Category: Blog

One of the most successful soft knowledge we have at our disposal is the ability to work together to improve our patterns while developing our own abilities and opinions, in whatever form it takes, and whatever it may be called.

Feedback is also one of the most underestimated equipment, and generally by assuming that we’re now great at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a skill that can be trained, grown, and improved. Bad comments can lead to conflict in projects, lower confidence, and long-term, undermine trust and teamwork. Quality comments can be a revolutionary force.

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

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

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

The material

The material of the feedback serves as the foundation for all effective critiques, so we need to start there. There are many versions that you can use to design your content. The one that I personally like best—because it’s obvious and actionable—is this one from Lara Hogan.

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

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

Not sure about the buttons ‘ styles and hierarchy—it feels off. Can you alter them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, for the request approach:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Therefore, the above equation serves as a mnemonic to reflect and enhance the practice rather than a strict template for feedback. Even after years of active work on my critiques, I still from time to time go back to this formula and reflect on whether what I just wrote is effective.

The atmosphere

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

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

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

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

Attitude is the equivalent of intent, and in the context of person-to-person feedback, it can be referred to as radical candor. Before writing, it’s important to make sure the person we’re writing will actually benefit them and improve the overall project. This might be a hard reflection at times because maybe we don’t want to admit that we don’t really appreciate that person. Although it’s possible, and that’s okay, it’s hoped not to be the case. Acknowledging and owning that can help you make up for that: how would I write if I really cared about them? How can I avoid being passive aggressive? What can I do to encourage constructive behavior?

Form is relevant especially in a diverse and cross-cultural work environments because having great content, perfect timing, and the right attitude might not come across if the way that we write creates misunderstandings. There could be many reasons for this, including the fact that occasionally certain words may cause specific reactions, that nonnative speakers may not be able to comprehend all thenuances of some sentences, that our brains may be different and that our world may be perceived differently; hence, neurodiversity must be taken into account. Whatever the reason, it’s important to review not just what we write but how.

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

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

We have a great advantage in giving feedback in written form: it can be reviewed by another person who isn’t directly involved, which can help to reduce or remove any bias that might be there. The best, most insightful moments for me came when I shared a comment and asked a trusted person how it sounds, how can I do it better, or even” How would you have written it”? I discovered that by seeing the two versions side by side, I’ve learned a lot.

The format

Asynchronous feedback also has a significant inherent benefit: it allows us to spend more time making sure that the suggestions ‘ clarity and actionability meet two main objectives.

Let’s imagine that someone shared a design iteration for a project. You are reviewing it and leaving a comment. There are many ways to accomplish this, and context is of course important, but let’s try to think about some things that might be worthwhile to take into account.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what on earth is a passionate burnout?

Imagine a person determined to do it all. She is homeschooling two wonderful children while her husband, who is also working mildly, is likewise homeschooling. She has a demanding customer weight at work—all of whom she loves. She wakes up early to get some movement in ( or frequently catch up on work ), prepares dinner while the kids are having breakfast, and works while positioning herself near the end of her “fourth grade” to watch as she balances clients, tasks, and budgets. Sound like a bit? Yet with a supportive group both at home and at work, it is.

Sounds like this person needs self-care because she has too much on her disk. But no, she doesn’t have occasion for that. She begins to feel as though she’s dropping pellets. No accomplishing enough. There’s not enough of her to be here and there, she is trying to divide her head in two all the time, all time, every time. She begins to question herself. And as those thoughts creep in more and more, her domestic tale becomes more and more important.

She instantly KNOWS what she needs to accomplish! She really DO MORE.

This is a difficult and dangerous period. Know the reasons? Because when she doesn’t end that new purpose, that storyline will get worse. She instantly starts failing. She isn’t doing much. SHE is not enough. She does fail, she might refuse her family, but she’ll discover more to do. She doesn’t nap as much, proceed because much, all in the attempts to do more. Trying to prove herself to herself, but not succeeding in any endeavor. Not feeling “enough”.

But, yeah, that’s what zealous burnout looks like for me. It doesn’t develop immediately in a magnificent sign; it develops gradually over the course of several weeks and months. My burning out process looks like speeding up, not a man losing target. I move up and up and up, and therefore I simply quit.

I am the one who had

It’s amusing the things that shape us. Through the camera of my youth, I witnessed the battles, sacrifices, and fears of a person who had to make it all work without having much. I was happy that my mom was so competent and my dad sympathetic, I never went without and also got an extra here or there.

