Category: Blog

Humility, a designer’s essential value—that has a nice ring to it. What about humility, an office manager’s essential value? Or a dentist’s? Or a librarian’s? They all sound great. When humility is our guiding light, the path is always open for fulfillment, evolution, connection, and engagement. In this chapter, we’re going to talk about why.

That said, this is a book for designers, and to that end, I’d like to start with a story—well, a journey, really. It’s a personal one, and I’m going to make myself a bit vulnerable along the way. I call it:

The Tale of Justin’s Preposterous Pate

When I was coming out of art school, a long-haired, goateed neophyte, print was a known quantity to me; design on the web, however, was rife with complexities to navigate and discover, a problem to be solved. Though I had been formally trained in graphic design, typography, and layout, what fascinated me was how these traditional skills might be applied to a fledgling digital landscape. This theme would ultimately shape the rest of my career.

So rather than graduate and go into print like many of my friends, I devoured HTML and JavaScript books into the wee hours of the morning and taught myself how to code during my senior year. I wanted—nay, needed—to better understand the underlying implications of what my design decisions would mean once rendered in a browser.

The late ’90s and early 2000s were the so-called “Wild West” of web design. Designers at the time were all figuring out how to apply design and visual communication to the digital landscape. What were the rules? How could we break them and still engage, entertain, and convey information? At a more macro level, how could my values, inclusive of humility, respect, and connection, align in tandem with that? I was hungry to find out.

Though I’m talking about a different era, those are timeless considerations between non-career interactions and the world of design. What are your core passions, or values, that transcend medium? It’s essentially the same concept we discussed earlier on the direct parallels between what fulfills you, agnostic of the tangible or digital realms; the core themes are all the same.

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

For example, this iteration of my personal portfolio site (“the pseudoroom”) from that era was experimental, if not a bit heavy- handed, in the visual communication of the concept of a living sketchbook. Very skeuomorphic. I collaborated with fellow designer and dear friend Marc Clancy (now a co-founder of the creative project organizing app Milanote) on this one, where we’d first sketch and then pass a Photoshop file back and forth to trick things out and play with varied user interactions. Then, I’d break it down and code it into a digital layout.

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

From around the same time, GUI Galaxy was a design, pixel art, and Mac-centric news portal some graphic designer friends and I conceived, designed, developed, and deployed.

Design news portals were incredibly popular during this period, featuring (what would now be considered) Tweet-size, small-format snippets of pertinent news from the categories I previously mentioned. If you took Twitter, curated it to a few categories, and wrapped it in a custom-branded experience, you’d have a design news portal from the late 90s / early 2000s.

We as designers had evolved and created a bandwidth-sensitive, web standards award-winning, much more accessibility-conscious website. Still ripe with experimentation, yet more mindful of equitable engagement. You can see a couple of content panes here, noting general news (tech, design) and Mac-centric news below. We also offered many of the custom downloads I cited before as present on my folio site but branded and themed to GUI Galaxy.

The site’s backbone was a homegrown CMS, with the presentation layer consisting of global design + illustration + news author collaboration. And the collaboration effort here, in addition to experimentation on a ‘brand’ and content delivery, was hitting my core. We were designing something bigger than any single one of us and connecting with a global audience.

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

Now, why am I taking you down this trip of design memory lane? Two reasons.

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

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

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

Pixel Problems

Websites during this period were often designed and built on Macs whose OS and desktops looked something like this. This is Mac OS 7.5, but 8 and 9 weren’t that different.

Desktop icons fascinated me: how could any single one, at any given point, stand out to get my attention? In this example, the user’s desktop is tidy, but think of a more realistic example with icon pandemonium. Or, say an icon was part of a larger system grouping (fonts, extensions, control panels)—how did it also maintain cohesion amongst a group?

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

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

Expanding upon the notion of exploration, I wanted to see how I could push the limits of a 32×32 pixel grid with that 256-color palette. Those ridiculous constraints forced a clarity of concept and presentation that I found incredibly appealing. The digital gauntlet had been tossed, and that challenge fueled me. And so, in my dorm room into the wee hours of the morning, I toiled away, bringing conceptual sketches into mini mosaic fruition.

These are some of my creations, utilizing the only tool available at the time to create icons called ResEdit. ResEdit was a clunky, built-in Mac OS utility not really made for exactly what we were using it for. At the core of all of this work: Research. Challenge. Problem- solving. Again, these core connection-based values are agnostic of medium.

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

This is K10k, short for Kaliber 1000. K10k was founded in 1998 by Michael Schmidt and Toke Nygaard, and was the design news portal on the web during this period. With its pixel art-fueled presentation, ultra-focused care given to every facet and detail, and with many of the more influential designers of the time who were invited to be news authors on the site, well… it was the place to be, my friend. With respect where respect is due, GUI Galaxy’s concept was inspired by what these folks were doing.

For my part, the combination of my web design work and pixel art exploration began to get me some notoriety in the design scene. Eventually, K10k noticed and added me as one of their very select group of news authors to contribute content to the site.

Amongst my personal work and side projects—and now with this inclusion—in the design community, this put me on the map. My design work also began to be published in various printed collections, in magazines domestically and overseas, and featured on other design news portals. With that degree of success while in my early twenties, something else happened:

I evolved—devolved, really—into a colossal asshole (and in just about a year out of art school, no less). The press and the praise became what fulfilled me, and they went straight to my head. They inflated my ego. I actually felt somewhat superior to my fellow designers.

The casualties? My design stagnated. Its evolution—my evolution— stagnated.

I felt so supremely confident in my abilities that I effectively stopped researching and discovering. When previously sketching concepts or iterating ideas in lead was my automatic step one, I instead leaped right into Photoshop. I drew my inspiration from the smallest of sources (and with blinders on). Any critique of my work from my peers was often vehemently dismissed. The most tragic loss: I had lost touch with my values.

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

Admittedly, it was a gift I initially did not accept but ultimately was able to deeply reflect upon. I was soon able to accept, and process, and course correct. The realization laid me low, but the re-awakening was essential. I let go of the “reward” of adulation and re-centered upon what stoked the fire for me in art school. Most importantly: I got back to my core values.

Always Students

Following that short-term regression, I was able to push forward in my personal design and career. And I could self-reflect as I got older to facilitate further growth and course correction as needed.

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

Around fifteen years ago, in one of my earlier professional roles, I designed the interface for the application that generated the LHC’s particle collision diagrams. These diagrams are the rendering of what’s actually happening inside the Collider during any given particle collision event and are often considered works of art unto themselves.

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

I cut my teeth on usability testing, working with the Fermilab team to iterate and improve the interface. How they spoke and what they spoke about was like an alien language to me. And by making myself humble and working under the mindset that I was but a student, I made myself available to be a part of their world to generate that vital connection.

I also had my first ethnographic observation experience: going to the Fermilab location and observing how the physicists used the tool in their actual environment, on their actual terminals. For example, one takeaway was that due to the level of ambient light-driven contrast within the facility, the data columns ended up using white text on a dark gray background instead of black text-on-white. This enabled them to pore over reams of data during the day and ease their eye strain. And Fermilab and CERN are government entities with rigorous accessibility standards, so my knowledge in that realm also grew. The barrier-free design was another essential form of connection.

So to those core drivers of my visual problem-solving soul and ultimate fulfillment: discovery, exposure to new media, observation, human connection, and evolution. What opened the door for those values was me checking my ego before I walked through it.

An evergreen willingness to listen, learn, understand, grow, evolve, and connect yields our best work. In particular, I want to focus on the words ‘grow’ and ‘evolve’ in that statement. If we are always students of our craft, we are also continually making ourselves available to evolve. Yes, we have years of applicable design study under our belt. Or the focused lab sessions from a UX bootcamp. Or the monogrammed portfolio of our work. Or, ultimately, decades of a career behind us.

But all that said: experience does not equal “expert.”

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

Ever since I was a boy, I’ve been fascinated with movies. I loved the characters and the excitement—but most of all the stories. I wanted to be an actor. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting adventures. I even dreamed up ideas for movies that my friends and I could make and star in. But they never went any further. I did, however, end up working in user experience (UX). Now, I realize that there’s an element of theater to UX—I hadn’t really considered it before, but user research is storytelling. And to get the most out of user research, you need to tell a good story where you bring stakeholders—the product team and decision makers—along and get them interested in learning more.

