Category: Blog

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

That said, this is a guide for developers, and to that conclusion, I’d like to begin with a story—well, a voyage, actually. It’s a private one, and I’m going to make myself prone as well. I call it:

The Ludicrous Pate of Justin: A Tale of its Author

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

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

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

Those are amazing factors between non-career relationships and the world of style, even though I’m talking about a different time. What are your main passions, or ideals, that elevate medium? The main themes are the same, basically the same as what we previously discussed on the primary parallels between what fulfills you, independent of the physical or digital realms.

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

For instance, this iteration of my personal portfolio site (” the pseudoroom” ) from that time was experimental if not a little overt in terms of visualizing how the idea of a living sketchbook was conveyed. Very skeuomorphic. This one involved sketching and then passing a Photoshop file back and forth to experiment with various user interactions with fellow designer and dear friend Marc Clancy, who is now a co-founder of the creative project organizing app Milanote. Then, I’d break it down and code it into a digital layout.

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

GUI Galaxy was a design, pixel art, and Mac-centric news portal that graphic designer friends and I developed from around the same time.

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

We as designers had changed and developed a bandwidth-sensitive, award-winning, much more accessibility-conscious website. Still ripe with experimentation, yet more mindful of equitable engagement. Below are some content panes that show general news (tech, design ) and news centered on Mac. We also offered many of the custom downloads I cited before as present on my folio site but branded and themed to GUI Galaxy.

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

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

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

First of all, there’s a reason for the nostalgia for the” Wild West” era of design that so many personal portfolio and design portals sprang from the past. Ultra-finely detailed pixel art UI, custom illustration, bespoke vector graphics, all underpinned by a strong design community.

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

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

Pixel Issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of my friendships and blossoming professional relationships almost ended up being destroyed by my ego. I was toxic in talking about design and in collaboration. But thankfully, candor was a gift from those same friends. They called me out on my unhealthy behavior.

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

Always Students

Following that temporary decline, my personal and professional design journey advanced. And I could self-reflect as I got older to facilitate further growth and course correction as needed.

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

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

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

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

I also had my first ethnographic observational experience, where I observed how the physicists used the tool in their own environments, on their own terminals. For example, one takeaway was that due to the level of ambient light-driven contrast within the facility, the data columns ended up using white text on a dark gray background instead of black text-on-white. They could read through a lot of data at once and relieve their strain in the process. And Fermilab and CERN are government entities with rigorous accessibility standards, so my knowledge in that realm also grew. Another crucial form of communication was the barrier-free design.

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

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

However, remember that “experience” does not equate to “expert.”

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

In today’s data-driven environment, it’s becoming more common for a UX expert to be asked to create a personal digital experience, whether it be a common website, consumer portal, or native application. However while there continues to be no lack of marketing buzz around personalization systems, we also have very few defined approaches for implementing personalized UX.

That’s where we begin. After completing tens of personalisation projects over the past few years, we gave ourselves a purpose: could you make a systematic personalization platform especially for UX practitioners? The Personalization Pyramid is a designer-centric framework for establishing human-centered personalization initiatives that cover files, classification, content delivery, and overall objectives. By using this strategy, you will be able to understand the core components of a modern, UX-driven personalization system ( or at the very least understand enough to get started ).

Getting Started

We’ll assume that you are already comfortable with the fundamentals of modern personalization for the purposes of this article. A nice guide can be found these: Website Personalization Planning. Although Graphic projects in this field can take a variety of forms, they frequently begin with identical starting points.

Common scenarios for starting a personalisation task:

• Your business or client made a purchase to personalize their content management system ( CMS ), marketing automation platform ( MAP ), or other related technology.
• The CMO, CDO, or CIO has identified personalisation as a target
• User data is unclear or disjointed.
• You are running some secluded targeting strategies or A/B tests
• On personalization method, participants disagree.
• Mandate of customer privacy rules ( e. g. GDPR ) requires revisiting existing user targeting practices

Regardless of where you begin, a powerful personalization system will require the same key building stones. These are the “levels” on the tower, as we’ve made them. Whether you are a UX artist, scholar, or planner, understanding the core components may help make your contribution effective.

From top to bottom, the amounts include:

North Star: What larger corporate goal is driving the personalization system?
1. Objectives: What are the specific, tangible benefits of the system?
2. Touchpoints: Where will you get a personal experience?
3. Contexts and Campaigns: What personalization information does the person view?
4. What constitutes a distinct, suitable audience? User Parts
5. Actionable Data: What dependable and credible information is captured by our professional platform to generate personalization?
6. What wider set of data is conceivable ( now in our environment ) to allow you to optimize?

We’ll go through each of these amounts in change. To make this more bearable, we created a deck of cards that accompany it to show particular examples from each stage. We’ve found them helpful in customisation pondering periods, and will include cases for you here.

Starting at the Top

The tower has the following elements:

North Star

What overall goal do you have with your personalization system ( big or small ) is a northern star. The North Star defines the (one ) overall mission of the personalization program. What do you hope to accomplish? North Stars cast a ghost. The darkness is bigger the sun, the sun, and so on. Example of North Starts may contain:

Function: Optimize based on fundamental consumer inputs. Examples:” Raw” messages, basic search effects, system user settings and settings options, general flexibility, basic improvements
1. Self-contained customisation component is a function. Examples:” Cooked” notifications, advanced optimizations ( geolocation ), basic dynamic messaging, customized modules, automations, recommenders
2. Experience: Individualized customer experiences across a variety of interactions and customer flows. Examples: Email campaigns, landing pages, advanced messaging ( i. e. C2C chat ) or conversational interfaces, larger user flows and content-intensive optimizations ( localization ).
3. Solution: Highly distinctive, personalized solution experiences. Example: Standalone, branded experience with personalization at their base, like the “algotorial” songs by Spotify quite as Discover Weekly.

Goals

Personalization can aid in accelerating designing with user intentions, as in any great UX design. Goals are the military and tangible metrics that may prove the entire program is effective. A good place to begin is with your existing analytics and assessment software and metrics you can standard against. In some cases, fresh targets may be ideal. The most important thing to keep in mind is that personalisation is not a desired outcome. It is a means to an end. Common targets include:

• Conversion
• Time spent on work
• Net promoter score ( NPS)
• Satisfaction of the customers

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are where the personalisation happens. One of your main responsibilities as a UX developer will be in this area. The connections available to you will depend on how your personalization and associated technology features are instrumented, and should be rooted in improving a person’s experience at a certain point in the trip. Touchpoints can be multi-device ( mobile, in-store, website ), but they can also be more specific ( web banner, web pop-up, etc. ). Voici some illustrations:

Touchpoints at the channel level

• Email: Role
• Email: When is the email open?
• In-store display ( JSON endpoint )
• Native app
• Search

Wireframe-level Touchpoints

• Web overlay
• Web alert bar
• Web banner
• Web content block
• Web home page

If you’re designing for web interfaces, for example, you will likely need to include personalized “zones” in your wireframes. Based on our next step, context, and campaigns, the content for these can be presented programmatically in touchpoints.

Contexts and Campaigns

Once you’ve identified some touchpoints, you can decide what kind of personalized content a user will receive. Many personalization tools will refer to these as” campaigns” ( so, for example, a campaign on a web banner for new visitors to the website ). These will be displayed to specific user segments programmatically, as defined by user data. At this stage, we find it helpful to consider two separate models: a context model and a content model. The context helps you consider the level of user engagement at the personalization moment, for instance, if they are just casually browsing information rather than engaging in a deep dive. Think of it in terms of information retrieval behaviors. The content model can then guide you in deciding what kind of personalization to use in the context ( for instance, an” Enrich” campaign that features related articles might be a good substitute for extant content ).

Personalization Context Model:

1. Browse
2. Skim
3. Nudge
4. Feast

Personalization Content Model

1. Alert
2. Make Easier
3. Cross-Sell
4. Enrich

If you’d like to read more about each of these models, check out Colin’s Personalization Content Model and Jeff’s Personalization Context Model.

User Groups

User segments can be created prescriptively or adaptively, based on user research ( e. g. via rules and logic tied to set user behaviors or via A/B testing ). You will need to think about how to treat the unidentified or first-time visitor, the guest or returning visitor for whom you may have a stateful cookie ( or an equivalent post-cookie identifier ), or the logged-in visitor who is authenticated. Here are some examples from the personalization pyramid:

• Unknown
• Guest
• Authenticated
• Default
• Referred
• Role
• Cohort
• Unique ID

Actionable Data

Every organization with any digital presence has data. It’s important to inquire about how to use the data you can ethically collect on users, its inherent reliability and value, and what is the term for “data activation.” Fortunately, the tide is turning to first-party data: a recent study by Twilio estimates some 80 % of businesses are using at least some type of first-party data to personalize the customer experience.

First-party data has a number of benefits on the user experience front, including being relatively simple to collect, more likely to be accurate, and less susceptible to the” creep factor” of third-party data. So a key part of your UX strategy should be to determine what the best form of data collection is on your audiences. Voici some illustrations:

There is a progression of profiling when it comes to recognizing and making decisioning about different audiences and their signals. As time and confidence and data volume increase, it varies to more granular constructs about smaller and smaller cohorts of users.

While some combination of implicit / explicit data is generally a prerequisite for any implementation ( more commonly referred to as first party and third-party data ) ML efforts are typically not cost-effective directly out of the box. This is because optimization requires a strong data backbone and content repository. But these approaches should be considered as part of the larger roadmap and may indeed help accelerate the organization’s overall progress. At this point, you will typically work with key stakeholders and product owners to create a profiling model. The profiling model includes defining approach to configuring profiles, profile keys, profile cards and pattern cards. a scalable, multi-faceted approach to profiling.

Pulling it Together

The cards serve as the foundation for an inventory of sorts ( we provide blanks for you to tailor your own ), a set of potential levers and motivations for the kind of personalization activities you aspire to deliver, but they are more valuable when grouped together.

In assembling a card “hand”, one can begin to trace the entire trajectory from leadership focus down through a strategic and tactical execution. It serves as the foundation for the workshops that both co-authors have conducted to build a program backlog, which would make a good article topic.

In the meantime, what is important to note is that each colored class of card is helpful to survey in understanding the range of choices potentially at your disposal, it is threading through and making concrete decisions about for whom this decisioning will be made: where, when, and how.

Lay Down Your Cards

Any effective personalization plan must take into account near, middle, and long-term objectives. Even with the leading CMS platforms like Sitecore and Adobe or the most exciting composable CMS DXP out there, there is simply no “easy button” wherein a personalization program can be stood up and immediately view meaningful results. Having said that, all personalization activities follow a common grammar, similar to how every sentence contains nouns and verbs. These cards attempt to map that territory.

