Category: Blog

The mobile-first design approach is excellent because it concentrates on what the customer truly needs, is well-practiced, and has become a standard design practice for years. But developing your CSS mobile-first should also be wonderful, too…right?

Well, not necessarily. Classic mobile-first CSS development is based on the principle of overwriting style declarations: you begin your CSS with default style declarations, and overwrite and/or add new styles as you add breakpoints with min-width media queries for larger viewports (for a good overview see “What is Mobile First CSS and Why Does It Rock?”). But all those exceptions create complexity and inefficiency, which in turn can lead to an increased testing effort and a code base that’s harder to maintain. Admit it—how many of us willingly want that?

Mobile-first CSS may yet be the best option for your own projects, but you need to first determine how acceptable it is in light of the physical design and user interactions you’re trying to create. To help you get started, here’s how I go about tackling the elements you need to watch for, and I’ll discuss some alternative remedies if mobile-first doesn’t seem to fit your job.

benefits of mobile-first technology

Some of the benefits of mobile-first CSS creation, and why it’s been the de facto growth strategy for so long, make a lot of sense:

Development order. A good development hierarchy is one thing you definitely get from mobile-first; you just concentrate on the cellular view and start developing.

tested and verified. It’s a tried and tested technique that’s worked for years for a cause: it solves a problem actually also.

prioritizes the smart viewpoint. The smart watch is the simplest and perhaps the most crucial because it covers all of the crucial user journeys and frequently accounts for more user visits ( depending on the project ) in terms of both simple and crucial aspects.

Inhibits desktop-centric growth. It can be tempting to first focus on the desktop perspective because enhancement is done using pc servers. No one wants to spend their day retrofitting a desktop-centric website to work on mobile devices, but thinking about smart right away keeps us from getting stuck later on!

Drawbacks of mobile-first

Model declarations can be set at higher breakpoints and therefore overwritten at higher breakpoints:

more complicated. The farther up the target order you go, the more unnecessary script you inherit from lower thresholds.

higher CSS sensitivity A group name declaration’s default style has then a higher specificity that has been returned to the browser’s default value. This can be a pain on big projects when you want to preserve the CSS candidates as simple as possible.

Requires more analysis assessment. All higher thresholds must be regression tested if CSS changes at lower views ( such as adding a new fashion ).

The browser can’t prioritize CSS downloads. At wider breakpoints, classic mobile-first min-width media queries don’t leverage the browser’s capability to download CSS files in priority order.

Property price issue: override

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with overwriting beliefs, CSS was designed to do just that. Even so, inheriting wrong values may be laborious and ineffective. When you have to replace styles to restore them back to their defaults, which may cause issues after, especially if you are using a combination of bespoke CSS and power classes, it can also lead to more fashion precision. We won’t be able to use a power course for a design that has been restore with a higher precision.

With this in mind, I’m developing CSS with a focus on the default values much more these days. Since there’s no specific order, and no chains of specific values to keep track of, this frees me to develop breakpoints simultaneously. I concentrate on finding common styles and isolating the specific exceptions in closed media query ranges (that is, any range with a max-width set). 

As you can view each target as a blank slate, this strategy opens up some opportunities. It’s acceptable and can be coded in the default style plate if a product’s structure appears to be based on Flexbox at all thresholds. But if it looks like Grid would be much better for large windows and Flexbox for portable, these can both be done entirely freely when the CSS is put into finished media keyword ranges. Additionally, having a thorough understanding of any given component in all breakpoints upfront is necessary for developing simultaneously. This can help identify issues with the design more quickly in the development process. We don’t want to get stuck down a rabbit hole building a complex component for mobile, and then get the designs for desktop and find they are equally complex and incompatible with the HTML we created for the mobile view!

Although this strategy won’t work for everyone, I urge you to try it. Responsively App, Blisk, and many others are among the many tools available to assist with concurrent development.

Having said that, I don’t feel the order itself is particularly relevant. If you like to work on one device at a time, are comfortable with focusing on the mobile view, and are familiar with the requirements for other breakpoints, then you should definitely follow the classic development order. The key is to find common styles and exceptions so that you can include them in the appropriate stylesheet, which is a manual tree-shaking procedure! Personally, I find this a little easier when working on a component across breakpoints, but that’s by no means a requirement.

Closed media query ranges are used in real life

We overwrite the styles in the traditional mobile-first CSS, but media query ranges can be used to prevent this. To illustrate the difference ( I’m using SCSS for brevity ), let’s assume there are three visual designs:

• smaller than 768
• from 768 to less than 1024
• 1024 and anything larger

Take a simple example where a block-level element has a default padding of “20px,” which is overwritten at tablet to be “40px” and set back to “20px” on desktop.

.my-block { padding: 20px; @media (min-width: 768px) { padding: 40px; } @media (min-width: 1024px) { padding: 20px; }}

.my-block { padding: 20px; @media (min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 1023.98px) { padding: 40px; }}

The subtle difference is that the mobile-first example sets the default padding to “20px” and then overwrites it at each breakpoint, setting it three times in total. In contrast, the second example sets the default padding to “20px” and only overrides it at the relevant breakpoint where it isn’t the default value (in this instance, tablet is the exception).

The goal is to: 

• Only set styles when needed. 
• Not set them with the expectation of overwriting them later on, again and again. 

To this end, closed media query ranges are our best friend. If we need to make a change to any given view, we make it in the CSS media query range that applies to the specific breakpoint. We’ll be much less likely to introduce unwanted alterations, and our regression testing only needs to focus on the breakpoint we have actually edited. 

Taking the above example, if we find that .my-block spacing on desktop is already accounted for by the margin at that breakpoint, and since we want to remove the padding altogether, we could do this by setting the mobile padding in a closed media query range.

.my-block {  @media (max-width: 767.98px) {    padding: 20px;  }  @media (min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 1023.98px) {    padding: 40px;  }}

The browser default padding for our block is “0,” so instead of adding a desktop media query and using unset or “0” for the padding value (which we would need with mobile-first), we can wrap the mobile padding in a closed media query (since it is now also an exception) so it won’t get picked up at wider breakpoints. At the desktop breakpoint, we won’t need to set any padding style, as we want the browser default value.

Bundling versus separating the CSS

Back in the day, keeping the number of requests to a minimum was very important because the browser's concurrent requests limit (typically around six ) was high. In consequence, using image sprites and CSS bundling was the norm, with all the CSS being downloaded as a single stylesheet with the highest priority.

With HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 now on the scene, the number of requests is no longer the big deal it used to be. This enables us to use a media query to break CSS into multiple files. The obvious benefit of this is that the browser can now request the CSS it currently requires with a higher priority than the CSS it doesn't. This is more performant and can reduce the overall time page rendering is blocked.