Think of your favorite movie. More than likely it follows a three-act structure that’s commonly seen in storytelling: the setup, the conflict, and the resolution. The first act shows what exists today, and it helps you get to know the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two introduces the conflict, where the action is. Here, problems grow or get worse. And the third and final act is the resolution. This is where the issues are resolved and the characters learn and change. I believe that this structure is also a great way to think about user research, and I think that it can be especially helpful in explaining user research to others.

Use storytelling as a structure to do research

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see research as being expendable. If budgets or timelines are tight, research tends to be one of the first things to go. Instead of investing in research, some product managers rely on designers or—worse—their own opinion to make the “right” choices for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get teams some of the way, but that approach can so easily miss out on solving users’ real problems. To remain user-centered, this is something we should avoid. User research elevates design. It keeps it on track, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay ahead of your competitors.

In the three-act structure, each act corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is critical to telling the whole story. Let’s look at the different acts and how they align with user research.

Act one: setup

The setup is all about understanding the background, and that’s where foundational research comes in. Foundational research (also called generative, discovery, or initial research) helps you understand users and identify their problems. You’re learning about what exists today, the challenges users have, and how the challenges affect them—just like in the movies. To do foundational research, you can conduct contextual inquiries or diary studies (or both!), which can help you start to identify problems as well as opportunities. It doesn’t need to be a huge investment in time or money.

Erika Hall writes about minimum viable ethnography, which can be as simple as spending 15 minutes with a user and asking them one thing: “‘Walk me through your day yesterday.’ That’s it. Present that one request. Shut up and listen to them for 15 minutes. Do your damndest to keep yourself and your interests out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography.” According to Hall, “[This] will probably prove quite illuminating. In the highly unlikely case that you didn’t learn anything new or useful, carry on with enhanced confidence in your direction.”  

This makes total sense to me. And I love that this makes user research so accessible. You don’t need to prepare a lot of documentation; you can just recruit participants and do it! This can yield a wealth of information about your users, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their lives. That’s really what act one is all about: understanding where users are coming from. 

Jared Spool talks about the importance of foundational research and how it should form the bulk of your research. If you can draw from any additional user data that you can get your hands on, such as surveys or analytics, that can supplement what you’ve heard in the foundational studies or even point to areas that need further investigation. Together, all this data paints a clearer picture of the state of things and all its shortcomings. And that’s the beginning of a compelling story. It’s the point in the plot where you realize that the main characters—or the users in this case—are facing challenges that they need to overcome. Like in the movies, this is where you start to build empathy for the characters and root for them to succeed. And hopefully stakeholders are now doing the same. Their sympathy may be with their business, which could be losing money because users can’t complete certain tasks. Or maybe they do empathize with users’ struggles. Either way, act one is your initial hook to get the stakeholders interested and invested.

Once stakeholders begin to understand the value of foundational research, that can open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making process. And that can guide product teams toward being more user-centered. This benefits everyone—users, the product, and stakeholders. It’s like winning an Oscar in movie terms—it often leads to your product being well received and successful. And this can be an incentive for stakeholders to repeat this process with other products. Storytelling is the key to this process, and knowing how to tell a good story is the only way to get stakeholders to really care about doing more research. 

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

Act two: conflict

Act two is all about digging deeper into the problems that you identified in act one. This usually involves directional research, such as usability tests, where you assess a potential solution (such as a design) to see whether it addresses the issues that you found. The issues could include unmet needs or problems with a flow or process that’s tripping users up. Like act two in a movie, more issues will crop up along the way. It’s here that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this act. 

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

There are parallels with storytelling here too; if you try to tell a story with too many characters, the plot may get lost. Having fewer participants means that each user’s struggles will be more memorable and easier to relay to other stakeholders when talking about the research. This can help convey the issues that need to be addressed while also highlighting the value of doing the research in the first place.

Researchers have run usability tests in person for decades, but you can also conduct usability tests remotely using tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You can think of in-person usability tests like going to a play and remote sessions as more like watching a movie. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. In-person usability research is a much richer experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. You also get real-time reactions—including surprise, agreement, disagreement, and discussions about what they’re seeing. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors’ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.

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

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

The benefit of usability testing, whether remote or in person, is that you get to see real users interact with the designs in real time, and you can ask them questions to understand their thought processes and grasp of the solution. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. Furthermore, you can test hypotheses and gauge whether your thinking is correct. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. Act two is the heart of the story—where the excitement is—but there can be surprises too. This is equally true of usability tests. Often, participants will say unexpected things, which change the way that you look at things—and these twists in the story can move things in new directions. 

Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. And too often usability testing is the only research process that some stakeholders think that they ever need. In fact, if the designs that you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a solid understanding of your users (foundational research), there’s not much to be gained by doing usability testing in the first place. That’s because you’re narrowing the focus of what you’re getting feedback on, without understanding the users’ needs. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. It’s only feedback on a particular design in the context of a usability test.  

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

In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can help motivate stakeholders to address the issues that come up.

Act three: resolution

While the first two acts are about understanding the background and the tensions that can propel stakeholders into action, the third part is about resolving the problems from the first two acts. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That means the whole product team, including developers, UX practitioners, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other stakeholders that have a say in the next steps. It allows the whole team to hear users’ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. And it lets the UX research and design teams clarify, suggest alternatives, or give more context behind their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

This act is mostly told in voiceover with some audience participation. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They give the stakeholders their recommendations and their guidance on creating this vision.

Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. “The most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved,” writes Duarte. “That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently.”

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

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be visual, like quick mockups of how a new design could look that solves a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the end of the session when you’ve wrapped everything up in the conclusion by summarizing the main issues and suggesting a way forward. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. This stage gives stakeholders the next steps and hopefully the momentum to take those steps!

While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. All the elements of a good story are there in the three-act structure of user research: 

• Act one: You meet the protagonists (the users) and the antagonists (the problems affecting users). This is the beginning of the plot. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. The output of these methods can include personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards.

• Act two: Next, there’s character development. There’s conflict and tension as the protagonists encounter problems and challenges, which they must overcome. In act two, researchers might use methods including usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and heuristics evaluation. The output of these can include usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices.

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

The researcher has multiple roles: they’re the storyteller, the director, and the producer. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters (in the research). And the stakeholders are the audience. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users’ stories through research. By the end, the stakeholders should walk away with a purpose and an eagerness to resolve the product’s ills. 

So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. Ultimately, user research is a win-win for everyone, and you just need to get stakeholders interested in how the story ends.

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Today’s web is not always an amiable place. Sites greet you with a popover that demands assent to their cookie policy, and leave you with Taboola ads promising “One Weird Trick!” to cure your ailments. Social media sites are tuned for engagement, and few things are more engaging than a fight. Today it seems that people want to quarrel; I have seen flame wars among birders.  

These tensions are often at odds with a site’s goals. If we are providing support and advice to customers, we don’t want those customers to wrangle with each other. If we offer news about the latest research, we want readers to feel at ease; if we promote upcoming marches, we want our core supporters to feel comfortable and we want curious newcomers to feel welcome. 

In a study for a conference on the History of the Web, I looked to the origins of Computer Science in Vienna (1928-1934)  for a case study of the importance of amiability in a research community and the disastrous consequences of its loss. That story has interesting implications for web environments that promote amiable interaction among disparate, difficult (and sometimes disagreeable) people.

The Vienna Circle

Though people had been thinking about calculating engines and thinking machines from antiquity, Computing really got going in Depression-era Vienna.  The people who worked out the theory had no interest in building machines; they wanted to puzzle out the limits of reason in the absence of divine authority. If we could not rely on God or Aristotle to tell us how to think, could we instead build arguments that were self-contained and demonstrably correct? Can we be sure that mathematics is consistent? Are there things that are true but that cannot be expressed in language? 