I’ve been fascinated by shows since I was a child. I loved the heroes and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I aspired to be an artist. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on fascinating experiences. Yet my friends and I had movie ideas to make and sun in. But they never went any farther. However, I did end up working in user experience ( UI). Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer research is story. And you must show a compelling story to entice stakeholders, such as the product team and decision-makers, to learn more in order to get the most out of consumer research.

Think of your favorite film. It more than likely follows a three-act narrative construction: the layout, the turmoil, and the resolution. The second act shows what exists now, and it helps you get to understand the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two sets the scene for the fight and introduces the action. Here, difficulties grow or get worse. The solution comes in the third and final work. This is where the issues are resolved and the figures learn and change. This structure, in my opinion, is also a fantastic way to think about customer research, and I think it can be particularly useful for explaining consumer research to others.

Use story as a framework when conducting study.

It’s sad to say, but many have come to view studies as being inconsequential. Research is typically one of the first things to go when finances or deadlines are tight. Instead of investing in study, some goods professionals rely on manufacturers or—worse—their personal judgment to make the “right” options for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get groups a little bit out of the way, but that approach is therefore easily miss out on resolving people ‘ real issues. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. User study improves pattern. It keeps it on record, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the problems with your goods and taking action can help you be ahead of your competition.

In the three-act structure, each action corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is important to telling the whole story. Let’s examine the various functions and how they relate to customer study.

Act one: layout

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

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

I think this makes sense. And I love that this makes consumer studies so visible. You can only attract participants and do it! You don’t need to create a lot of documentation. This can offer a wealth of knowledge about your customers, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their life. Understanding where people are coming from is what action one is really all about.

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

When partners begin to understand the value of basic research, that is open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making approach. And that can help item team become more user-centric. This gains everyone—users, the goods, and partners. It’s similar to winning an Oscar for a film because it frequently results in a favorable and productive outcome for your item. And this can be an opportunity for participants to repeat this process with different items. Knowing how to show a good story is the only way to convince partners to worry about doing more research, and story is the key to this method.

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

Act two: fight

Act two is all about digging deeper into the problems that you identified in operate one. In order to evaluate a potential solution ( such as a design ), you typically conduct vertical research, such as usability tests, to see if it addresses the problems you identified. The issues may include unfulfilled needs or problems with a circulation or procedure that’s tripping users away. More issues may come up in the process, much like in action two of a movie. It’s here that you learn more about the figures as they grow and develop through this action.

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

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

Usability tests have been conducted in person for decades, but you can also do them remotely using software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You might consider in-person usability tests like watching a movie as opposed to remote testing like attending a play. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Much more in-depth research is conducted on user experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. Additionally, you get real-time reactions, including surprises, disagreements, 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 conducting usability testing in the field is like watching a play that is staged and controlled, where any two sessions may be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can conduct your research by meeting users at their locations. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that wouldn’t have in a lab environment—and conversion can shift in entirely different directions. You have less control over how these sessions end as researchers, but this can occasionally help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests add a level of detail that remote usability tests frequently lack.

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

You can ask real users questions to understand their thoughts and understanding of the solution as a result of usability testing, whether it is done remotely or in person. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. Additionally, you can test your own hypotheses and determine whether your reasoning 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. The excitement is in the second act, but there are also potential surprises in the third. This is equally true of usability tests. Sometimes, participants will say unexpected things that alter the way you look at them, which can lead to unexpected turns in the story.

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

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

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

Act three: resolution

The third act is about resolving the issues raised by the first two acts, whereas the first two are about comprehending the context and the tensions that can compel action. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That includes the entire product team, including developers, UX experts, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other interested parties who have a say in the coming development. It allows the whole team to hear users ‘ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. Additionally, it enables the UX design and research teams to clarify, suggest alternatives, or provide more context for their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

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

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

This type of structure aligns well with research results, and particularly results from usability tests. It provides proof for “what is “—the issues you’ve identified. And “what could be “—your recommendations on how to address them. And so forth and 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 as visual as quick sketches of a potential solution to a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the session is over when you’ve concluded everything by summarizing the key points and offering suggestions for a solution. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. The stakeholders will now have the opportunity to take the next steps, and hopefully the will-power to do so!

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

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

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

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

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

So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. In the end, user research is beneficial to everyone, and all parties must be interested in the conclusion.

Picture this. You’ve joined a squad at your company that’s designing new product features with an emphasis on automation or AI. Or your company has just implemented a personalization engine. Either way, you’re designing with data. Now what? When it comes to designing for personalization, there are many cautionary tales, no overnight successes, and few guides for the perplexed. 

Between the fantasy of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong—like when we encounter “persofails” in the vein of a company repeatedly imploring everyday consumers to buy additional toilet seats—the personalization gap is real. It’s an especially confounding place to be a digital professional without a map, a compass, or a plan.

For those of you venturing into personalization, there’s no Lonely Planet and few tour guides because effective personalization is so specific to each organization’s talent, technology, and market position. 

But you can ensure that your team has packed its bags sensibly.

There’s a DIY formula to increase your chances for success. At minimum, you’ll defuse your boss’s irrational exuberance. Before the party you’ll need to effectively prepare.

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the music

Consider Spotify’s DJ feature, which debuted this past year.

We’re used to seeing the polished final result of a personalization feature. Before the year-end award, the making-of backstory, or the behind-the-scenes victory lap, a personalized feature had to be conceived, budgeted, and prioritized. Before any personalization feature goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a backlog of worthy ideas for expressing customer experiences more dynamically.

So how do you know where to place your personalization bets? How do you design consistent interactions that won’t trip up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve found that for many budgeted programs to justify their ongoing investments, they first needed one or more workshops to convene key stakeholders and internal customers of the technology. Make yours count.

​From Big Tech to fledgling startups, we’ve seen the same evolution up close with our clients. In our experiences with working on small and large personalization efforts, a program’s ultimate track record—and its ability to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and organize its design and technology efforts—turns on how effectively these prepersonalization activities play out.

Time and again, we’ve seen effective workshops separate future success stories from unsuccessful efforts, saving countless time, resources, and collective well-being in the process.

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

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

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

Set your kitchen timer

How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The surrounding assessment activities that we recommend including can (and often do) span weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Here’s a summary of our broader approach along with details on the essential first-day activities.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

1. Kickstart: This sets the terms of engagement as you focus on the opportunity as well as the readiness and drive of your team and your leadership. .
2. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
3. Work your plan: This phase is all about creating a competitive environment for team participants to individually pitch their own pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept project, its business case, and its operating model.

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

Kickstart: Whet your appetite

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

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

This is all about setting the table. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? If you want a broader view, here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework.

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature (or something similar). In our cards, we divide connected experiences into five levels: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to focus the conversation on the merits of ongoing investment as well as the gap between what you deliver today and what you want to deliver in the future.

Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is critical because it emphasizes how personalization can not only help your external customers but also affect your own ways of working. It’s also a reminder (which is why we used the word argument earlier) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Each team member should vote on where they see your product or service putting its emphasis. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. The intention here is to flesh out how different departments may view their own upsides to the effort, which can vary from one to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final kickstart activity is about naming your personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will data and privacy compliance be too big of a challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? (We’re pretty sure that you do: it’s just a matter of recognizing the relative size of that need and its remedy.) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. Our Detractor card, for example, lists six stakeholder behaviors that hinder progress.

Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential barriers to your future progress. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. As studies have shown, personalization efforts face many common barriers.

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

Hit that test kitchen

Next, let’s look at what you’ll need to bring your personalization recipes to life. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. Their capabilities are sweeping and powerful, and they present broad options for how your organization can conduct its activities. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

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

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

The dishes will come from recipes, and those recipes have set ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

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

This isn’t just about discovering requirements. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team: 

1. compare findings toward a unified approach for developing features, not unlike when artists paint with the same palette; 
2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar; 
3. and develop parity across performance measurements and key performance indicators too. 

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

Compose your recipe

What ingredients are important to you? Think of a who-what-when-why construct: 

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

We first developed these cards and card categories five years ago. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And we still encounter new possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

Here are three examples for a subscription-based reading app, which you can generally follow along with right to left in the cards in the accompanying photo below. 

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

A useful preworkshop activity may be to think through a first draft of what these cards might be for your organization, although we’ve also found that this process sometimes flows best through cocreating the recipes themselves. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

You can think of the later stages of the workshop as moving from recipes toward a cookbook in focus—like a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual “cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.

Better kitchens require better architecture

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

When personalization becomes a laugh line, it’s because a team is overfitting: they aren’t designing with their best data. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. Your AI’s output quality, for example, is indeed limited by your IA. Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture.

You can definitely stand the heat…

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach will bring about the necessary focus and intention to succeed. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, hit the test kitchen to save time, preserve job satisfaction and security, and safely dispense with the fanciful ideas that originate upstairs of the doers in your organization. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.

This workshop framework gives you a fighting shot at lasting success as well as sound beginnings. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. But if you use the same cookbook and shared recipes, you’ll have solid footing for success. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.

While there are associated costs toward investing in this kind of technology and product design, your ability to size up and confront your unique situation and your digital capabilities is time well spent. Don’t squander it. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

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

How we got below

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

online requirements were born.

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

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

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

The web as software platform

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

Mobile devices increased in their capabilities as well, and they gave us access to the internet while we were traveling. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.

This fusion of potent mobile devices and potent development tools contributed to the growth of social media and other centralized tools for user interaction and consumption. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media provided connections on a global scale, with both the positive and negative effects.

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

Where we are now

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

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

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

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

Where do we go from here?

Hacks of today help to shape standards for the future. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks —for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we refuse to acknowledge that they are hacks or when we refuse to take their place. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go ahead and create a masterpiece.

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

I’d like you to consider this a “yes … and” piece to complement Joe’s post. I’m not trying to reject any of what he’s saying, but rather to give some context to initiatives and options where AI may produce real, positive impacts on people with disabilities. To be clear, I want to take some time to talk about what’s possible in hope that we’ll find it one day. There are, and we’ve needed to address them, like, yesterday.

Other words

Joe’s article spends a lot of time examining how computer vision versions can create other words. He raises a lot of valid points about the state of the world right now. And while computer-vision concepts continue to improve in the quality and complexity of information in their information, their benefits aren’t wonderful. As he rightly points out, the state of image research is currently very poor, especially for some graphic types, in large part due to the lack of context for which AI systems look at images ( which is a result of having separate “foundation” models for words analysis and picture analysis ). Today’s models aren’t trained to distinguish between images that are contextually relevant ( which should probably have descriptions ) and those that are purely decorative ( which might not even need a description ) either. Nonetheless, I still think there’s possible in this area.