What version of HTTP do you use?

Go to your website and open your browser's dev tools to find out which version of HTTP you're using. Next, select the Network tab and make sure the Protocol column is visible. If "h2" is included in the protocol list, that indicates that HTTP/2 is being used.

Note: To check the Protocol column in your browser's dev tools, right-click any column header ( such as Name ), go to the Network tab, reload your page, and then check the Protocol column.

Also, if your website is still using HTTP/1... WHHY!! What are you waiting for? Excellent user support exists for HTTP/2.

CSS is split in half.

Separating the CSS into individual files is a worthwhile task. Linking the separate CSS files using the relevant media attribute allows the browser to identify which files are needed immediately (because they’re render-blocking) and which can be deferred. Based on this, it allocates each file an appropriate priority.

In the following example of a website visited on a mobile breakpoint, we can see the mobile and default CSS are loaded with" Highest" priority, as they are currently needed to render the page. In case they are needed later, the remaining CSS files ( print, tablet, and desktop ) are still being downloaded with" Lowest" priority, though they are still needed.

Before rendering can begin, the browser will need to download and parse the CSS file when using bundled CSS.

While, as noted, with the CSS separated into different files linked and marked up with the relevant media attribute, the browser can prioritize the files it currently needs. Using closed media query ranges allows the browser to do this at all widths, as opposed to classic mobile-first min-width queries, where the desktop browser would have to download all the CSS with Highest priority. We can’t assume that desktop users always have a fast connection. For instance, in many rural areas, internet connection speeds are still slow. 

Depending on project requirements, the media queries and the number of separate CSS files will vary from project to project, but the example below might look similar.

Depending on the project’s deployment strategy, a change to one file (mobile.css, for example) would only require the QA team to regression test on devices in that specific media query range. Compare that to the prospect of deploying the single bundled site.css file, an approach that would normally trigger a full regression test.

Moving on

The adoption of mobile-first CSS was a significant development milestone because it allowed front-end developers to concentrate on mobile web applications rather than creating websites for desktop use and attempting to convert them to work on other devices.

I don't think anyone wants to return to that development model again, but it's important we don't lose sight of the issue it highlighted: that things can easily get convoluted and less efficient if we prioritize one particular device—any device—over others. For this reason, it seems natural to concentrate on the CSS in its own right, always mindful of what is the default setting and what constitutes an exception, as a result. I've started to notice subtle simplifications in the CSS I write for myself as well as other developers, and that the testing and maintenance work is also a little more organized and effective.

In general, simplifying CSS rule creation whenever we can is ultimately a cleaner approach than going around in circles of overrides. However, the project must fit the methodology you choose. Mobile-first may turn out to be the best option for the situation at hand, but first you need to fully comprehend the trade-offs you're entering.

However, we’re still very far from this perfect.

At the time, I didn’t realize yet how to functionally combine morality. Yes, I did discover some tools in past projects that had worked for me, such as using checklists, assumption monitoring, and “dark fact” sessions, but I wasn’t able to use them in every task. I was still struggling for time and support, and at best I had only partially achieved a higher ( moral ) quality of design—which is far from my definition of structurally integrated.

I made a deeper investigation into the main causes of business that prevent us from practicing regular honest style. Today, after much research and experimentation, I believe that I’ve found the code that will let us functionally combine ethics. And it’s amazingly easy! However, we must second move out to understand what we’re going through.

Control the program

Unfortunately, we’re confined to a capitalist system that encourages commercialism and inequality and is obsessed with the irrationality of infinite expansion. Sea levels, temperature, and our demand for energy continue to rise unquestioned, while the divide between rich and poor continues to increase. Owners expect ever-higher returns on their investments, and firms feel forced to set short-term goals that reflect this. Over the past few years, those goals have transformed our well-meaning human-centered attitude into a potent tool that encourages ever-higher levels of consumption. When we’re working for an organization that pursues “double-digit growth” or “aggressive sales targets” ( which is 99 percent of us ), that’s very hard to resist while remaining human friendly. We’re a part of the problem, even with our best intentions, and we’re doing it despite our best efforts to declare that we provide solutions for people.

What can we do to alter this?

We may begin by acting on the appropriate level of the system. A technique thinker named Donna H. Meadows after outlined ways to influence a system in terms of effectiveness. When you apply these to style, you get:

You can change figures like functionality results or the number of layout critiques at the lowest level of effectiveness. But none of that may change the direction of a business.
• Similarly, affecting buffers ( such as team budgets ), stocks ( such as the number of designers ), flows ( such as the number of new hires ), and delays ( such as the time that it takes to hear about the effect of design ) won’t significantly affect a company.
• Instead of focusing on feedback loops like control power, employee reputation, or design-system investments, a company can improve its ability to achieve its goals. But that doesn’t alter the goals themselves, which means that the business may also work against your ethical-design ideals.
• Most ethical-design efforts’ current focus is on the exchange of social techniques, toolkits, articles, conferences, workshops, and other topics. This is also where social style has remained largely theoretical. We’ve been focusing on the wrong level of the system all this day.
• Get rules, for instance; they consistently surpass information. There can be commonly accepted guidelines, such as how fund works, or a sprint group’s concept of done. However, illegal laws meant to keep income, frequently revealed through comments like” the customer didn’t request for it” or “don’t make it too big” is also smother social style.
• Changing the rules without holding official energy is extremely difficult. That’s why the next stage is thus important: self-organization. Research, bottom-up initiatives, love projects, self-steering teams, and other such self-organization techniques all contribute to a company’s resilience and creativity. It’s precisely this diversity of viewpoints that’s needed to functionally address major structural issues like materialism, wealth inequality, and climate change.
• But objectives and metrics are even more powerful than self-organization. Our companies want to make more money, which means that everything and everyone in the company does their best to… make the company more money. And once I realized that profit is nothing more than a measurement, I understood how crucial a very specific, defined metric can be toward pushing a company in a certain direction.

What is the takeaway? If we truly want to incorporate ethics into our daily design practice, we must first change the measurable objectives of the company we work for, from the bottom up.

Redefine success

Traditionally, we consider a product or service successful if it’s desirable to humans, technologically feasible, and financially viable. You tend to see these represented as equals, if you type the three words in a search engine, you’ll find diagrams of three equally sized, evenly arranged circles.

However, we all know that the three dimensions are not equally important: viability is ultimately what determines whether a product will become functional. So a more realistic representation might look like this:

Viability is the aim, while feasibility and desire are the means. Companies—outside of nonprofits and charities—exist to make money.

A genuinely purpose-driven company would try to reverse this dynamic: it would recognize finance for what it was intended for: a means. Therefore, both the company’s goals and its viability are important in order to realize what they are trying to accomplish. It makes intuitive sense: to achieve most anything, you need resources, people, and money. Fun fact: the Italian language is completely unaware of the differences between feasibility and viability; both are merely fattibilità.