The core ideas were worked out in the weekly meetings (Thursdays at 6) of a group remembered as the Vienna Circle. They got together in the office of Professor Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna to discuss problems in philosophy, math, and language. The intersection of physics and philosophy had long been a specialty of this Vienna department, and this work had placed them among the world leaders.  Schlick’s colleague Hans Hahn was a central participant, and by 1928 Hahn brought along his graduate students Karl Menger and Kurt Gödel. Other frequent participants included philosopher Rudolf Carnap, psychologist Karl Popper, economist Ludwig von Mises (brought by his brother Frederick, a physicist),  graphic designer Otto Neurath (inventor of infographics), and architect Josef Frank (brought by his physicist brother, Phillip).  Out-of-town visitors often joined, including the young Johnny von Neumann, Alfred Tarski, and the irascible Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

When Schlick’s office grew too dim, participants adjourned to a nearby café for additional discussion with an even larger circle of participants.  This convivial circle was far from unique.  An intersecting circle–Neurath, von Mises, Oskar Morgenstern–established the Austrian School of free-market economics. There were theatrical circles (Peter Lorre, Hedy Lamarr, Max Reinhardt), and literary circles. The café was where things happened.

The interdisciplinarity of the group posed real challenges of temperament and understanding. Personalities were often a challenge. Gödel was convinced people were trying to poison him. Architect Josef Frank depended on contracts for public housing, which Mises opposed as wasteful. Wittgenstein’s temper had lost him his job as a secondary school teacher, and for some of these years he maintained a detailed list of whom he was willing to meet. Neurath was eager to detect muddled thinking and would interrupt a speaker with a shouted “Metaphysics!” The continuing amity of these meetings was facilitated by the personality of their leader, Moritz Schlick, who would be remembered as notably adept in keeping disagreements from becoming quarrels.

In the Café

The Viennese café of this era was long remembered as a particularly good place to argue with your friends, to read, and to write. Built to serve an imperial capital, the cafés found themselves with too much space and too few customers now that the Empire was gone. There was no need to turn tables: a café could only survive by coaxing customers to linger. Perhaps they would order another coffee, or one of their friends might drop by. One could play chess, or billiards, or read newspapers from abroad. Coffee was invariably served with a glass of purified spring water, still a novelty in an era in which most water was still unsafe to drink. That water glass would be refilled indefinitely. 

In the basement of one café, the poet Jura Soyfer staged “The End Of The World,” a musical comedy in which Professor Peep has discovered a comet heading for earth.

Prof. Peep: The comet is going to destroy everybody!

Hitler:  Destroying everybody is my business.

Of course, coffee can be prepared in many ways, and the Viennese café developed a broad vocabulary to represent precisely how one preferred to drink it: melange, Einspänner, Brauner, Schwarzer, Kapuziner. This extensive customization, with correspondingly esoteric conventions of service, established the café as a comfortable and personal third space, a neutral ground in which anyone who could afford a coffee would be welcome. Viennese of this era were fastidious in their use of personal titles, of which an abundance were in common use. Café waiters greeted regular customers with titles too, but were careful to address their patrons with titles a notch or two greater than they deserved. A graduate student would be Doktor, an unpaid postdoc Professor.  This assurance mattered all the more because so many members of the Circle (and so many other Viennese) came from elsewhere: Carnap from Wuppertal, Gödel from Brno, von Neumann from Budapest. No one was going to make fun of your clothes, mannerisms, or accent. Your friends wouldn’t be bothered by the pram in the hall. Everyone shared a Germanic Austrian literary and philosophical culture, not least those whose ancestors had been Eastern European Jews who knew that culture well, having read all about it in books.

The amiability of the café circle was enhanced by its openness. Because the circle sometimes extended to architects and actors, people could feel less constrained to admit shortfalls in their understanding. It was soon discovered that marble tabletops made a useful surface for pencil sketches, serving all as an improvised and accessible blackboard.

Comedies like “The End Of The World” and fictional newspaper sketches or feuilletons of writers like Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig served as a second defense against disagreeable or churlish behavior. The knowledge that, if one got carried away, a parody of one’s remarks might shortly appear in Neue Freie Presse surely helped Professor Schlick keep matters in hand.

The End Of Red Vienna

Though Austria’s government drifted to the right after the War, Vienna’s city council had been Socialist, dedicated to public housing based on user-centered design, and embracing  ambitious programs of public outreach and adult education. In 1934 the Socialists lost a local election, and this era soon came to its end as the new administration focused on the imagined threat of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Most members of the Circle fled within months: von Neumann to Princeton, Neurath to Holland and Oxford, Popper to New Zealand, Carnap to Chicago. Prof. Schlick was murdered on the steps of the University by a student outraged by his former association with Jews.  Jura Soyfer, who wrote “The End Of The World,” died in Buchenwald.

In 1939, von Neumann finally convinced Gödel to accept a job in Princeton. Gödel was required to pay large fines to emigrate. The officer in charge of these fees would look back on this as the best posting of his career; his name was Eichmann.

Design for Amiability

An impressive literature recounts those discussions and the environment that facilitated the development of computing. How can we design for amiability?  This is not just a matter of choosing rounded typefaces and a cheerful pastel palette. I believe we may identify eight distinct issues that exert design forces in usefully amiable directions.

Seriousness: The Vienna Circle was wrestling with a notoriously difficult book—Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico-Philosophicus—and a catalog of outstanding open questions in mathematics. They were concerned with consequential problems, not merely scoring points for debating. Constant reminders that the questions you are considering matter—not only that they are consequential or that those opposing you are scoundrels—help promote amity.

Empiricism: The characteristic approach of the Vienna Circle demanded that knowledge be grounded either in direct observation or in rigorous reasoning. Disagreement, when it arose, could be settled by observation or by proof. If neither seemed ready to hand, the matter could not be settled. On these terms, one can seldom if ever demolish an opposing argument, and trolling is pointless.

Abstraction: Disputes grow worse when losing the argument entails lost face or lost jobs. The Vienna Circle’s focus on theory—the limits of mathematics, the capability of language—promoted amity. Without seriousness, abstraction could have been merely academic, but the limits of reason and the consistency of mathematics were clearly serious.

Formality: The punctilious demeanor of waiters and the elaborated rituals of coffee service helped to establish orderly attitudes amongst the argumentative participants. This stands in contrast to the contemptuous sneer that now dominates social media.  

Schlamperei: Members of the Vienna Circle maintained a global correspondence, and they knew their work was at the frontier of research. Still, this was Vienna, at the margins of Europe: old-fashioned, frumpy, and dingy. Many participants came from even more obscure backwaters. Most or all harbored the suspicion that they were really schleppers, and a tinge of the ridiculous helped to moderate tempers. The director of “The End Of The World” had to pass the hat for money to purchase a moon for the set, and thought it was funny enough to write up for publication.

Openness: All sorts of people were involved in discussion, anyone might join in. Each week would bring different participants. Fluid borders reduce tension, and provide opportunities to broaden the range of discussion and the terms of engagement. Low entrance friction was characteristic of the café: anyone could come, and if you came twice you were virtually a regular. Permeable boundaries and café culture made it easier for moderating influences to draw in raconteurs and storytellers to defuse awkward moments, and Vienna’s cafés had no shortage of humorists. Openness counteracts the suspicion that promoters of amiability are exerting censorship.

Parody: The environs of the Circle—the university office and the café—were unmistakably public. There were writers about, some of them renowned humorists. The prospect that one’s bad taste or bad behavior might be ridiculed in print kept discussion within bounds. The sanction of public humiliation, however, was itself made mild by the veneer of fiction; even if you got a little carried away and a character based on you made a splash in some newspaper fiction, it wasn’t the end of the world.

Engagement: The subject matter was important to the participants, but it was esoteric: it did not matter very much to their mothers or their siblings. A small stumble or a minor humiliation could be shrugged off in ways that major media confrontations cannot.

I believe it is notable that this environment was designed to promote amiability through several different voices.  The café waiter flattered each newcomer and served everyone, and also kept out local pickpockets and drunks who would be mere disruptions. Schlick and other regulars kept discussion moving and on track. The fiction writers and raconteurs—perhaps the most peripheral of the participants—kept people in a good mood and reminded them that bad behavior could make anyone ridiculous.  Crucially, each of these voices were human: you could reason with them. Algorithmic or AI moderators, however clever, are seldom perceived as reasonable. The café circles had no central authority or Moderator against whom everyone’s resentments might be focused. Even after the disaster of 1934, what people remembered were those cheerful arguments.

“Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a totally coherent system bound to context and behavior.” — Kenneth L. Pike

The web has accents. So should our design systems.

Design Systems as Living Languages

Design systems aren’t component libraries—they’re living languages. Tokens are phonemes, components are words, patterns are phrases, layouts are sentences. The conversations we build with users become the stories our products tell.

But here’s what we’ve forgotten: the more fluently a language is spoken, the more accents it can support without losing meaning. English in Scotland differs from English in Sydney, yet both are unmistakably English. The language adapts to context while preserving core meaning. This couldn’t be more obvious to me, a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, who learned English with an American accent, and lives in Sydney.

Our design systems must work the same way. Rigid adherence to visual rules creates brittle systems that break under contextual pressure. Fluent systems bend without breaking.

Consistency becomes a prison

The promise of design systems was simple: consistent components would accelerate development and unify experiences. But as systems matured and products grew more complex, that promise has become a prison. Teams file “exception” requests by the hundreds. Products launch with workarounds instead of system components. Designers spend more time defending consistency than solving user problems.

Our design systems must learn to speak dialects.

A design dialect is a systematic adaptation of a design system that maintains core principles while developing new patterns for specific contexts. Unlike one-off customizations or brand themes, dialects preserve the system’s essential grammar while expanding its vocabulary to serve different users, environments, or constraints.

When Perfect Consistency Fails

At Booking.com, I learned this lesson the hard way. We A/B-tested everything—color, copy, button shapes, even logo colors. As a professional with a graphic design education and experience building brand style guides, I found this shocking. While everyone fell in love with Airbnb’s pristine design system, Booking grew into a giant without ever considering visual consistency.  

The chaos taught me something profound: consistency isn’t ROI; solved problems are.

At Shopify. Polaris () was our crown jewel—a mature design language perfect for merchants on laptops. As a product team, we were expected to adopt Polaris as-is. Then my fulfillment team hit an “Oh, Ship!” moment, as we faced the challenge of building an app for warehouse pickers using our interface on shared, battered Android scanners in dim aisles, wearing thick gloves, scanning dozens of items per minute, many with limited levels of English understanding.

Task completion with standard Polaris: 0%.

Every component that worked beautifully for merchants failed completely for pickers. White backgrounds created glare. 44px tap targets were invisible to gloved fingers. Sentence-case labels took too long to parse. Multi-step flows confused non-native speakers.

We faced a choice: abandon Polaris entirely, or teach it to speak warehouse.

The Birth of a Dialect

We chose evolution over revolution. Working within Polaris’s core principles—clarity, efficiency, consistency—we developed what we now call a design dialect:

Constraint	Fluent Move	Rationale
Glare & low light	Dark surfaces + light text	Reduce glare on low-DPI screens
Gloves & haste	90px tap targets (~2cm)	Accommodate thick gloves
Multilingual	Single-task screens, plain language	Reduce cognitive load

Result: Task completion jumped from 0% to 100%. Onboarding time dropped from three weeks to one shift.

This wasn’t customization or theming—this was a dialect: a systematic adaptation that maintained Polaris’s core grammar while developing new vocabulary for a specific context. Polaris hadn’t failed; it had learned to speak warehouse.

The Flexibility Framework

At Atlassian, working on the Jira platform—itself a system within the larger Atlassian system—I pushed for formalizing this insight. With dozens of products sharing a design language across different codebases, we needed systematic flexibility so we built directly into our ways of working. The old model—exception requests and special approvals—was failing at scale.

We developed the Flexibility Framework to help designers define how flexible they wanted their components to be:

Tier	Action	Ownership
Consistent	Adopt unchanged	Platform locks design + code
Opinionated	Adapt within bounds	Platform provides smart defaults, products customize
Flexible	Extend freely	Platform defines behavior, products own presentation

During a navigation redesign, we tiered every element. Logo and global search stayed Consistent. Breadcrumbs and contextual actions became Flexible. Product teams could immediately see where innovation was welcome and where consistency mattered.

The Decision Ladder

Flexibility needs boundaries. We created a simple ladder for evaluating when rules should bend:

Good: Ship with existing system components. Fast, consistent, proven.

Better: Stretch a component slightly. Document the change. Contribute improvements back to the system for all to use.

Best: Prototype the ideal experience first. If user testing validates the benefit, update the system to support it.

The key question: “Which option lets users succeed fastest?”

Rules are tools, not relics.

Unity Beats Uniformity

Gmail, Drive, and Maps are unmistakably Google—yet each speaks with its own accent. They achieve unity through shared principles, not cloned components. One extra week of debate over button color costs roughly $30K in engineer time.

Unity is a brand outcome; fluency is a user outcome. When the two clash, side with the user.

Governance Without Gates

How do you maintain coherence while enabling dialects? Treat your system like a living vocabulary:

Document every deviation – e.g., dialects/warehouse.md with before/after screenshots and rationale.

Promote shared patterns – when three teams adopt a dialect independently, review it for core inclusion.

Deprecate with context – retire old idioms via flags and migration notes, never a big-bang purge.

A living dictionary scales better than a frozen rulebook.

Start Small: Your First Dialect

Ready to introduce dialects? Start with one broken experience:

This week: Find one user flow where perfect consistency blocks task completion. Could be mobile users struggling with desktop-sized components, or accessibility needs your standard patterns don’t address.

Document the context: What makes standard patterns fail here? Environmental constraints? User capabilities? Task urgency?

Design one systematic change: Focus on behavior over aesthetics. If gloves are the problem, bigger targets aren’t “”breaking the system””—they’re serving the user. Earn the variations and make them intentional.

Test and measure: Does the change improve task completion? Time to productivity? User satisfaction?

Show the savings: If that dialect frees even half a sprint, fluency has paid for itself.

Beyond the Component Library

We’re not managing design systems anymore—we’re cultivating design languages. Languages that grow with their speakers. Languages that develop accents without losing meaning. Languages that serve human needs over aesthetic ideals.

The warehouse workers who went from 0% to 100% task completion didn’t care that our buttons broke the style guide. They cared that the buttons finally worked.

Your users feel the same way. Give your system permission to speak their language.

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

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

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

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

The Anatomy of a Healthy Design Team

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

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

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

The Nervous System: People & Psychology

Primary caretaker: Design Manager
Supporting role: Lead Designer

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

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

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

Design Manager tends to:

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

Lead Designer supports by:

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

The Muscular System: Craft & Execution

Primary caretaker: Lead Designer
Supporting role: Design Manager

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

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

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

Lead Designer tends to:

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

Design Manager supports by:

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

The Circulatory System: Strategy & Flow

Shared caretakers: Both Design Manager and Lead Designer

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

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

Lead Designer contributes:

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

Design Manager contributes:

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

Both collaborate on:

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

Keeping the Organism Healthy

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

Be Explicit About Which System You’re Tending

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

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

Create Healthy Feedback Loops

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

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

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

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

Handle Handoffs Gracefully

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

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

Stay Curious, Not Territorial

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

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

When the Organism Gets Sick

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

System Isolation

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

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

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

Poor Circulation

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

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

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

Autoimmune Response

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

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

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

The Payoff

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

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

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

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

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

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

The pitfalls of feature-first development

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

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

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

The importance of bedrock

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practical strategies for building financial products that stick

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

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

The bedrock paradox

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

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

This article contains spoilers for Fallout season 2 episode 4. Playing the wrinkled, irradiated Ghoul on Prime Video’s game adaptation Fallout is not a walk in the post-apocalyptic park for Walton Goggins. Not only does the actor have to access the emotional interiority of a centuries-old cowboy wandering the wasteland, he has to undergo a […]

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With second seasons of The Night Manager and Red Eye already heating up U.K. telly, there’s still so much more to come in 2026. Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, and Chris Chibnall all have new shows lined up this year. There are some big adaptations on the way, too, including a Kit Harington-led version of A Tale of Two Cities.

Meanwhile, Richard Gadd will follow up his smash hit awards-grabber Baby Reindeer with a new show that is bound to be absolutely devastating, and Lisa McGee will follow up Derry Girls with her new Netflix series, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast.