As Joe points out, alt text publishing via human-in-the-loop should be a given. And if AI can intervene to provide a starting place for alt text, even if the swift might say What is this BS? That’s certainly correct at all … Let me try to offer a starting point— I think that’s a win.

If we can specifically station a design to examine image usage in context, it might help us more quickly determine which images are likely to be elegant and which ones are likely to need a description. That will help clarify which situations require image descriptions, and it will increase authors ‘ effectiveness in making their sites more visible.

While complex images—like graphs and charts—are challenging to describe in any sort of succinct way ( even for humans ), the image example shared in the GPT4 announcement points to an interesting opportunity as well. Let’s say you came across a map that merely stated the chart’s name and the type of representation it was:” Pie chart comparing smartphone use to have phone usage in US households making under$ 30, 000 annually.” ( That would be a pretty bad alt text for a chart because it would frequently leave many unanswered questions about the data, but let’s just assume that that was the description in place. ) If your website knew that that picture was a pie graph ( because an onboard model concluded this ), imagine a world where people could ask questions like these about the creative:

• Do more people use feature phones or smartphones?
• How many more?
• Is there a group of people that don’t fall into either of these buckets?
• That number, how many?

For a moment, the chance to learn more about images and data in this way could be revolutionary for people who are blind and low vision as well as for those with various forms of color blindness, cognitive disabilities, and other issues. Putting aside the realities of large language model ( LLM) hallucinations, where a model just makes up plausible-sounding “facts,” It could also be useful in educational contexts to help people who can see these charts, as is, to understand the data in the charts.

What if you could ask your browser to make a complicated chart simpler? What if you asked it to separate a single line from a line graph? What if you could ask your browser to transpose the colors of the different lines to work better for form of color blindness you have? What if you could ask it to switch colors for patterns? That seems like a possibility given the chat-based interfaces and our current ability to manipulate images in today’s AI tools.

Now imagine a purpose-built model that could extract the information from that chart and convert it to another format. Perhaps it could convert that pie chart (or, better yet, a series of pie charts ) into more usable ( and useful ) formats, like spreadsheets, for instance. That would be incredible!

Matching algorithms

When Safiya Umoja Noble chose to put her book Algorithms of Oppression, she hit the nail on the head. Although her book focused on the ways that search engines can foster racism, I believe it to be equally accurate to say that all computer models have the potential to amplify conflict, bias, and intolerance. Whether it’s Twitter always showing you the latest tweet from a bored billionaire, YouTube sending us into a Q-hole, or Instagram warping our ideas of what natural bodies look like, we know that poorly authored and maintained algorithms are incredibly harmful. Many of these are the result of a lack of diversity in the people who create and build them. There is real potential for algorithm development when these platforms are built with inclusive features in, though.

Take Mentra, for example. They serve as a network of employment for people who are neurodivers. They employ an algorithm to match job seekers with potential employers based on more than 75 data points. On the job-seeker side of things, it considers each candidate’s strengths, their necessary and preferred workplace accommodations, environmental sensitivities, and so on. On the employer side, it takes into account each work environment, communication strategies for each job, and other factors. Mentra made the decision to change the script when it came to the typical employment websites because it was run by neurodivergent people. They use their algorithm to propose available candidates to companies, who can then connect with job seekers that they are interested in, reducing the emotional and physical labor on the job-seeker side of things.

When more people with disabilities are involved in the development of algorithms, this can lower the likelihood that these algorithms will harm their communities. That’s why diverse teams are so crucial.

Imagine that a social media company’s recommendation engine was tuned to analyze who you’re following and if it was tuned to prioritize follow recommendations for people who talked about similar things but who were different in some key ways from your existing sphere of influence. For instance, if you were to follow a group of non-disabled white male academics who talk about AI, it might be advisable to follow those who are disabled, aren’t white, or aren’t men who also talk about AI. If you followed its advice, you might gain a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of what’s happening in the AI field. These same systems should also use their understanding of biases about particular communities—including, for instance, the disability community—to make sure that they aren’t recommending any of their users follow accounts that perpetuate biases against (or, worse, spewing hate toward ) those groups.

Other ways that AI can assist people with disabilities

If I weren’t attempting to combine this with other tasks, I’m sure I could go on and on, giving various examples of how AI could be used to assist people with disabilities, but I’m going to make this last section into a bit of a lightning round. In no particular order:

preservation of voice You may be aware of the voice-prescribing options from Microsoft, Acapela, or others, or you may have seen the announcement for VALL-E or Apple’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day. It’s possible to train an AI model to replicate your voice, which can be a tremendous boon for people who have ALS ( Lou Gehrig’s disease ) or motor-neuron disease or other medical conditions that can lead to an inability to talk. We need to approach this tech responsibly because it has the potential to have a truly transformative impact, which is why it can also be used to create audio deepfakes.
• voice recognition is. Researchers like those in the Speech Accessibility Project are paying people with disabilities for their help in collecting recordings of people with atypical speech. As I type, they are actively seeking out people who have Parkinson’s and related conditions, and they intend to expand this list as the project develops. More people with disabilities will be able to use voice assistants, dictation software, and voice-response services as a result of this research, which will result in more inclusive data sets that will enable them to use their computers and other devices more easily and with just their voices.
• Text transformation. The most recent generation of LLMs is quite capable of changing existing text without giving off hallucinations. This is incredibly empowering for those who have cognitive disabilities and who may benefit from text summaries, simplified versions, or even text that has been prepared for Bionic Reading.

The importance of diverse teams and data

Our differences must be acknowledged as important. The intersections of the identities we exist in have an impact on our lived experiences. These lived experiences—with all their complexities ( and joys and pain ) —are valuable inputs to the software, services, and societies that we shape. Our differences must be reflected in the data we use to develop new models, and those who provide it need to be compensated for doing so. Stronger models can be created using inclusive data sets, which lead to more equitable outcomes.

Want a model that doesn’t demean or patronize or objectify people with disabilities? Make sure that the training data includes information about disabilities written by people with a range of disabilities.

Want a non-binary language model? You may be able to use existing data sets to build a filter that can intercept and remediate ableist language before it reaches readers. Despite this, AI models won’t soon replace human copy editors when it comes to sensitivity reading.

Want a copilot for coding that provides recomprehensible recommendations after the jump? Train it on code that you know to be accessible.

I have no doubts about how dangerous AI can and will be for people today, tomorrow, and for the rest of the world. However, I think we should also acknowledge this and make thoughtful, thoughtful, and intentional changes to our approaches to AI that will also reduce harm over time with an emphasis on accessibility ( and, in general, inclusion ). Today, tomorrow, and well into the future.

Many thanks to Kartik Sawhney for supporting the development of this article, Ashley Bischoff for providing me with invaluable editorial support, and, of course, Joe Dolson for the prompt.

Outsmarting AI: Secrets to Human-Centered Marketing written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Mark Schaefer In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Mark Schaefer, futurist, bestselling author, and marketing strategist, about his new book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. Mark is a thought leader in digital and content marketing, and in this conversation, he […]

Outsmarting AI: Secrets to Human-Centered Marketing written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Mark Schaefer

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Mark Schaefer, futurist, bestselling author, and marketing strategist, about his new book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. Mark is a thought leader in digital and content marketing, and in this conversation, he explores the intersection of AI marketing and what it truly means to be human in an increasingly automated landscape.

We dive deep into why human-centered marketing is more essential than ever, how shared experiences and emotional marketing can outperform cold performance metrics, and why creative branding—especially the bold and unexpected kind—is the antidote to the AI-generated noise. If you’re wondering how your business can stand out in the age of AI and shifting consumer behavior, this conversation is for you.

Key Takeaways:

• Human-centered marketing is the competitive edge in the AI era. While AI marketing tools are powerful, they can’t replicate genuine human connection, emotional marketing, or brand experiences built around shared values and trust.
• Performance marketing has overshadowed the soul of branding. Mark challenges the overreliance on SEO, paid ads, and automation—urging marketers to reclaim storytelling, empathy, and creativity in their strategy.
• Experiential marketing is key to creating emotional resonance. Mark emphasizes the need for shared experiences—both online and offline—that tap into what he calls collective effervescence, a psychological state where people feel connected, inspired, and part of something bigger.
• Word-of-mouth marketing remains massively underutilized. Despite being one of the most trusted forms of promotion, most brands don’t budget for it. Building communities and customer advocacy should be a core part of any marketing strategy.
• In a world of sameness, be audacious. Whether it’s creative branding or marketing disruption, Mark argues that the brands who dare to be bold—sometimes even weird—win attention and loyalty. AI can’t replicate originality.
• Consumer behavior has shifted—and AI is influencing it. As consumers begin using AI to filter content and make decisions, marketers need to deliver clarity, brevity, and emotional depth. Attention is earned, not assumed.
• Start with wrong to spark innovation. One of Mark’s most memorable tips: disrupt your thinking by flipping assumptions. Instead of optimizing the old way, ask what would happen if you did the opposite.

Chapters:

• 00:09 Introducing Mark Schaefer
• 00:59 Where Do Humans Fit in an AI Dominated World?
• 04:09 A World Without Shared Experiences
• 07:00 How to Out-Human AI
• 09:44 Embracing Every Day Awe
• 13:08 How AI is Changing Consumer Behavior
• 17:25 Story of the Book Cover
• 19:17 Start with Wrong

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 Andor season 2 episodes 4-6. The planet Ghorman is an important part of Star Wars history, in both the Legends continuity and current canon. The Ghor suffer greatly under the Empire’s rule, and go through a tragic event known as the Ghorman Massacre. It’s been known that season 2 of […]

The post Star Wars: Andor – What Is the Tarkin Massacre? appeared first on Den of Geek.

For some people, the summer months mean beaches and long days outdoors. For Den of Geek readers, the summer means staying inside air conditioned movie theaters and watching big budget spectacles! And boy, does summer 2025 have spectacles. But if superheroes and dinosaurs aren’t your bag, you don’t have to skip cinemas altogether this season. Everything from comedy revivals to existential horrors will be hitting screens over the next couple of months, promising cool entertainment for all. And we got it all here for your viewing pleasure.

Another Simple Favor

May 1

Paul Feig continues to be one of the more mercurial figures in Hollywood. He’s directed or co-created some excellent stuff, including Freaks & Geeks, Spy, and the deeply underrated Last Christmas. But he’s also behind absolute stinkers such as The Heat and Jackpot!, making for a checkered filmography.

