Category: Blog

Cartons are used to style CSS. In fact, the whole website is made of containers, from the computer viewport to components on a webpage. However, every now and then a new function emerges that prompts us to reevaluate our design philosophy.

Square features, for instance, make it fun to play with round picture areas. Mobile display holes and electronic keyboards offer issues to best manage content that stays clear of them. Additionally, two screen or portable devices force us to reevaluate how to best make the most of the available space in a variety of different device positions.

These latest changes to the online platform have made it both more challenging and fascinating to design items. They’re wonderful opportunities for us to break out of our rectangular boxes.

I’d like to talk about a new feature similar to the above: the Window Controls Overlay for Progressive Web Apps ( PWAs ).

Democratic Web Apps are bridging the gap between websites and apps. They combine the best of both worlds. On the one hand, they’re flexible, shareable, and stable, just like sites. On the other hand, they provide more effective features, work online, and read documents just like local apps.

As a style area, PWAs are really exciting because they challenge us to think about what mixing online and device-native user interface can get. We have more than 40 years of experience telling us what software may look like on desktop products in particular, and it can be challenging to get out of this psychological design.

At the end of the day though, PWAs on desktops are constrained to the glass they appear in: a square with a name bar at the top.

What a standard pc PWA app looks like:

Sure, as the author of a PWA, you get to choose the color of the title bar (using the Web Application Manifest theme_color house ), but that’s about it.

What if we could look beyond this field and reclaim the entire screen of the app? Doing so would give us a chance to create our programs more wonderful and feel more included in the operating system.

This is exactly what the Window Controls Overlay provides. This innovative PWA operation makes it possible to take advantage of the full floor area of the app, including where the name bar usually appears.

About the subject bar and screen controls

Let’s get started with an explanation of what the window and name handles are.

The title bar is the place displayed at the top of an game windows, which frequently contains the phone’s name. The buttons or buttons that are displayed at the top of an app’s window allow you to minimize, maximize, or close it.

Window Controls Overlay removes the physical constraint of the title bar and window controls areas. The title bar and window control buttons are overlayed on top of the application’s web content, allowing for full height to be the app window.

If you are reading this article on a desktop computer, take a quick look at other apps. Chances are they’re already doing something similar to this. In fact, the web browser you are using uses the top area to display tabs.

Spotify displays album artwork to the top of the application window at the very top.

Microsoft Word uses the available title bar space to display the auto-save and search functionalities, and more.

The whole point of this feature is to allow you to make use of this space with your own content while providing a way to account for the window control buttons. And it makes it possible to offer this modified experience across a variety of platforms without having a negative impact on browsers or other devices that don’t support Window Controls Overlay. After all, PWAs are all about progressive enhancement, so this feature is a chance to enhance your app to use this extra space when it’s available.

Let’s use the feature.

For the rest of this article, we’ll be working on a demo app to learn more about using the feature.

The demo app is called 1DIV. Users can create designs using CSS and a single HTML element in a simple CSS playground.

The app has two pages. The first lists the CSS designs you’ve already created:

The second page enables you to create and edit CSS designs:

We can install the app as a PWA on the desktop because I added a straightforward web manifest and service worker. Here is what it looks like on macOS:

And on Windows:

Our app is looking good, but the white title bar in the first page is wasted space. It would be really nice if the design area reached the top of the app window on the second page.

Let’s use the Window Controls Overlay feature to improve this.

Enabling Window Controls Overlay

The feature is still experimental at the moment. To try it, you need to enable it in one of the supported browsers.

It has currently been incorporated into Chromium as a result of a collaboration between Microsoft and Google. We can therefore use it in Chrome or Edge by going to the internal about: //flags page, and enabling the Desktop PWA Window Controls Overlay flag.

Using the overlay of Window Controls

To use the feature, we need to add the following display_override member to our web app’s manifest file:

{ "name": "1DIV", "description": "1DIV is a mini CSS playground", "lang": "en-US", "start_url": "/", "theme_color": "#ffffff", "background_color": "#ffffff", "display_override": [ "window-controls-overlay" ], "icons": [ ... ]}

On the surface, the feature is really simple to use. The only thing required is for this manifest change to transform the window controls into an overlay and make the title bar disappear.

However, to provide a great experience for all users regardless of what device or browser they use, and to make the most of the title bar area in our design, we’ll need a bit of CSS and JavaScript code.

Here is how the app currently looks:

Our logo, search field, and NEW button are now partially covered by the window controls, but the title bar has been removed, which is what we wanted.

It’s similar on Windows, with the difference that the close, maximize, and minimize buttons appear on the right side, grouped together with the PWA control buttons:

Using CSS to keep clear of the window controls

New CSS environment variables have also been introduced along with the feature:

• titlebar-area-x
• titlebar-area-y
• titlebar-area-width
• titlebar-area-height

You use these variables with the CSS env ( ) function to position your content where the title bar would have been while ensuring it won’t overlap with the window controls. In our case, we’ll position our header, which includes the logo, search bar, and NEW button, using two of the variables.

header { position: absolute; left: env(titlebar-area-x, 0); width: env(titlebar-area-width, 100%); height: var(--toolbar-height);}

The titlebar-area-x variable gives us the distance from the left of the viewport to where the title bar would appear, and titlebar-area-width is its width. (Remember, this is not equivalent to the width of the entire viewport, just the title bar portion, which as noted earlier, doesn’t include the window controls.)

By doing this, we make sure our content remains fully visible. We’re also defining fallback values (the second parameter in the env() function) for when the variables are not defined (such as on non-supporting browsers, or when the Windows Control Overlay feature is disabled).

Now our header adapts to its surroundings, and it doesn’t feel like the window control buttons have been added as an afterthought. The app appears much more like a native app.

Changing the window controls background color so it blends in

Now let’s take a closer look at our second page: the CSS playground editor.

Not very good. Our CSS demo area does go all the way to the top, which is what we wanted, but the way the window controls appear as white rectangles on top of it is quite jarring.

We can fix this by changing the app’s theme color. There are a few ways to define it:

PWAs can define a theme color in the web app manifest file using the theme_color manifest member. The OS then uses this color in various ways. On desktop platforms, it is used to provide a background color to the title bar and window controls.
• Websites can use the theme-color meta tag as well. It’s used by browsers to customize the color of the UI around the web page. For PWAs, this color can override the manifest theme_color.

In our case, we can set the manifest theme_color to white to provide the right default color for our app. The OS will read this color value when the app is installed and use it to make the window controls background color white. This color works great for our main page with the list of demos.

The theme-color meta tag can be changed at runtime, using JavaScript. So we can do that to override the white with the right demo background color when one is opened.

Here is the function we’ll employ:

function themeWindow(bgColor) { document.querySelector("meta[name=theme-color]").setAttribute('content', bgColor);}

With this in place, we can imagine how using color and CSS transitions can produce a smooth change from the list page to the demo page, and enable the window control buttons to blend in with the rest of the app’s interface.

Dragging the window

Now, getting rid of the title bar entirely does have an important accessibility consequence: it’s much more difficult to move the application window around.

Users can drag and click their way to a sizable area in the title bar, but when using the Window Controls Overlay feature, they are limited to where the control buttons are, and must carefully place their fingers in between these buttons to move the window.

Fortunately, this can be fixed using CSS with the app-region property. This property is, for now, only supported in Chromium-based browsers and needs the -webkit- vendor prefix. 

We can use the following to animate any aspect of the app so that the window can drag it toward any point:

-webkit-app-region: drag;

It is also possible to explicitly make an element non-draggable:

-webkit-app-region: no-drag; 

These choices might be beneficial to us. We can make the entire header a dragging target, but make the search field and NEW button within it non-draggable so they can still be used as normal.

However, because the editor page doesn’t display the header, users wouldn’t be able to drag the window while editing code. So let’s take a different strategy. We’ll create another element before our header, also absolutely positioned, and dedicated to dragging the window.

...

.drag { position: absolute; top: 0; width: 100%; height: env(titlebar-area-height, 0); -webkit-app-region: drag;}

With the above code, we’re making the draggable area span the entire viewport width, and using the titlebar-area-height variable to make it as tall as what the title bar would have been. This way, our draggable area is aligned with the window control buttons as shown below.

And, now, to make sure our search field and button remain usable:

header .search,header .new { -webkit-app-region: no-drag;}

Users can click and drag where the title bar used to be with the above code. It is an area that users expect to be able to use to move windows on desktop, and we’re not breaking this expectation, which is good.

Adapting to window resize

It may be useful for an app to know both whether the window controls overlay is visible and when its size changes. In our situation, there won’t be enough room for the search field, logo, and button to fit because the user made the window very narrow. We would need to lower them a little.

The Window Controls Overlay feature comes with a JavaScript API we can use to do this: navigator.windowControlsOverlay.

The API offers three intriguing features:

• navigator.windowControlsOverlay.visiblelets us know whether the overlay is visible.
• navigator.windowControlsOverlay.getBoundingClientRect()lets us know the position and size of the title bar area.
• navigator.windowControlsOverlay.ongeometrychangelets us know when the visibility or size change.

Let’s use this to be aware of the size of the title bar area and move the header down if it’s too narrow.

if (navigator.windowControlsOverlay) { navigator.windowControlsOverlay.addEventListener('geometrychange', () => { const { width } = navigator.windowControlsOverlay.getBoundingClientRect(); document.body.classList.toggle('narrow', width < 250); });}

In the example above, we set the narrow class on the body of the app if the title bar area is narrower than 250px. We could do something similar with a media query, but using the windowControlsOverlay API has two advantages for our use case:

• It’s only fired when the feature is supported and used, we don’t want to adapt the design otherwise.
• We can see the title bar area on different operating systems, which is great because Mac and Windows have different title bar sizes. Using a media query wouldn’t make it possible for us to know exactly how much space remains.

.narrow header { top: env(titlebar-area-height, 0); left: 0; width: 100%;}

When the window is too small, we can use the above CSS code to move our header down and move the thumbnails down in accordance with this.

Thirty pixels of exciting design opportunities

Our straightforward demo app was transformed into something that felt much more connected to desktop devices by using the Window Controls Overlay feature. Something that reaches out of the usual window constraints and provides a custom experience for its users.

In reality, this feature only gives us about 30 more pixels of room, and it presents challenges for using the window controls. And yet, this extra room and those challenges can be turned into exciting design opportunities.

More devices of all shapes and forms get invented all the time, and the web keeps on evolving to adapt to them. To make it easier for us web authors to integrate more and more fully with those devices, new features are added to the web platform. From watches or foldable devices to desktop computers, we need to evolve our design approach for the web. Nowadays, web building enables us to think outside the rectangular box.

So let’s embrace this. Let’s use the standard technologies already at our disposal, and experiment with new ideas to provide tailored experiences for all devices, all from a single codebase!

You can open issues on the spec’s repository if you get the chance to try the Window Controls Overlay feature and have feedback on it. It’s still early in the development of this feature, and you can help make it even better. You can also look at this demo app and the source code, the feature’s existing documentation, or the feature’s existing documentation.

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

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

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

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

It’s known as prepersonalization.

Behind the audio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set the timer for the kitchen.

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

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

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

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

Kickstart: Apt your appetite

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

Give examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike, as examples of consumer and business-to-business examples. 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 list of these in the cards. Here’s a list of 142 different interactions to jog your thinking.

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

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature ( or something similar ). In our cards, we break down connected experiences into five categories: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to draw attention to the benefits of ongoing investment as well as the difference between what you deliver right now 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 crucial because it emphasizes how personalization can affect your own methods of working as well as your external customers. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

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

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

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

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

Hit that test kitchen

What will you need next to bring your personalized recipes to life. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. Their capabilities are broad and potent, and they give you a variety of ways to organize your company. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

What’s crucial here is to avoid treating the installed software like a dream kitchen from some imaginary 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.

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

The dishes will be made from recipes, which have predetermined ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

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

This is not just about identifying needs. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team:

1. compare findings to a common strategy for developing features, similar to how artists paint with the same color palette,
2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar,
3. and establish parity between all important performance indicators and performance metrics.

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

Create a recipe.

What ingredients are important to you? Consider the construct “what-what-when-why”

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

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

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

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

We’ve also found that sometimes this process comes together more effectively by cocreating the recipes themselves, so a good preworkshop activity might be to think about what these cards might be for your organization. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

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

Better architecture is necessary for better kitchens.