But simply swapping viable for desirable isn’t enough to achieve an ethical outcome. Desirability is still linked to consumerism because the associated activities aim to identify what people want—whether it’s good for them or not. When it comes to a product’s desirability goals, such as user satisfaction or conversion, don’t take into account whether it is good for people. They don’t prevent us from creating products that distract or manipulate people or stop us from contributing to society’s wealth inequality. They are unsuitable for striking a healthy balance with the natural world.

There’s a fourth dimension of success that’s missing: our designs also need to be ethical in the effect that they have on the world.

This is hardly a new idea. There are many variations of these models, some calling the fourth dimension accountability, integrity, or responsibility. What I’ve never seen before, however, is the necessary step that comes after: to influence the system as designers and to make ethical design more practical, we must create objectives for ethical design that are achievable and inspirational. There is no single way to accomplish this because it depends greatly on your country’s values, culture, and industry. But I’ll give you the version that I developed with a group of colleagues at a design agency. Consider it a template to get started.

pursue equity, sustainability, and well-being.

We created objectives that address design’s effect on three levels: individual, societal, and global.

An objective on a personal level teaches us that success transcends the typical area of user experience and satisfaction, taking into account factors like how much time and effort are required of users. We pursued well-being:

We create products and services that allow for people’s health and happiness. Our solutions are non-misleading, transparent, and calm. We respect our users ‘ time, attention, and privacy, and help them make healthy and respectful choices.

A societal goal requires us to consider our impact beyond the mere user, widening our focus to the economy, communities, and other involuntary parties. We called this objective equity:

We create products and services that have a positive social impact. We think of racial justice, inclusiveness and diversity of people as teams, users, and customer segments as indicators of economic equality. We listen to local culture, communities, and those we affect.

Finally, the global goal of maintaining harmony with humanity’s only home is the one we have. Referring to it simply as sustainability, our definition was:

We create products and services that reward sufficiency and reusability. Our solutions promote the circular economy by generating value from waste, reusing products, and giving priority to sustainable choices. We deliver functionality instead of ownership, and we limit energy use.

In essence, ethical design ( to us ) meant achieving the wellbeing of each user and an equitable value distribution within society through a design that can sustain our living planet. When we introduced these objectives in the company, for many colleagues, design ethics and responsible design suddenly became tangible and achievable through practical—and even familiar—actions.

Measure impact

However, it is still necessary to define these goals. What truly caught the attention of senior management was the fact that we created a way to measure every design project’s well-being, equity, and sustainability.

This overview includes some examples of metrics you can use to measure your progress toward equity, well-being, and sustainability:

There’s a lot of power in measurement. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets done. Donella Meadows once provided this illustration:

” If the desired system state is national security, and that is defined as the amount of money spent on the military, the system will produce military spending. It may or may not lead to national security.

This phenomenon explains why desirability is a poor indicator of success: it’s typically defined as the increase in customer satisfaction, session length, frequency of use, conversion rate, churn rate, download rate, and so on. But none of these metrics increase the health of people, communities, or ecosystems. What if we instead used ( reduced ) screen time or software energy consumption to measure success?

There’s another important message here. If we were to choose the wrong metric for calmness, such as the number of interface elements, we might still end up with a screen that makes us anxious, even if we set an objective to create a calm interface. Choosing the wrong metric can completely undo good intentions.

Additionally, choosing the right metric is enormously helpful in focusing the design team. You are forced to consider what success looks like in real life and how you can demonstrate that you have met your ethical goals once you have chosen the metrics to use. It also forces you to consider what we as designers have control over: what can I include in my design or change in my process that will lead to the right type of success? The response to this query provides a lot of insight and clarity.

And finally, it’s good to remember that traditional businesses run on measurements, and managers love to spend much time discussing charts ( ideally hockey-stick shaped ) —especially if they concern profit, the one-above-all of metrics. For good or ill, to improve the system, to have a serious discussion about ethical design with managers, we’ll need to speak that business language.

Practice daily ethical design

Once you’ve defined your objectives and you have a reasonable idea of the potential metrics for your design project, only then do you have a chance to structurally practice ethical design. It” simply” turns into a matter of using your imagination and sprinkling from the knowledge and tools that are already at your disposal.

I think this is quite exciting! It opens a whole new set of challenges and considerations for the design process. Would a simple illustration suffice, or should you go with that energizing video? Which typeface is the most calm and inclusive? What brand-new equipment and techniques do you employ? When is the website’s end of life? How can you provide the same service while requiring less attention from users? How can you ensure that those who are affected by decisions are present when they are made? How can you measure our effects?

The definition of success will fundamentally alter what doing good design entails.

There is, however, a final piece of the puzzle that’s missing: convincing your client, product owner, or manager to be mindful of well-being, equity, and sustainability. For this, it’s essential to engage stakeholders in a dedicated kickoff session.

Start it off or return to the pre-existing

The kickoff is the most important meeting that can be so easy to forget to include. There are two main stages to it: 1 ) the alignment of expectations and 2 ) the success definition.

In the first phase, the entire ( design ) team goes over the project brief and meets with all the relevant stakeholders. Everyone gets to know one another and express their expectations on the outcome and their contributions to achieving it. Possumptions are raised and discussed. The aim is to get on the same level of understanding and to in turn avoid preventable miscommunications and surprises later in the project.

For instance, we conducted an online kickoff with the client, a subject-matter expert, and two other designers for a recent freelance project that aimed to design a digital platform that facilitates US student advisors ‘ documentation and communication. We used a combination of canvases on Miro: one with questions from” Manual of Me” ( to get to know each other ), a Team Canvas ( to express expectations ), and a version of the Project Canvas to align on scope, timeline, and other practical matters.

The above is the traditional purpose of a kickoff. However, agreeing on what success means for the project in terms of desirability, viability, feasibility, and ethics is just as crucial as expressing expectations. What are the objectives in each dimension?

It’s crucial to reach an understanding of what success means at this early stage because you can depend on it for the duration of the project. If, for example, the design team wants to build an inclusive app for a diverse user group, they can raise diversity as a specific success criterion during the kickoff. If the client agrees, the team can refer back to that promise throughout the project. To create a successful product, we agreed in our first meeting that a diverse user group that includes A and B is necessary. So we do activity X and follow research process Y”. Compare those odds to a scenario where the team had to request permission halfway through the project and didn’t agree to it in advance. The client might argue that that came on top of the agreed scope—and she’d be right.