Growing up, I didn’t feel shame when my mom gave me food passports; in fact, I would have likely sparked debates about the subject, orally eviscerating anyone who dared to criticize the disabled person who was attempting to ensure all of our needs were met with so little. As a child, I watched the way the worry of not making those ends meet impacted persons I love. As the non-disabled people in my home, I did take on many of the real things because I was” the one who was” make our lives a little easier. I soon realized that putting more of myself into it was linked to fears or confusion; I am the one who does. I learned first that when something frightens me, I may double down and work harder to make it better. I am in charge of the problem. When individuals have seen this in me as an adult, I’ve been told I seem brave, but make no mistake, I’m not. If I seem courageous, it’s because this behavior was forged from another people’s worries.

And here I am, surrounded by enormous tasks ahead of me, assuming that I am the one who is and therefore should, more than 30 years later, also feeling the urge to aimlessly drive myself forward. I find myself driven to prove that I can make things happen if I work longer hours, take on more responsibility, and do more.

Because I have seen how strong a financially challenged person can be, I do not see people who struggle financially as failures because they are pulled along the way. I truly get that I have been privileged to be able to avoid many of the challenges that were present in my youth. That said, I am still” the one who can” who feels she should, so if I were faced with not having enough to make ends meet for my own family, I would see myself as having failed. Despite my best efforts and education, the majority of this is due to chance. I will, however, allow myself the arrogance of saying I have been careful with my choices to have encouraged that luck. My sense of identity comes from the notion that I am” the one who can” and feel compelled to accomplish the most. I can choose to stop, and with some quite literal cold water splashed in my face, I’ve made the choice to before. But that choosing to stop is not my go-to, I move forward, driven by a fear that is so a part of me that I barely notice it’s there until I’m feeling utterly worn away.

So why all the history? You see, burnout is a fickle thing. Over the years, I’ve read and heard a lot about burnout. Burnout is real. Especially now, with COVID, many of us are balancing more than we ever have before—all at once! It’s challenging, and so many amazing professionals are affected by the avoidance, the shutting down, and the procrastination. There are important articles that relate to what I imagine must be the majority of people out there, but not me. Not at the time of my burnout, though.

The dangerous invisibility of zealous burnout

A lot of work environments see the extra hours, extra effort, and overall focused commitment as an asset ( and sometimes that’s all it is ). They see a person attempting to overcome obstacles, not a person trapped in fear. Many well-meaning organizations have safeguards in place to protect their teams from burnout. However, in situations like this, those alarms don’t always go off, and some organization members are surprised and depressed when the inevitable stop occurs. And sometimes maybe even betrayed.

Parents—more so mothers, statistically speaking—are praised as being so on top of it all when they can work, be involved in the after-school activities, practice self-care in the form of diet and exercise, and still meet friends for coffee or wine. Many of us watched endless streaming COVID episodes to see how challenging the female protagonist is, but she is strong, funny, and capable of doing it. It’s a “very special episode” when she breaks down, cries in the bathroom, woefully admits she needs help, and just stops for a bit. Truth be told, countless people are hidden in tears or doom-scrolling to escape. We know that the media is a lie to amuse us, but often the perception that it’s what we should strive for has penetrated much of society.

Women and burnout

I adore men. And though I don’t love every man ( heads up, I don’t love every woman or nonbinary person either ), I think there is a beautiful spectrum of individuals who represent that particular binary gender.

Despite this, women are still more frequently at risk of burnout than their male counterparts, especially in these COVID stressed out times. Mothers in the workplace feel the pressure to do all the “mom” things while giving 110 %. Mothers not in the workplace feel they need to do more to” justify” their lack of traditional employment. Women who are not mothers frequently feel the need to work even more at home because of the pressure. It’s vicious and systemic and so a part of our culture that we’re often not even aware of the enormity of the pressures we put on ourselves and each other.

And there are costs that go beyond happiness. Harvard Health Publishing released a study a decade ago that “uncovered strong links between women’s job stress and cardiovascular disease”. The CDC noted,” Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, killing 299, 578 women in 2017—or about 1 in every 5 female deaths”.

According to what I’ve read, this connection between work stress and health is more dangerous for women than it is for their non-female counterparts.

But what if your burnout isn’t like that either?