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

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

You can’t stand the heat, unquestionably…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The web as software platform

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

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

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

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

Where we are now

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

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

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

If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks, which previously made it easier to adopt new techniques sooner, have since evolved into obstacles. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And when scripts fail ( whether due to poor code, network issues, or other environmental factors ), users frequently have no choice but to use blank or broken pages.

Where do we go from here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share and amplify. Share what you think has worked for you as you go through testing, playing, and learning. 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.

Make a move and make it happen.

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

I’d like you to consider this a “yes … and” piece to complement Joe’s post. I’m not trying to reject any of what he’s saying, but rather to give some context to initiatives and options where AI may produce real, positive impacts on people with disabilities. I want to take some time to talk about what’s possible in hope that we’ll get there one day. I’m no saying that there aren’t real challenges or pressing problems with AI that need to be addressed; there are.

Other words

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

As Joe points out, alt text authoring by human-in-the-loop should definitely be a thing. And if AI can intervene and provide a starting point for alt text, even if the rapid reads,” What is this BS?” That’s not correct at all … Let me try to offer a starting point— I think that’s a win.

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

While complex images—like graphs and charts—are challenging to describe in any sort of succinct way ( even for humans ), the image example shared in the GPT4 announcement points to an interesting opportunity as well. Let’s say you came across a map that merely stated the chart’s name and the type of representation it was:” Pie chart comparing smartphone use to have phone usage in US households making under$ 30, 000 annually.” ( That would be a pretty bad alt text for a chart because it would frequently leave many unanswered questions about the data, but let’s just assume that that was the description in place. ) If your 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 other types of smartphones?
• How many more?
• Is there a group of people that don’t fall into either of these buckets?
• How many people are that?

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

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

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

Matching algorithms

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

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

More people with disabilities can be used to create algorithms, which can lessen the likelihood that they will harm their communities. Diverse teams are crucial because of this.

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

Other ways that AI can assist people with disabilities

I’m sure I could go on and on about using AI to assist people with disabilities, but I’m going to make this last section into a bit of a lightning round if I weren’t trying to put this together in between other tasks. In no particular order:

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

The importance of diverse teams and data

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

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

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

Want a coding copilot who can provide you with useful recommendations after the jump? Train it on code that you know to be accessible.

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

Thanks to Kartik Sawhney for assisting me with writing this article, Ashley Bischoff for her invaluable editorial assistance, and of course Joe Dolson for the prompt.

I have a creative side. Alchemy is what I do. It’s a puzzle. I prefer to let it be done through me rather than through me.

I have a creative side. Certainly all aspiring artists approve of this brand. No everyone see themselves in this manner. Some innovative people practice scientific in their work. That is their perception, and I regard it. Perhaps I have a little bit of fear for them. However, my method is different; my becoming is unique.

It distracts one to apologize and qualify in progress. That’s what my head does to destroy me. I put it off for the moment. I may regret and then qualify. after I’ve said what I should have. which is difficult enough.

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

Sometimes it does go that method. Maybe what I need to make arrives right away. When I say something at that moment, I’ve learned not to say it because people often don’t work hard enough to acknowledge that the idea is the best idea even when you know it’s the best idea.

Sometimes I just keep working until the plan strikes me. Maybe it arrives right away and I don’t remind people for three days. Maybe I get so excited about an idea that just came along that I blurt it out and didn’t stop myself. like a child who discovered a medal in one of his Cracker Jacks. I occasionally manage to get away with this. Yes, that is the best plan, per some observers. They don’t usually, and I regret losing my passion.

Passion should only be saved for the meet, when it will matter. Certainly the informal get-together that comes before that meet with two more meetings. Nothing understands why we hold these gatherings. We keep saying we’re getting rid of them, but we keep discovering new ways to get them. They occasionally also excel. Sometimes they detract from the real function, though. Depending on what you do and where you do it, the ratio between when conferences are valuable and when they are a sad distraction vary. And who you are and how you go about doing it. I’ll go back and forth once more. I have a creative side. That is the style.

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

Don’t inquire about the procedure. I have a creative side.

I have a creative side. My ambitions are not in my power. And I have no power over my best tips.

I may hammer away and often find it useful to surround myself with images or information. I can go for a move, which occasionally works. There is a Eureka, which has nothing to do with boiling pots and sizzling oil, and I may be making dinner. I frequently have a sense of direction when I awaken. The idea that may have saved me disappears almost as frequently as I become aware and a part of the world once more as a senseless wind of oblivion. For imagination, in my opinion, comes from that other planet. The one that we enter in ambitions and, possibly, before and after suicide. I’m not a writer, so that’s up to writers to think about. I have a creative side. And it’s for philosophers to build massive soldiers in their imaginative world that they claim to be true. But that is yet another diversion. And a miserable one. Possibly on a much bigger issue than whether or not I am creative. But that’s not how I came around, though.

Often, the outcome is evasion. also suffering. You are familiar with the adage” the tortured musician”? Even when the artist is trying to write a soft drink song, a call in a worn-out comedy, or a budget ask, that word is correct.

Some individuals who detest being called artistic perhaps been closeted artists, but that’s between them and their gods. No offence here. Your reality is also true. However, mine is for me.

Artists acknowledge their work.

Disadvantages know cons, just like real rappers recognize actual rappers, just like queers recognize queers. People have a lot of regard for artists. We respect, follow, and almost deify the excellent ones. Of course, deifying any person is a dreadful error. We’ve been given a warning. We are more knowledgeable. We are aware that people are really people. Because they are clay, like us, they squabble, they are depressed, they regret making the most important decisions, they are poor and hungry, they can be violent, and they can be as ridiculous as we can. But. But. However, they produce this incredible point. They give birth to something that may not exist without them and did not exist before them. They are thought’s founders. And since it’s only lying there, I suppose I should add that they are the inventor’s parents. Ba ho backside! Okay, that’s all said and done. Continue.

Because we compare our personal small accomplishments to those of the great ones, designers denigrate our own. Wonderful graphics I‘m not Miyazaki, so I‘m not. That is glory right now. That is glory straight out of the mouth of God. This meagre much creation that I made? It essentially fell off the pumpkin truck’s again. And the carrots weren’t actually new.

Designers is aware that they are at best Salieri. That is what Mozart’s artists do, also.

I have a creative side. In my hallucinations, my former artistic managers are the ones who judge me because I haven’t worked in advertising in 30 times. And they are correct to do so. When it really counts, my mind goes flat because I am too lazy and simplistic. No medication is available to treat artistic difficulties.

I have a creative side. Every experience I create has the potential to make Indiana Jones look older while snoring in a balcony seat. The more I pursue my creative endeavors, the faster I progress in my work, and the more I slog through lines and gaze blankly before beginning that task.

I can move ten times more quickly than those who aren’t creative, those who have only had a short-cut of creativity, and those who have just had a short-cut of creativity for work. Simply that I spend twice as long putting the work off as they do before I work ten times as quickly as they do. When I put my mind to it, I am so confident in my ability to do a wonderful career. I am completely dependent on the excitement rush of delay. I’m still so frightened of jumping.

I am hardly a painter.

I have a creative side. Never a performer. Though as a child, I had a dream that I would one day become that. Some of us criticize our abilities and like our own accomplishments because we are not Michelangelos and Warhols. That is narcissism, but at least we aren’t in elections.

I have a creative side. Despite my belief in reason and science, I make decisions based on my own senses and instincts. and sit in the aftermath of both the triumphs and disasters.

I have a creative side. Another artists, who see things differently, will find every word I’ve said irritate me. Ask a question to two designers, and you’ll find three responses. Our dispute, our interest in it, and our commitment to our own truth, at least in my opinion, are the proof that we are creative, no matter how we does think about it.

I have a creative side. I lament my lack of taste in almost all of the areas of human understanding, which I know very little about. And I put my ego before everything else in the areas that are most important to me, or perhaps more precisely, to my passions. Without my addictions, I’d probably have to spend the majority of our time looking ourselves in the eye, which is something that almost none of us can do for very long. No actually. No really. Because a lot of career is intolerable if you really look at it.

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

Working frees me from worrying about my job.

I have a creative side. I worry that my little product will disappear unexpectedly.

I have a creative side. I’m too busy making the next thing to devote too much time to it, especially since practically everything I create did achieve the level of success I conceive of.

I have a creative side. I think there is the greatest secret in the process. I think it is so important that I’m actually foolish enough to publish an essay I wrote into a little machine without having to go through or edit it. I swear I didn’t accomplish this frequently. But I did it right away because I was even more frightened of forgetting what I was saying because I was afraid of you seeing through my sad gestures toward the beautiful.

There. I believe I said it correctly.

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

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

The Ludicrous Pate of Justin: The Tale of Justin

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

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

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

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

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

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

Along with pattern book pieces, the site even offered free downloads for Mac OS customizations: pc wallpapers that were successfully style experimentation, custom-designed typefaces, and desktop icons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixel Issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The victims? My design stagnated. Its evolution, which is what I evolved, has stagnated.

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

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

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

Always Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Started

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

Common scenarios for starting a personalisation task:

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

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

From top to bottom, the rates include:

North Star: What larger corporate goal is the personalisation initiative pursuing?
1. Objectives: What are the specific, tangible benefits of the system?
2. Touchpoints: Where will you get personal service?
3. Contexts and Campaigns: What personalization information does the person view?
4. What makes up a distinct, useable market according to user segments?
5. Actionable Data: What dependable and credible information is captured by our professional platform to generate personalization?
6. What wider set of data is conceivable ( now in our environment ) to allow you to optimize?

We’ll go through each of these amounts in turn. An associated deck of cards was created to demonstrate specific examples from each level to make this more meaningful. We’ve found them helpful in customisation pondering periods, and will include cases for you here.

Starting at the Top

The tower has the following elements:

North Star

With your personalisation plan, whether large or small, you aim for a general north star. The North Star defines the (one ) overall mission of the personalization program. What are your goals, exactly? North Stars cast a ghost. The darkness is bigger the sun the bigger the sun. Example of North Starts may incorporate:

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

Goals

Personalization can aid in accelerating designing with user intentions, as in any great UX design. Goals are the military and tangible metrics that may prove the entire program is effective. A good place to begin is with your existing analytics and calculation software and metrics you can standard against. In some cases, new targets may be suitable. The most important thing to consider is that personalisation is more of a means of achieving an objective than a desired result. Popular targets include:

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

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are where the personalisation happens. This will be one of your biggest areas of responsibility as a UX custom. The connections available to you will depend on how your personalization and associated technology features are instrumented, and should be rooted in improving a person’s experience at a certain point in the trip. Touchpoints can be multi-device ( mobile, in-store, website ), but they can also be more specific ( web banner, web pop-up, etc. ). Here are a few illustrations:

Touchpoints at the channel level

• Email: Role
• Email opens at what time?
• In-store display ( JSON endpoint )
• Native app
• Search

Wireframe-level Touchpoints

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

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

Contexts and Campaigns

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

Personalization Context Model:

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

Personalization Content Model

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

We’ve written a lot about each of these models elsewhere, so if you’d like to read more, check out Colin’s Personalization Content Model and Jeff’s Personalization Context Model.

User Groups

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

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

Actionable Data

Every organization with any digital presence has data. It’s a matter of examining what user data you can ethically collect, its inherent reliability and value, and how you can use it ( sometimes referred to as “data activation” ). Fortunately, the tide is turning to first-party data: a recent study by Twilio estimates some 80 % of businesses are using at least some type of first-party data to personalize the customer experience.

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

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

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

Pulling it Together

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

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

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

Lay Down Your Cards

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

Given its mission to seek out new life and new civilizations, Star Trek doesn’t give its physicians the most glamorous jobs. Captain Kirk and Commander Riker get to go on adventures, Picard and Spock wrestle with complex questions. The doctors just clean up the mess. And yet, the doctors remain some of the most intriguing […]

The post Bones and All: Ranking the Star Trek Doctors and Physicians appeared first on Den of Geek.

And that’s another SXSW for the history books. At the same festival that saw a keynote talk given by the CEO trying to bring the Woolly Mammoth back, cinephiles and genre enthusiasts also got a new Babak Anvari banger, the unicorn horror-comedy you never knew you needed, and a reported return to form by Matthew McConaughey after he stepped away from the big screen for the last six years.

It was a lot of fun, a lot of work, and as always over too soon. (Spoiler: McConaughey’s much celebrated The Rivals of the Amaziah King is one of the ones we missed!) Be that as it may, we still saw a whole lot from the Film and TV festival selection during our limited time on the ground. Here’s the round-up to prove it.