In the case of this freelance project, to define success I prepared a round canvas that I call the Wheel of Success. An inner ring with the intention of capturing ideas for objectives and an outer ring with the intention of capturing ideas for measuring those objectives are included. The rings are divided into five dimensions of successful design: healthy, equitable, sustainable, desirable, feasible, and viable.

We explored each dimension and recorded ideas on digital sticky notes. Then we discussed our ideas and verbally agreed on the most important ones. For example, our client agreed that sustainability and progressive enhancement are important success criteria for the platform. Additionally, the subject-matter expert stressed the value of involving students from underprivileged and low-income groups in the design process.

After the kickoff, we summarized our ideas and shared understanding in a project brief that captured these aspects:

the project’s history and purpose: What is the purpose of this project?
• the problem definition: what do we want to solve?
• the concrete goals and metrics for each success dimension: what do we want to achieve?
• how will we go about defining the scope, process, and role descriptions?

With such a brief in place, you can use the agreed-upon objectives and concrete metrics as a checklist of success, and your design team will be ready to pursue the right objective—using the tools, methods, and metrics at their disposal to achieve ethical outcomes.

Conclusion

A number of my coworkers have questioned me over the past year,” Where do I begin with ethical design?” My answer has always been the same: organize a session with your stakeholders to ( re ) define success. Even though you might not always be 100 percent successful in agreeing on goals that cover all responsibility objectives, that beats the alternative ( the status quo ) every time. There is no skipping this step if you want to design in an ethical, responsible way.

To be even more specific: if you consider yourself a strategic designer, your challenge is to define ethical objectives, set the right metrics, and conduct those kick-off sessions. If you think of yourself as a system designer, your first step should be to understand how your industry contributes to consumerism and inequality, how finance drives business, and how to think about how to use the system to exert the most influence. Then redefine success to create the space to exercise those levers.

And for those who consider themselves service designers or UX designers or UI designers: if you truly want to have a positive, meaningful impact, stay away from the toolkits and meetups and conferences for a while. Gather your coworkers and set design goals for well-being, equity, and sustainability. Engage your stakeholders in a workshop and challenge them to think of ways to achieve and measure those ethical goals. Take their ideas, make them clear and tangible, ask for their consent, and hold them to it.

Otherwise, I’m genuinely sorry to say, you’re wasting your precious time and creative energy.

Of course, engaging your stakeholders in this way can be uncomfortable. Many of my coworkers had questions to ask, such as” Will they take this seriously?” and” Wouldn’t we just do it within the design team instead”? In fact, a product manager once asked me why ethics couldn’t just be a structured part of the design process—to just do it without spending the effort to define ethical objectives. It seems like a good idea, no? We wouldn’t have to have difficult discussions with stakeholders about what values or which key-performance indicators to pursue. It would let us focus on what we like and do best: designing.

However, as systems theory suggests, that’s not enough. For those of us who aren’t from marginalized groups and have the privilege to be able to speak up and be heard, that uncomfortable space is exactly where we need to be if we truly want to make a difference. We can’t continue to live in the design-for-designers bubble and enjoy our privileged working-from-home environment without access to the real world. For those of us who have the possibility to speak up and be heard: if we solely keep talking about ethical design and it remains at the level of articles and toolkits—we’re not designing ethically. It’s just theory. By challenging them to redefine success in business, we must actively engage with our coworkers and clients.

With a bit of courage, determination, and focus, we can break out of this cage that finance and business-as-usual have built around us and become facilitators of a new type of business that can see beyond financial value. We simply need to come to terms with the right goals at the start of each design project, identify the appropriate metrics, and acknowledge that we already have everything we need to get started. That’s what it means to do daily ethical design.

For their inspiration and support over the years, I would like to thank Emanuela Cozzi Schettini, José Gallegos, Annegret Bönemann, Ian Dorr, Vera Rademaker, Virginia Rispoli, Cecilia Scolaro, Rouzbeh Amini, and many others.

The same applies for those of us working in design and development these times. 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. Each day that we as developers and designers get into a regular rhythm, some innovative idea or technology comes down to shake things up and copy 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.

The beginning of website standards

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

Server-side languages like PHP, Java, and.NET overtook Perl as the predominant back-end processors, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the trash bin. With these better server-side tools came the first era of web applications, starting with content-management systems ( particularly in the blogging space with tools like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress ). In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened doors for asynchronous interaction between the front end and back end. Suddenly, pages could update their content without needing to reload. A crop of JavaScript frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and jQuery arose to help developers build more reliable client-side interaction across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like image replacement let crafty designers and developers display fonts of their choosing. And technologies like Flash made it possible to add animations, games, and even more interactivity.

These new technologies, standards, and techniques reinvigorated the industry in many ways. Web design flourished as designers and developers explored more diverse styles and layouts. But we still relied on tons of hacks. 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 ). Complicated layouts required all manner of nested floats or absolute positioning ( or both ). Flash and image replacement for custom fonts was a great start toward varying the typefaces from the big five, but both hacks introduced accessibility and performance problems. And JavaScript libraries made it easy for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, although at the cost of doubling or even quadrupling the download size of simple websites.

The web as software platform

The symbiosis between the front end and back end continued to improve, and that led to 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. Alongside these tools came others, including collaborative version control, build automation, and shared package libraries. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.

At the same time, mobile devices became more capable, and they gave us internet access in our pockets. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.

This combination of capable mobile devices and powerful development tools contributed to the waxing of social media and other centralized tools for people to connect and consume. 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 offered connections on a global scale, with both the good and bad that that entails.

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

Where we are now

In the last couple of years, it’s felt like we’ve begun to reach another major inflection point. 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 make a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all flavors. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other tools of the IndieWeb can help with this, but they’re still relatively underimplemented and hard to use for the less nerdy. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.

Browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other standards like web components has accelerated, especially through efforts like Interop. New technologies gain support across the board in a fraction of the time that they used to. I often learn about a new feature and check its browser support only to find that its coverage is already above 80 percent. 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.

Today, with a few commands and a couple of lines of code, we can prototype almost any idea. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. But the upfront cost that these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes due as upgrading and maintaining them becomes a part 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 used to let us adopt new techniques sooner—have now become hindrances instead. 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 when scripts fail ( whether through poor code, network issues, or other environmental factors ), there’s often no alternative, leaving users with blank or broken pages.

Where do we go from here?

Today’s hacks help to shape tomorrow’s standards. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks —for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we’re unwilling to admit that they’re hacks or we hesitate to replace them. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?

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

Start from 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 true of third-party frameworks. Sites built with even the hackiest of HTML from the’ 90s still work just fine today. The same can’t always be said of sites built with frameworks even after just a couple years.

Design with care. Whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes, consider the impacts of each decision. 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. Rather than rushing headlong to “move fast and break things”, use the time saved by modern tools to consider more carefully and design with deliberation.