The year also has some big returning shows in store! Line of Duty and Unforgotten are both coming back to the small screen with their seventh series.

Let’s take a look at some of the big shows heading our way in 2026…

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials

January 15 on Netflix

We love a new Agatha Christie adaptation, and this one has a stacked cast (Mia McKenna-Bruce, Helena Bonham Carter, Martin Freeman, and more!) and a classic 1929 mystery to unravel, courtesy of Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall. This story follows a group of young, well-off Londoners who stumble into a strange puzzle involving time, coded messages, and a shadowy organization known as “Seven Dials,” after a seemingly harmless prank goes wrong.

How to Get to Heaven From Belfast

February on Netflix

Originally envisioned as a Channel 4 series, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast has now moved to Netflix due to rising costs. It’s the new show from Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee, and it follows three childhood friends from Belfast – Saoirse, Robyn and Dara – who are now in their late thirties and living very different lives when they receive word that a fourth member of their school-friend group has died. Roísín Gallagher, Sinéad Keenan and Caoilfhionn Dunne lead the cast.

Young Sherlock

March 4 on Prime Video

Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is back, but he is definitely looking a bit younger than Robert Downey Jr. here as the director plans to explore the famous detective’s early years in Oxford for this Prime Video series, which adapts Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes books. Hero Fiennes Tiffin (nephew of Ralph and young Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince) stars as the titular deerstalker-botherer.

Betrayal

TBD on ITV

From the mind of playwright David Eldridge, slick new spy show Betrayal will take us into the complex new reality of MI5, as veteran agent John Hughes (Endeavour’s Shaun Evans) navigates an evolving security landscape and a progressive workplace. When an assassination links him to a conspiracy, Hughes will have to figure out how to protect not only his marriage and career, but also Britain itself.

Lord of the Flies

TBD on BBC

The Beeb has never attempted a TV adaptation of William Golding’s famous novel… until now! With Adolescence writer Jack Thorne behind the upcoming series, we could be in for a very special version of the classic book this year. If you’re not familiar with the story Golding wrote in 1954, it focuses on a group of schoolboys who are stranded on a tropical island. With no adults to tell them what to do, the boys soon try to organize. But hope is a fragile thing…

The Lady

TBD on ITV

The gang behind The Crown have a new royal drama series for you in 2026! This one comes with its own true-life crime twist, as The Lady follows Sarah Ferguson’s royal dresser Jane Andrews (Mia McKenna-Bruce), who falls from grace after being convicted of murdering her stockbroker boyfriend Thomas Cressman. Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones) and Ed Speelers (Star Trek: Picard) co-star.

Maya

TBD on Channel 4

In the midst of filming HBO’s hit series The Last of Us, Bella Ramsey has also hopped onto Channel 4’s Maya, a psychological thriller about a mum (Breeders star Daisy Haggard, also on co-writing duties) and daughter who get put in a witness protection program in a remote Scottish village. So, are they then safe from the danger that pursues them and left to their own devices? Are they heck! Not with Tobias “Black Jack Randall” Menzies after them.

Secret Service

TBD on ITVX

This 5-episode ITVX series stars Gemma Arterton as an MI6 officer who seems to have an ordinary but happy life. Still, she’s got a rather important job as the head of the Russia Desk of the Secret Intelligence Service to deal with behind the scenes, which is very much not ordinary. After she learns that a senior British politician could be a potential Russian asset, she finds herself in a political game of cat and mouse.

Out of the Dust

TBD on Netflix

From the director of Oranges and Sunshine and the writer of Cuffs comes a new Netflix streaming series that follows a woman named Rosie, who ends up on a dangerous path after she starts questioning her conservative Christian sect. Asa Butterfield, Molly Windsor, Fra Fee, Siobhan Finneran and Christopher Eccleston make up the cast of this one.

The Blame

TBD on ITV

Michelle Keegan and Douglas Booth play Emma Crane and Tom Radley in this ITV adaptation of Charlotte Langley’s debut novel. The pair are two detectives who have to investigate the murder of a teenage figure skater in a small town, while also falling in love. But when one of them becomes a suspect, things get a bit more complicated.

Line of Duty Series 7

TBD on BBC One

We knew it wouldn’t be gone forever! Martin Compston, Vicky McClure, and Adrian Dunbar are back, as is writer Jed Mercurio, for a brand-new six-episode series of the Beeb’s hit cop series. Expect a slightly different setup in series 7, as AC-12 has been disbanded and rebranded as the Inspectorate of Police Standards. The team will be taking a deeper look into a sensitive case involving a celebrated detective inspector accused of abusing his position of trust.

Legends

TBD on Netflix

Two ordinary men (Tom Burke and Steve Coogan) are sent undercover in Britain’s biggest drug networks during the early 1990s in this new show from The Gold creator Neil Forsyth. Based on a true story, the series will dramatize what happened when people who’d only gone through a basic training regime had to build new identities in the criminal underworld. These will be our titular “Legends.”

Army of Shadows

TBD on Channel 4

The 1969 war movie Army of Shadows will be reimagined this year for C4, moving the film’s (and book’s) story of a resistance cell from WWII to a near-future authoritarian Britain under American occupation. The Day of the Jackal showrunner Ronan Bennett is behind this one, and more details should arrive soon, but it already sounds very intriguing indeed.

Dear England

TBD on BBC One

This four-part BBC One and BBC iPlayer drama series is adapted from James Graham’s Olivier Award-winning stage play of the same name. It stars Joseph Fiennes, who is reprising his stage role as England football manager Gareth Southgate, and features a cast that includes Jodie Whittaker and Jason Watkins. The show will chronicle Southgate’s tenure as the team’s manager and draw on the play’s exploration of leadership, national identity, and, of course, footie.

Number 10

TBD on Channel 4

Rafe Spall, Jenna Coleman, and Katherine Kelly lead the cast of Steven Moffat’s upcoming comedy drama, which explores life at Britain’s most famous address. Spall (Trying) will play the Prime Minister, Coleman (The Serpent) will be the Deputy Chief of Staff, and Kelly (Mr Bates vs The Post Office) will be the Chief of Staff. It’s a fictional government at Number 10, but they will be dealing with some all-too-familiar problems.

Kill Jackie

TBD on Prime Video

Adapted from the Nick Harkaway novel The Price You Pay, this forthcoming series has gender-swapped its main character for the show. It will follow Jackie Price (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a wealthy art dealer who becomes the target of a hitman squad called The Seven Demons. Filming has been taking place in Bilbao, Lisbon, London and Swansea, but the show is still eyeing a 2026 release.

Unforgotten Series 7

TBD on ITVX

Details on the seventh series of Unforgotten are being kept under wraps for now, but we can expect Sanjeev Bhaskar (DI Sunny Khan) and Sinéad Keenan (DCI Jess James) to be heading into a new cold case, following the success and strong ratings of series six.

Tip Toe

TBD on Channel 4

Fellow Doctor Who showrunner vets Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall have both got new shows for us this year, but what about Russell T Davies? Yes, indeed, Davies has a new drama called Tip Toe on the way, starring David Morrissey and Alan Cumming, where the Queer as Folk creator will revisit Manchester’s Canal Street to explore the current LGBTQ+ community and the dangers they face.

A Tale of Two Cities

TBD on BBC One

There have been a few adaptations of Charles Dickens’ classic novel, but none of them starred Kit Harington, have they? Well, that’s all set to change this year as the Beeb will be rolling out four episodes to tell the tale of Charles Darnay (Harington), a French aristocrat who is tried for treason in England but manages to get acquitted thanks to a lookalike lawyer called Sydney Carton (François Civil). When he’s arrested again in France during the Revolution and sentenced to death, Carton has to make a difficult choice because he’s now very much in love with Darnay’s beautiful wife, Lucie (Mirren Mack).

Under Salt Marsh

TBD on Sky Atlantic

As a massive storm gathers offshore, Jackie Ellis (Kelly Reilly), a teacher and former detective, discovers the body of her eight-year-old student, Cefin, who appears to have drowned. The shocking find forces the town to confront memories of a case left unresolved three years earlier, the disappearance of Jackie’s niece, Nessa, which destroyed her career. Cefin’s death also draws Jackie’s former partner, Detective Eric Bull (Rafe Spall), back to lead the investigation. Convinced the two cases are linked, Jackie and Bull work together to uncover buried secrets before the approaching storm erases key evidence.