#1 Happy Family USA

Animated sitcoms don’t usually make a habit of concluding their first episode with the events of Sept. 11, 2001. But then again not many animated sitcoms are Prime Video’s #1 Happy Family USA. Created by comedy superstar Ramy Youssef and South Park producer Pam Brady, #1 Happy Family USA follows the Husseins—a Muslim family in New Jersey doing their best to project patriotism amid a very dark time in American history. 

While that setup is bleak (and undoubtedly reflects Youssef’s own experiences growing up as a Muslim-American during the turn of the 21st century), the series ends up being quite a cheerful experience. Young Rumi Hussein (Youssef) befriends a talking lamb and tries to bang his teacher (who may or may not have a personal connection to His Airness, Michael Jordan). His dad Hussein Hussein (also Youssef) breaks out into pro-America song numbers routinely. Also, Grandma (Randa Jarrar) appears to have Doc Ock arm attachments.

Each episode of the show, which has already scored a two-season order at Prime, opens with faux MPAA text warning “Rated H for Haram: Allah please forgive mistakes in this program.” Rated H it may be, but that could just as easily stand for “Halal.” – Alec Bojalad

American Sweatshop

Most folks objectively recognize the internet is a terrible and unpleasant place. But most of us also never think about the poor souls who are encouraged (tricked?) into trying to clean it up for lawsuit-fearing tech companies. Director Uta Briesewitz and star/producer Lili Reinhart care though. And maybe they can convince you to put down the doom-scroller in your hand for a while with American Sweatshop.

In the film, written by Matthew Nemeth, Reinhart plays a young person who thinks the gig of a media moderator at the fictional company of Paladin is a foot in the door to tech, but in truth it is an invitation for the most vile and terrible things on the web being seared into her brain. Briesewitz wisely elects to mostly obscure what those things are. But we glimpse them in miniature reflection on Reinhart’s pupils as they burrow into her soul. This acts as the opening to a larger drama with thriller elements as Reinhart’s Daisy demands for more to be done than simply deleting harmful (and possibly murderous) content. She wants revenge. Yet the film is at its best when wallowing in the camaraderie and occasional gallows humor of a young staff that looks increasingly as hollowed out as meat in a frontline’s grinder. – David Crow

The Age of Disclosure

Ready Player One’s producer Dan Farah makes the leap to documentary filmmaking by chronicling decade-spanning observations on UFOs and other alleged non-human organisms with the help of 34 talking heads who were/are U.S. government, military, and intelligence officials. While interesting at first, the documentary spins its wheels over the course of 108 minutes, failing to add any substantial evidence over the subject it highlights, especially since much of its on screen information is readily accessible. – Rendy Jones

Are We Good?

“Are we good?” That phrase began as a verbal tic from comedian Marc Maron as he launched his eventual medium-conquering podcast WTF in 2009. Maron would conclude episodes with that question, often posed to his comedic peers whom he previously was not, in fact, good with. Nowadays Maron is more or less good with everyone, having long ago conquered both his personal demons and professional insecurities. It’s only fitting then that the documentary about him bears that familiar phrase.

Directed by Steven Feinartz, Are We Good? tells the whole story of Maron while honing in on his particularly chaotic 2020s. The doc is rich in pathos, covering the death of Maron’s partner, filmmaker Lynn Shelton, to a non-COVID illness at the outset of the pandemic. It also covers his triumphant 2023 special From Bleak to Dark and his still-fraught but now simpler relationship with his father.

Through it all Feinartz summons many of Maron’s peers in the comedy world to explain his unique appeal. “Marc’s having a bad time all day. Then gets on stage and destroys the audience,” John Mulaney offers. Is it good? It sure is. – AB

Ash

Flying Lotus fully embraces his love for creature feature spectacles of the 1980s and ‘70s with this trippy throwback to Ridley Scott and John Carpenter movies so seminal you don’t even need us to name them. The trick about Ash, however, is that the musical artist and filmmaker behind the film synthesizes it in a dreamlike fantasia of psychedelic imagery and some gnarly camera tricks which could only be executed in this century.

Our favorite is when Riya—Eiza Gonzaléz’s heroine who awakens on an abandoned spaceship with her crew dead and her memories erased—is forced to defend herself against a monstrous foe in a fevered first-person oner. The camera catches her arms and legs using scalpels, fire, and some badass choreography before things get really whild. It’s all part and parcel for a drive-in dopamine-hit. Other highs include fantasy dream sequences and an ensemble that includes Aaron Paul and The Raid‘s Iko Uwais. – DC

The Astronaut

Kate Mara knows her way around a spaceship. After all, she helped steer one of the great ones in cinema during Ridley Scott’s The Martian. But in that film, she never really got to come back down to Earth. We see a homecoming in Jess Varley’s The Astronaut, though, and it’s a rough landing when the film opens on the wide, wide sea where a decimated space capsule floats. Apparently it needed emergency deployment after something cracked the hull, and even suit, of Mara’s Capt. Sam Walker.

This proves to be a kinetic and spacious kickoff to what is really a claustrophobic thriller. After being monitored for some time, Sam is sent by NASA and her father (Laurence Fishburne) to finish her quarantine on a glorified farmhouse where something seems to continue to stalk the astronaut. The film is obviously playing with tropes, but Varley seems intent on inverting the often reductive parable about the “mad, crazy woman” in touchstones like Repulsion and Black Swan in favor of something optimistic about a woman’s ability to observe eerie changes in the world around her—and within. – DC

The Ballad of Wallis Island

Music can remind us of a time. Music can remind us of a place. Music puts us in touch with the people we once were. There is something sweet about that. It can also be annoying as hell. James Griffiths’ The Ballad of Wallis Island finds humor in both sentiments with an absolute charmer of a movie. As cozy as a cable-knit sweater by the fire on a cold night, Wallis Island takes place in exactly such an environment when struggling folk singer Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) is induced to visit Wallis Island because he is being offered a lot of money to play for an intimate audience of uber-fans. Actually, as it turns out, there is only one fan: Charles (Tim Key). And he’s also invited Herb’s ex and former songwriting collaborator, Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan).

The Ballad of Wallis Island is an absurd premise that most of the collaborators have spent a lot of time thinking about. Basden and Key in fact wrote it as a short film some 18 years ago, which Griffiths directed. Time has given them space to make a feature that’s a little more wistful and reflective on the ephemeral nature of life—while still being funny enough to convince you that Key’s lonely fanboy is neither a creeper nor a danger to Herb and Nell. Although that doesn’t mean trips down memory lane are ever truly safe. – DC

The Bondsman 

Kevin Bacon has been a regular on episodic television since headlining Fox’s The Following in 2013, with lead roles in Amazon’s I Love Dick and three seasons on the acclaimed Showtime series City on a Hill. His new series for Prime Video, The Bondsman, which premiered at SXSW Film & TV Festival, has all the hallmarks of his preferred workday: covered in blood, sticking a chainsaw into a demon’s face. 

“It was a blast,” Bacon says with a laugh while his showrunner, Erik Olsen reminds him that one particular stunt sees Bacon’s character, Hub Halloran, drown a demonic cheerleader in a pool. Bacon himself was in the pool for the stunt. The Bondsman begins with Hub Halloran’s gruesome death and resurrection, maybe the fastest in television history, and what may seem like a demon-hunting “case of the week” storytelling structure quickly world-builds into a much larger narrative arc across season one. 

One of the most prolific working actors with over 107 credits to his name, Bacon “still loves making movies,” but he’s found a home, for now, in the gritty world of Satanic bounty hunters. 

“I went to television very reluctantly when I first signed up for The Following,” Bacon tells Den of Geek. “It’s hard to imagine that there was a world where if you were a movie actor, you just did not do a series. That was just a thing… and all of a sudden I said ‘Wow! This is so much fun! I’m really digging this.’” – Chris Longo

Bulldozer

In the spirit of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, independent TV pilot Bulldolzer is a single-word titled show about a funny woman whose life is falling apart. Written by and starring Joanna Leeds, and directed by her brother Andrew Leeds, Bulldozer picks up with Jo learning of her partner’s infidelity and reacting… poorly. What follows is a fun and breezy half-hour journey of self destruction with only occasional breaks for growth. 

Both Leeds shine in front of and behind the camera, and are bolstered by an impressive supporting cast that includes Nat Faxon, Harvey Guillen, and most notably, Mary Steenburgen, who according to the Leeds, hand-crafted her own blonde wig to better resemble her onscreen daughter Jo. The many famous faces, sunny California setting, and lead character’s very transparent flaws lend a welcome air of Curb Your Enthusiasm to the proceedings. 

It’s an impressive, personal debut but maybe not that personal, as Joanna Leeds told Den of Geek: “I have the same first name as the lead character but we have different last names so we’re not the same person, right? Maybe the awful characteristics about her, I don’t have them!” – AB

Clown in a Cornfield

It’s been 15 years since director Eli Craig has been in Austin for SXSW. The last time was because he brought future cult classic Tucker and Dale vs. Evil to town. He might have another on his hands with this Shudder-bound horror-comedy, Clown in a Cornfield.

Deliberately modeled after the look of other 1980s slasher movies, Clown in a Cornfield plays with the generation gap between Zoomers like Quinn (Katie Douglas) and Xers like her father (Aaron Abrams) when they move to a dying small town with a local mascot called Friendo the Clown. There are some obvious similarities to Terrifier, however this film, which is based on a YA novel by Adam Cesare, is not after the same splatter cinema highs (not least of all because the kills are a lot less inventive). But there’s some clever social satire at play, especially when we reach the third act and the clown takes things out of the cornfield and into the streets. Suddenly, it’s like if Freddy Krueger had a fanged point to make to “kids these days.” – DC

Dead Lover

Grace Glowicki’s sophomore feature came from a simple starting point: “I wanted to make a comedy with my friends,” she tells us. She assembled a “weird writer’s room” to build ideas and jokes. 

What came out of it was a true midnighter (though it was curiously in the festival’s Visions section) that follows a lonely gravedigger who “stinks of corpses.” When the gravedigger, played by Glowicki, has a whirlwind affair cut short by the tragic passing of her lover (played by her frequent collaborator and off-screen partner Ben Petrie), she defies science to bring him back from the dead with unintended consequences.  

If the logline sounds far too familiar, the final outcome is anything but: the film was shot on 16mm with no monitors on set for playback to “honor a more theatrical process.” Glowicki says the structure “forced us to be spontaneous and trust ourselves.” It worked. We awarded Grace and the Dead Lover cast our only Den of Geek award of the festival, for best (and funniest) accent work. 

Dead Lover is bound to be a buzzy camp hit on the festival circuit for its innovative filmmaking approach. Glowicki’s risk paid off as she took home the NEON Auteur Award for Uncompromising Visionary in the Visions Section. It’s admittedly a much more impressive award than ours, but not nearly as fun. – CL

Death of a Unicorn

In the High Middle Ages, unicorns were embraced by the wealthy and moneyed as a metaphor for the appeal of resurrection and everlasting life. In his first feature, writer-director Alex Scharfman shrewdly estimates not much has changed between then and now for the elite gentry classes, even if we get our highs a little differently—be it by vaping, a la the film’s heroine Ridley (Jenna Ortega), or snorting pure concentrated, ground unicorn horn up our noses, a la Will Poulter’s absolute shit-kicker of a trust fund baby, Shep.

Those prove to be just a few of the appeals of this delightfully weird horror-comedy which marries creature feature aesthetics—including a surprisingly heavy emphasis on emulating the first couple of Steven Spielberg-directed Jurassic Park flicks—with class satire that makes direct allusions between the billionaires of today and the liege lords of the past. Somehow the two impulses make a happy union in large part because of the cast, including the aforementioned Poulter, Paul Rudd, and a scene-stealing Richard E. Grant as the patriarch of a pharmaceutical dynasty who discovers on his deathbed that unicorns are real and they have the power to extend life. Pleasantly, though, any attempt to corner that market turns into an absolute bloodbath. – DC

Descendant 

Peter Cilella’s Descendant kicks into gear when Sean Bruner (Ross Marquand), a school security guard who is haunted by childhood trauma, sees a beam of light in the sky. He then wakes up in a hospital and soon he’s inexplicably drawing beautifully artistic renderings of extraterrestrials and desert landscapes. 

Cilella drew inspiration from Jeff Nichols 2011 apocalyptic thriller Take Shelter, which he lauded because of the performances and character development. With Descendant, he knew the genre elements resonate only if he landed the relationship between Marquand’s Sean and Sarah Bolger’s Andrea, who is quickly approaching her baby’s due date.