You might not be the same as that. After all, each of us is so different and how we respond to stressors is too. It’s part of what makes us human. Don’t put too much emphasis on how burnout manifests; rather, learn to recognize it in yourself. Here are a few questions I sometimes ask friends if I am concerned about them.

How are you feeling? This simple question should be the first thing you ask yourself. Chances are, even if you’re burning out doing all the things you love, as you approach burnout you’ll just stop taking as much joy from it all.

Do you feel like you have the authority to decline? I have observed in myself and others that when someone is burning out, they no longer feel they can say no to things. Even those who don’t” speed up” feel pressured to say “yes” and not let the people around them be disappointed.

What are three things you’ve done for yourself? Another observance is that we all tend to stop doing things for ourselves. anything from avoiding conversations with friends to skipping showers and eating poorly. These can be red flags.

Are you using justifications? Many of us try to disregard feelings of burnout. Over and over I have heard,” It’s just crunch time”,” As soon as I do this one thing, it will all be better”, and” Well I should be able to handle this, so I’ll figure it out”. And it might actually be crunch time, a single objective, or a set of skills you need to master. That happens—life happens. BUT if all of this doesn’t stop, be open to yourself. If you’ve worked more 50-hour weeks since January than not, maybe it’s not crunch time—maybe it’s a bad situation that you’re burning out from.

Do you have a plan to stop feeling this way? If something is only temporary and you have to push through, it has an exit route and a reward system.
defined end.

Take the time to listen to your friend in the same way. Be honest, allow yourself to be uncomfortable, and break the thought cycles that prevent you from healing.

So now what?

What I just described is a different path to burnout, but it’s still burnout. There are well-established approaches to working through burnout:

• Get enough sleep.
• Eat healthy.
• Work out.
• Go outside.
• Take a break.
• Practice self-care in general.

Those are hard for me because they feel like more tasks. If I’m in the burnout cycle, doing any of the above for me feels like a waste. Why would I take care of myself when I’m dropping all those other balls, according to the narrative? People need me, right?

Your inner voice might already be pretty bad if you’re deeply in the cycle. If you need to, tell yourself you need to take care of the person your people depend on. If your roles are pushing you toward burnout, use them to help make healing easier by justifying the time spent working on you.

I have come up with a few things that I do when I start to feel like I’m going into a zealous burnout to help me remember the airline attendant advice to put the mask on yourself first.

Cook an elaborate meal for someone!

Okay, since I’m a “food-focused” person, I’ve always been a fan. There are countless tales in my home of someone walking into the kitchen and turning right around and walking out when they noticed I was” chopping angrily”. But it’s more than that, and you should give it a try. Seriously. It’s the perfect go-to if you don’t feel worthy of taking time for yourself—do it for someone else. Because the majority of us work in a digital world, cooking can pique your interest and make you feel present in the moment in all your ways. It can break you out of your head and help you gain a better perspective. In my house, I’ve been known to pick a place on the map and cook food that comes from wherever that is ( thank you, Pinterest ). Because it’s not what I was raised making, I enjoy making Indian food because the smells are warm and the bread only needs a small amount of kneading to keep my hands busy. And in the end, we all win!

Vent like a sniveling jerk.

Be careful with this one!

I have been making an effort to practice more gratitude over the past few years, and I recognize the true benefits of that. Having said that, sometimes you just need to let it all out, even the ugly ones. Hell, I’m a big fan of not sugarcoating our lives, and that sometimes means that to get past the big pile of poop, you’re gonna wanna complain about it a bit.

When that is required, turn to a trusted friend and give yourself some pure verbal diarrhea by expressing all your concerns. You need to trust this friend not to judge, to see your pain, and, most importantly, to tell you to remove your cranium from your own rectal cavity. Seriously, it’s about getting a reality check here! One of the things I admire most about my husband is how he can simplify things down to their simplest bits, despite often after the fact. ” We’re spending our lives together, of course you’re going to disappoint me from time to time, so get over it” has been his way of speaking his dedication, love, and acceptance of me—and I could not be more grateful. Of course, it also required that I take my head out of that rectal cavity. So, again, usually those moments are appreciated in hindsight.

Pick up a book!