Rivals Series 2

TBD on Disney+

Rivals will return to our screens in 2026 with an expanded twelve-episode run. It continues the story of competing TV executives and social climbers in the glamorous, high-stakes world of 1980s British telly, picking up where the first season’s dramatic cliffhanger left off. Most of the main cast, including David Tennant as Lord Tony Baddingham, Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black, and Aidan Turner as Declan O’Hara, are set to return, with new additions Hayley Atwell and Rupert Everett also joining in the fun.

Half Man

TBD on BBC One

Formerly known as Lions, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer is now called Half Man. It stars Gadd and Jamie Bell (All of Us Strangers) as estranged “brothers” Ruben and Niall, and tracks what happens when Ruben shows up at Niall’s wedding after a long absence from his life. The show will untangle 40 years of their relationship, from their teenage stretch to some violent encounters in their adult lives.

War

TBD on Sky

George Kay is on a hot streak after creating Lupin and Criminal for Netflix and Hijack for Apple TV. Is this new series for Sky and HBO also worth your attention? Probably, because they’ve ordered not one but two series of it right off the bat. The first one (it’s in an anthology format) stars Dominic West and Sienna Miller, and centers on two of London’s most prestigious rival law firms as they battle over “the divorce case of the century” between tech titan Morgan Henderson (West) and his estranged wife, international film star Carla Duval (Miller).

The Other Bennet Sister

TBD on BBC One

The Other Bennet Sister is adapted from Janice Hadlow’s novel of the same name. It reimagines Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of Mary Bennet, the often-overlooked middle sister. The 10‑episode series, written chiefly by Sarah Quintrell, follows Mary as she leaves Longbourn for London and the Lake District in Regency England. Ella Bruccoleri stars as Mary Bennett, with Richard E. Grant and Ruth Jones as Mr and Mrs Bennett.

The post Upcoming British TV Series for 2026: BBC, Netflix, ITV, Channel 4, Prime Video, Sky appeared first on Den of Geek.

With second seasons of The Night Manager and Red Eye already heating up U.K. telly, there’s still so much more to come in 2026. Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, and Chris Chibnall all have new shows lined up this year. There are some big adaptations on the way, too, including a Kit Harington-led version of […]

The post Upcoming British TV Series for 2026: BBC, Netflix, ITV, Channel 4, Prime Video, Sky appeared first on Den of Geek.

With second seasons of The Night Manager and Red Eye already heating up U.K. telly, there’s still so much more to come in 2026. Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, and Chris Chibnall all have new shows lined up this year. There are some big adaptations on the way, too, including a Kit Harington-led version of A Tale of Two Cities.

Meanwhile, Richard Gadd will follow up his smash hit awards-grabber Baby Reindeer with a new show that is bound to be absolutely devastating, and Lisa McGee will follow up Derry Girls with her new Netflix series, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast.

The year also has some big returning shows in store! Line of Duty and Unforgotten are both coming back to the small screen with their seventh series.

Let’s take a look at some of the big shows heading our way in 2026…

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials

January 15 on Netflix

We love a new Agatha Christie adaptation, and this one has a stacked cast (Mia McKenna-Bruce, Helena Bonham Carter, Martin Freeman, and more!) and a classic 1929 mystery to unravel, courtesy of Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall. This story follows a group of young, well-off Londoners who stumble into a strange puzzle involving time, coded messages, and a shadowy organization known as “Seven Dials,” after a seemingly harmless prank goes wrong.

How to Get to Heaven From Belfast

February on Netflix

Originally envisioned as a Channel 4 series, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast has now moved to Netflix due to rising costs. It’s the new show from Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee, and it follows three childhood friends from Belfast – Saoirse, Robyn and Dara – who are now in their late thirties and living very different lives when they receive word that a fourth member of their school-friend group has died. Roísín Gallagher, Sinéad Keenan and Caoilfhionn Dunne lead the cast.

Young Sherlock

March 4 on Prime Video

Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is back, but he is definitely looking a bit younger than Robert Downey Jr. here as the director plans to explore the famous detective’s early years in Oxford for this Prime Video series, which adapts Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes books. Hero Fiennes Tiffin (nephew of Ralph and young Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince) stars as the titular deerstalker-botherer.

Betrayal

TBD on ITV

From the mind of playwright David Eldridge, slick new spy show Betrayal will take us into the complex new reality of MI5, as veteran agent John Hughes (Endeavour’s Shaun Evans) navigates an evolving security landscape and a progressive workplace. When an assassination links him to a conspiracy, Hughes will have to figure out how to protect not only his marriage and career, but also Britain itself.

Lord of the Flies

TBD on BBC

The Beeb has never attempted a TV adaptation of William Golding’s famous novel… until now! With Adolescence writer Jack Thorne behind the upcoming series, we could be in for a very special version of the classic book this year. If you’re not familiar with the story Golding wrote in 1954, it focuses on a group of schoolboys who are stranded on a tropical island. With no adults to tell them what to do, the boys soon try to organize. But hope is a fragile thing…

The Lady

TBD on ITV

The gang behind The Crown have a new royal drama series for you in 2026! This one comes with its own true-life crime twist, as The Lady follows Sarah Ferguson’s royal dresser Jane Andrews (Mia McKenna-Bruce), who falls from grace after being convicted of murdering her stockbroker boyfriend Thomas Cressman. Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones) and Ed Speelers (Star Trek: Picard) co-star.

Maya

TBD on Channel 4

In the midst of filming HBO’s hit series The Last of Us, Bella Ramsey has also hopped onto Channel 4’s Maya, a psychological thriller about a mum (Breeders star Daisy Haggard, also on co-writing duties) and daughter who get put in a witness protection program in a remote Scottish village. So, are they then safe from the danger that pursues them and left to their own devices? Are they heck! Not with Tobias “Black Jack Randall” Menzies after them.

Secret Service

TBD on ITVX

This 5-episode ITVX series stars Gemma Arterton as an MI6 officer who seems to have an ordinary but happy life. Still, she’s got a rather important job as the head of the Russia Desk of the Secret Intelligence Service to deal with behind the scenes, which is very much not ordinary. After she learns that a senior British politician could be a potential Russian asset, she finds herself in a political game of cat and mouse.

Out of the Dust

TBD on Netflix

From the director of Oranges and Sunshine and the writer of Cuffs comes a new Netflix streaming series that follows a woman named Rosie, who ends up on a dangerous path after she starts questioning her conservative Christian sect. Asa Butterfield, Molly Windsor, Fra Fee, Siobhan Finneran and Christopher Eccleston make up the cast of this one.

The Blame

TBD on ITV

Michelle Keegan and Douglas Booth play Emma Crane and Tom Radley in this ITV adaptation of Charlotte Langley’s debut novel. The pair are two detectives who have to investigate the murder of a teenage figure skater in a small town, while also falling in love. But when one of them becomes a suspect, things get a bit more complicated.

Line of Duty Series 7

TBD on BBC One

We knew it wouldn’t be gone forever! Martin Compston, Vicky McClure, and Adrian Dunbar are back, as is writer Jed Mercurio, for a brand-new six-episode series of the Beeb’s hit cop series. Expect a slightly different setup in series 7, as AC-12 has been disbanded and rebranded as the Inspectorate of Police Standards. The team will be taking a deeper look into a sensitive case involving a celebrated detective inspector accused of abusing his position of trust.

Legends

TBD on Netflix

Two ordinary men (Tom Burke and Steve Coogan) are sent undercover in Britain’s biggest drug networks during the early 1990s in this new show from The Gold creator Neil Forsyth. Based on a true story, the series will dramatize what happened when people who’d only gone through a basic training regime had to build new identities in the criminal underworld. These will be our titular “Legends.”

Army of Shadows

TBD on Channel 4

The 1969 war movie Army of Shadows will be reimagined this year for C4, moving the film’s (and book’s) story of a resistance cell from WWII to a near-future authoritarian Britain under American occupation. The Day of the Jackal showrunner Ronan Bennett is behind this one, and more details should arrive soon, but it already sounds very intriguing indeed.