For Bolger, the slightest hint of extraterrestrial life had her from the jump. “First of all, I’m obsessed with aliens. We’re very knowledgeable about this [topic], UAPs. We’re all in.” On a deeper level, Bolger was excited about exploring the film’s familial themes through the science fiction lens. “If you look at the alien metaphor, it makes people feel isolated or removes them from reality,” she says. “There’s this beautiful thing of fate and identity that’s such a big part of Descendant: who are you as a person? And what changes you? Those factors are wonderful when you can merge them with something science fiction or ethereal or alien.” – CL

Drop

When a studio brings a genre movie to an Austin festival, it usually means they have the goods for winning over a movie-loving crowd. And Christopher Landon (Freaky, Happy Death Day) knows nothing if not how to put audiences on his side, which he does with glee in this Blumhouse original that hews closer to Hitchcockian suspense than straight horror.

The stakes are high, too, even before the genre stuff is introduced, because this film marks the first date of Violet (Meghann Fahy) and Henry (Brandon Sklenar), an immediately adorable would-be couple with enough chemistry to intoxicate the entire posh restaurant with a view where they rendezvous. Unfortunately, one stranger in the back doesn’t want to imbibe. Instead they send increasingly cryptic and threatening AirDrop messages to Violet, slowly urging her to prepare to murder Henry for no apparent reason—or they promise they’ll kill her son at home.

With massive font lettering marking every hideous message on Violet’s phone, and ultra-glossy studio set design and cinematography, this is unapologetic popcorn-programming, and it is absolutely a blast in that lane. There is a more ambitious version of this story that could have been told, but somehow we suspect this is the one you really want if you’re looking for a date night out at the multiplex.  – DC

Fantasy Life

There’s a very deliberate choice made by actor-turned-director Matthew Shear in his first feature. He never shows the moment when his two main characters, who both suffer from differing forms of anxiety, panic. We know they have such attacks, or that they endure dark moments while alone, but those bits are left just ever off-screen. Instead we are asked to deal with the aftermath of the proverbial pyrotechnics. We are asked to deal with what it means to be human.

Casting himself as one of those humans, and relying on a wonderful performance by Amanda Peet for the other, Sheer’s Fantasy Life favors a story of connections (and performance), even when it comes down to a genuinely odd pairing. What Sam (Shear) and Dianne (Peet) have isn’t romantic—per se—but it is nonetheless profound when a thirtysomething failed paralegal becomes the unlikely nanny of Dianne’s three children. It’s messy, sometimes tragicomic, and ultimately sweet. It also features a terrific performance by Alessandro Nivola as David, Dianne’s rock star husband who might want to be home more often. – DC

Fucktoys

Writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram’s idea for Fucktoys started with a phone call from a psychic, who told her to break up with her then boyfriend to avoid further illness and any roadblocks to her career. 

Sriram impulsively obliged and within weeks she had a script for her debut feature, described perfectly in the logline as a “lush 16mm fever dream that reimagines The Fool’s Journey of the Tarot through the story of AP – a sanguine young woman seeking salvation from a curse.” With Fucktoys, the psychic’s prophecy has come true.

The campy fantastical comedy is grotesque, sexy, smutty, and surprisingly poignant when tapping into themes of exploitation and class. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny with standout performances from its leads in Sriram and Sadie Scott, as well as supporting roles from Brandon Flynn, Damian Young, Big Freedia, and François Arnaud. 

The film is set in Trashtown, which Sriram described as “a neglected Americana yesteryear landscape. Trashtown is a term of endearment. We love Trashtown.” Sriram’s singular vision for Trashtown earned her the festival’s Special Jury Award for a Multi-Hyphenate. It was well-deserved for pushing forward a bold, darkly funny sensibility unlike any film we screened at the festival, a new genre the cast described as “neo-camp.” Long live Trashtown. – CL

Good Boy

Writer-director Ben Leonberg and producer Kari Fischer might have stumbled on one of the best setups for an original horror movie we’ve heard in years. Ever notice how your dog or cat stares off into the darkness of empty rooms? Has it ever creeped you out to ponder what it is they’re getting so worked up about after midnight? Well, Good Boy has the answers, and they’re provided through a dog’s perspective.

What could be a gimmick ultimately works as a bit of inspired, if rough-around-the-edges, genre moviemaking. As Leonberg’s feature debut, Good Boy was shot largely like a documentary with Leonberg and Fischer’s own pup, Indy, standing in as the poor dog in a house haunted with secrets and despair, and an unseen owner who is not particularly warm and cuddly. The effect is a definite low-budget indie, but one with a lot of style and atmosphere that manipulates the audience into investing in one dog’s seeming plight. Owing a bit to silent movies as well, Indy proves a compelling lead while turning the corner and seeing what goes bump in the night. – DC

Government Cheese

How far can magical thinking take you? In Government Cheese, Hampton Chambers (David Oyelowo) will endeavor to find out. Fresh out of prison in 1969 Los Angeles, this convicted burglar turned man of faith is putting his family’s financial well-being in the hands of his latest radical doo-hicky—a self-sharpening drill called a “Bit Magician.” Will that be enough to realize the American dream? Hell, will it be enough to pay off the debts Hampton unknowingly incurred from the dangerous Prevost brothers? Guess we’ll find out!

Government Cheese is a stylish 10-episode series from Apple TV+ that combines the timeless story of Black family life in California with some magical realism. Show creator Paul Hunter (previously known for his revolutionary work in commercial campaigns and music videos) cites his own father as inspiration for Hampton Chambers—a man powered by ambition and that titular government food product that helped fuel working class families. – AB

Happy Face

Ever sit back and think about how many pop songs have the word “Happy” in the title? Paramount+ true crime series Happy Killer certainly has and it puts those cheery tunes to ironic good use in this dark serial killer drama. Adapted from the 2018 podcast of the same name, Happy Face follows Melissa Moore (Annaleigh Ashford), a woman who deals with the fallout of discovering that her father (Dennis Quaid) is a prolific serial killer known as Happy Face. 

While that may sound like a stranger-than-fiction premise, not only is Melissa Moore’s experience real, she serves as an executive producer on this project. Moore’s involvement gives the proceedings an added element of realism, even as the show indulges in some by-the-numbers true crime pop storytelling. – AB

Hallow Road

The best horror movie we saw while in Austin, Babak Anvari’s Hallow Road is a nearly-perfect exercise in descent. It begins with a plunge into the worst nightmare of any parent: that call in the middle of the night from a child whose life has been forever changed. In the case of Maddie and Frank (Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys), that comes after their daughter Alice (voiced by Megan McDonnell) has hit a stranger in the middle of the night while driving alone on Hallow Road in the deep woods of Wales. Now she wants Mom and Dad to come fix it for her.

What starts as one type of nightmare quickly cascades into something far more slippery and sinister. Hallow Road is a dark fable as grim as the fairy stories of yore, and as unforgiving as an Old Testament deity. Maddie and Frank have differing views of parenting and of their daughter, and both are put to the extreme test in a taut 80 minutes that mostly take place inside of their car as they drive from their suburban home deep into the wilderness. Often as much about how they listen to the pleas and fears of their daughter over the phone as it is how they try to guide her, Anvari’s camera stalks and shadows the lines of their faces until even their countenances become haunted things and they discover what lies at the end of their surreal journey into dark. It’s a relentless triumph. Stay for the credits. – DC

Holland

Mimi Cave’s first feature was the seductively twisted horror-comedy Fresh. Her second seeks to similarly beguile its audience into thinking they’re getting one type of movie only to discover another as we enter the world of Holland, Michigan—a real Midwestern town with an affinity for things so Dutch that it verges on fetishistic.

It is there that Nancy Vandergroot (Nicole Kidman) lives with her perfect husband Fred (Matthew Macfadyen) and tween son Harry (Jude Hill). Theirs is such an idyllic existence that Nancy seemingly wants to create a sense of danger to spice up her life, or at least find an excuse to hang out with a fellow teacher named Dave (Gael Garcia Bernal) who clearly is carrying a torch for her in the instructor’s lounge.

Look, there’s obviously something ominous occurring beneath the surface, and Holland takes its time getting there. But truthfully, when the revelation finally comes, it feels ultimately in service to a sum lesser than its parts. But it does give Kidman a juicy role to play as a Midwestern mom who kind of stumbles her way into a genuine thriller, which is likely why such an unsatisfying screenplay got made.

LifeHack

Producer Timur Bekmambetov has spent about a decade making screenlife movies like Searching and Unfriended. Some have been clever genre inversions and others tacky high-concepts. All, however, have felt largely like an older generation trying to imagine what Zoomers’ online life might be. LifeHack, by contrast, is actually made by youts’, which might be why it amounts to a dazzling, fast-moving plunge into a digital lifestyle that is all things at once: coming of age melodrama, high-stakes heist escapism, and finally an expression that the “kids are all right” even when scrolling endlessly through Minecraft group chats.

Directed by Ronan Corrigan and featuring a cast that includes both a Wednesday player (Georgie Farmer) and an honest-to-goodness YouTuber (James Scholz), there is indie gumption and rebellious zeal to the film that is infectious. It also taps into the modern zeitgeist of eating the rich since this teenaged, keyboard-ratpack is off to snatch a crypto bro’s BitCoin reserves. It’s all flash and a lot of fun. – DC

Mix Tape

“You never forget the boy who makes you your first mix tape.” So says Allison (Teresa Palmer) near the conclusion of Mix Tape’s first episode. The four-episode series, an Irish-Australian joint production, then goes on to reveal just how right she is.

Mix Tape is a decades-spanning romantic saga, picking up with a young Daniel (Rory Walton-Smith) and Allison (Florence Hunt) at a house party in 1989 Sheffield house party before jetting off to a future where the pair (now played by Palmer and Jim Sturgess) is set to reconnect over their shared love of music. Mix Tape is a lowkey, yet affecting sonic journey. – AB

New Jack City

Boy, I’ve been itching for a new silly Blaxploitation tribute romp for some time. The gap left by Michael Jai White’s Black Dynamite is a void that I thought couldn’t have been filled. Lanfia Wal’s New Jack Fury isn’t quite there, but it delivers via its sheer silliness and charm. If Black Dynamite was a throwback to the ‘70s, New Jack Fury is for the ‘80s nerds who grew up playing Double Dragon and clips of Michael Jackson’s moon walk.

Drenched with ‘80s retro color and captivating green screen backgrounds—more impressive art direction than most recent blockbusters I’d say—the film follows Dylan Gamble (Andre Hall), a former cop trying to rescue his girlfriend Tanisha (Ally Renee) from evil kingpin Silkwaan Styles (Page Kennedy). He enlists two street-smart associates Hendrix Moon (Paul Wheeler) and rival Leslie Kindall (Michael Trapson) to help him find her, and nothing goes the way they expect. The movie is one hilarious over the top gag after the next with the hit ratio being extremely high. It’s cartoonish in the best way possible. Furthermore, its narrative is framed like an after school special, as every act-break is accompanied by a hilarious 1980s-styled commercial that’s as stupid and funny as the main movie. The film is a straight silliness and irresistible romp with so much passion worn on its sleeves that I had a blast. – RJ

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie

In 2017, Matt Johnson came by himself to SXSW to screen three episodes of his webseries turned TV series, Nivanna The Band The Show. “I had never seen a crowd in my life react the way they did to the TV show,” he tells us of the reception in Austin. 

Johnson returned home to Canada and the screening became a legend within the show’s creative and production team. It became the goal of Johnson and co-creator and co-star Jay McCarrol to bring a feature length version of the show and premiere it at SXSW. They submitted an unfinished cut and still made the festival. For SXSW it was worth the risk. For Johnson and McCarrol it was well worth the wait. 

We don’t time festival ovations with a stopwatch here like other outlets, but it comfortably felt like the audience reception to Nirvanna The Band the Show The Movie was the longest at SXSW 2025. The data backs up our claim: Nirvanna won the 2025 audience award for the midnighters section. The film sees Johnson and McCarrol reprise their roles as bandmates who attempt to scheme their way to a gig at Toronto’s Rivoli nightclub, to no success. In their most elaborate plan yet, they Back to the Future their way to 2008. Using clever editing techniques to splice present day and archival footage, and featuring daring stunts on the unsuspecting public in downtown Toronto, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie earned every bit of the riotous energy at the ZACH Theatre.