Always be learning. If you’re always learning, you’re also growing. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. You might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year, even if you were to focus solely on learning standards. ( Remember XHTML? ) But constant learning opens up new connections in your brain, and the hacks that you learn one day may help to inform different experiments another day.

Play, experiment, and be weird! This web that we’ve built is the ultimate experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be courageous and try new things. Build a playground for ideas. Make goofy experiments in your own mad science lab. Start your own small business. There has never been a more empowering place to be creative, take risks, and explore what we’re capable of.

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

Go forth and make

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 imbue our values into the things that we create, and let’s make the web a better place for everyone. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then share it, make it better, make it again, or make something new. Learn. Make. Share. Grow. Rinse and repeat. Every time you think that you’ve mastered the web, everything will change.

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 instead provide some awareness to projects and possibilities where AI can generate substantial differences for people with disabilities. To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t true threats or pressing problems with AI that need to be addressed—there are, and we’ve needed to address them, like, yesterday—but I want to take a little time to talk about what’s possible in hope that we’ll get there one day.

Other words

Joe’s part spends a lot of time talking about computer-vision types generating other words. He highlights a ton of true issues with the current state of things. 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 current state of image analysis is pretty poor—especially for certain image types—in large part because current AI systems examine images in isolation rather than within the contexts that they’re in ( which is a consequence of having separate “foundation” models for text analysis and image analysis ). Today’s models aren’t trained to distinguish between images that are contextually relevant ( that should probably have descriptions ) and those that are purely decorative ( which might not need a description ) either. Still, I still think there’s potential in this space.

As Joe mentions, human-in-the-loop authoring of alt text should absolutely be a thing. And if AI can pop in to offer a starting point for alt text—even if that starting point might be a prompt saying What is this BS? That’s not right at all … Let me try to offer a starting point— I think that’s a win.

Taking things a step further, if we can specifically train a model to analyze image usage in context, it could help us more quickly identify which images are likely to be decorative and which ones likely require a description. That will help reinforce which contexts call for image descriptions and it’ll improve authors ‘ efficiency toward making their pages more accessible.

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 suppose that you came across a chart whose description was simply the title of the chart and the kind of visualization it was, such as: Pie chart comparing smartphone usage to feature phone usage among US households making under$ 30, 000 a year. ( That would be a pretty awful alt text for a chart since that would tend to leave many questions about the data unanswered, but then again, let’s suppose that that was the description that was in place. ) If your browser knew that that image was a pie chart ( because an onboard model concluded this ), imagine a world where users could ask questions like these about the graphic:

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

Setting aside the realities of large language model ( LLM) hallucinations—where a model just makes up plausible-sounding “facts” —for a moment, the opportunity to learn more about images and data in this way could be revolutionary for blind and low-vision folks as well as for people with various forms of color blindness, cognitive disabilities, and so on. 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.

Taking things a step further: What if you could ask your browser to simplify a complex chart? What if you could ask it to isolate a single line on 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 swap colors for patterns? Given these tools ‘ chat-based interfaces and our existing ability to manipulate images in today’s AI tools, that seems like a possibility.

Now imagine a purpose-built model that could extract the information from that chart and convert it to another format. For example, perhaps it could turn that pie chart ( or better yet, a series of pie charts ) into more accessible ( and useful ) formats, like spreadsheets. That would be amazing!

Matching algorithms

Safiya Umoja Noble absolutely hit the nail on the head when she titled her book Algorithms of Oppression. While her book was focused on the ways that search engines reinforce racism, I think that it’s equally true 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. A lot of this stems from a lack of diversity among the people who shape and build them. When these platforms are built with inclusively baked in, however, there’s real potential for algorithm development to help people with disabilities.

Take Mentra, for example. They are an employment network for neurodivergent people. They use an algorithm to match job seekers with potential employers based on over 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 considers each work environment, communication factors related to each job, and the like. As a company run by neurodivergent folks, Mentra made the decision to flip the script when it came to typical employment sites. 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 creation of algorithms, that can reduce the chances that these algorithms will inflict harm on their communities. That’s why diverse teams are so important.

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 example, if you were to follow a bunch of nondisabled white male academics who talk about AI, it could suggest that you follow academics who are disabled or aren’t white or aren’t male who also talk about AI. If you took its recommendations, perhaps you’d get a more holistic 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 helps people with disabilities

If I weren’t trying to put this together between other tasks, I’m sure that I could go on and on, providing all kinds of examples of how AI could be used to help people with disabilities, but I’m going to make this last section into a bit of a lightning round. In no particular order:

Voice preservation. You may have seen the VALL-E paper or Apple’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day announcement or you may be familiar with the voice-preservation offerings from Microsoft, Acapela, or others. 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. This is, of course, the same tech that can also be used to create audio deepfakes, so it’s something that we need to approach responsibly, but the tech has truly transformative potential.
• Voice recognition. 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 recruiting people with Parkinson’s and related conditions, and they have plans to expand this to other conditions as the project progresses. This research will result in more inclusive data sets that will let more people with disabilities use voice assistants, dictation software, and voice-response services as well as control their computers and other devices more easily, using only their voice.
• Text transformation. The current generation of LLMs is quite capable of adjusting existing text content without injecting hallucinations. This is hugely empowering for people with cognitive disabilities who may benefit from text summaries or simplified versions of text or even text that’s prepped for Bionic Reading.

The importance of diverse teams and data

We need to recognize that our differences matter. Our lived experiences are influenced by the intersections of the identities that we exist in. 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 need to be represented in the data that we use to train new models, and the folks who contribute that valuable information need to be compensated for sharing it with us. Inclusive data sets yield more robust models that foster more equitable outcomes.

Want a model that doesn’t demean or patronize or objectify people with disabilities? Make sure that you have content about disabilities that’s authored by people with a range of disabilities, and make sure that that’s well represented in the training data.

Want a model that doesn’t use ableist language? You may be able to use existing data sets to build a filter that can intercept and remediate ableist language before it reaches readers. That being said, when it comes to sensitivity reading, AI models won’t be replacing human copy editors anytime soon.

Want a coding copilot that gives you accessible recommendations from the jump? Train it on code that you know to be accessible.

I have no doubt that AI can and will harm people … today, tomorrow, and well into the future. But I also believe that we can acknowledge that and, with an eye towards accessibility ( and, more broadly, inclusion ), make thoughtful, considerate, and intentional changes in our approaches to AI that will reduce harm over time as well. Today, tomorrow, and well into the future.

Many thanks to Kartik Sawhney for helping me with the development of this piece, Ashley Bischoff for her invaluable editorial assistance, and, of course, Joe Dolson for the prompt.

I am a artistic. What I do is alchemy. It is a puzzle. I do not so many do it, since let it be done through me.