There are many books out there that are more like you sharing their stories and how they’ve come to find greater balance than they are self-help. Maybe you’ll find something that speaks to you. Among the titles that have stood out to me are:

• Thrive by Arianna Huffington
• Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
• Girl, Stop Apologizing by Rachel Hollis
• Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Or, another method I enjoy using is to read or listen to a book that is NOTHING to do with my work-life balance. I’ve read the following books and found they helped balance me out because my mind was pondering their interesting topics instead of running in circles:

• The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart
• Darin Olien’s Superlife
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford
• Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden

If you’re not into reading, pick up a topic on YouTube or choose a podcast to subscribe to. I’ve watched countless permaculture and gardening topics in addition to how to raise chickens and ducks. I don’t currently own any livestock of any kind, nor do I have a particularly large food garden. I just find the topic interesting, and it has nothing to do with any aspect of my life that needs anything from me.

Give yourself a break.

You are never going to be perfect—hell, it would be boring if you were. It’s OK to be broken and flawed. Being tired, depressed, and worried is human nature. It’s OK to not do it all. You can’t be brave without being imperfect, which is terrifying.

This last one is the most important: allow yourself permission to NOT do it all. You never promised to be everything to everyone at all times. We have greater power than the repressed fears that motivate us.

This is hard. I struggle with it. It’s what’s driven me to write this—that it’s OK to stop. It’s OK that your unhealthy habit that might even benefit those around you needs to end. You can still succeed in life.

I recently read that we are all writing our eulogy in how we live. What will your professional accomplishments say, knowing that yours won’t be mentioned in that speech? What do you want it to say?

Look, I get that none of these ideas will “fix it”, and that’s not their purpose. Only how we react to the things around us is what we control. These suggestions are to help stop the spiral effect so that you are empowered to address the underlying issues and choose your response. They are things that most of the time work for me. Maybe they’ll work for you.

Does this sound familiar?

If this sounds familiar, you’re not just going to know about it. Don’t let your negative self-talk tell you that you “even burn out wrong”. It is not improper. Even if rooted in fear like my own drivers, I believe that this need to do more comes from a place of love, determination, motivation, and other wonderful attributes that make you the amazing person you are. We’re going to be OK, ya know. The lives that come before us might never have the same meaning as the one we’re striving for, which is acceptable because the only way to judge is in the mirror when we stop and look around.

Do you remember that Winnie the Pooh sketch that had Pooh eat so much at Rabbit’s house that his buttocks couldn’t fit through the door? It came as no surprise when Rabbit abruptly declared that this was unacceptable because I already associate a lot with him. But do you recall what happened next? He put a shelf across poor Pooh’s ankles and decorations on his back, and made the best of the big butt in his kitchen.

At the end of the day, we are resourceful and aware that we can push ourselves if necessary, even when we are exhausted or have a ton of stuff in our room. None of us has to be afraid, as we can manage any obstacle put in front of us. And maybe that means we will need to redefine success to make room for comfortable human space, but that doesn’t really sound that bad either.

So, wherever you are right now, please breathe. Do what you need to do to get out of your head. Give thanks and be considerate.

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

Laptops have trouble because between spoken and written speech, talk is more primitive. Machines must wrestle with the chaos of human statement, including the squabbling and pauses, the gestures and body vocabulary, and the dialect variations that can impede even the most skillfully created human-computer conversation. In the human-to-human situation, spoken language also has the opportunity of face-to-face call, where we can easily interpret visual interpersonal cues.

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

Spoken language is not a pleasure in this regard. Besides the visual cues that mark conversations with emphasis and personal context, there are also linguistic cues and outspoken behaviors that mimic conversation in complex ways: how something is said, never what. Our spoken language conveys much more than the published word can actually contain, whether it’s rapid-fire, low-pitched, high-decibel, sarcastic, stiff, or groaning. But when it comes to tone interfaces—the devices we conduct spoken discussions with—we experience exciting difficulties as designers and content strategists.

Voice Compositions

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

• we need something done ( such as a transaction ),
• we seek knowledge of anything ( some kind of data ), or
• we are social people and want someone to talk to ( conversation for conversation’s pleasure ).

A second talk from beginning to end that achieves some goal for the consumer, starting with the words interface’s initial greeting and ending with the user exiting the interface, also fits into these three categories, which I refer to as interpersonal, technical, and prosocial. Note here that a conversation in our human sense—a chat between people that leads to some result and lasts an arbitrary length of time—could encompass multiple transactional, informational, and prosocial voice interactions in succession. In other words, a voice interaction is a conversation, but it may not always be one voice interaction.