It’s been 17 years since the original Nirvanna webseries was released. Since then, the project ran for two seasons as a full-fledged TV show on the ill-fated Viceland, Johnson had a hit feature film with 2023 SXSW darling Blackberry (on which McCarroll did the music), and they’ve already filmed a third season. They’re hopeful a positive reception to the feature film will help find a U.S. distributor for the film and a new home for season three. Until then, the Canadians are happy to bask in a warm, if not red hot reception way south of the Toronto border. “It felt like a gift that we gave to all the fans who stuck with us,” McCarrol says. – CL

O’Dessa

Eight years after knocking Austin’s socks off with Patti Cake$, Geremy Jasper returns with O’Dessa, a niche fairytale that will appeal to a very specific kind of nerd. Did you grow up loving post-apocalyptic or dystopian wasteland movies with dilapidated mega-cities? These would be your Blade Runners and Tim Burton Batmans, but also Dark Citys and Streets of Fires? Do you know all the words to “Science Fiction Double Feature” and Meatloaf’s big moment in Rocky Horror Picture Show? If that Venn Diagram crossed over and found you smiling at both prospects, then O’Dessa’s rock opera silliness is for you.

It certainly was for me during an opening credits crawl that looked as if it had been panned and scanned for VHS in another century. This sets the stage for a parable about a farmgirl (Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink) with dreams about being a musician and wanderer (or rambler) in the big city, even as that city is ruled by a despot (Murray Bartlett). There she might find love, or at least a partner in crime opposite a fabulous Kelvin Harrison Jr., and a reality show where contestants sing to the death. It’s bizarre, fleeting, and yet filled with the kind aspirational power of rock that makes movies worth seeing. In another era, it would be a cult favorite at the video store waiting to be discovered by hopeless nerd romantics. Hopefully today, it still finds the descendents of that on Hulu at the end of the month.  – DC

Sally

Science Fair director Cristina Costantini returns with an unflinching, deeply emotional portrait of astronaut Sally Ride, and her 27-year relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy that was kept from the public spotlight until Ride’s passing in 2012.  In third grade, Costantini painted a life-sized mural of Sally Ride in her jumpsuit and by the time she was ready for high school she was inspired to find a career in science in part because of Ride’s story.

“I was struck by this feeling of disbelief that she could have went through something like that,” Costantini tells us of her motivation to put the story on film. “NASA was barely ready for a woman at that time. The idea that she was also queer and closeted at such a homophobic time, it was illegal to be gay in Texas at that time.”

Sally uses a mix of original audio interviews  from Ride, as well as recreations of Sally and Tam’s time together to supplement a lack of documentation of their relationship. The film dives into women and LGBTQ+ rights through interviews with Billie Jean King, members of the Ride family, and astronauts from Sally Ride’s NASA class of 1978: Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, John Fabian, and Steve Hawley, Sally’s ex-husband. Ultimately Tam’s journey provides a gut-wrenching look into Ride’s life and the power dynamics and pressure that come with fame.

“Tam is an incredible gift to a documentary filmmaker,” Costantini says. “She is an amazing storyteller. She has an incredible memory. But more than anything she is willing to be vulnerable to tell the story of what it was like to fall in love in this secret relationship.”  – CL

Slanted

Slanted was the big winner at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, taking home the Grand Jury Award in the Narrative Feature Competition. And to that we say… good on ya, South By! This comedy-drama from Australian filmmaker Amy Wang is an entertaining and affecting coming-of-age story with a clever supernatural bent.

Shirley Chen stars as Joan Huang, a second-generation Chinese-American high school student who just wants to be prom queen. To make that dream a reality she undergoes a controversial “ethnic modification” procedure and comes out the other side as Ghostbusters: Afterlife star Mckenna Grace. Okay, Shirley doesn’t become literally Mckenna Grace, but Grace does take over the role as the now white-passing Shirley.

Slanted has as much fun with that premise as you’d hope while also never losing sight of the complicated racial dynamics and youthful insecurities at play. Call it The Substance for the YA crowd: smart, silly, and satisfyingly gross. – AB

Stars Diner

We have but one simple rule at Den of Geek’s TV section: if you open your indie comedy pilot with a jaunty ‘80s sitcom theme song, you get included in the festival roundup. Three cheers to Stars Diner creators Fidel Ruiz-Healy, Tyler Walker, and Mary Neely for making it happen.

Stars Diner is a whacky pastiche of laughtrack sitcoms set in the titular diner where everything is always going to shit. Not only will the steak get overcooked but the nearby supervolcano may exterminate all life in Fresno. Blessed with an endearing DIY energy (Ruiz-Healy handles all the exterior shots as miniature and “PS1 graphics”), Stars Diner should get a look from distributors and networks that don’t mind a little bit of anarchy. – AB

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror

The Rocky Horror Picture Show remains the longest running theatrically released film in history. Seriously, if your hometown has any sort of cool cred, it’s playing this Saturday at midnight somewhere. Yet, curiously, there has never been a major, comprehensive documentary about the phenomenon lest you count a ‘90s Behind the Music episode on VH1. Director Linus O’Brien, son of Richard O’Brien, and writer/producer Avner Shiloah correct that oversight with Strange Journey, aka the Rocky Horror Documentary.

Filled with most of the surviving stars and contributors to both the 1975 film and the original 1973 stage musical who shaped the lore, Strange Journey doesn’t necessarily teach diehards anything new, but it immortalizes for posterity the memories of all involved in a concise and elegantly told format. O’Brien and Shiloah also make the astute choice to intertwine the building of Rocky Horror with the legacy of its myth—eschewing a linear format in favor of using the feature-length to expand on why this show became such a conduit for counterculture, freedom, and escape. May it continue to provide that time warp release for another 50 years. – DC

The Surrender

Take a touch of Ari Aster’s Hereditary, add a heaping dose of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, and blend them together with a host of chopped up limbs and you’ve got the formula for Julia Max’s macabre horror flick, The Surrender. 

The Boys’ Colby Minifie stars as Megan, a woman who returns home to take care of her terminally ill father. After Megan’s dad succumbs to the inevitable, her mother Barbara (Kate Burton) turns to some alternative methods to bring him back. The Surrender leaves too much potential woo-woo wellness culture satire on the table but ultimately succeeds as a horror movie sizzle reel for all involved. – AB

The Threesome

If the star-crossed entanglements of characters played by Zoey Deutch and Jonah Hauer-King aren’t enough to sell you on this rom-com, then a first-act twist anchored by Bottoms breakout Ruby Cruz pushes The Threesome out of familiar territory and into something much closer to comedic bliss. 

Director Chad Hartigan masterfully balances the film’s big hearted moments of Ethan Ogilby’s script with key supporting roles from comedy TV mainstays like Jaboukie Young-White and Josh Segarra, and standout quips and one-liners from Deutch. 

“Whenever I read a script and find myself reading the lines out loud, I know I really want to do [the film],” Deutch tells us. “It’s almost like my body has a physical reaction to wanting to jump in and figure out how I would gel with [the role]. I loved the script.” – CL

The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick

Director Pete Ohs had a SXSW breakout in 2022 with Jethica and returned in 2025 with The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, a creeping rural psychological thriller. Like his past films, Ohs’ creative process is unique in that he shares writing credits with his actors, and they’re constantly evolving the narrative or solving problems on set together in real time. 

“Filmmaking is a collaborative medium, but that approach is extra collaborative,” Ohs says.  

He calls the process his “table of bubbles.” A shoot begins with an outline of the story and, with a “minimal crew anchored by a key location,” they shoot chronologically while writing scenes together. Zoë Chao, Callie Hernandez, and James Cusati-Moyer, and Jeremy O. Harris, the top four on a sparse call sheet, are all credited as writers on the film in which Chao’s Yvonne develops troubling symptoms after a tick bite during a weekend away at a secluded house amongst friends new and old.

Harris, who executive produced and previously collaborated with Ohs on the editing of Harris’ Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play., credited the director for building a creatively freeing atmosphere on set.

“The genre isn’t horror. It’s much like [David] Lynch. It’s Ohs-ian. Part of being in an Ohs-ian universe is saying ‘yes’ to his table of bubbles. It’s a very fragile process to say ‘yes’ to what’s on the table to keep the table alive. It’s like being in film school with the best, most active professor.” – CL

We Bury the Dead

It seems increasingly tough these days to produce a zombie movie that feels fresh or innovative. So the fact that Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead finds a new way into the genre via We Bury the Dead makes the horror-drama hybrid one of the nicer genre surprises out of Austin this year. Technically a post-apocalyptic movie set down under where Ava (Daisy Ridley) is a woman looking for her missing husband after the world stopped, the truth is We Bury the Dead is the first undead parable in-tune with a post-COVID and post-Trump world.

In the film, life on the Australian island of Tasmania ended long before the story properly begins, with most of the inhabitants dropping dead after the U.S. government accidentally detonated an EMP off the coast of a sovereign ally. Oopsie. Curiouser still, a few of the dead won’t stay down. The hapless local authorities euphemistically refer to these folks as coming “back online.” Still, everyone is promised that the dead, and not-so-dead, will be treated with the “dignity” they deserve.

It’s in this context that Ridley’s Ava enters the island as a member of the Bodies Retrieval Unit. Like everyone else in the gig, she’s looking for a closure that will not come, and a loved one who at best will be a snarling corpse. The irony, and day-to-day indignity, of such a prospect grounds the horror in an eerie verisimilitude. Ridley does raw work, too, when encountering others haunted by those, uh, terminally online. – DC

Best Music Sets & Showcases

Initial reports that SXSW’s music festival is in a state of flux for 2026 have since been clarified by the event organizers. The show will go on, albeit reduced by two days. There has been a dramatic decrease in artist participation over the decade or so, and a shortening of the SXSW 2026’s overall schedule due to construction on Austin’s new convention center will inevitably lead to changes for the music festival that has been a staple of the event for nearly 40 years. 

The artists that did travel to SXSW 2025 still packed a punch, though. Of the artists we selected for our SXSW 2025 music preview, we caught sets by Aussie six-piece Coldwave (photo above), who captivated a packed inside stage audience at Mohawk during a late-night set, and Brazilian outfit Terraplana closed out Valhalla with a mesmerizing shoegaze set that evokes emo and grunge inspiration. 

From artists who also made our SXSW Music Mixtape playlist, we saw Sierra Spirit, a Native American indie artist from Oklahoma, shine during an intimate set with standout tracks “bleed you” and “better wild,” and Norway’s indie pop math rockers Mall Girl impressed with tantalizing vocals and thumping guitars inspired by midwest emo (see “Midwest”). 

The British Music Embassy, one of our favorite mainstays at SXSW, once again filled out one of the festival’s strongest lineups with strong sets from some of the buzzy bands showcasing last week, including Freak Slug, Gurriers, and Delivery. 

Finally, we stopped by the Sounds Australia House on Thursday for a second Coldwave set and photoshoot to make sure our eyes and ears didn’t deceive us. They delivered yet again. And they were followed by Brisbane three-piece Dune Rats (pictured above), who lit up Creek and Cave with their energetic mix of rowdy throwback pop punk. – CL

The post Everything We Saw at SXSW 2025  appeared first on Den of Geek.

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

Think of your favorite film. It more than likely follows a three-act construction that’s frequently seen in movies: the layout, the conflict, and the resolution. The second act shows what exists now, and it helps you get to know the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. The fight begins in Act 2, which introduces the issue. Here, issues grow or get worse. The solution comes in the third and final action. This is where the issues are resolved and the figures learn and change. This structure, in my opinion, is also a fantastic way to think about customer research, and it might be particularly useful for explaining user research to others.

Use story as a framework when conducting analysis.

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see studies as being dispensable. Research is frequently one of the first things to go when finances or deadlines are tight. Instead of investing in study, some goods professionals rely on manufacturers or—worse—their personal judgment to make the “right” options for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may lead some groups, but that approach can so easily miss the chance to solve people ‘ real issues. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. Design is enhanced by customer research. It keeps it on trail, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of problems with your goods and taking corrective actions can help you be ahead of your competition.

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

Act one: layout

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act two: fight

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not to say that the “movies” —remote sessions—aren’t a good option. Remote training 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. Additionally, they make access to a much wider user base geographically. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working.

You can ask real users questions to understand their thoughts and understanding of the solution as a result of usability testing, whether it is done remotely or in person. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. You can also test your own ideas and determine whether they are true. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. The excitement centers on Act 2, but there are also potential surprises in that Act. This is equally true of usability tests. Unexpected things that participants say frequently alter the way you look at things, and these unexpected revelations can lead to unexpected turns in the narrative.

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

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

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

Act three: resolution

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

This act is primarily 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 provide the stakeholders with their suggestions and direction for developing this vision.

