response ) systems

Though written conversational interfaces have been fixtures of computing for many decades, voice interfaces first emerged in the early 1990s with text-to-speech ( TTS ) dictation programs that recited written text aloud, as well as speech-enabled in-car systems that gave directions to a user-provided address. We became familiar with the first real voice interfaces that could actually be spoken to without having to deal with overburdened customer service representatives as a result of the development of interactive voice response ( IVR ) systems.

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

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

Screen readers

The screen reader, a program that converts visual information into synthesized speech, was a development that accompanied the development of IVR systems. For Blind or visually impaired website users, it’s the predominant method of interacting with text, multimedia, or form elements. The most recent version of a voice-over-text format of content delivery is probably the one that is closest to it.

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

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

There is a big draw for screen readers: they’re challenging to use and relentlessly verbose, despite being incredibly instructive for voice interface designers. The visual structures of websites and web navigation don’t translate well to screen readers, sometimes resulting in unwieldy pronouncements that name every manipulable HTML element and announce every formatting change. Working with web-based interfaces takes a cognitive toll for many screen reader users.

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

I hated the way Screen Readers operated from the beginning. Why are they designed the way they are? It makes no sense to present information visually before converting it to audio only after that. All of the time and energy that goes into creating the perfect user experience for an app is wasted, or even worse, adversely impacting the experience for blind users. __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

In many cases, well-designed voice interfaces can speed users to their destination better than long-winded screen reader monologues. After all, users of the visual interface have the advantage of freely scurrying around the viewport to find information, ignoring areas that are unimportant to them. Blind users, meanwhile, are obligated to listen to every utterance synthesized into speech and therefore prize brevity and efficiency. Users with disabilities who have long had no choice but to use clumsy screen readers might benefit from more streamlined user interfaces, especially more advanced voice assistants.

Voice assistants

Many of us immediately associate voice assistants with the subset of voice interfaces that are now commonplace in living rooms, smart homes, and offices with the film HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey or Majel Barrett’s voice as the omniscient computer in Star Trek. Voice assistants are akin to personal concierges that can answer questions, schedule appointments, conduct searches, and perform other common day-to-day tasks. And because of their assistive potential, they are quickly gaining more and more attention from accessibility advocates.

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

There is a significant variation in how programmable and customizable some voice assistants are compared to others due to the sheer number of voice assistants available today ( Fig. 1 ). At one extreme, everything except vendor-provided features is locked down, for example, at the time of their release, the core functionality of Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana couldn’t be extended beyond their existing capabilities. There are no other means by which developers can interact with Siri at a low level, aside from predefined categories of tasks like sending messages, hailing rideshares, making restaurant reservations, and other things, so even now it isn’t possible to program Siri to perform arbitrary functions.

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

As businesses like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google continue to occupy their positions, they’re also selling and open-sourcing an unheard array of tools and frameworks for designers and developers that aim to make creating voice interfaces as simple as possible, even without code.

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

Voice content

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

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

For many of us, our first foray into informational voice interfaces will be to deliver content to users. There is only one issue: any content we already have isn’t in any way suitable for this new environment. So how do we make the content trapped on our websites more conversational? And how do we create fresh copy that works with voice movements?

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

An example of microcontent can be a day’s weather forecast [sic], an airplane flight’s arrival and departure times, an abstract from a lengthy publication, or a single instant message. __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I would update Dash’s definition of microcontent to include all instances of bite-sized content that goes beyond written communiqués. After all, today we encounter microcontent in interfaces where a small snippet of copy is displayed alone, unmoored from the browser, like a textbot confirmation of a restaurant reservation. The best way to learn how to stretch your content to the limits of its potential is through microcontent, which will inform both established and new delivery methods.

As microcontent, voice content is unique because it’s an example of how content is experienced in time rather than in space. We can instantly look at a digital sign for an instant and be informed when the next train is coming, but voice interfaces keep our attention captive for so long that we can’t quickly evade or skip, a feature that screen reader users are all too familiar with.

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

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

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

Flash, Photoshop, and flexible style

When I first started designing sites, my go-to technology was Photoshop. I started by making a design for a 960px canvas that I would later add willing to. The growth phase was about attaining pixel-perfect precision using set widths, fixed levels, and absolute setting.

All of this was altered by Ethan Marcotte’s speak at An Event Apart and the subsequent article in A Checklist Off in 2010. I was sold on responsive pattern as soon as I heard about it, but I was even terrified. The pixel-perfect models full of special figures that I had formerly prided myself on producing were no longer good enough.

My first encounter with reactive style didn’t help my fear. My second project was to get an active fixed-width website and make it reactive. You can’t really put responsiveness at the end of a job, which I learned the hard way. To make smooth design, you need to prepare throughout the style stage.