I am a innovative. Certainly all creative people like this brand. Certainly all see themselves this approach. Some creative individuals see knowledge in what they do. That is their reality, and I respect it. Sometimes I even envy them, a minor. But my approach is different—my becoming is unique.

Apologizing and qualifying in progress is a diversion. That’s what my mind does to destroy me. I set it aside for today. I may come back later to forgive and count. After I’ve said what I came to say. Which is challenging enough.

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

Sometimes it does come that approach. Maybe what I need to build comes in an instant. I have learned not to say it at that time, because if you admit that sometimes the thought just comes and it is the best idea and you know it is the best idea, they think you don’t work hard enough.

Maybe I work and work and work until the plan comes. Often it comes suddenly and I don’t tell people for three weeks. Maybe I’m so excited by the idea that came immediately that I blurt it out, can’t help myself. Like a child who found a medal in his Cracker Jacks. Maybe I get away with this. Maybe other people agree: yes, that is the best plan. Most times they don’t and I regret having given way to joy.

Joy is best saved for the conference where it will make a difference. Certainly the casual get-together that accompanies that gathering by two different meetings. Anyone knows why we have all these sessions. We keep saying we’re doing away with them, but then only finding different ways to include them. Sometimes they are also excellent. But other days they are a distraction from the actual labor. The percentages between when conferences are important, and when they are a sad distraction, vary, depending on what you do and where you do it. And who you are and how you do it. Once I digress. I am a artistic. That is the design.

Often many hours of hard and persistent work produce something that is rarely serviceable. Often I have to accept that and move on to the next task.

Don’t question about approach. I am a innovative.

I am a artistic. I don’t command my goals. And I don’t handle my best tips.

I can nail aside, surround myself with information or photos, and maybe that works. I can go for a walk, and occasionally that functions. I may be making breakfast and there’s a Eureka having nothing to do with sizzling oil and flowing pots. Generally I know what to do the moment I wake up. And then, nearly as often, as I become aware and part of the world once, the idea that may have saved me turns to vanishing sand in a senseless storm of nothingness. For ingenuity, I believe, comes from that other world. The one we enter in aspirations, and possibly, before conception and after death. But that’s for writers to know, and I am not a writer. I am a artistic. And it’s for theologians to large forces about in their artistic world that they insist is true. But that is another diversion. And a miserable one. Even on a much more important issue than whether I am a inventive or not. But nevertheless a diversion from what I came here to say.

Often the process is mitigation. And horror. You know the cliché about the tortured actor? It’s true, even when the artist ( and let’s put that noun in quotes ) is trying to write a soft drink jingle, a callback in a tired sitcom, a budget request.

Some people who hate being called innovative may be closeted artists, but that’s between them and their angels. No offence meant. Your wisdom is correct, too. But mine is for me.

Creatives understand creatives.

Creatives identify creatives like faggots recognize queers, like true rappers recognize true performers, like cons know cons. Creatives feel large regard for creatives. We love, respect, emulate, and nearly deify the excellent ones. To idolize any man is, of course, a dreadful mistake. We have been warned. We know much. We know people are simply people. They dispute, they are depressed, they regret their most critical decisions, they are weak and thirsty, they can be cruel, they can be just as terrible as we can, if, like us, they are clay. But. But. But they make this wonderful issue. They beginning something that did not exist before them, and could not occur without them. They are the mother of tips. And I suppose, since it’s only lying it, I have to put that they are the mother of technology. Ba ho backside! Okay, that’s done. Continue.

Creatives belittle our personal small successes, because we compare them to those of the wonderful people. Wonderful graphics! Also, I‘m no Miyazaki. Now THAT is glory. That is glory directly from the mind of God. This half-starved small item that I made? It more or less fell off the back of the pumpkin trailer. And the carrots weren’t actually new.

Creatives knows that, at best, they are Salieri. Yet the creatives who are He think that.

I am a artistic. I haven’t worked in advertising in 30 years, but in my hallucinations, it’s my previous artistic managers who judge me. And they are appropriate to do so. I am very lazy, overly simplistic, and when it actually counts, my mind goes blank. There is no medication for artistic function.

I am a artistic. Every date I make is an experience that makes Indiana Jones look like a retiree snoring in a balcony seat. The longer I remain a artistic, the faster I am when I do my job and the longer I brood and move in circles and gaze blankly before I do that job.

I am also 10 times faster than people who are not artistic, or people who have just been imaginative a short while, or people who have just been properly imaginative a short while. It’s just that, before I work 10 times as fast as they do, I spend twice as long as they do putting the work out. I am that confident in my ability to do a great task when I put my mind to it. I am that attached to the excitement scramble of delay. I am also that scared of the climb.

I am not an actor.

I am a innovative. Not an actor. Though I dreamed, as a boy, of eventually being that. Some of us denigrate our products and like ourselves because we are not Michelangelos and Warhols. That is narcissism—but at least we aren’t in elections.

I am a artistic. Though I believe in reason and science, I decide by intelligence and desire. And sit with what follows—the calamities as well as the successes.

I am a artistic. Every term I’ve said these may offend another artists, who see things differently. Ask two artists a problem, get three ideas. Our dispute, our love about it, and our responsibility to our own reality are, at least to me, the facts that we are artists, no matter how we may think about it.

I am a artistic. I lament my lack of taste in the places about which I know very little, which is to suggest virtually all areas of human knowledge. And I trust my preference above all other items in the regions closest to my soul, or perhaps, more precisely, to my passions. Without my passions, I would probably have to spend my time looking career in the eye, and virtually none of us can do that for longer. No seriously. No truly. Because many in existence, if you really look at it, is terrible.

I am a artistic. I believe, as a family believes, that when I am gone, some little good part of me will take on in the head of at least one other people.

Working saves me from worrying about function.

I am a artistic. I live in despair of my little present immediately going ahead.

I am a innovative. I am very active making the next thing to spend too much time seriously considering that almost nothing I make does come anywhere near the glory I awkwardly aspire to.

I am a artistic. I believe in the greatest mystery of operation. I believe in it so much, I am actually foolish enough to submit an article I dictated into a small machine and didn’t take time to evaluate or update. I won’t do this often, I promise. But I did it just now, because, as afraid as I might be of your seeing through my pitiful gestures toward the beautiful, I was even more afraid of forgetting what I came to say.

There. I think I’ve said it.

Weekend Favs April 5th written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Selling

My trip blog post program includes posting references to a handful of equipment or great glad I ran across during the week. I don’t go into detail about the sees, but I encourage you to check them out if they sound exciting. The pictures in the article is a favourite for the week from an online ]…]

Your Book Launch Requires a Marketing Plan written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Alex Strathdee

In this instance of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Alex Strathdee, CEO of Shelf Life and publisher of Before the Bestseller. Alex is an expert in reserve promotion, having helped over 1, 000 writers across 50+ areas get genuine benefits. His perspectives challenge the standard belief that publishers will market your book and show the necessary strategies every author must use to generate their own achievement.