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

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

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be visual, like quick sketches of how a new design could look that solves a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the session is over when you’ve concluded by bridging the gaps and offering suggestions for improvement. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. This stage provides stakeholders with the next steps and, hoped, the motivation 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. The three-act structure of user research contains all the components for a good story:

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

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

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

The researcher plays a variety of roles, including producer, director, and storyteller. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters ( in the research ). And the audience is the audience, as well. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users ‘ stories through research. By the end, the parties should leave with a goal and an eagerness to address the product’s flaws.

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

This article contains spoilers for The Electric State. The Electric State has many problems: derivative plot, lackluster acting, indifferent visual style. But the most troubling issue might be the way it portrays AI. In The Electric State‘s fictional 1994, a technological leap in 1990 allowed machines to become self-aware. They immediately rebelled against their creators, […]

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And that’s another SXSW for the history books. At the same festival that saw a keynote talk given by the CEO trying to bring the Woolly Mammoth back, cinephiles and genre enthusiasts also got a new Babak Anvari banger, the unicorn horror-comedy you never knew you needed, and a reported return to form by Matthew McConaughey after he stepped away from the big screen for the last six years.

It was a lot of fun, a lot of work, and as always over too soon. (Spoiler: McConaughey’s much celebrated The Rivals of the Amaziah King is one of the ones we missed!) Be that as it may, we still saw a whole lot from the Film and TV festival selection during our limited time on the ground. Here’s the round-up to prove it.

#1 Happy Family USA

Animated sitcoms don’t usually make a habit of concluding their first episode with the events of Sept. 11, 2001. But then again not many animated sitcoms are Prime Video’s #1 Happy Family USA. Created by comedy superstar Ramy Youssef and South Park producer Pam Brady, #1 Happy Family USA follows the Husseins—a Muslim family in New Jersey doing their best to project patriotism amid a very dark time in American history. 

While that setup is bleak (and undoubtedly reflects Youssef’s own experiences growing up as a Muslim-American during the turn of the 21st century), the series ends up being quite a cheerful experience. Young Rumi Hussein (Youssef) befriends a talking lamb and tries to bang his teacher (who may or may not have a personal connection to His Airness, Michael Jordan). His dad Hussein Hussein (also Youssef) breaks out into pro-America song numbers routinely. Also, Grandma (Randa Jarrar) appears to have Doc Ock arm attachments.

Each episode of the show, which has already scored a two-season order at Prime, opens with faux MPAA text warning “Rated H for Haram: Allah please forgive mistakes in this program.” Rated H it may be, but that could just as easily stand for “Halal.” – Alec Bojalad

American Sweatshop

Most folks objectively recognize the internet is a terrible and unpleasant place. But most of us also never think about the poor souls who are encouraged (tricked?) into trying to clean it up for lawsuit-fearing tech companies. Director Uta Briesewitz and star/producer Lili Reinhart care though. And maybe they can convince you to put down the doom-scroller in your hand for a while with American Sweatshop.

In the film, written by Matthew Nemeth, Reinhart plays a young person who thinks the gig of a media moderator at the fictional company of Paladin is a foot in the door to tech, but in truth it is an invitation for the most vile and terrible things on the web being seared into her brain. Briesewitz wisely elects to mostly obscure what those things are. But we glimpse them in miniature reflection on Reinhart’s pupils as they burrow into her soul. This acts as the opening to a larger drama with thriller elements as Reinhart’s Daisy demands for more to be done than simply deleting harmful (and possibly murderous) content. She wants revenge. Yet the film is at its best when wallowing in the camaraderie and occasional gallows humor of a young staff that looks increasingly as hollowed out as meat in a frontline’s grinder. – David Crow

The Age of Disclosure

Ready Player One’s producer Dan Farah makes the leap to documentary filmmaking by chronicling decade-spanning observations on UFOs and other alleged non-human organisms with the help of 34 talking heads who were/are U.S. government, military, and intelligence officials. While interesting at first, the documentary spins its wheels over the course of 108 minutes, failing to add any substantial evidence over the subject it highlights, especially since much of its on screen information is readily accessible. – Rendy Jones

Are We Good?

“Are we good?” That phrase began as a verbal tic from comedian Marc Maron as he launched his eventual medium-conquering podcast WTF in 2009. Maron would conclude episodes with that question, often posed to his comedic peers whom he previously was not, in fact, good with. Nowadays Maron is more or less good with everyone, having long ago conquered both his personal demons and professional insecurities. It’s only fitting then that the documentary about him bears that familiar phrase.

Directed by Steven Feinartz, Are We Good? tells the whole story of Maron while honing in on his particularly chaotic 2020s. The doc is rich in pathos, covering the death of Maron’s partner, filmmaker Lynn Shelton, to a non-COVID illness at the outset of the pandemic. It also covers his triumphant 2023 special From Bleak to Dark and his still-fraught but now simpler relationship with his father.

Through it all Feinartz summons many of Maron’s peers in the comedy world to explain his unique appeal. “Marc’s having a bad time all day. Then gets on stage and destroys the audience,” John Mulaney offers. Is it good? It sure is. – AB

Ash

Flying Lotus fully embraces his love for creature feature spectacles of the 1980s and ‘70s with this trippy throwback to Ridley Scott and John Carpenter movies so seminal you don’t even need us to name them. The trick about Ash, however, is that the musical artist and filmmaker behind the film synthesizes it in a dreamlike fantasia of psychedelic imagery and some gnarly camera tricks which could only be executed in this century.

Our favorite is when Riya—Eiza Gonzaléz’s heroine who awakens on an abandoned spaceship with her crew dead and her memories erased—is forced to defend herself against a monstrous foe in a fevered first-person oner. The camera catches her arms and legs using scalpels, fire, and some badass choreography before things get really whild. It’s all part and parcel for a drive-in dopamine-hit. Other highs include fantasy dream sequences and an ensemble that includes Aaron Paul and The Raid‘s Iko Uwais. – DC

The Astronaut

Kate Mara knows her way around a spaceship. After all, she helped steer one of the great ones in cinema during Ridley Scott’s The Martian. But in that film, she never really got to come back down to Earth. We see a homecoming in Jess Varley’s The Astronaut, though, and it’s a rough landing when the film opens on the wide, wide sea where a decimated space capsule floats. Apparently it needed emergency deployment after something cracked the hull, and even suit, of Mara’s Capt. Sam Walker.

This proves to be a kinetic and spacious kickoff to what is really a claustrophobic thriller. After being monitored for some time, Sam is sent by NASA and her father (Laurence Fishburne) to finish her quarantine on a glorified farmhouse where something seems to continue to stalk the astronaut. The film is obviously playing with tropes, but Varley seems intent on inverting the often reductive parable about the “mad, crazy woman” in touchstones like Repulsion and Black Swan in favor of something optimistic about a woman’s ability to observe eerie changes in the world around her—and within. – DC

The Ballad of Wallis Island

Music can remind us of a time. Music can remind us of a place. Music puts us in touch with the people we once were. There is something sweet about that. It can also be annoying as hell. James Griffiths’ The Ballad of Wallis Island finds humor in both sentiments with an absolute charmer of a movie. As cozy as a cable-knit sweater by the fire on a cold night, Wallis Island takes place in exactly such an environment when struggling folk singer Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) is induced to visit Wallis Island because he is being offered a lot of money to play for an intimate audience of uber-fans. Actually, as it turns out, there is only one fan: Charles (Tim Key). And he’s also invited Herb’s ex and former songwriting collaborator, Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan).

The Ballad of Wallis Island is an absurd premise that most of the collaborators have spent a lot of time thinking about. Basden and Key in fact wrote it as a short film some 18 years ago, which Griffiths directed. Time has given them space to make a feature that’s a little more wistful and reflective on the ephemeral nature of life—while still being funny enough to convince you that Key’s lonely fanboy is neither a creeper nor a danger to Herb and Nell. Although that doesn’t mean trips down memory lane are ever truly safe. – DC

The Bondsman 

Kevin Bacon has been a regular on episodic television since headlining Fox’s The Following in 2013, with lead roles in Amazon’s I Love Dick and three seasons on the acclaimed Showtime series City on a Hill. His new series for Prime Video, The Bondsman, which premiered at SXSW Film & TV Festival, has all the hallmarks of his preferred workday: covered in blood, sticking a chainsaw into a demon’s face. 

“It was a blast,” Bacon says with a laugh while his showrunner, Erik Olsen reminds him that one particular stunt sees Bacon’s character, Hub Halloran, drown a demonic cheerleader in a pool. Bacon himself was in the pool for the stunt. The Bondsman begins with Hub Halloran’s gruesome death and resurrection, maybe the fastest in television history, and what may seem like a demon-hunting “case of the week” storytelling structure quickly world-builds into a much larger narrative arc across season one. 

One of the most prolific working actors with over 107 credits to his name, Bacon “still loves making movies,” but he’s found a home, for now, in the gritty world of Satanic bounty hunters. 

“I went to television very reluctantly when I first signed up for The Following,” Bacon tells Den of Geek. “It’s hard to imagine that there was a world where if you were a movie actor, you just did not do a series. That was just a thing… and all of a sudden I said ‘Wow! This is so much fun! I’m really digging this.’” – Chris Longo

Bulldozer

In the spirit of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, independent TV pilot Bulldolzer is a single-word titled show about a funny woman whose life is falling apart. Written by and starring Joanna Leeds, and directed by her brother Andrew Leeds, Bulldozer picks up with Jo learning of her partner’s infidelity and reacting… poorly. What follows is a fun and breezy half-hour journey of self destruction with only occasional breaks for growth. 

Both Leeds shine in front of and behind the camera, and are bolstered by an impressive supporting cast that includes Nat Faxon, Harvey Guillen, and most notably, Mary Steenburgen, who according to the Leeds, hand-crafted her own blonde wig to better resemble her onscreen daughter Jo. The many famous faces, sunny California setting, and lead character’s very transparent flaws lend a welcome air of Curb Your Enthusiasm to the proceedings. 

It’s an impressive, personal debut but maybe not that personal, as Joanna Leeds told Den of Geek: “I have the same first name as the lead character but we have different last names so we’re not the same person, right? Maybe the awful characteristics about her, I don’t have them!” – AB

Clown in a Cornfield

It’s been 15 years since director Eli Craig has been in Austin for SXSW. The last time was because he brought future cult classic Tucker and Dale vs. Evil to town. He might have another on his hands with this Shudder-bound horror-comedy, Clown in a Cornfield.

Deliberately modeled after the look of other 1980s slasher movies, Clown in a Cornfield plays with the generation gap between Zoomers like Quinn (Katie Douglas) and Xers like her father (Aaron Abrams) when they move to a dying small town with a local mascot called Friendo the Clown. There are some obvious similarities to Terrifier, however this film, which is based on a YA novel by Adam Cesare, is not after the same splatter cinema highs (not least of all because the kills are a lot less inventive). But there’s some clever social satire at play, especially when we reach the third act and the clown takes things out of the cornfield and into the streets. Suddenly, it’s like if Freddy Krueger had a fanged point to make to “kids these days.” – DC

Dead Lover

Grace Glowicki’s sophomore feature came from a simple starting point: “I wanted to make a comedy with my friends,” she tells us. She assembled a “weird writer’s room” to build ideas and jokes. 

What came out of it was a true midnighter (though it was curiously in the festival’s Visions section) that follows a lonely gravedigger who “stinks of corpses.” When the gravedigger, played by Glowicki, has a whirlwind affair cut short by the tragic passing of her lover (played by her frequent collaborator and off-screen partner Ben Petrie), she defies science to bring him back from the dead with unintended consequences.  

If the logline sounds far too familiar, the final outcome is anything but: the film was shot on 16mm with no monitors on set for playback to “honor a more theatrical process.” Glowicki says the structure “forced us to be spontaneous and trust ourselves.” It worked. We awarded Grace and the Dead Lover cast our only Den of Geek award of the festival, for best (and funniest) accent work. 

Dead Lover is bound to be a buzzy camp hit on the festival circuit for its innovative filmmaking approach. Glowicki’s risk paid off as she took home the NEON Auteur Award for Uncompromising Visionary in the Visions Section. It’s admittedly a much more impressive award than ours, but not nearly as fun. – CL

Death of a Unicorn

In the High Middle Ages, unicorns were embraced by the wealthy and moneyed as a metaphor for the appeal of resurrection and everlasting life. In his first feature, writer-director Alex Scharfman shrewdly estimates not much has changed between then and now for the elite gentry classes, even if we get our highs a little differently—be it by vaping, a la the film’s heroine Ridley (Jenna Ortega), or snorting pure concentrated, ground unicorn horn up our noses, a la Will Poulter’s absolute shit-kicker of a trust fund baby, Shep.