This year, Feig returns to one of his more successful projects with the sequel Another Simple Favor. Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick reprise their roles as the stylish, suspicious rivals Emily Nelson and Stephanie Smothers. This time, the murder that binds them occurs in Capri, Italy, promising even more magazine-spread sophistication than the first movie.

Thunderbolts*

May 2

Who can say what kind of movie Thunderbolts* will be? It follows Captain America: Brave New World, a movie that seemed to embarrass even Marvel, and precedes the highly-anticipated The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Throw in a delayed production process that lost Steven Yeun and Ayo Edebiri, replaced by Lewis Pullman and Geraldine Viswanathan, and the tea leaves might be ambiguous.

But maybe that misfit status will work in the film’s favor. Thunderbolts* walks the same path as Suicide Squad and this year’s Star Trek: Section 31 as a story about people who don’t belong together forming a team. Unlike those dismal films, however, Thunderbolts* seems to understand its ragtag place, with marketing leaning heavily on the mountains of charisma that Florence Pugh and David Harbour bring, alongside Sebastian Stan’s beloved Winter Soldier.

The Surfer

May 2

By this point, Nicolas Cage has completed his purgation from being ironically loved by the internet to actually loved by the internet, to finally recognized (again) as one of the most interesting working actors in cinema. So even the the ad campaign for The Surfer has been as spartan as its title, we can’t help but be intrigued.

Directed by Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium, Nocebo) and written by Thomas Martin, The Surfer features Cage as a man who brings his son to surf an Australian beach he loved in his youth only to be menaced by local roughs. That sounds a lot like Cage’s recent masterpiece Pig, and some reviewers have compared it to the Aussie New Wave classic Wake in Fright, making The Surfer one of the more compelling entries on this list.

Friendship

May 9

Speaking of internet faves, Friendship stars Tim Robinson as a bored suburbanite who makes fast friends with a new neighbor played by Paul Rudd. Feeling that the bond has restored his lost youth, Robinson’s character soon becomes an obsessive and even destructive force in his neighbor’s life while alienating himself from his wife (Kate Mara).

To anyone familiar with I Think You Should Leave, that description fills the mind with images of slicked back hair and sloppy steaks, which should both excite and worry us. Robinson’s humor works great in five-minute sketches, but will that translate to feature length? Fortunately, Robinson and Rudd have Our Flag Means Death and PEN15‘s Andrew DeYoung onboard to direct.

Final Destination: Bloodlines

May 16

The Final Destination franchise has tried to close itself out twice, first with 2009’s awful The Final Destination and again in 2011’s excellent Final Destination 5. But Death’s work is never complete, so it’s fitting that a new entry would appear with Final Destination: Bloodlines.

To be honest, Bloodlines has some stiff competition, not only because it comes more than a decade after the last and best entry, but also because Oz Perkins already gave us a glorious pseudo-Destination this year with The Monkey. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein don’t exactly build the most confidence, as they won acclaim for their work on Disney XD shows. But Bloodlines does give us one last look at the late, great Tony Todd as mortician William Bludsworth, so we will be there on day one.

Hurry Up Tomorrow

May 14

On the heels of Smile 2 and Opus comes another horror movie about the plight of being an internationally beloved pop star. Based on his own album, Hurry Up Tomorrow stars Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, as a fictionalized version of himself who suffers a paranoid breakdown.

For those who only know The Weeknd from gifs, Hurry Up Tomorrow also stars Jenna Ortega as the pop star’s girlfriend and Barry Keoghan as a mysterious stranger. For cinephiles, the most compelling name on the poster is that of Trey Edward Shults, who broke out with the world’s scariest Thanksgiving movie Krisha and then followed it up with highly divisive movies It Comes at Night and Waves. Judging by Hurry Up Tomorrow‘s trailer, Shults has no intention of becoming predictable now.

Lilo & Stitch

May 23

Having already desecrated its classic and renaissance era in order to mine for ugly remakes that can be shoved into theaters, Disney turns to its oddball post-renaissance period for its latest live-action rehash. Are they remaking Brother Bear or Home on the Range, bad movies that might be improved by a second draft? Of course not! They’re remaking the good ones because those have name recognition!

Lilo & Stitch seems to repeat the exact same beats of the 2002 movie in which a fuzzy but dangerous alien (Chris Sanders) crash lands on Hawaii and befriends a lonely orphaned girl (Maia Kealoha) and her guardian big sister (Sydney Agudong). The one sliver of hope comes in the fact that Lilo & Stitch 2025 is directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, who made the delightful Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Then again, if Camp is successful and Lilo & Stitch does well, then we’re bound to see live-action version of The Emperor’s New Groove, and no one wants that.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

May 23

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning promises to do what Owen Davian, Solomon Lane, and Jim Phelps could never accomplish: It will bring a stop to Ethan Hunt. Maybe. Through sure force of will and madness, Tom Cruise has transformed the Mission: Impossible franchise from a TV series best known for its theme song into a big-budget stunt spectacular in which we flock to see him risk his life for our amusement. But time comes even for Cruise, so Final Reckoning is being marketed as Hunt’s last outing.

At least he’s going out with a bang. Once again directed by Christopher McQuarrie, The Final Reckoning reveals the mastermind behind the rogue AI known as the Entity as someone with ties to the first film. Along the way, he’ll get help from his team, including mainstays played by Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, as well as newer additions played by Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby, and Pom Klementieff. Also, Tom Cruise will hang off a plane, which is what we’re really here to see.

Fear Street: Prom Queen

May 23

If you’re over the age of 25, you may only know Fear Street as the YA novels written by Goosebumps author R.L. Stein. However, the three Fear Street movies released by Netflix have been horror favorites of Gen Z, thanks to viral videos shared online. Fear Street: Prom Queen breaks from the trilogy format of the first three movies for a standalone story about scary things occurring at a 1988 prom queen race. Matt Palmer steps in for departing director Leigh Janiak, but as long as he can bring the gory thrills, Zoomers are sure to love it.

Fountain of Youth

May 23

English director Guy Ritchie continues to broaden his offerings with the adventure tale Fountain of Youth. Penned by veteran screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man), Fountain of Youth stars John Krasinski and Natalie Portman as siblings searching for the titular water source. They’re joined by a gaggle of character actors like Domhnall Gleeson, Eiza Gonzalez, and Stanley Tucci. That all sounds like a throwback good time to at least the heyday of National Treasure and Tomb Raider if not Indiana Jones. But one has to wonder if Fountain of Youth will be hampered by the fact that it’s straight to Apple TV+, dulling the sense of scale that adventure tales usually need.

Karate Kid: Legends

May 30

Karate Kid: Legends offers a rarity even in this age of IP-first filmmaking, a legacy sequel combined with a remake. Legends sees original Karate Kid Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) team with Kung Fu master Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) of the 2010 remake to train newcomer Li Fong (Ben Wang).

It’s a strange maneuver on Sony’s part, pivoting away from the very popular Karate Kid legacy series Cobra Kai, which recently ended its six season run on Netflix, and toward the lesser-loved 2010 remake. Will Legends uncover a hidden trove of fans nostalgic for the 2010 movie? Or is it time to finally bring back Hilary Swank from The Next Karate Kid? We’ll find out this summer.

The Phoenician Scheme

May 30, June 6 (wide)

Although initially panned upon its release in 2005, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou has been reclaimed as on of Wes Anderson‘s best movies (including by us!). So it’s good to see Anderson take another swing at the action genre with The Phoenician Scheme.

That said, The Phoenician Scheme does feel slightly different from most of Anderson’s movies, mostly because he’s shaking up his usual stable of players. Benicio del Toro, who had only previously worked with Anderson on The French Dispatch, takes the lead as businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, alongside new additions Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, and Riz Ahmed. Of course familiar faces Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, and Scarlett Johansson are on hand, as is Anderson’s impeccable aesthetic.

Bring Her Back

May 30

Aussie twins Danny and Michael Philippou made the jump from YouTube to indie cult status with 2022’s Talk To Me. They’re ready to ride that momentum with their follow-up Bring Her Back, once again distributed by A24. Bring Her Back follows a recently orphaned brother and sister who come to the home of a foster mother played by Sally Hawkins, who already cares for a troubled boy who may have mystical powers. Judging by Bring Her Back‘s trailer, the Philippou brothers plan a movie just as troubling and intense as their debut.

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina

June 6

John Wick: Chapter 4 seemed to bring an end to the Baba Yaga, but you can’t keep a financially successful franchise down. Thus comes Ana de Armas in From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, complete with an appropriately ostentatious title. Even if you don’t think the John Wick series needed a movie that isn’t about John Wick, Ballerina has a few things in its favor. First, the movie sees the return of not just Reeves’ titular killer (this film is a side-quel set simultaneously during the events of Chapter 3 and 4), but also Ian McShane as Winston and Lance Reddick in his final performance as Charon. The “directed by” credit for Len Wiseman doesn’t inspire much hope, but behind-the-scenes reports indicate that original series director Chad Stahelski shot some of the fight scenes and spearheaded the reshoots. So maybe Ballerina‘s worth checking out after all.

The Life of Chuck

June 6

For the past few years, Mike Flanagan has established himself as one of the most interesting television creators working today. Although his last movie Doctor Sleep has its fans, supporters explicitly cite the Director’s Cut as the preferred version, arguing that the extended run time better suits the dazzling monologues Flanagan writes.

So we greet Flanagan’s return to the big screen with a bit of trepidation. Yes, he’s adapting Stephen King once again, and yes, he has most of his familiar ensemble in tow, including Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Mark Hamill, and Carl Lumbly, alongside Tom Hiddleston stepping out of the MCU for a minute. But The Life of Chuck clocks in at under two hours, which seems like far too little time for these brilliant actors to deliver Flanagan’s lines about fate, faith, and the meaning of life. However, the buzz the film has generated out of TIFF, where it won the audience award and threw Oscar prognosticators’ end-of-year predictions into chaos (since this is a June 2025 release) fills us with curiosity.

How to Train Your Dragon (June 13)

The live-action Disney remakes can at least claim that they’re reimagining beloved classics. Great as the original How to Train Your Dragon, it’s only 15 years old. Worse, the remake seems to be using the exact same plot, the exact same CG designs of the dragons, and even the exact same Gerard Butler to play grumpy father Stoick the Vast. Why so many similarities? Because the remake is directed by the same guy who dreamed up the original, Dean DeBlois.