During our chat, Alex shared effective and useful tips on how to sell books, build a compelling book release plan, and avoid the most common reserve marketing mistakes. From free viewer seeding to building an author email list, Alex outlines a consistent book sales strategy that helps artists to address their book like a business asset—whether you &#8217, d self publishing or working with a traditional publisher.

Alex’s approach to nonfiction book marketing is data-driven, entrepreneurial, and deeply practical. Whether you’re a seasoned business owner or just starting out, the insights from this episode can help you avoid wasted effort—and get real ROI from your book.

Key Takeaways:

Publishers won’t market your book. Authors must take ownership of their book promotion strategy.
• Think of your book like a product. If it’s good ( and light, as Alex says ), it needs only wind—your marketing—to take off.
• Pick a sales goal. Whether it &#8217, s 1, 000 or 20, 000 copies, defining a target helps guide every marketing tactic.
• Use free reader seeding. Get your book into the hands of people who can talk about it and create buzz.
• Break down your sales goal into channels. Consider email, podcasts, Amazon ads, or lumpy mail to move copies strategically.
• Your email list is gold. Start small with 100 engaged readers and build from there—this is traffic you own.
• Use VA support for outreach. Outsourcing book promotion tasks helps you scale more efficiently.
• Don&#8217, t overlook physical presence. Alex shares how one book sold millions after being spotted in a car wash!
• Design a book funnel. Use your book as a lead magnet for higher-ticket services like courses or coaching.
• Presentation matters. From soft t-shirts to custom editions, packaging your book with care can spark word-of-mouth and long-term publishing success.

Chapters:

• ]00: 09 ] Introduction to Alex Strathdee
• ]01: 03] Do Publishers Promote Books?
• ]02: 45] Mistakes in Book Marketing
• ]06: 54] How is AI Affecting Book Marketing?
• ]08: 30 ] What is the Goal of your Book?
• ]09: 39] Seeding Readers with no Audience
• ]13: 34] Team and Tools to Help You with Your Book
• ]16: 03] Positioning Yourself to get Lucky

More About Alex Strathdee:

Check out Alex Strathdee&#8217, s Website
• Connect with Alex Strathdee on LinkedIn
• Read Before The Bestseller: Your Proven Path to Book Sales Without Wasting Time &amp, Money by Alex Strathdee

Always since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated with movies. I loved the heroes and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I wanted to be an actor. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on fascinating experiences. I also dreamed up suggestions for videos that my friends and I could render and sun in. But they never went any farther. I did, however, end up working in user experience ( UX). Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer research is story. And to get the most out of consumer research, you need to show a good account where you bring stakeholders—the solution team and choice makers—along and getting them interested in learning more.

Think of your favourite film. More than likely it follows a three-act construction that’s frequently seen in story: the layout, the fight, and the quality. The second act shows what exists now, and it helps you get to know the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two introduces the turmoil, where the action is. Here, issues grow or get worse. And the third and final work is the solution. This is where the issues are resolved and the figures learn and change. I believe that this architecture is also a great way to think about customer study, and I think that it can be particularly helpful in explaining person exploration to others.

Use story as a framework to complete research

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see studies as being inconsequential. If finances or timelines are small, analysis tends to be one of the first points to go. 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 clubs some of the way, but that strategy is so easily miss out on solving people ‘ real problems. To remain user-centered, this is something we should avoid. User research elevates design. It keeps it on track, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay ahead of your competitors.

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

Act one: setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act two: conflict

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act three: resolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between the dream of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong—like when we encounter “persofails” in the vein of a company constantly imploring daily consumers to buy more toilet seats—the personalization gap is true. It’s an particularly confusing place to be a modern professional without a map, a map, or a strategy.

For those of you venturing into customisation, there’s no Lonely Planet and some tour guides because powerful personalization is so specific to each group’s skills, systems, and market place.

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:

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..
1. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
2. Work your plan: This 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.

Shinichirō Watanabe is a real animation filmmaker who is responsible for some of the most famous names to come out of the late ‘ 90s and 2000s, quite as Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Space Dandy, and Carole &amp, Tuesday. Watanabe’s line cover incredibly diverse materials, but all his animation safely interact with people because of the]… ]

The article Lazarus ‘ Shinichirō Watanabe Wants You To Miss About Cowboy Bebop For a Bit appeared second on Den of Geek.

Some may complain that the walk look for Superman does n&#8217, t really let us break anything new. It begins with Superman crashing into the frost and calling for his puppy Krypto, just like the video released a few months before. It continues with a medley of images, including photographs of characters such as Hawkgirl, Metamorpho, and the Green Lantern Guy Gardner. It ends with Superman ( David Corenswet ) embracing Lois Lane ( Rachel Brosnahan ), all while a variation of the John Williams theme plays.

However, there is new images in this preview. Well, just new in the sense that we have n&#8217, t seen this particular field from Superman earlier. But the thoughts in the film is aged in the very best manner, proving that James Gunn is going deeply into DC and even tissue legend to create anything special.

The teaser features extended footage of Krypto ( perhaps because it debuted in front of the kid-friendly A Minecraft Movie ), frolicking and being a normal dog before rescuing Superman. Krypto takes Superman to his Arctic hideaway the Fortress of Solitude, presented here with the crystal style that John Barry made for the 1978 picture.

But the most significant inclusion comes with the numbers who tend to Superman, four human machines with robes and spears.

Superman and robots may be new to the this picture &#8217, s marketing, and truly, to Superman movies in general. But they have a longer history in the cartoons. In throughout the Silver Age, Superman frequently employed machine replicas of himself, often to put off people who suspect his secret personality, and sometimes just to disaster with Lois Lane.

Since Crisis on Infinite Earths rebooted the DC Universe in the mid-1980s, the computers tended to be more insect-like aides who tended to the Fortress of Solitude. The film version appears to combine the two methods, as they appear to be caretakers of the Fortress with more slender features, but they still activity the weapon and capes of their masters.

However, the whole idea of robotic assistants and a hidden fortress goes back even further than the Silver Age, even before Superman even started the superhero comic book genre with Action Comics# 1 in 1938. They are concepts Superman inherited from pulp novels and magazines, high adventure stories about people with remarkable powers, who sometimes put on costumes and took on alter egos.

In particular, they come from the adventures of Doc Savage, created by Henry W. Ralston, John L. Nanovic, and Lester Dent, and debuting in 1933&#8217, s Doc Savage Magazine# 1. Dubbed the Man of Bronze, Doc Savage was a genius mathematician, scientist, and adventurer, who fought evildoers with the help of his team of experts. Savage operated mostly out of his office on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, but also had a secret arctic hideout called the Fortress of Solitude.