Dear England

TBD on BBC One

This four-part BBC One and BBC iPlayer drama series is adapted from James Graham’s Olivier Award-winning stage play of the same name. It stars Joseph Fiennes, who is reprising his stage role as England football manager Gareth Southgate, and features a cast that includes Jodie Whittaker and Jason Watkins. The show will chronicle Southgate’s tenure as the team’s manager and draw on the play’s exploration of leadership, national identity, and, of course, footie.

Number 10

TBD on Channel 4

Rafe Spall, Jenna Coleman, and Katherine Kelly lead the cast of Steven Moffat’s upcoming comedy drama, which explores life at Britain’s most famous address. Spall (Trying) will play the Prime Minister, Coleman (The Serpent) will be the Deputy Chief of Staff, and Kelly (Mr Bates vs The Post Office) will be the Chief of Staff. It’s a fictional government at Number 10, but they will be dealing with some all-too-familiar problems.

Kill Jackie

TBD on Prime Video

Adapted from the Nick Harkaway novel The Price You Pay, this forthcoming series has gender-swapped its main character for the show. It will follow Jackie Price (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a wealthy art dealer who becomes the target of a hitman squad called The Seven Demons. Filming has been taking place in Bilbao, Lisbon, London and Swansea, but the show is still eyeing a 2026 release.

Unforgotten Series 7

TBD on ITVX

Details on the seventh series of Unforgotten are being kept under wraps for now, but we can expect Sanjeev Bhaskar (DI Sunny Khan) and Sinéad Keenan (DCI Jess James) to be heading into a new cold case, following the success and strong ratings of series six.

Tip Toe

TBD on Channel 4

Fellow Doctor Who showrunner vets Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall have both got new shows for us this year, but what about Russell T Davies? Yes, indeed, Davies has a new drama called Tip Toe on the way, starring David Morrissey and Alan Cumming, where the Queer as Folk creator will revisit Manchester’s Canal Street to explore the current LGBTQ+ community and the dangers they face.

A Tale of Two Cities

TBD on BBC One

There have been a few adaptations of Charles Dickens’ classic novel, but none of them starred Kit Harington, have they? Well, that’s all set to change this year as the Beeb will be rolling out four episodes to tell the tale of Charles Darnay (Harington), a French aristocrat who is tried for treason in England but manages to get acquitted thanks to a lookalike lawyer called Sydney Carton (François Civil). When he’s arrested again in France during the Revolution and sentenced to death, Carton has to make a difficult choice because he’s now very much in love with Darnay’s beautiful wife, Lucie (Mirren Mack).

Under Salt Marsh

TBD on Sky Atlantic

As a massive storm gathers offshore, Jackie Ellis (Kelly Reilly), a teacher and former detective, discovers the body of her eight-year-old student, Cefin, who appears to have drowned. The shocking find forces the town to confront memories of a case left unresolved three years earlier, the disappearance of Jackie’s niece, Nessa, which destroyed her career. Cefin’s death also draws Jackie’s former partner, Detective Eric Bull (Rafe Spall), back to lead the investigation. Convinced the two cases are linked, Jackie and Bull work together to uncover buried secrets before the approaching storm erases key evidence.

Rivals Series 2

TBD on Disney+

Rivals will return to our screens in 2026 with an expanded twelve-episode run. It continues the story of competing TV executives and social climbers in the glamorous, high-stakes world of 1980s British telly, picking up where the first season’s dramatic cliffhanger left off. Most of the main cast, including David Tennant as Lord Tony Baddingham, Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black, and Aidan Turner as Declan O’Hara, are set to return, with new additions Hayley Atwell and Rupert Everett also joining in the fun.

Half Man

TBD on BBC One

Formerly known as Lions, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer is now called Half Man. It stars Gadd and Jamie Bell (All of Us Strangers) as estranged “brothers” Ruben and Niall, and tracks what happens when Ruben shows up at Niall’s wedding after a long absence from his life. The show will untangle 40 years of their relationship, from their teenage stretch to some violent encounters in their adult lives.

War

TBD on Sky

George Kay is on a hot streak after creating Lupin and Criminal for Netflix and Hijack for Apple TV. Is this new series for Sky and HBO also worth your attention? Probably, because they’ve ordered not one but two series of it right off the bat. The first one (it’s in an anthology format) stars Dominic West and Sienna Miller, and centers on two of London’s most prestigious rival law firms as they battle over “the divorce case of the century” between tech titan Morgan Henderson (West) and his estranged wife, international film star Carla Duval (Miller).

The Other Bennet Sister

TBD on BBC One

The Other Bennet Sister is adapted from Janice Hadlow’s novel of the same name. It reimagines Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of Mary Bennet, the often-overlooked middle sister. The 10‑episode series, written chiefly by Sarah Quintrell, follows Mary as she leaves Longbourn for London and the Lake District in Regency England. Ella Bruccoleri stars as Mary Bennett, with Richard E. Grant and Ruth Jones as Mr and Mrs Bennett.

The post Upcoming British TV Series for 2026: BBC, Netflix, ITV, Channel 4, Prime Video, Sky appeared first on Den of Geek.

The massive reality competition series BEAST GAMES is back on Prime Video! Setting records at every turn, the series continues to be quite the undertaking, in line with the  @MrBeast  brand. MrBeast himself, Jimmy Donaldson, spoke with Matthew Shuchman of Den of Geek about what it took to pull it off, and what to look […]

The post MrBeast Reveals Biggest Changes to BEAST GAMES appeared first on Den of Geek.

With second seasons of The Night Manager and Red Eye already heating up U.K. telly, there’s still so much more to come in 2026. Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, and Chris Chibnall all have new shows lined up this year. There are some big adaptations on the way, too, including a Kit Harington-led version of A Tale of Two Cities.

Meanwhile, Richard Gadd will follow up his smash hit awards-grabber Baby Reindeer with a new show that is bound to be absolutely devastating, and Lisa McGee will follow up Derry Girls with her new Netflix series, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast.

The year also has some big returning shows in store! Line of Duty and Unforgotten are both coming back to the small screen with their seventh series.

Let’s take a look at some of the big shows heading our way in 2026…

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials

January 15 on Netflix

We love a new Agatha Christie adaptation, and this one has a stacked cast (Mia McKenna-Bruce, Helena Bonham Carter, Martin Freeman, and more!) and a classic 1929 mystery to unravel, courtesy of Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall. This story follows a group of young, well-off Londoners who stumble into a strange puzzle involving time, coded messages, and a shadowy organization known as “Seven Dials,” after a seemingly harmless prank goes wrong.

How to Get to Heaven From Belfast

February on Netflix

Originally envisioned as a Channel 4 series, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast has now moved to Netflix due to rising costs. It’s the new show from Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee, and it follows three childhood friends from Belfast – Saoirse, Robyn and Dara – who are now in their late thirties and living very different lives when they receive word that a fourth member of their school-friend group has died. Roísín Gallagher, Sinéad Keenan and Caoilfhionn Dunne lead the cast.

Young Sherlock

March 4 on Prime Video

Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is back, but he is definitely looking a bit younger than Robert Downey Jr. here as the director plans to explore the famous detective’s early years in Oxford for this Prime Video series, which adapts Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes books. Hero Fiennes Tiffin (nephew of Ralph and young Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince) stars as the titular deerstalker-botherer.

Betrayal

TBD on ITV

From the mind of playwright David Eldridge, slick new spy show Betrayal will take us into the complex new reality of MI5, as veteran agent John Hughes (Endeavour’s Shaun Evans) navigates an evolving security landscape and a progressive workplace. When an assassination links him to a conspiracy, Hughes will have to figure out how to protect not only his marriage and career, but also Britain itself.