Still, maybe there’s some magic to be found in the new cast, which includes The Black Phone‘s Mason Thames as Hiccup and The Last of Us‘s Nico Parker as Astrid. If they can provide just enough energy, and if DeBlois can recapture some of the original’s magic he brought to the animated trilogy, then How to Train Your Dragon might stand on its own.

Materialists

June 13

Materialists may not be getting the same push as the summer’s superhero and remake entries, but it’s easily one of the more exciting movies coming soon. First, there’s the buzzy cast, including Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans. Then there’s the director Celine Song, making her follow-up to 2023’s Past Lives. Finally, there’s the design of the poster, which finds the central trio doing catalogue poses in an image surrounded by a thick white border.

Everything about Materialists recalls the adult romantic comedies of the ’80s and ’90s, especially its plot. Johnson plays a high-powered matchmaker who, against her better judgment, gets caught in a triangle. If it has even an ounce of the verve of Broadcast News and half the humanity of Past Lives, Materialists will be a favorite long after summer’s end.

Echo Valley

June 13

Speaking of big names in a low-stakes picture, Mare of Eastown creator Brad Ingelsby returns to the features with Echo Valley for Apple TV+. Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney play a mother and daughter who reunite after a tragedy. Sweeney may have broken out with the flashy series Euphoria, but Echo Valley may be another chance to show off the acting chops witnessed in Reality. As seen in his scripts for Mare of Eastown, The Way Back, and Out of the Furnace, Ingelsby understands the nuances of small town life, giving Sweeney plenty of room to develop a complex character.

28 Years Later

June 20

It’s only been 23 years since director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland un-nevered the world with their zombie thriller 28 Days Later, but we’re willing the fudge the math to get the pair together again. As its title suggests, 28 Years Later takes place more than a quarter century after a rage virus ravaged England. Despite the new status quo, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) must leave their island village to face the monsters.

Back in 2002, before George Romero’s return to the genre and all of The Walking Dead, zombies felt fresh and digital photography seemed innovative. Both the technology and the genre have lost some of their bite today. but if there’s anyone who can reanimate the dead forms, it’s Boyle and Garland. We’ll see if 28 Years Later proves worth the wait.

Elio

June 20

Even though Pixar isn’t the surefire studio it once was, a new release still deserves our attention, especially when the trio of directors includes Turning Red‘s Domee Shi and Coco‘s Adrian Molina. Both helmers of two of the best recent Pixar movies, Shi and Molina are joined by Madeline Sharafian, making her feature debut.

Elio follows the titular outer-space nerd (Yonas Kibreab) as he’s somehow selected o represent humanity in an intergalactic council. If all goes well, Elio will learn about life while going through some wacky hijinks, and kids and adults alike will be moved to tears.

M3GAN 2.0

June 27

You can’t keep a viral sensation down, so it’s no surprise to see Blumhouse‘s pre-teen murder-bot make her return for M3GAN 2.0. Taking a page out of the Terminator 2 handbook, M3GAN 2.0 sees the reconstituted robot (voiced by Jenna Davis and performed by Amie Donald) doing battle with an upgraded successor called Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno).

Allison Williams is back as M3GAN’s inventor as is Violet McGraw as her charge/victim. James Wan produces again, as does original co-writer Akela Cooper and director Gerard Johnstone scripting. The question is whether this one will be as heavy on the meme-ready action?

F1

June 27

Most movie fans point to baseball and boxing as the most cinematic of sports, but racing is a pretty close third. So the prospect of seeing Brad Pitt drive fast cars is enough to get butts in seats for F1, especially with direction by Joseph Kosinski of Tron: Legacy and Top Gun: Maverick.

F1 has a well-worn sports plot, with Pitt playing a driver whose career ended with a crash decades ago but is now brought back to mentor a promising up-and-comer (Damson Idris). But racing’s all about improvisations within a set track, and if Kosinski can shoot cars like he shot fighter jets, then no one will care about familiar plot beats.

Jurassic World: Rebirth

July 2

Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of the original Jurassic Park is how Steven Spielberg‘s movie still inspires wonder no matter how many lackluster sequels follow. That said, Jurassic World: Rebirth does have a harder road to hoe, given that it comes off of the dismal Jurassic World Dominion (aka, the one with more locusts than dinosaurs).

Rebirth hopes to correct course by going back to the original. Not only is the trailer full of callbacks to the first movie, but it even boasts a script by David Koepp, screenwriter of the 1993 film. Furthermore, Rebirth director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One) seems to be aiming for old-school adventure in which a scientist (Jonathan Bailey) hires two mercenaries (Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali) to help him find dino genetics that could lead to pharmaceutical breakthroughs. Not exactly cutting edge in plot, but, honestly, as long as Jurassic World: Rebirth has cool dinos eating some folks in cool ways, we’ll be there.

The Old Guard 2

July 2

It’s been five years since Netflix released The Old Guard, an excellent fantasy action film based on the comic book by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández. In the passing years, The Old Guard hasn’t quite become the cult sensation that it deserves to be, but the story is worthy of continuing, especially if new director Victoria Mahoney can match the mixture of action and character depth established by her predecessor Gina Prince-Bythewood.

The Old Guard 2 brings back Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia, aka Andy, the leader of a group of near-immortals who travel the world doing good. She’s joined by newest recruit Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne) and her reliable teammates, all of whom she’ll need to counter a vengeful former lover (Vân Veronica Ngô), who spent the past centuries trapped in an underwater grave.

Superman

July 11

This late in the cycle of superhero movies, we all believe a man can fly. What remains an open questions is if Warner Bros. can make a Superman film as inspirational as the 1978 classic with that tagline in 2025. Hiring true genre aficanado James Gunn seemed like a great start, but can the guy who cut his teeth with Troma, and gleefully slaughtered Z-listers in The Suicide Squad, be the one to pull it off?

Yet with each new look at Superman, our belief grows. Rachel Brosnahan is pitch-perfect casting for Lois Lane and David Corenswet seems to embody the Clark Kent/Superman divide. After The Great and The Menu, Nicholas Hoult has become the ideal person to play the megalomaniacal Lex Luthor. Throw in a compelling supporting cast with inspired choices, including Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner and Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, and its getting easier to believe every minute.

I Know What You Did Last Summer

July 18

As the Scream franchise burns up the goodwill its relaunch earned with a series of unforced errors, its kid sister rises to take its place. The 2025 version of I Know What You Did Last Summer follows a group of attractive young people who get chased around a seaside town by a killer fisherman with a hook hand, all penance for some secret crime committed the previous year… just like in the 1997 film.

To its credit, the I Know What You Did Last Summer 2025 seems to recognize the improbability of its premise and leans into it. The trailer not only highlights the pretty new set of victims, led by Glass Onion’s Madelyn Cline, but also originals Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt, both of whom deliver some self-aware dialogue. If director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge) can nail the balance of metatextual references and nasty slasher kills, Scream may indeed become the stuff of forgotten summers.

Eddington

July 18

Ari Aster made his name by shocking viewers: first with the deeply unsettling Hereditary and then with the still-beguiling Midsommar, which drove people back to his inexplicable short films, before completely baffling everyone with his comic odyssey Beau Is Afraid.

All of that’s a long way of saying that we have no idea what to expect from his latest entry, Eddington. A teaser trailer suggests that Aster’s taking a more satirical edge, as it shows a man played by Joaquin Phoenix scrolling to his phone to see ripped-from-the-headlines videos about COVID, public shaming, and MAGA protests, and here performed by actors as adored as Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone. But that sounds way too easy for a filmmaker like Aster, so prepare for Eddington to shock you in ways you could never foresee.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

July 25

Together with Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps seeks to revitalize the superhero movie genre with a dose of bright-eyed optimism. And like its cousin over at the Distinguished Competition side of the street, First Steps has to cleanse public memory of some pretty terrible predecessors. It’s taking the right steps with its cast, which includes favorites Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the central quartet.

Adding to the appeal is the retro-futuristic aesthetic, brought to life by WandaVision’s Matt Shakman. However, that does raise questions about First Steps’ placement in the larger Marvel Universe. Will the world-devourer Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his herald Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) destroy this world, immediately tarnishing Marvel’s brightly-hued new entries? We’ll have to wait for the post-credits to know for sure.

Happy Gilmore 2

July 25

Forget I Know What You Did Last Summer. 2025’s most surprising ‘90s come back belongs to hockey player-turned-golfer Happy Gilmore who comes to Netflix with a sequel 29 years in the making. Adam Sandler reteams with original writer Tim Herlihy for the latest in Happy’s shenanigans.

Happy Gilmore 2 finds Happy returning to the green for some reason. But let’s be honest, the reason doesn’t matter. Adam Sandler movies are mostly about watching him have fun with his friends, and that’s exactly what Happy Gilmore 2 promises, complete with appearances by Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, and Ben Stiller, all reprising their characters from the first movie, along with lots of golfer cameos.

The Bad Guys 2

August 1

Based on the popular line of children’s illustrated novels, The Bad Guys stars Sam Rockwell as Mr. Wolf, the leader of a group of carnivores/criminals who seek to rehabilitate their image. Thanks to its solid voice acting from Rockwell and co-stars, including Marc Maron and Awkwafina, and its use of the animation techniques pioneered by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Bad Guys was a surprise hit in 2022.

The sequel hopes to continue that success, bringing back all of the principle cast, director Pierre Perifel, and the same animation engine. Following the “bigger is better” approach to sequels, The Bad Guys 2 introduces the Bad Girls, lady animals voiced by the likes of Danielle Brooks and Natasha Lyonne. As long as it can provide the zany energy that kids liked about the first film, The Bad Guys are sure to do good once again at the box office.

The Naked Gun

August 1

On paper the long-in-development remake of The Naked Gun sounds like a disaster. Who today has the same dry humor of the late, great Leslie Nielsen? Who has the same eye for parodic detail as the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrams? Heck, does our current world of non-stop police procedurals have anything like M Squad, the forgotten show that inspired The Naked Gun’s predecessor, Police Squad?

Most of those concerns fall away when we see the first teaser for The Naked Gun 2025. Directed by the Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer, The Naked Gun has an inspired pick in Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., leader of a new version of Police Squad, and he’s joined by Paul Walter Hauser as Ed Hocken Jr. and Moses Jones as Nordberg Jr. Just reading that sentence boosts confidence that, somehow, Schaffer and company have figured out how to replicate the ZAZ humor for today’s audiences.

Freakier Friday

August 8

The train of long-in-the-making sequels continues with Freakier Friday, a continuation of the 2003 Disney remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. In the 2003 version, mother and daughter Tess and Anna Coleman swapped bodies, leading to good-hearted shenanigans and family bonding. The sequel doubles up with a four-way swap, bringing a daughter and step-daughter (Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons, respectively) into the mix.