To be clear, Doc Savage didn&#8217, t fill his Fortress with robots. But in the 1935 novel The Fantastic Island, Savage employs Robbie the Robot as a synthetic double to confound his enemies, just like Superman would do two decades later. But he did fill it with his assistants and aids, a common trope found in fellow pulp heroes such as Zorro, Tarzan, and the Shadow.

Superman&#8217, s creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster alter that trope for the first adventures of their hero, using Superman&#8217, s secret identity as Clark Kent and his friendship with Lois Lane as an alternative to the band of experts on which the pulp heroes relied. But the trope soon resurfaced, with Superman not only getting help from his pal Jimmy Olsen and boss Perry White ( both additions from the radio show The Adventures of Superman ), but also with fellow heroes Batman and the Justice Society of America.

More importantly for the James Gunn movie, writer Grant Morrison strengthened the connections between Superman and the pulp heroes. The robots seen in the film come directly from Morrison&#8217, s All-Star Superman, which features the Man of Steel completing heroic tasks before his death and creating new scientific wonders in his lab, plot points common to the pulp era. Morrison&#8217, s Superman and the Authority, which features a team-up that Gunn&#8217, s movie will replicate, reimagines Superman as an explicitly in the style of Doc Savage ( or even Alan Moore&#8216, s homage Tom Strong ), complete with ever-present work gloves and a commitment to scientific exploration. And, of course, the robots are there again to help him.

As this brief history shows, the robots aren&#8217, t just a cool detail from the comics. They are part of a longer tradition of genre fiction, one that Gunn clearly loves. By situating Superman within this lineage, Gunn shows that he&#8217, s not just performing another cynical task of IP-mining. He&#8217, s celebrating a genre, remembering its past while moving forward.

Superman flies into theaters on July 11, 2025.

The post New Superman Trailer Reveals How Deep into Pulp Origins James Gunn Is Diving appeared first on Den of Geek.

It may seem clear to examine Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Ghost of Tsushima for the simple fact that they’re both triple-A, open-world game set in royal Japan. But that’s not the actual story below. The truth is if Assassin’s Creed Shadows wasn’t as good as it is, there would be no assessment. Spirit of Tsushima]…]

The article Assassin’s Creed vs. Ghost of Tsushima: Which Is Better? appeared primary on Den of Geek.

Some may complain that the walk look for Superman does n&#8217, t really let us break anything new. It begins with Superman crashing into the frost and calling for his puppy Krypto, just like the video released a few months before. It continues with a medley of images, including photographs of characters such as Hawkgirl, Metamorpho, and the Green Lantern Guy Gardner. It ends with Superman ( David Corenswet ) embracing Lois Lane ( Rachel Brosnahan ), all while a variation of the John Williams theme plays.

But, there is new images in this preview. Well, just new in the sense that we have n&#8217, t seen this particular field from Superman earlier. But the thoughts in the film is aged in the very best manner, proving that James Gunn is going deeply into DC and even tissue legend to create anything special.

The teaser features extended footage of Krypto ( perhaps because it debuted in front of the kid-friendly A Minecraft Movie ), frolicking and being a normal dog before rescuing Superman. Krypto takes Superman to his Arctic hideaway the Fortress of Solitude, presented here with the crystal style that John Barry made for the 1978 picture.

But the most renowned addition comes with the numbers who tend to Superman, four human machines with robes and spears.

Superman and robots may be new to the this picture &#8217, s marketing, and truly, to Superman movies in general. But they have a long story in the cartoons. In throughout the Silver Age, Superman frequently employed machine replicas of himself, often to put off people who suspect his secret personality, and sometimes just to disaster with Lois Lane.

Since Crisis on Infinite Earths rebooted the DC Universe in the mid-1980s, the computers tended to be more insect-like aides who tended to the Fortress of Solitude. The film version appears to combine the two methods, as they appear to be caretakers of the Fortress with more slender features, but they still activity the weapon and capes of their masters.

But, the whole idea of mechanical assistants and a hidden stronghold goes up even further than the Silver Age, yet before Superman also started the hero comic book genre with Action Comics# 1 in 1938. They are concepts Superman inherited from pulp novels and magazines, high adventure stories about people with remarkable powers, who sometimes put on costumes and took on alter egos.

In particular, they come from the adventures of Doc Savage, created by Henry W. Ralston, John L. Nanovic, and Lester Dent, and debuting in 1933&#8217, s Doc Savage Magazine# 1. Dubbed the Man of Bronze, Doc Savage was a genius mathematician, scientist, and adventurer, who fought evildoers with the help of his team of experts. Savage operated mostly out of his office on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, but also had a secret arctic hideout called the Fortress of Solitude.

To be clear, Doc Savage didn&#8217, t fill his Fortress with robots. But in the 1935 novel The Fantastic Island, Savage employs Robbie the Robot as a synthetic double to confound his enemies, just like Superman would do two decades later. But he did fill it with his assistants and aids, a common trope found in fellow pulp heroes such as Zorro, Tarzan, and the Shadow.

Superman&#8217, s creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster alter that trope for the first adventures of their hero, using Superman&#8217, s secret identity as Clark Kent and his friendship with Lois Lane as an alternative to the band of experts on which the pulp heroes relied. But the trope soon resurfaced, with Superman not only getting help from his pal Jimmy Olsen and boss Perry White ( both additions from the radio show The Adventures of Superman ), but also with fellow heroes Batman and the Justice Society of America.

More importantly for the James Gunn movie, writer Grant Morrison strengthened the connections between Superman and the pulp heroes. The robots seen in the film come directly from Morrison&#8217, s All-Star Superman, which features the Man of Steel completing heroic tasks before his death and creating new scientific wonders in his lab, plot points common to the pulp era. Morrison&#8217, s Superman and the Authority, which features a team-up that Gunn&#8217, s movie will replicate, reimagines Superman as an explicitly in the style of Doc Savage ( or even Alan Moore&#8216, s homage Tom Strong ), complete with ever-present work gloves and a commitment to scientific exploration. And, of course, the robots are there again to help him.

As this brief history shows, the robots aren&#8217, t just a cool detail from the comics. They are part of a longer tradition of genre fiction, one that Gunn clearly loves. By situating Superman within this lineage, Gunn shows that he&#8217, s not just performing another cynical task of IP-mining. He&#8217, s celebrating a genre, remembering its past while moving forward.

Superman flies into theaters on July 11, 2025.

The post New Superman Trailer Reveals How Deep into Pulp Origins James Gunn Is Diving appeared first on Den of Geek.