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

That leaves two different types of conversations we can have with one another that a voice interface can also have easily, such as one that focuses on a transactional voice interaction ( buying iced tea ) and another on learning something new ( discuss a musical ).

Transactional voice interactions

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

Alison: Hey, how are things going?

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

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

Burhan: Sure, what size?

Large, Alison.

Burhan: Anything else?

Alison: No thanks, that’s it.

Burhan: Something to drink?

Alison: I’ll have a bottle of Coke.

Burhan: You got it. That will cost$ 13.55 and take about fifteen minutes.

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

Informational voice interactions

Meanwhile, some conversations are primarily about obtaining information. Alison might only want to place an order at Crust Deluxe, but she might not want to leave without a pizza at all. She might be just as interested in whether they serve halal or kosher dishes, gluten-free options, or something else. Even though we have a prosocial mini-conversation once more at the beginning to establish politeness, we’re after much more.

Alison: Hey, how are things going?

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

Alison: Can I ask a few questions?

Burhan: Of course! Go right ahead.

Alison, do you have any menu items that are halal?

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

Alison: What about gluten-free pizzas?

Burhan: For both our deep-dish and thin-crust pizzas, we can definitely make a gluten-free crust for you, without a problem. Anything else I can answer for you?

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

Burhan: Anytime, come back soon!

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

Voice Interfaces

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

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

IVR ( interactive voice response ) systems

Though written conversational interfaces have been fixtures of computing for many decades, voice interfaces first emerged in the early 1990s with text-to-speech ( TTS ) dictation programs that recited written text aloud, as well as speech-enabled in-car systems that gave directions to a user-provided address. We became familiar with the first real voice interfaces that could actually be spoken with the help of interactive voice response ( IVR ) systems, which were developed as an alternative to overburdened customer service representatives.

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

IVR systems have a reputation for having less scintillating conversations than we’re used to in real life ( or even in science fiction ), despite being extremely repetitive and monotonous.

Screen readers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voice assistants

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voice content

Simply put, voice content is content delivered through voice. Voice content must be free-flowing and organic, contextless and concise in order to preserve what makes human conversation so compelling in the first place. Everything written content is not.

Our world is replete with voice content in various forms: screen readers reciting website content, voice assistants rattling off a weather forecast, and automated phone hotline responses governed by IVR systems. We’re most concerned with the audiobook content being delivered as a requirement rather than an option.

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

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

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

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

As microcontent, voice content is unique because it’s an example of how content is experienced in time rather than in space. We can instantly see when the next train is coming from a digital sign underground, but voice interfaces keep our attention occupied for so long that screen reader users are all too familiar.

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

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

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

Flash, Photoshop, and flexible pattern

When I first started designing sites, my go-to technology was Photoshop. I created a design for a 960px paint that I would eventually add willing to. The growth phase was about attaining pixel-perfect reliability using set widths, fixed levels, and absolute placement.

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

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

A new way to style

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

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

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

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

Media concerns

The next ingredient for flexible design is press queries. Without them, regardless of whether the information was still readable, may shrink to fit the available storage.

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

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

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

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

Another difficulty arose as I moved from a design firm building websites for smaller- to medium-sized companies, to larger in-house teams where I worked across a collection of related sites. In those capacities, I began to work many more with washable pieces.

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

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

Container queries: our savior or a false dawn?

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

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

In other words, responsive elements should be used to replace responsive layouts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CSS is changing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intrinsic layouts

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

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

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

—Jen Simmons,” Designing Intrinsic Layouts”

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

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

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

Another 2010 moment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, the content

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

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

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

 First line of text with different styling...

—we can target content based on where it appears.

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

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

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

Directional variables must be specified in the Sass version.

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

These variables can be used as values—

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

—or as properties.

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

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

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

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

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

Fluid and fixed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Situation first

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

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

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

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

Responsible design

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

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

Chris Ashton

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

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

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

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

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

So how can we put users in control?

The media queries are returning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expect the unexpected

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

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

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

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

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

Several wealthy runners had come to the conclusion that it was impossible to run a mile in less than four hours in the 1950s. Riders had been attempting it since the later 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body just wasn’t built for the job.

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

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

We accomplish a lot more when we think something is possible, and we only think it can be done when we see someone else doing it after all. As for individual running speed, we also think there are the strictest requirements for how a website should do.