Judging by the trailer, director Nisha Ganatra (Late Night, The High Note) knows exactly what fans expect from this outing and plans to give it to them. A game Curtis and Lohan throw themselves into their age-inappropriate roles and the quadruple swap changes things up just enough. Throw familiar faces such as Chad Michael Murray and Rosalind Chao from the first movie and add Manny Jacinto as a new love interest, and Freakier Friday’s set to be a warm reunion for 2000s kids ready for some nostalgia.

Weapons

August 8

Weapons director Zach Cregger isn’t a new name, having performed for years in the sketch group The Whitest Kids U’ Know and even co-directed Miss March with late co-star Trevor Moore. But Cregger proved we didn’t really know him at all with his solo director debut, the 2022 shocker Barbarian.

Weapons seeks to surprise us all over again, beginning with a cryptic ad campaign of blurry surveillance footage. Weapons presents itself as a missing persons story, dealing with the mass exodus of children from a suburban neighborhood. But if Barbarian is any indication, that premise just starts the upsetting story that Cregger wants to tell.

Nobody 2

August 15

No one watching Mr. Show in its heyday could have predicted that Bob Odenkirk would have gone from guy who shouts obscenities in sketch comedies to beloved dad who warmly greets his little women. Even more shocking was Odenkirk’s turn to action hero in 2021’s Nobody, in which he played a put-upon suburbanite who recovers his international assassin skills after an attack on his family. If that sounds similar to John Wick, well, it is written by Derek Kolstad, who co-created the Keanu Reeves character.

Nobody 2 picks up where the first movie left off, with Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell and his FBI agent father David (Christopher Lloyd) trying to return to their old lives after the latter’s night of chaos. This time around, Kolstad shares a writing credit with three others (including Odenkirk), but Timo Tjahjanto (who co-directed the “Safe Haven” segment of V/H/S/ 2 with Gareth Evans) steps into direct.

Eden

August 22

By this point, you know what to expect from a Ron Howard movie: something that’s solidly well-made or—occasionally—a project that unintentionally unleashes nightmares upon the country, as with 2020’s Hillbilly Elegy. We’re hoping for more of the former with Eden, starring Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Ana de Armas, and Sydney Sweeney.

Based on a true story, Eden follows two German scientists (Law and Kirby) as they flee their home country in 1929 to settle on Floreana Island in the Galápagos. Soon others follow, creating trouble in their apparent paradise. Will the story of Europeans colonizing Latin American land provide entertainment in the year 2025 or will Howard’s style of middlebrow blockbusters be rejected by modern audiences? We’ll see soon enough.

Caught Stealing

August 29

Darren Aronofsky movies aren’t always good, but they are always interesting, so we can’t help but look with anticipation toward Caught Stealing. Working from a script by author Charlie Huston, Caught Stealing stars Austin Butler as a baseball player who descends into the criminal underworld of 1990s New York. While he’s made some out-there fantasias such as The Fountain and mother!, Aronofsky’s biggest hits tend to be gritty tales such as Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and The Wrestler. Huston’s writing seems to tend toward the more realistic side with hints of surrealism, which suits Aronofsky’s style just fine.

The Toxic Avenger

August 29

Video store kids of the ‘80s and ‘90s all know about Toxie, the breakout hero and mascot of Troma Entertainment. Does that name mean anything today? After all, Troma is very much a product of the VHS era when the demand for home video made a reliable market for their low-budget movies, designed to nothing more than offend moral and aesthetic taste. The Toxic Avenger from 1984 brought Troma and Toxie to the masses, but when kids today have instant access to the worst humanity has to offer, what can Troma do?

We’ll find out when the remake of The Toxic Avenger finally hits theaters this summer. Originally debuting at Fantastic Fest in 2023, The Toxic Avenger stars Peter Dinklage as janitor Winston Gooze, transformed into the titular anti-hero after a bullying accident. But the most promising part of this update is behind the camera, as actor Macon Blair, a regular of Jeremy Saulnier’s troupe and the director of I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, writes and directs.

The Roses

August 29

Closing out a summer full of surprising sequels and remakes is the most unlikely of them all. Directed by Jay Roach and written by Tony McNamara, The Roses is based on the 1981 novel The War of the Roses by Warren Adler, which was previously adapted into a 1989 movie starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito. In this version, Olivia Coleman and Benedict Cumberbatch play a successful, upper-class couple who turn destructive as they head toward divorce.

Unlike some others on this list, The Roses feels like exactly the type of movie that needs a refresh in 2025. Movies for adults have taken a backseat to the big-budget PG-13 fair of the past two decades, and we’re worse off for it. A comedy about grown ups, even grown up behaving like children, might be exactly the palate cleanser we need as we head into the awards-friendly autumn.

The post Summer Movie Preview 2025: From Superman to Fantastic Four and Beyond appeared first on Den of Geek.

For some people, the summer months mean beaches and long days outdoors. For Den of Geek readers, the summer means staying inside air conditioned movie theaters and watching big budget spectacles! And boy, does summer 2025 have spectacles. But if superheroes and dinosaurs aren’t your bag, you don’t have to skip cinemas altogether this season. […]

The post Summer Movie Preview 2025: From Superman to Fantastic Four and Beyond appeared first on Den of Geek.

For some people, the summer months mean beaches and long days outdoors. For Den of Geek readers, the summer means staying inside air conditioned movie theaters and watching big budget spectacles! And boy, does summer 2025 have spectacles. But if superheroes and dinosaurs aren’t your bag, you don’t have to skip cinemas altogether this season. Everything from comedy revivals to existential horrors will be hitting screens over the next couple of months, promising cool entertainment for all. And we got it all here for your viewing pleasure.

Another Simple Favor

May 1

Paul Feig continues to be one of the more mercurial figures in Hollywood. He’s directed or co-created some excellent stuff, including Freaks & Geeks, Spy, and the deeply underrated Last Christmas. But he’s also behind absolute stinkers such as The Heat and Jackpot!, making for a checkered filmography.

This year, Feig returns to one of his more successful projects with the sequel Another Simple Favor. Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick reprise their roles as the stylish, suspicious rivals Emily Nelson and Stephanie Smothers. This time, the murder that binds them occurs in Capri, Italy, promising even more magazine-spread sophistication than the first movie.

Thunderbolts*

May 2

Who can say what kind of movie Thunderbolts* will be? It follows Captain America: Brave New World, a movie that seemed to embarrass even Marvel, and precedes the highly-anticipated The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Throw in a delayed production process that lost Steven Yeun and Ayo Edebiri, replaced by Lewis Pullman and Geraldine Viswanathan, and the tea leaves might be ambiguous.

But maybe that misfit status will work in the film’s favor. Thunderbolts* walks the same path as Suicide Squad and this year’s Star Trek: Section 31 as a story about people who don’t belong together forming a team. Unlike those dismal films, however, Thunderbolts* seems to understand its ragtag place, with marketing leaning heavily on the mountains of charisma that Florence Pugh and David Harbour bring, alongside Sebastian Stan’s beloved Winter Soldier.

The Surfer

May 2

By this point, Nicolas Cage has completed his purgation from being ironically loved by the internet to actually loved by the internet, to finally recognized (again) as one of the most interesting working actors in cinema. So even the the ad campaign for The Surfer has been as spartan as its title, we can’t help but be intrigued.

Directed by Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium, Nocebo) and written by Thomas Martin, The Surfer features Cage as a man who brings his son to surf an Australian beach he loved in his youth only to be menaced by local roughs. That sounds a lot like Cage’s recent masterpiece Pig, and some reviewers have compared it to the Aussie New Wave classic Wake in Fright, making The Surfer one of the more compelling entries on this list.

Friendship

May 9

Speaking of internet faves, Friendship stars Tim Robinson as a bored suburbanite who makes fast friends with a new neighbor played by Paul Rudd. Feeling that the bond has restored his lost youth, Robinson’s character soon becomes an obsessive and even destructive force in his neighbor’s life while alienating himself from his wife (Kate Mara).

To anyone familiar with I Think You Should Leave, that description fills the mind with images of slicked back hair and sloppy steaks, which should both excite and worry us. Robinson’s humor works great in five-minute sketches, but will that translate to feature length? Fortunately, Robinson and Rudd have Our Flag Means Death and PEN15‘s Andrew DeYoung onboard to direct.

Final Destination: Bloodlines

May 16

The Final Destination franchise has tried to close itself out twice, first with 2009’s awful The Final Destination and again in 2011’s excellent Final Destination 5. But Death’s work is never complete, so it’s fitting that a new entry would appear with Final Destination: Bloodlines.

To be honest, Bloodlines has some stiff competition, not only because it comes more than a decade after the last and best entry, but also because Oz Perkins already gave us a glorious pseudo-Destination this year with The Monkey. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein don’t exactly build the most confidence, as they won acclaim for their work on Disney XD shows. But Bloodlines does give us one last look at the late, great Tony Todd as mortician William Bludsworth, so we will be there on day one.

Hurry Up Tomorrow

May 14

On the heels of Smile 2 and Opus comes another horror movie about the plight of being an internationally beloved pop star. Based on his own album, Hurry Up Tomorrow stars Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, as a fictionalized version of himself who suffers a paranoid breakdown.

For those who only know The Weeknd from gifs, Hurry Up Tomorrow also stars Jenna Ortega as the pop star’s girlfriend and Barry Keoghan as a mysterious stranger. For cinephiles, the most compelling name on the poster is that of Trey Edward Shults, who broke out with the world’s scariest Thanksgiving movie Krisha and then followed it up with highly divisive movies It Comes at Night and Waves. Judging by Hurry Up Tomorrow‘s trailer, Shults has no intention of becoming predictable now.

Lilo & Stitch

May 23

Having already desecrated its classic and renaissance era in order to mine for ugly remakes that can be shoved into theaters, Disney turns to its oddball post-renaissance period for its latest live-action rehash. Are they remaking Brother Bear or Home on the Range, bad movies that might be improved by a second draft? Of course not! They’re remaking the good ones because those have name recognition!

Lilo & Stitch seems to repeat the exact same beats of the 2002 movie in which a fuzzy but dangerous alien (Chris Sanders) crash lands on Hawaii and befriends a lonely orphaned girl (Maia Kealoha) and her guardian big sister (Sydney Agudong). The one sliver of hope comes in the fact that Lilo & Stitch 2025 is directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, who made the delightful Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Then again, if Camp is successful and Lilo & Stitch does well, then we’re bound to see live-action version of The Emperor’s New Groove, and no one wants that.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

May 23

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning promises to do what Owen Davian, Solomon Lane, and Jim Phelps could never accomplish: It will bring a stop to Ethan Hunt. Maybe. Through sure force of will and madness, Tom Cruise has transformed the Mission: Impossible franchise from a TV series best known for its theme song into a big-budget stunt spectacular in which we flock to see him risk his life for our amusement. But time comes even for Cruise, so Final Reckoning is being marketed as Hunt’s last outing.