Lord of the Flies

TBD on BBC

The Beeb has never attempted a TV adaptation of William Golding’s famous novel… until now! With Adolescence writer Jack Thorne behind the upcoming series, we could be in for a very special version of the classic book this year. If you’re not familiar with the story Golding wrote in 1954, it focuses on a group of schoolboys who are stranded on a tropical island. With no adults to tell them what to do, the boys soon try to organize. But hope is a fragile thing…

The Lady

TBD on ITV

The gang behind The Crown have a new royal drama series for you in 2026! This one comes with its own true-life crime twist, as The Lady follows Sarah Ferguson’s royal dresser Jane Andrews (Mia McKenna-Bruce), who falls from grace after being convicted of murdering her stockbroker boyfriend Thomas Cressman. Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones) and Ed Speelers (Star Trek: Picard) co-star.

Maya

TBD on Channel 4

In the midst of filming HBO’s hit series The Last of Us, Bella Ramsey has also hopped onto Channel 4’s Maya, a psychological thriller about a mum (Breeders star Daisy Haggard, also on co-writing duties) and daughter who get put in a witness protection program in a remote Scottish village. So, are they then safe from the danger that pursues them and left to their own devices? Are they heck! Not with Tobias “Black Jack Randall” Menzies after them.

Secret Service

TBD on ITVX

This 5-episode ITVX series stars Gemma Arterton as an MI6 officer who seems to have an ordinary but happy life. Still, she’s got a rather important job as the head of the Russia Desk of the Secret Intelligence Service to deal with behind the scenes, which is very much not ordinary. After she learns that a senior British politician could be a potential Russian asset, she finds herself in a political game of cat and mouse.

Out of the Dust

TBD on Netflix

From the director of Oranges and Sunshine and the writer of Cuffs comes a new Netflix streaming series that follows a woman named Rosie, who ends up on a dangerous path after she starts questioning her conservative Christian sect. Asa Butterfield, Molly Windsor, Fra Fee, Siobhan Finneran and Christopher Eccleston make up the cast of this one.

The Blame

TBD on ITV

Michelle Keegan and Douglas Booth play Emma Crane and Tom Radley in this ITV adaptation of Charlotte Langley’s debut novel. The pair are two detectives who have to investigate the murder of a teenage figure skater in a small town, while also falling in love. But when one of them becomes a suspect, things get a bit more complicated.

Line of Duty Series 7

TBD on BBC One

We knew it wouldn’t be gone forever! Martin Compston, Vicky McClure, and Adrian Dunbar are back, as is writer Jed Mercurio, for a brand-new six-episode series of the Beeb’s hit cop series. Expect a slightly different setup in series 7, as AC-12 has been disbanded and rebranded as the Inspectorate of Police Standards. The team will be taking a deeper look into a sensitive case involving a celebrated detective inspector accused of abusing his position of trust.

Legends

TBD on Netflix

Two ordinary men (Tom Burke and Steve Coogan) are sent undercover in Britain’s biggest drug networks during the early 1990s in this new show from The Gold creator Neil Forsyth. Based on a true story, the series will dramatize what happened when people who’d only gone through a basic training regime had to build new identities in the criminal underworld. These will be our titular “Legends.”

Army of Shadows

TBD on Channel 4

The 1969 war movie Army of Shadows will be reimagined this year for C4, moving the film’s (and book’s) story of a resistance cell from WWII to a near-future authoritarian Britain under American occupation. The Day of the Jackal showrunner Ronan Bennett is behind this one, and more details should arrive soon, but it already sounds very intriguing indeed.

Dear England

TBD on BBC One

This four-part BBC One and BBC iPlayer drama series is adapted from James Graham’s Olivier Award-winning stage play of the same name. It stars Joseph Fiennes, who is reprising his stage role as England football manager Gareth Southgate, and features a cast that includes Jodie Whittaker and Jason Watkins. The show will chronicle Southgate’s tenure as the team’s manager and draw on the play’s exploration of leadership, national identity, and, of course, footie.

Number 10

TBD on Channel 4

Rafe Spall, Jenna Coleman, and Katherine Kelly lead the cast of Steven Moffat’s upcoming comedy drama, which explores life at Britain’s most famous address. Spall (Trying) will play the Prime Minister, Coleman (The Serpent) will be the Deputy Chief of Staff, and Kelly (Mr Bates vs The Post Office) will be the Chief of Staff. It’s a fictional government at Number 10, but they will be dealing with some all-too-familiar problems.

Kill Jackie

TBD on Prime Video

Adapted from the Nick Harkaway novel The Price You Pay, this forthcoming series has gender-swapped its main character for the show. It will follow Jackie Price (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a wealthy art dealer who becomes the target of a hitman squad called The Seven Demons. Filming has been taking place in Bilbao, Lisbon, London and Swansea, but the show is still eyeing a 2026 release.

Unforgotten Series 7

TBD on ITVX

Details on the seventh series of Unforgotten are being kept under wraps for now, but we can expect Sanjeev Bhaskar (DI Sunny Khan) and Sinéad Keenan (DCI Jess James) to be heading into a new cold case, following the success and strong ratings of series six.

Tip Toe

TBD on Channel 4

Fellow Doctor Who showrunner vets Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall have both got new shows for us this year, but what about Russell T Davies? Yes, indeed, Davies has a new drama called Tip Toe on the way, starring David Morrissey and Alan Cumming, where the Queer as Folk creator will revisit Manchester’s Canal Street to explore the current LGBTQ+ community and the dangers they face.

A Tale of Two Cities

TBD on BBC One

There have been a few adaptations of Charles Dickens’ classic novel, but none of them starred Kit Harington, have they? Well, that’s all set to change this year as the Beeb will be rolling out four episodes to tell the tale of Charles Darnay (Harington), a French aristocrat who is tried for treason in England but manages to get acquitted thanks to a lookalike lawyer called Sydney Carton (François Civil). When he’s arrested again in France during the Revolution and sentenced to death, Carton has to make a difficult choice because he’s now very much in love with Darnay’s beautiful wife, Lucie (Mirren Mack).

Under Salt Marsh

TBD on Sky Atlantic

As a massive storm gathers offshore, Jackie Ellis (Kelly Reilly), a teacher and former detective, discovers the body of her eight-year-old student, Cefin, who appears to have drowned. The shocking find forces the town to confront memories of a case left unresolved three years earlier, the disappearance of Jackie’s niece, Nessa, which destroyed her career. Cefin’s death also draws Jackie’s former partner, Detective Eric Bull (Rafe Spall), back to lead the investigation. Convinced the two cases are linked, Jackie and Bull work together to uncover buried secrets before the approaching storm erases key evidence.

Rivals Series 2

TBD on Disney+

Rivals will return to our screens in 2026 with an expanded twelve-episode run. It continues the story of competing TV executives and social climbers in the glamorous, high-stakes world of 1980s British telly, picking up where the first season’s dramatic cliffhanger left off. Most of the main cast, including David Tennant as Lord Tony Baddingham, Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black, and Aidan Turner as Declan O’Hara, are set to return, with new additions Hayley Atwell and Rupert Everett also joining in the fun.

Half Man

TBD on BBC One

Formerly known as Lions, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer is now called Half Man. It stars Gadd and Jamie Bell (All of Us Strangers) as estranged “brothers” Ruben and Niall, and tracks what happens when Ruben shows up at Niall’s wedding after a long absence from his life. The show will untangle 40 years of their relationship, from their teenage stretch to some violent encounters in their adult lives.

War

TBD on Sky

George Kay is on a hot streak after creating Lupin and Criminal for Netflix and Hijack for Apple TV. Is this new series for Sky and HBO also worth your attention? Probably, because they’ve ordered not one but two series of it right off the bat. The first one (it’s in an anthology format) stars Dominic West and Sienna Miller, and centers on two of London’s most prestigious rival law firms as they battle over “the divorce case of the century” between tech titan Morgan Henderson (West) and his estranged wife, international film star Carla Duval (Miller).

The Other Bennet Sister

TBD on BBC One

The Other Bennet Sister is adapted from Janice Hadlow’s novel of the same name. It reimagines Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of Mary Bennet, the often-overlooked middle sister. The 10‑episode series, written chiefly by Sarah Quintrell, follows Mary as she leaves Longbourn for London and the Lake District in Regency England. Ella Bruccoleri stars as Mary Bennett, with Richard E. Grant and Ruth Jones as Mr and Mrs Bennett.

The post Upcoming British TV Series for 2026: BBC, Netflix, ITV, Channel 4, Prime Video, Sky appeared first on Den of Geek.