A new way to style

Removing restrictions and creating content that can be viewed on any system has always been the goal of designing responsive or liquid websites. It relies on the use of percentage-based design, which I immediately achieved with local CSS and power groups:

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

Therefore with Sass but that I could use @includes to re-use repeated blocks of code and transition to more semantic premium:

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

Media questions

The next ingredient for flexible design is press queries. Without them, regardless of whether the content remained readable, would shrink to fit the available space. ( The exact opposite issue developed with the introduction of a mobile-first approach. )

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

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

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

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

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

Our rely on multimedia queries resulted in parts that were tied to frequent screen sizes. If the goal of part libraries is modify, then this is a real problem because you can just use these components if the devices you’re designing for correspond to the viewport sizes used in the pattern library—in the process never really hitting that “devices that don’t already occur” goal.

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

Container queries: our savior or a false dawn?

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

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

In other words, responsive elements are meant to replace responsive layouts.

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

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

The best place to make that choice is probably a component library that is disconnected from context and real content.

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

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

Without having strong cross-browser support for them, it’s difficult to say for certain whether container queries will be a success story. Responsive component libraries would definitely evolve how we design and would improve the possibilities for reuse and design at scale. However, we might need to modify these elements in order to fit our content.

CSS is changing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intrinsic layouts

I’d be remiss not to mention intrinsic layouts, a term used by Jen Simmons to describe a mix of contemporary and traditional CSS features used to create layouts that respond to available space.

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

frunits is a statement that says,” I want you to distribute the extra space in this way, but never make it smaller than the content that is inside.”

—Jen Simmons,” Designing Intrinsic Layouts”

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

What makes intrinsic design stand out is that it not only creates designs that can withstand future devices but also helps scale design without losing flexibility. Without having to have the same breakpoints or content as in the previous implementation, components and patterns can be removed and reused.

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

Another 2010 moment?

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

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

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

Another possibility is that I’m now more prepared for change. In 2010 I was new to design in general, the shift was frightening and required a lot of learning. Additionally, an intrinsic approach isn’t exactly all-new; it’s about applying existing skills and CSS knowledge in a unique way.

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

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

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

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

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

How do you do that now, with each component responding to content and layouts flexing as and when they need to? This kind of design must take place in the browser, which is something I’m very fond of.

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

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

First, the content

Content is not constant. After all, to design for the unanticipated or unexpected, we must take into account changes in content, such as in our earlier Subgrid card illustration, which allowed the cards to make adjustments to both their own and sibling elements.

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

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

 First line of text with different styling...

—we can target content based on where it appears.

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

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

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

Directional variables must be specified in the Sass version.

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

These variables can be used as values—

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

—or as properties.

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

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

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

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

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

Fluid and fixed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, the situation

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

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

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

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

Responsible design

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

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

Chris Ashton

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

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

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

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

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

So how can we put users in control?

The media queries are now being returned.

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

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

The Level 5 spec for Media Queries is still being developed at this writing. It introduces some really exciting queries that in the future will help us design for multiple other unexpected situations.

For instance, a light-level feature allows you to alter a user’s style when they are in the sun or in the dark. Paired with custom properties, these features allow us to quickly create designs or themes for specific environments.

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

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

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

Expect the unexpected

In the end, we should always anticipate that things will change. Devices in particular change faster than we can keep up, with foldable screens already on the market.

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

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

When it comes to unexpected circumstances, we must make sure our goods are accessible whenever and wherever needed. We can move closer to achieving this by involving users in our design decisions, by creating choice via browsers, and by giving control to our users with user-preference-based media queries.

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

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

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

The world then knew that the four-minute hour was possible because of this change in the standard. Bannister’s history lasted just forty-six days, when it was snatched aside by American sprinter John Landy. Finally, in the same race, three athletes managed to cross the four-minute challenge together. Since therefore, over 1, 400 walkers have actually run a mile in under four days, the current document is 3: 43.13, held by Moroccan performer Hicham El Guerrouj.

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

Establishing requirements for a green website

The key indicators of climate performance in most big sectors are pretty well established, such as power per square metre for homes and miles per gallon for cars. The tools and methods for calculating those measures are standardized as well, which keeps everyone on the same site when doing economic evaluations. However, we aren’t held to any specific environmental standards in the world of websites and apps, and we only recently have access to the tools and techniques we need to do so.

The main objective in green web layout is to reduce carbon emissions. However, it’s nearly impossible to accurately assess the CO₂ output of a website product. We can’t assess the pollutants coming out of the exhaust valves on our laptops. The pollution coming from power plants that burn coal and oil are considerably away, out of sight, and out of mind. We have no way to track the particles from a website or app up to the power station where the light is being generated and really know the exact amount of house oil produced. What then do we do?

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

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

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

Transfer of data

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

The page weight, or the page’s transfer size in kilobytes, can be most easily calculated for a single visit for web pages. It’s fairly easy to measure using the developer tools in any modern web browser. Frequently, the statistics for the total data transfer of any web application are included in your web hosting account ( Fig. 2.1 ).