At least he’s going out with a bang. Once again directed by Christopher McQuarrie, The Final Reckoning reveals the mastermind behind the rogue AI known as the Entity as someone with ties to the first film. Along the way, he’ll get help from his team, including mainstays played by Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, as well as newer additions played by Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby, and Pom Klementieff. Also, Tom Cruise will hang off a plane, which is what we’re really here to see.

Fear Street: Prom Queen

May 23

If you’re over the age of 25, you may only know Fear Street as the YA novels written by Goosebumps author R.L. Stein. However, the three Fear Street movies released by Netflix have been horror favorites of Gen Z, thanks to viral videos shared online. Fear Street: Prom Queen breaks from the trilogy format of the first three movies for a standalone story about scary things occurring at a 1988 prom queen race. Matt Palmer steps in for departing director Leigh Janiak, but as long as he can bring the gory thrills, Zoomers are sure to love it.

Fountain of Youth

May 23

English director Guy Ritchie continues to broaden his offerings with the adventure tale Fountain of Youth. Penned by veteran screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man), Fountain of Youth stars John Krasinski and Natalie Portman as siblings searching for the titular water source. They’re joined by a gaggle of character actors like Domhnall Gleeson, Eiza Gonzalez, and Stanley Tucci. That all sounds like a throwback good time to at least the heyday of National Treasure and Tomb Raider if not Indiana Jones. But one has to wonder if Fountain of Youth will be hampered by the fact that it’s straight to Apple TV+, dulling the sense of scale that adventure tales usually need.

Karate Kid: Legends

May 30

Karate Kid: Legends offers a rarity even in this age of IP-first filmmaking, a legacy sequel combined with a remake. Legends sees original Karate Kid Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) team with Kung Fu master Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) of the 2010 remake to train newcomer Li Fong (Ben Wang).

It’s a strange maneuver on Sony’s part, pivoting away from the very popular Karate Kid legacy series Cobra Kai, which recently ended its six season run on Netflix, and toward the lesser-loved 2010 remake. Will Legends uncover a hidden trove of fans nostalgic for the 2010 movie? Or is it time to finally bring back Hilary Swank from The Next Karate Kid? We’ll find out this summer.

The Phoenician Scheme

May 30, June 6 (wide)

Although initially panned upon its release in 2005, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou has been reclaimed as on of Wes Anderson‘s best movies (including by us!). So it’s good to see Anderson take another swing at the action genre with The Phoenician Scheme.

That said, The Phoenician Scheme does feel slightly different from most of Anderson’s movies, mostly because he’s shaking up his usual stable of players. Benicio del Toro, who had only previously worked with Anderson on The French Dispatch, takes the lead as businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, alongside new additions Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, and Riz Ahmed. Of course familiar faces Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, and Scarlett Johansson are on hand, as is Anderson’s impeccable aesthetic.

Bring Her Back

May 30

Aussie twins Danny and Michael Philippou made the jump from YouTube to indie cult status with 2022’s Talk To Me. They’re ready to ride that momentum with their follow-up Bring Her Back, once again distributed by A24. Bring Her Back follows a recently orphaned brother and sister who come to the home of a foster mother played by Sally Hawkins, who already cares for a troubled boy who may have mystical powers. Judging by Bring Her Back‘s trailer, the Philippou brothers plan a movie just as troubling and intense as their debut.

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina

June 6

John Wick: Chapter 4 seemed to bring an end to the Baba Yaga, but you can’t keep a financially successful franchise down. Thus comes Ana de Armas in From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, complete with an appropriately ostentatious title. Even if you don’t think the John Wick series needed a movie that isn’t about John Wick, Ballerina has a few things in its favor. First, the movie sees the return of not just Reeves’ titular killer (this film is a side-quel set simultaneously during the events of Chapter 3 and 4), but also Ian McShane as Winston and Lance Reddick in his final performance as Charon. The “directed by” credit for Len Wiseman doesn’t inspire much hope, but behind-the-scenes reports indicate that original series director Chad Stahelski shot some of the fight scenes and spearheaded the reshoots. So maybe Ballerina‘s worth checking out after all.

The Life of Chuck

June 6

For the past few years, Mike Flanagan has established himself as one of the most interesting television creators working today. Although his last movie Doctor Sleep has its fans, supporters explicitly cite the Director’s Cut as the preferred version, arguing that the extended run time better suits the dazzling monologues Flanagan writes.

So we greet Flanagan’s return to the big screen with a bit of trepidation. Yes, he’s adapting Stephen King once again, and yes, he has most of his familiar ensemble in tow, including Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Mark Hamill, and Carl Lumbly, alongside Tom Hiddleston stepping out of the MCU for a minute. But The Life of Chuck clocks in at under two hours, which seems like far too little time for these brilliant actors to deliver Flanagan’s lines about fate, faith, and the meaning of life. However, the buzz the film has generated out of TIFF, where it won the audience award and threw Oscar prognosticators’ end-of-year predictions into chaos (since this is a June 2025 release) fills us with curiosity.

How to Train Your Dragon (June 13)

The live-action Disney remakes can at least claim that they’re reimagining beloved classics. Great as the original How to Train Your Dragon, it’s only 15 years old. Worse, the remake seems to be using the exact same plot, the exact same CG designs of the dragons, and even the exact same Gerard Butler to play grumpy father Stoick the Vast. Why so many similarities? Because the remake is directed by the same guy who dreamed up the original, Dean DeBlois.

Still, maybe there’s some magic to be found in the new cast, which includes The Black Phone‘s Mason Thames as Hiccup and The Last of Us‘s Nico Parker as Astrid. If they can provide just enough energy, and if DeBlois can recapture some of the original’s magic he brought to the animated trilogy, then How to Train Your Dragon might stand on its own.

Materialists

June 13

Materialists may not be getting the same push as the summer’s superhero and remake entries, but it’s easily one of the more exciting movies coming soon. First, there’s the buzzy cast, including Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans. Then there’s the director Celine Song, making her follow-up to 2023’s Past Lives. Finally, there’s the design of the poster, which finds the central trio doing catalogue poses in an image surrounded by a thick white border.

Everything about Materialists recalls the adult romantic comedies of the ’80s and ’90s, especially its plot. Johnson plays a high-powered matchmaker who, against her better judgment, gets caught in a triangle. If it has even an ounce of the verve of Broadcast News and half the humanity of Past Lives, Materialists will be a favorite long after summer’s end.

Echo Valley

June 13

Speaking of big names in a low-stakes picture, Mare of Eastown creator Brad Ingelsby returns to the features with Echo Valley for Apple TV+. Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney play a mother and daughter who reunite after a tragedy. Sweeney may have broken out with the flashy series Euphoria, but Echo Valley may be another chance to show off the acting chops witnessed in Reality. As seen in his scripts for Mare of Eastown, The Way Back, and Out of the Furnace, Ingelsby understands the nuances of small town life, giving Sweeney plenty of room to develop a complex character.

28 Years Later

June 20

It’s only been 23 years since director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland un-nevered the world with their zombie thriller 28 Days Later, but we’re willing the fudge the math to get the pair together again. As its title suggests, 28 Years Later takes place more than a quarter century after a rage virus ravaged England. Despite the new status quo, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) must leave their island village to face the monsters.

Back in 2002, before George Romero’s return to the genre and all of The Walking Dead, zombies felt fresh and digital photography seemed innovative. Both the technology and the genre have lost some of their bite today. but if there’s anyone who can reanimate the dead forms, it’s Boyle and Garland. We’ll see if 28 Years Later proves worth the wait.

Elio

June 20

Even though Pixar isn’t the surefire studio it once was, a new release still deserves our attention, especially when the trio of directors includes Turning Red‘s Domee Shi and Coco‘s Adrian Molina. Both helmers of two of the best recent Pixar movies, Shi and Molina are joined by Madeline Sharafian, making her feature debut.

Elio follows the titular outer-space nerd (Yonas Kibreab) as he’s somehow selected o represent humanity in an intergalactic council. If all goes well, Elio will learn about life while going through some wacky hijinks, and kids and adults alike will be moved to tears.

M3GAN 2.0

June 27

You can’t keep a viral sensation down, so it’s no surprise to see Blumhouse‘s pre-teen murder-bot make her return for M3GAN 2.0. Taking a page out of the Terminator 2 handbook, M3GAN 2.0 sees the reconstituted robot (voiced by Jenna Davis and performed by Amie Donald) doing battle with an upgraded successor called Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno).

Allison Williams is back as M3GAN’s inventor as is Violet McGraw as her charge/victim. James Wan produces again, as does original co-writer Akela Cooper and director Gerard Johnstone scripting. The question is whether this one will be as heavy on the meme-ready action?

F1

June 27

Most movie fans point to baseball and boxing as the most cinematic of sports, but racing is a pretty close third. So the prospect of seeing Brad Pitt drive fast cars is enough to get butts in seats for F1, especially with direction by Joseph Kosinski of Tron: Legacy and Top Gun: Maverick.

F1 has a well-worn sports plot, with Pitt playing a driver whose career ended with a crash decades ago but is now brought back to mentor a promising up-and-comer (Damson Idris). But racing’s all about improvisations within a set track, and if Kosinski can shoot cars like he shot fighter jets, then no one will care about familiar plot beats.

Jurassic World: Rebirth

July 2

Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of the original Jurassic Park is how Steven Spielberg‘s movie still inspires wonder no matter how many lackluster sequels follow. That said, Jurassic World: Rebirth does have a harder road to hoe, given that it comes off of the dismal Jurassic World Dominion (aka, the one with more locusts than dinosaurs).

Rebirth hopes to correct course by going back to the original. Not only is the trailer full of callbacks to the first movie, but it even boasts a script by David Koepp, screenwriter of the 1993 film. Furthermore, Rebirth director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One) seems to be aiming for old-school adventure in which a scientist (Jonathan Bailey) hires two mercenaries (Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali) to help him find dino genetics that could lead to pharmaceutical breakthroughs. Not exactly cutting edge in plot, but, honestly, as long as Jurassic World: Rebirth has cool dinos eating some folks in cool ways, we’ll be there.