Those prove to be just a few of the appeals of this delightfully weird horror-comedy which marries creature feature aesthetics—including a surprisingly heavy emphasis on emulating the first couple of Steven Spielberg-directed Jurassic Park flicks—with class satire that makes direct allusions between the billionaires of today and the liege lords of the past. Somehow the two impulses make a happy union in large part because of the cast, including the aforementioned Poulter, Paul Rudd, and a scene-stealing Richard E. Grant as the patriarch of a pharmaceutical dynasty who discovers on his deathbed that unicorns are real and they have the power to extend life. Pleasantly, though, any attempt to corner that market turns into an absolute bloodbath. – DC

Descendant 

Peter Cilella’s Descendant kicks into gear when Sean Bruner (Ross Marquand), a school security guard who is haunted by childhood trauma, sees a beam of light in the sky. He then wakes up in a hospital and soon he’s inexplicably drawing beautifully artistic renderings of extraterrestrials and desert landscapes. 

Cilella drew inspiration from Jeff Nichols 2011 apocalyptic thriller Take Shelter, which he lauded because of the performances and character development. With Descendant, he knew the genre elements resonate only if he landed the relationship between Marquand’s Sean and Sarah Bolger’s Andrea, who is quickly approaching her baby’s due date.

For Bolger, the slightest hint of extraterrestrial life had her from the jump. “First of all, I’m obsessed with aliens. We’re very knowledgeable about this [topic], UAPs. We’re all in.” On a deeper level, Bolger was excited about exploring the film’s familial themes through the science fiction lens. “If you look at the alien metaphor, it makes people feel isolated or removes them from reality,” she says. “There’s this beautiful thing of fate and identity that’s such a big part of Descendant: who are you as a person? And what changes you? Those factors are wonderful when you can merge them with something science fiction or ethereal or alien.” – CL

Drop

When a studio brings a genre movie to an Austin festival, it usually means they have the goods for winning over a movie-loving crowd. And Christopher Landon (Freaky, Happy Death Day) knows nothing if not how to put audiences on his side, which he does with glee in this Blumhouse original that hews closer to Hitchcockian suspense than straight horror.

The stakes are high, too, even before the genre stuff is introduced, because this film marks the first date of Violet (Meghann Fahy) and Henry (Brandon Sklenar), an immediately adorable would-be couple with enough chemistry to intoxicate the entire posh restaurant with a view where they rendezvous. Unfortunately, one stranger in the back doesn’t want to imbibe. Instead they send increasingly cryptic and threatening AirDrop messages to Violet, slowly urging her to prepare to murder Henry for no apparent reason—or they promise they’ll kill her son at home.

With massive font lettering marking every hideous message on Violet’s phone, and ultra-glossy studio set design and cinematography, this is unapologetic popcorn-programming, and it is absolutely a blast in that lane. There is a more ambitious version of this story that could have been told, but somehow we suspect this is the one you really want if you’re looking for a date night out at the multiplex.  – DC

Fantasy Life

There’s a very deliberate choice made by actor-turned-director Matthew Shear in his first feature. He never shows the moment when his two main characters, who both suffer from differing forms of anxiety, panic. We know they have such attacks, or that they endure dark moments while alone, but those bits are left just ever off-screen. Instead we are asked to deal with the aftermath of the proverbial pyrotechnics. We are asked to deal with what it means to be human.

Casting himself as one of those humans, and relying on a wonderful performance by Amanda Peet for the other, Sheer’s Fantasy Life favors a story of connections (and performance), even when it comes down to a genuinely odd pairing. What Sam (Shear) and Dianne (Peet) have isn’t romantic—per se—but it is nonetheless profound when a thirtysomething failed paralegal becomes the unlikely nanny of Dianne’s three children. It’s messy, sometimes tragicomic, and ultimately sweet. It also features a terrific performance by Alessandro Nivola as David, Dianne’s rock star husband who might want to be home more often. – DC

Fucktoys

Writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram’s idea for Fucktoys started with a phone call from a psychic, who told her to break up with her then boyfriend to avoid further illness and any roadblocks to her career. 

Sriram impulsively obliged and within weeks she had a script for her debut feature, described perfectly in the logline as a “lush 16mm fever dream that reimagines The Fool’s Journey of the Tarot through the story of AP – a sanguine young woman seeking salvation from a curse.” With Fucktoys, the psychic’s prophecy has come true.

The campy fantastical comedy is grotesque, sexy, smutty, and surprisingly poignant when tapping into themes of exploitation and class. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny with standout performances from its leads in Sriram and Sadie Scott, as well as supporting roles from Brandon Flynn, Damian Young, Big Freedia, and François Arnaud. 

The film is set in Trashtown, which Sriram described as “a neglected Americana yesteryear landscape. Trashtown is a term of endearment. We love Trashtown.” Sriram’s singular vision for Trashtown earned her the festival’s Special Jury Award for a Multi-Hyphenate. It was well-deserved for pushing forward a bold, darkly funny sensibility unlike any film we screened at the festival, a new genre the cast described as “neo-camp.” Long live Trashtown. – CL

Good Boy

Writer-director Ben Leonberg and producer Kari Fischer might have stumbled on one of the best setups for an original horror movie we’ve heard in years. Ever notice how your dog or cat stares off into the darkness of empty rooms? Has it ever creeped you out to ponder what it is they’re getting so worked up about after midnight? Well, Good Boy has the answers, and they’re provided through a dog’s perspective.

What could be a gimmick ultimately works as a bit of inspired, if rough-around-the-edges, genre moviemaking. As Leonberg’s feature debut, Good Boy was shot largely like a documentary with Leonberg and Fischer’s own pup, Indy, standing in as the poor dog in a house haunted with secrets and despair, and an unseen owner who is not particularly warm and cuddly. The effect is a definite low-budget indie, but one with a lot of style and atmosphere that manipulates the audience into investing in one dog’s seeming plight. Owing a bit to silent movies as well, Indy proves a compelling lead while turning the corner and seeing what goes bump in the night. – DC

Government Cheese

How far can magical thinking take you? In Government Cheese, Hampton Chambers (David Oyelowo) will endeavor to find out. Fresh out of prison in 1969 Los Angeles, this convicted burglar turned man of faith is putting his family’s financial well-being in the hands of his latest radical doo-hicky—a self-sharpening drill called a “Bit Magician.” Will that be enough to realize the American dream? Hell, will it be enough to pay off the debts Hampton unknowingly incurred from the dangerous Prevost brothers? Guess we’ll find out!

Government Cheese is a stylish 10-episode series from Apple TV+ that combines the timeless story of Black family life in California with some magical realism. Show creator Paul Hunter (previously known for his revolutionary work in commercial campaigns and music videos) cites his own father as inspiration for Hampton Chambers—a man powered by ambition and that titular government food product that helped fuel working class families. – AB

Happy Face

Ever sit back and think about how many pop songs have the word “Happy” in the title? Paramount+ true crime series Happy Killer certainly has and it puts those cheery tunes to ironic good use in this dark serial killer drama. Adapted from the 2018 podcast of the same name, Happy Face follows Melissa Moore (Annaleigh Ashford), a woman who deals with the fallout of discovering that her father (Dennis Quaid) is a prolific serial killer known as Happy Face. 

While that may sound like a stranger-than-fiction premise, not only is Melissa Moore’s experience real, she serves as an executive producer on this project. Moore’s involvement gives the proceedings an added element of realism, even as the show indulges in some by-the-numbers true crime pop storytelling. – AB

Hallow Road

The best horror movie we saw while in Austin, Babak Anvari’s Hallow Road is a nearly-perfect exercise in descent. It begins with a plunge into the worst nightmare of any parent: that call in the middle of the night from a child whose life has been forever changed. In the case of Maddie and Frank (Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys), that comes after their daughter Alice (voiced by Megan McDonnell) has hit a stranger in the middle of the night while driving alone on Hallow Road in the deep woods of Wales. Now she wants Mom and Dad to come fix it for her.

What starts as one type of nightmare quickly cascades into something far more slippery and sinister. Hallow Road is a dark fable as grim as the fairy stories of yore, and as unforgiving as an Old Testament deity. Maddie and Frank have differing views of parenting and of their daughter, and both are put to the extreme test in a taut 80 minutes that mostly take place inside of their car as they drive from their suburban home deep into the wilderness. Often as much about how they listen to the pleas and fears of their daughter over the phone as it is how they try to guide her, Anvari’s camera stalks and shadows the lines of their faces until even their countenances become haunted things and they discover what lies at the end of their surreal journey into dark. It’s a relentless triumph. Stay for the credits. – DC

Holland

Mimi Cave’s first feature was the seductively twisted horror-comedy Fresh. Her second seeks to similarly beguile its audience into thinking they’re getting one type of movie only to discover another as we enter the world of Holland, Michigan—a real Midwestern town with an affinity for things so Dutch that it verges on fetishistic.

It is there that Nancy Vandergroot (Nicole Kidman) lives with her perfect husband Fred (Matthew Macfadyen) and tween son Harry (Jude Hill). Theirs is such an idyllic existence that Nancy seemingly wants to create a sense of danger to spice up her life, or at least find an excuse to hang out with a fellow teacher named Dave (Gael Garcia Bernal) who clearly is carrying a torch for her in the instructor’s lounge.

Look, there’s obviously something ominous occurring beneath the surface, and Holland takes its time getting there. But truthfully, when the revelation finally comes, it feels ultimately in service to a sum lesser than its parts. But it does give Kidman a juicy role to play as a Midwestern mom who kind of stumbles her way into a genuine thriller, which is likely why such an unsatisfying screenplay got made.

LifeHack

Producer Timur Bekmambetov has spent about a decade making screenlife movies like Searching and Unfriended. Some have been clever genre inversions and others tacky high-concepts. All, however, have felt largely like an older generation trying to imagine what Zoomers’ online life might be. LifeHack, by contrast, is actually made by youts’, which might be why it amounts to a dazzling, fast-moving plunge into a digital lifestyle that is all things at once: coming of age melodrama, high-stakes heist escapism, and finally an expression that the “kids are all right” even when scrolling endlessly through Minecraft group chats.

Directed by Ronan Corrigan and featuring a cast that includes both a Wednesday player (Georgie Farmer) and an honest-to-goodness YouTuber (James Scholz), there is indie gumption and rebellious zeal to the film that is infectious. It also taps into the modern zeitgeist of eating the rich since this teenaged, keyboard-ratpack is off to snatch a crypto bro’s BitCoin reserves. It’s all flash and a lot of fun. – DC

Mix Tape

“You never forget the boy who makes you your first mix tape.” So says Allison (Teresa Palmer) near the conclusion of Mix Tape’s first episode. The four-episode series, an Irish-Australian joint production, then goes on to reveal just how right she is.

Mix Tape is a decades-spanning romantic saga, picking up with a young Daniel (Rory Walton-Smith) and Allison (Florence Hunt) at a house party in 1989 Sheffield house party before jetting off to a future where the pair (now played by Palmer and Jim Sturgess) is set to reconnect over their shared love of music. Mix Tape is a lowkey, yet affecting sonic journey. – AB

New Jack City

Boy, I’ve been itching for a new silly Blaxploitation tribute romp for some time. The gap left by Michael Jai White’s Black Dynamite is a void that I thought couldn’t have been filled. Lanfia Wal’s New Jack Fury isn’t quite there, but it delivers via its sheer silliness and charm. If Black Dynamite was a throwback to the ‘70s, New Jack Fury is for the ‘80s nerds who grew up playing Double Dragon and clips of Michael Jackson’s moon walk.

Drenched with ‘80s retro color and captivating green screen backgrounds—more impressive art direction than most recent blockbusters I’d say—the film follows Dylan Gamble (Andre Hall), a former cop trying to rescue his girlfriend Tanisha (Ally Renee) from evil kingpin Silkwaan Styles (Page Kennedy). He enlists two street-smart associates Hendrix Moon (Paul Wheeler) and rival Leslie Kindall (Michael Trapson) to help him find her, and nothing goes the way they expect. The movie is one hilarious over the top gag after the next with the hit ratio being extremely high. It’s cartoonish in the best way possible. Furthermore, its narrative is framed like an after school special, as every act-break is accompanied by a hilarious 1980s-styled commercial that’s as stupid and funny as the main movie. The film is a straight silliness and irresistible romp with so much passion worn on its sleeves that I had a blast. – RJ

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie

In 2017, Matt Johnson came by himself to SXSW to screen three episodes of his webseries turned TV series, Nivanna The Band The Show. “I had never seen a crowd in my life react the way they did to the TV show,” he tells us of the reception in Austin. 