The nice thing about page weight as a metric is that it allows us to compare the efficiency of web pages on a level playing field without confusing the issue with constantly changing traffic volumes.

A large scope is necessary to reduce page weight. By early 2020, the median page weight was 1.97 MB for setups the HTTP Archive classifies as “desktop” and 1.77 MB for “mobile”, with desktop increasing 36 percent since January 2016 and mobile page weights nearly doubling in the same period ( Fig 2.2 ). Image files account for roughly half of this data transfer, making them the single biggest contributor to carbon emissions on the typical website.

History clearly shows us that our web pages can be smaller, if only we set our minds to it. While the majority of technologies, including the underlying technology of the web like data centers and transmission networks, become more and more energy efficient, websites themselves become less effective as time goes on.

You might be aware of the idea behind performance budgeting as a method for directing a project team to deliver faster user experiences. For example, we might specify that the website must load in a maximum of one second on a broadband connection and three seconds on a 3G connection. Performance budgets are upper limits rather than vague suggestions, much like speed limits while driving, so the goal should always be to come within budget.

Designing for fast performance does often lead to reduced data transfer and emissions, but it isn’t always the case. Page weight and transfer size are more objective and reliable benchmarks for sustainable web design, whereas web performance often depends more on the user’s perception of load times than it does on how effective the underlying system is.

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

We could start looking at the transferability of our web pages for repeat visitors if we want to take it one step further. Although page weight for the first time someone visits is the easiest thing to measure, and easy to compare on a like-for-like basis, we can learn even more if we start looking at transfer size in other scenarios too. For instance, visitors who load the same page more frequently will likely have a high percentage of the files cached in their browser, which means they won’t need to move all the files on subsequent visits. Likewise, a visitor who navigates to new pages on the same website will likely not need to load the full page each time, as some global assets from areas like the header and footer may already be cached in their browser. Moving away from the first visit and allowing us to determine page weight budgets for scenarios other than this one can help us learn even more about how to optimize efficiency for users who regularly visit our pages.

Page weight budgets are easy to track throughout a design and development process. Although they don’t directly disclose carbon emissions and energy consumption data, they do provide a clear indicator of efficiency in comparison to other websites. And as transfer size is an effective analog for energy consumption, we can actually use it to estimate energy consumption too.

In summary, less data transfer leads to more energy efficiency, which is a crucial component of reducing web product carbon emissions. The more efficient our products, the less electricity they use, and the less fossil fuels need to be burned to produce the electricity to power them. However, as we’ll see next, it’s important to take into account the source of that electricity because all web products require some.

Electricity’s coal power

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reverting it to carbon emissions

If we combine carbon intensity with a calculation for energy consumption, we can calculate the carbon emissions of our websites and apps. A tool my team created accomplishes this by measuring the data transfer over the wire when a web page is loaded, calculating the associated electricity consumption, and then converting that data into a CO₂ figure ( Fig. ₂.4). It also factors in whether or not the web hosting is powered by renewable energy.

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

With the ability to calculate carbon emissions for our projects, we could even set up carbon budgets as well. CO₂ is not a metric commonly used in web projects, we’re more familiar with kilobytes and megabytes, and can fairly easily look at design options and files to assess how big they are. Although translating that into carbon adds an air of abstraction, carbon budgets do focus our minds on the main issue we’re trying to reduce, which also supports the main goal of sustainable web design: reducing carbon emissions.

Browser Energy

Transfer of data might be the simplest and most complete analog for energy consumption in our digital projects, but by giving us one number to represent the energy used in the data center, the telecoms networks, and the end user’s devices, it can’t offer us insights into the efficiency in any specific part of the system.

One part of the system we can look at in more detail is the energy used by end users ‘ devices. The computational burden is increasingly shifting from the data center to the users ‘ devices, whether they are phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or even smart TVs, as front-end web technologies advance. Modern web browsers allow us to implement more complex styling and animation on the fly using CSS and JavaScript. Additionally, JavaScript libraries like Angular and React make it possible to create applications where the” thinking” process is performed partially or completely in the browser.

All of these advances are exciting and open up new possibilities for what the web can do to serve society and create positive experiences. However, more data is processed in a web browser, which means more energy is used by the user’s devices. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a lot of processing power on a user’s device unintentionally exclude those who have older, slower devices and make the batteries on phones and laptops drain more quickly. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. The poorest members of society are also under disproportionate financial burdens due to this, which is not just bad for the environment.

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

You are aware of the moment your computer’s cooling fans start spinning so frantically that you mistakenly believe it might take off when you load a website? That’s essentially what this tool is measuring.

It uses these figures to create an energy impact rating and shows the percentage of CPU used and how long the CPU used when loading the web page last. It doesn’t give us precise data for the amount of electricity used in kilowatts, but the information it does provide can be used to benchmark how efficiently your websites use energy and set targets for improvement.