The Old Guard 2

July 2

It’s been five years since Netflix released The Old Guard, an excellent fantasy action film based on the comic book by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández. In the passing years, The Old Guard hasn’t quite become the cult sensation that it deserves to be, but the story is worthy of continuing, especially if new director Victoria Mahoney can match the mixture of action and character depth established by her predecessor Gina Prince-Bythewood.

The Old Guard 2 brings back Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia, aka Andy, the leader of a group of near-immortals who travel the world doing good. She’s joined by newest recruit Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne) and her reliable teammates, all of whom she’ll need to counter a vengeful former lover (Vân Veronica Ngô), who spent the past centuries trapped in an underwater grave.

Superman

July 11

This late in the cycle of superhero movies, we all believe a man can fly. What remains an open questions is if Warner Bros. can make a Superman film as inspirational as the 1978 classic with that tagline in 2025. Hiring true genre aficanado James Gunn seemed like a great start, but can the guy who cut his teeth with Troma, and gleefully slaughtered Z-listers in The Suicide Squad, be the one to pull it off?

Yet with each new look at Superman, our belief grows. Rachel Brosnahan is pitch-perfect casting for Lois Lane and David Corenswet seems to embody the Clark Kent/Superman divide. After The Great and The Menu, Nicholas Hoult has become the ideal person to play the megalomaniacal Lex Luthor. Throw in a compelling supporting cast with inspired choices, including Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner and Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, and its getting easier to believe every minute.

I Know What You Did Last Summer

July 18

As the Scream franchise burns up the goodwill its relaunch earned with a series of unforced errors, its kid sister rises to take its place. The 2025 version of I Know What You Did Last Summer follows a group of attractive young people who get chased around a seaside town by a killer fisherman with a hook hand, all penance for some secret crime committed the previous year… just like in the 1997 film.

To its credit, the I Know What You Did Last Summer 2025 seems to recognize the improbability of its premise and leans into it. The trailer not only highlights the pretty new set of victims, led by Glass Onion’s Madelyn Cline, but also originals Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt, both of whom deliver some self-aware dialogue. If director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge) can nail the balance of metatextual references and nasty slasher kills, Scream may indeed become the stuff of forgotten summers.

Eddington

July 18

Ari Aster made his name by shocking viewers: first with the deeply unsettling Hereditary and then with the still-beguiling Midsommar, which drove people back to his inexplicable short films, before completely baffling everyone with his comic odyssey Beau Is Afraid.

All of that’s a long way of saying that we have no idea what to expect from his latest entry, Eddington. A teaser trailer suggests that Aster’s taking a more satirical edge, as it shows a man played by Joaquin Phoenix scrolling to his phone to see ripped-from-the-headlines videos about COVID, public shaming, and MAGA protests, and here performed by actors as adored as Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone. But that sounds way too easy for a filmmaker like Aster, so prepare for Eddington to shock you in ways you could never foresee.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

July 25

Together with Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps seeks to revitalize the superhero movie genre with a dose of bright-eyed optimism. And like its cousin over at the Distinguished Competition side of the street, First Steps has to cleanse public memory of some pretty terrible predecessors. It’s taking the right steps with its cast, which includes favorites Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the central quartet.

Adding to the appeal is the retro-futuristic aesthetic, brought to life by WandaVision’s Matt Shakman. However, that does raise questions about First Steps’ placement in the larger Marvel Universe. Will the world-devourer Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his herald Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) destroy this world, immediately tarnishing Marvel’s brightly-hued new entries? We’ll have to wait for the post-credits to know for sure.

Happy Gilmore 2

July 25

Forget I Know What You Did Last Summer. 2025’s most surprising ‘90s come back belongs to hockey player-turned-golfer Happy Gilmore who comes to Netflix with a sequel 29 years in the making. Adam Sandler reteams with original writer Tim Herlihy for the latest in Happy’s shenanigans.

Happy Gilmore 2 finds Happy returning to the green for some reason. But let’s be honest, the reason doesn’t matter. Adam Sandler movies are mostly about watching him have fun with his friends, and that’s exactly what Happy Gilmore 2 promises, complete with appearances by Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, and Ben Stiller, all reprising their characters from the first movie, along with lots of golfer cameos.

The Bad Guys 2

August 1

Based on the popular line of children’s illustrated novels, The Bad Guys stars Sam Rockwell as Mr. Wolf, the leader of a group of carnivores/criminals who seek to rehabilitate their image. Thanks to its solid voice acting from Rockwell and co-stars, including Marc Maron and Awkwafina, and its use of the animation techniques pioneered by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Bad Guys was a surprise hit in 2022.

The sequel hopes to continue that success, bringing back all of the principle cast, director Pierre Perifel, and the same animation engine. Following the “bigger is better” approach to sequels, The Bad Guys 2 introduces the Bad Girls, lady animals voiced by the likes of Danielle Brooks and Natasha Lyonne. As long as it can provide the zany energy that kids liked about the first film, The Bad Guys are sure to do good once again at the box office.

The Naked Gun

August 1

On paper the long-in-development remake of The Naked Gun sounds like a disaster. Who today has the same dry humor of the late, great Leslie Nielsen? Who has the same eye for parodic detail as the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrams? Heck, does our current world of non-stop police procedurals have anything like M Squad, the forgotten show that inspired The Naked Gun’s predecessor, Police Squad?

Most of those concerns fall away when we see the first teaser for The Naked Gun 2025. Directed by the Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer, The Naked Gun has an inspired pick in Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., leader of a new version of Police Squad, and he’s joined by Paul Walter Hauser as Ed Hocken Jr. and Moses Jones as Nordberg Jr. Just reading that sentence boosts confidence that, somehow, Schaffer and company have figured out how to replicate the ZAZ humor for today’s audiences.

Freakier Friday

August 8

The train of long-in-the-making sequels continues with Freakier Friday, a continuation of the 2003 Disney remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. In the 2003 version, mother and daughter Tess and Anna Coleman swapped bodies, leading to good-hearted shenanigans and family bonding. The sequel doubles up with a four-way swap, bringing a daughter and step-daughter (Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons, respectively) into the mix.

Judging by the trailer, director Nisha Ganatra (Late Night, The High Note) knows exactly what fans expect from this outing and plans to give it to them. A game Curtis and Lohan throw themselves into their age-inappropriate roles and the quadruple swap changes things up just enough. Throw familiar faces such as Chad Michael Murray and Rosalind Chao from the first movie and add Manny Jacinto as a new love interest, and Freakier Friday’s set to be a warm reunion for 2000s kids ready for some nostalgia.

Weapons

August 8

Weapons director Zach Cregger isn’t a new name, having performed for years in the sketch group The Whitest Kids U’ Know and even co-directed Miss March with late co-star Trevor Moore. But Cregger proved we didn’t really know him at all with his solo director debut, the 2022 shocker Barbarian.

Weapons seeks to surprise us all over again, beginning with a cryptic ad campaign of blurry surveillance footage. Weapons presents itself as a missing persons story, dealing with the mass exodus of children from a suburban neighborhood. But if Barbarian is any indication, that premise just starts the upsetting story that Cregger wants to tell.

Nobody 2

August 15

No one watching Mr. Show in its heyday could have predicted that Bob Odenkirk would have gone from guy who shouts obscenities in sketch comedies to beloved dad who warmly greets his little women. Even more shocking was Odenkirk’s turn to action hero in 2021’s Nobody, in which he played a put-upon suburbanite who recovers his international assassin skills after an attack on his family. If that sounds similar to John Wick, well, it is written by Derek Kolstad, who co-created the Keanu Reeves character.

Nobody 2 picks up where the first movie left off, with Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell and his FBI agent father David (Christopher Lloyd) trying to return to their old lives after the latter’s night of chaos. This time around, Kolstad shares a writing credit with three others (including Odenkirk), but Timo Tjahjanto (who co-directed the “Safe Haven” segment of V/H/S/ 2 with Gareth Evans) steps into direct.

Eden

August 22

By this point, you know what to expect from a Ron Howard movie: something that’s solidly well-made or—occasionally—a project that unintentionally unleashes nightmares upon the country, as with 2020’s Hillbilly Elegy. We’re hoping for more of the former with Eden, starring Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Ana de Armas, and Sydney Sweeney.

Based on a true story, Eden follows two German scientists (Law and Kirby) as they flee their home country in 1929 to settle on Floreana Island in the Galápagos. Soon others follow, creating trouble in their apparent paradise. Will the story of Europeans colonizing Latin American land provide entertainment in the year 2025 or will Howard’s style of middlebrow blockbusters be rejected by modern audiences? We’ll see soon enough.

Caught Stealing

August 29

Darren Aronofsky movies aren’t always good, but they are always interesting, so we can’t help but look with anticipation toward Caught Stealing. Working from a script by author Charlie Huston, Caught Stealing stars Austin Butler as a baseball player who descends into the criminal underworld of 1990s New York. While he’s made some out-there fantasias such as The Fountain and mother!, Aronofsky’s biggest hits tend to be gritty tales such as Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and The Wrestler. Huston’s writing seems to tend toward the more realistic side with hints of surrealism, which suits Aronofsky’s style just fine.

The Toxic Avenger

August 29

Video store kids of the ‘80s and ‘90s all know about Toxie, the breakout hero and mascot of Troma Entertainment. Does that name mean anything today? After all, Troma is very much a product of the VHS era when the demand for home video made a reliable market for their low-budget movies, designed to nothing more than offend moral and aesthetic taste. The Toxic Avenger from 1984 brought Troma and Toxie to the masses, but when kids today have instant access to the worst humanity has to offer, what can Troma do?

We’ll find out when the remake of The Toxic Avenger finally hits theaters this summer. Originally debuting at Fantastic Fest in 2023, The Toxic Avenger stars Peter Dinklage as janitor Winston Gooze, transformed into the titular anti-hero after a bullying accident. But the most promising part of this update is behind the camera, as actor Macon Blair, a regular of Jeremy Saulnier’s troupe and the director of I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, writes and directs.

The Roses

August 29

Closing out a summer full of surprising sequels and remakes is the most unlikely of them all. Directed by Jay Roach and written by Tony McNamara, The Roses is based on the 1981 novel The War of the Roses by Warren Adler, which was previously adapted into a 1989 movie starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito. In this version, Olivia Coleman and Benedict Cumberbatch play a successful, upper-class couple who turn destructive as they head toward divorce.

Unlike some others on this list, The Roses feels like exactly the type of movie that needs a refresh in 2025. Movies for adults have taken a backseat to the big-budget PG-13 fair of the past two decades, and we’re worse off for it. A comedy about grown ups, even grown up behaving like children, might be exactly the palate cleanser we need as we head into the awards-friendly autumn.

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