Johnson returned home to Canada and the screening became a legend within the show’s creative and production team. It became the goal of Johnson and co-creator and co-star Jay McCarrol to bring a feature length version of the show and premiere it at SXSW. They submitted an unfinished cut and still made the festival. For SXSW it was worth the risk. For Johnson and McCarrol it was well worth the wait. 

We don’t time festival ovations with a stopwatch here like other outlets, but it comfortably felt like the audience reception to Nirvanna The Band the Show The Movie was the longest at SXSW 2025. The data backs up our claim: Nirvanna won the 2025 audience award for the midnighters section. The film sees Johnson and McCarrol reprise their roles as bandmates who attempt to scheme their way to a gig at Toronto’s Rivoli nightclub, to no success. In their most elaborate plan yet, they Back to the Future their way to 2008. Using clever editing techniques to splice present day and archival footage, and featuring daring stunts on the unsuspecting public in downtown Toronto, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie earned every bit of the riotous energy at the ZACH Theatre.

It’s been 17 years since the original Nirvanna webseries was released. Since then, the project ran for two seasons as a full-fledged TV show on the ill-fated Viceland, Johnson had a hit feature film with 2023 SXSW darling Blackberry (on which McCarroll did the music), and they’ve already filmed a third season. They’re hopeful a positive reception to the feature film will help find a U.S. distributor for the film and a new home for season three. Until then, the Canadians are happy to bask in a warm, if not red hot reception way south of the Toronto border. “It felt like a gift that we gave to all the fans who stuck with us,” McCarrol says. – CL

O’Dessa

Eight years after knocking Austin’s socks off with Patti Cake$, Geremy Jasper returns with O’Dessa, a niche fairytale that will appeal to a very specific kind of nerd. Did you grow up loving post-apocalyptic or dystopian wasteland movies with dilapidated mega-cities? These would be your Blade Runners and Tim Burton Batmans, but also Dark Citys and Streets of Fires? Do you know all the words to “Science Fiction Double Feature” and Meatloaf’s big moment in Rocky Horror Picture Show? If that Venn Diagram crossed over and found you smiling at both prospects, then O’Dessa’s rock opera silliness is for you.

It certainly was for me during an opening credits crawl that looked as if it had been panned and scanned for VHS in another century. This sets the stage for a parable about a farmgirl (Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink) with dreams about being a musician and wanderer (or rambler) in the big city, even as that city is ruled by a despot (Murray Bartlett). There she might find love, or at least a partner in crime opposite a fabulous Kelvin Harrison Jr., and a reality show where contestants sing to the death. It’s bizarre, fleeting, and yet filled with the kind aspirational power of rock that makes movies worth seeing. In another era, it would be a cult favorite at the video store waiting to be discovered by hopeless nerd romantics. Hopefully today, it still finds the descendents of that on Hulu at the end of the month.  – DC

Sally

Science Fair director Cristina Costantini returns with an unflinching, deeply emotional portrait of astronaut Sally Ride, and her 27-year relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy that was kept from the public spotlight until Ride’s passing in 2012.  In third grade, Costantini painted a life-sized mural of Sally Ride in her jumpsuit and by the time she was ready for high school she was inspired to find a career in science in part because of Ride’s story.

“I was struck by this feeling of disbelief that she could have went through something like that,” Costantini tells us of her motivation to put the story on film. “NASA was barely ready for a woman at that time. The idea that she was also queer and closeted at such a homophobic time, it was illegal to be gay in Texas at that time.”

Sally uses a mix of original audio interviews  from Ride, as well as recreations of Sally and Tam’s time together to supplement a lack of documentation of their relationship. The film dives into women and LGBTQ+ rights through interviews with Billie Jean King, members of the Ride family, and astronauts from Sally Ride’s NASA class of 1978: Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, John Fabian, and Steve Hawley, Sally’s ex-husband. Ultimately Tam’s journey provides a gut-wrenching look into Ride’s life and the power dynamics and pressure that come with fame.

“Tam is an incredible gift to a documentary filmmaker,” Costantini says. “She is an amazing storyteller. She has an incredible memory. But more than anything she is willing to be vulnerable to tell the story of what it was like to fall in love in this secret relationship.”  – CL

Slanted

Slanted was the big winner at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, taking home the Grand Jury Award in the Narrative Feature Competition. And to that we say… good on ya, South By! This comedy-drama from Australian filmmaker Amy Wang is an entertaining and affecting coming-of-age story with a clever supernatural bent.

Shirley Chen stars as Joan Huang, a second-generation Chinese-American high school student who just wants to be prom queen. To make that dream a reality she undergoes a controversial “ethnic modification” procedure and comes out the other side as Ghostbusters: Afterlife star Mckenna Grace. Okay, Shirley doesn’t become literally Mckenna Grace, but Grace does take over the role as the now white-passing Shirley.

Slanted has as much fun with that premise as you’d hope while also never losing sight of the complicated racial dynamics and youthful insecurities at play. Call it The Substance for the YA crowd: smart, silly, and satisfyingly gross. – AB

Stars Diner

We have but one simple rule at Den of Geek’s TV section: if you open your indie comedy pilot with a jaunty ‘80s sitcom theme song, you get included in the festival roundup. Three cheers to Stars Diner creators Fidel Ruiz-Healy, Tyler Walker, and Mary Neely for making it happen.

Stars Diner is a whacky pastiche of laughtrack sitcoms set in the titular diner where everything is always going to shit. Not only will the steak get overcooked but the nearby supervolcano may exterminate all life in Fresno. Blessed with an endearing DIY energy (Ruiz-Healy handles all the exterior shots as miniature and “PS1 graphics”), Stars Diner should get a look from distributors and networks that don’t mind a little bit of anarchy. – AB

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror

The Rocky Horror Picture Show remains the longest running theatrically released film in history. Seriously, if your hometown has any sort of cool cred, it’s playing this Saturday at midnight somewhere. Yet, curiously, there has never been a major, comprehensive documentary about the phenomenon lest you count a ‘90s Behind the Music episode on VH1. Director Linus O’Brien, son of Richard O’Brien, and writer/producer Avner Shiloah correct that oversight with Strange Journey, aka the Rocky Horror Documentary.

Filled with most of the surviving stars and contributors to both the 1975 film and the original 1973 stage musical who shaped the lore, Strange Journey doesn’t necessarily teach diehards anything new, but it immortalizes for posterity the memories of all involved in a concise and elegantly told format. O’Brien and Shiloah also make the astute choice to intertwine the building of Rocky Horror with the legacy of its myth—eschewing a linear format in favor of using the feature-length to expand on why this show became such a conduit for counterculture, freedom, and escape. May it continue to provide that time warp release for another 50 years. – DC

The Surrender

Take a touch of Ari Aster’s Hereditary, add a heaping dose of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, and blend them together with a host of chopped up limbs and you’ve got the formula for Julia Max’s macabre horror flick, The Surrender. 

The Boys’ Colby Minifie stars as Megan, a woman who returns home to take care of her terminally ill father. After Megan’s dad succumbs to the inevitable, her mother Barbara (Kate Burton) turns to some alternative methods to bring him back. The Surrender leaves too much potential woo-woo wellness culture satire on the table but ultimately succeeds as a horror movie sizzle reel for all involved. – AB

The Threesome

If the star-crossed entanglements of characters played by Zoey Deutch and Jonah Hauer-King aren’t enough to sell you on this rom-com, then a first-act twist anchored by Bottoms breakout Ruby Cruz pushes The Threesome out of familiar territory and into something much closer to comedic bliss. 

Director Chad Hartigan masterfully balances the film’s big hearted moments of Ethan Ogilby’s script with key supporting roles from comedy TV mainstays like Jaboukie Young-White and Josh Segarra, and standout quips and one-liners from Deutch. 

“Whenever I read a script and find myself reading the lines out loud, I know I really want to do [the film],” Deutch tells us. “It’s almost like my body has a physical reaction to wanting to jump in and figure out how I would gel with [the role]. I loved the script.” – CL

The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick

Director Pete Ohs had a SXSW breakout in 2022 with Jethica and returned in 2025 with The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, a creeping rural psychological thriller. Like his past films, Ohs’ creative process is unique in that he shares writing credits with his actors, and they’re constantly evolving the narrative or solving problems on set together in real time. 

“Filmmaking is a collaborative medium, but that approach is extra collaborative,” Ohs says.  

He calls the process his “table of bubbles.” A shoot begins with an outline of the story and, with a “minimal crew anchored by a key location,” they shoot chronologically while writing scenes together. Zoë Chao, Callie Hernandez, and James Cusati-Moyer, and Jeremy O. Harris, the top four on a sparse call sheet, are all credited as writers on the film in which Chao’s Yvonne develops troubling symptoms after a tick bite during a weekend away at a secluded house amongst friends new and old.

Harris, who executive produced and previously collaborated with Ohs on the editing of Harris’ Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play., credited the director for building a creatively freeing atmosphere on set.

“The genre isn’t horror. It’s much like [David] Lynch. It’s Ohs-ian. Part of being in an Ohs-ian universe is saying ‘yes’ to his table of bubbles. It’s a very fragile process to say ‘yes’ to what’s on the table to keep the table alive. It’s like being in film school with the best, most active professor.” – CL

We Bury the Dead

It seems increasingly tough these days to produce a zombie movie that feels fresh or innovative. So the fact that Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead finds a new way into the genre via We Bury the Dead makes the horror-drama hybrid one of the nicer genre surprises out of Austin this year. Technically a post-apocalyptic movie set down under where Ava (Daisy Ridley) is a woman looking for her missing husband after the world stopped, the truth is We Bury the Dead is the first undead parable in-tune with a post-COVID and post-Trump world.

In the film, life on the Australian island of Tasmania ended long before the story properly begins, with most of the inhabitants dropping dead after the U.S. government accidentally detonated an EMP off the coast of a sovereign ally. Oopsie. Curiouser still, a few of the dead won’t stay down. The hapless local authorities euphemistically refer to these folks as coming “back online.” Still, everyone is promised that the dead, and not-so-dead, will be treated with the “dignity” they deserve.

It’s in this context that Ridley’s Ava enters the island as a member of the Bodies Retrieval Unit. Like everyone else in the gig, she’s looking for a closure that will not come, and a loved one who at best will be a snarling corpse. The irony, and day-to-day indignity, of such a prospect grounds the horror in an eerie verisimilitude. Ridley does raw work, too, when encountering others haunted by those, uh, terminally online. – DC

Best Music Sets & Showcases

Initial reports that SXSW’s music festival is in a state of flux for 2026 have since been clarified by the event organizers. The show will go on, albeit reduced by two days. There has been a dramatic decrease in artist participation over the decade or so, and a shortening of the SXSW 2026’s overall schedule due to construction on Austin’s new convention center will inevitably lead to changes for the music festival that has been a staple of the event for nearly 40 years. 

The artists that did travel to SXSW 2025 still packed a punch, though. Of the artists we selected for our SXSW 2025 music preview, we caught sets by Aussie six-piece Coldwave (photo above), who captivated a packed inside stage audience at Mohawk during a late-night set, and Brazilian outfit Terraplana closed out Valhalla with a mesmerizing shoegaze set that evokes emo and grunge inspiration. 

From artists who also made our SXSW Music Mixtape playlist, we saw Sierra Spirit, a Native American indie artist from Oklahoma, shine during an intimate set with standout tracks “bleed you” and “better wild,” and Norway’s indie pop math rockers Mall Girl impressed with tantalizing vocals and thumping guitars inspired by midwest emo (see “Midwest”). 

The British Music Embassy, one of our favorite mainstays at SXSW, once again filled out one of the festival’s strongest lineups with strong sets from some of the buzzy bands showcasing last week, including Freak Slug, Gurriers, and Delivery. 

Finally, we stopped by the Sounds Australia House on Thursday for a second Coldwave set and photoshoot to make sure our eyes and ears didn’t deceive us. They delivered yet again. And they were followed by Brisbane three-piece Dune Rats (pictured above), who lit up Creek and Cave with their energetic mix of rowdy throwback pop punk. – CL

The post Everything We Saw at SXSW 2025  appeared first on Den of Geek.