Establishing requirements for a green website

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

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

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

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

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

Transfer of data

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

The webpage weight, or the page’s transfer size in kilobytes, can be most readily calculated for a second visit for web pages. It’s very easy to measure using the engineer equipment in any modern internet browser. Statistics for the total data transfer of any web application are frequently included in your web hosting account ( Fig. 2.1 ).

The great thing about website weight as a parameter is that it allows us to compare the effectiveness of web pages on a level playing field without confusing the issue with frequently changing traffic volumes.

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

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

You might be aware of the project team’s focus on creating faster user experiences using the concept of performance budgeting. For example, we might specify that the website must load in a maximum of one second on a broadband connection and three seconds on a 3G connection. Performance budgets are upper limits rather than hazy ideas, much like speed limits while driving. As a result, the goal should always be to stay within budget.

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

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

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

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

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

Electricity’s coal power

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

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

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

Having said that, we don’t want to locate our servers too far away from our users; however, it takes energy to transmit data through the telecom’s networks, and the more energy is used, the further the data travels. Just like food miles, we can think of the distance from the data center to the website’s core user base as “megabyte miles” —and we want it to be as small as possible.

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

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

Reverting it to carbon emissions

If we combine carbon intensity with a calculation for energy consumption, we can calculate the carbon emissions of our websites and apps. The method my team developed converts the data transferred over wire when loading a website into a CO₂ figure ( Fig. ₂.4), calculating the associated electricity, and then converting that data into a figure ( Fig. ₂.4). It also factors in whether or not the web hosting is powered by renewable energy.

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

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

Browser Energy

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

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

All of these advances are exciting and open up new possibilities for what the web can do to serve society and create positive experiences. However, more energy is used by the user’s devices as a result of the user’s web browser’s increased computation. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a lot of processing power on a user’s device unintentionally exclude users with older, slower devices and make the batteries on phones and laptops drain more quickly. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. This not only hurts the environment, but it also places a disproportionate financial burden on society’s poorest.

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

You know what happens when your computer’s cooling fans start spinning so frantically that you suspect it might take off when you load a website? That’s essentially what this tool is measuring.

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

How can a content management system ( CMS ) be set up to reach your current and future audience? I learned the hard way that creating a content model—a concept of information types, attributes, and relationships that let people and systems understand content—with my more comfortable design-system wondering would collapse my patient’s holistic information strategy. By developing willing versions that are conceptual and that also connect related information, you can avoid that result.

A Fortune 500 company recently tapped me to guide the CMS application. The customer was excited by the benefits of an holistic information plan, including material modify, multichannel marketing, and robot delivery—designing content to be comprehensible to bots, Google knowledge panels, snippets, and voice user interfaces.

A content type is essential to an holistic content strategy, and it required conceptual types to be given names that don’t depend on how the content is presented. Our goal was to allow artists to create original content that could be used wherever they felt was most useful. But as the job proceeded, I realized that supporting material utilize at the range that my client needed required the whole group to identify a new pattern.

Despite our best efforts, we remained influenced by pattern systems, which we were more comfortable with. An holistic content strategy doesn’t rely on WYSIWYG equipment for design and layout, unlike web-focused material strategies. Our tendency to approach the material model with our common design-system thinking frequently led us to veer away from one of the main purposes of a material model: delivering content to audiences on various marketing channels.

Two fundamental tenets must be followed in order to create a successful content model

We needed to explain to our designers, developers, and stakeholders that we were undertaking a very different task from their earlier web projects, where it was common for everyone to view content as visual building blocks that fit into layouts. The previous approach was not only more familiar but also more intuitive—at least at first—because it made the designs feel more tangible. We learned two guiding principles that helped the team understand how a content model and the design processes we were familiar with were:

1. Instead of layout, content models must define semantics.
2. And content models should connect content that belongs together.

Semantic content models

A semantic content model uses type and attribute names that reflect the content’s intended purpose and not how it will be displayed. For example, in a nonsemantic model, teams might create types like teasers, media blocks, and cards. These types may simplify the presentation of content, but they do not aid in understanding the meaning of the content, which would have opened the door to the content presented in each marketing channel. In contrast, a semantic content model employs type names like product, service, and testimonial to allow for each delivery channel to interpret the content and use it as necessary.

When you’re creating a semantic content model, a great place to start is to look over the types and properties defined by Schema. a community-driven resource for type definitions that are understandable on platforms like Google search.

A semantic content model has a number of advantages:

Even if your team doesn’t care about omnichannel content, a semantic content model decouples content from its presentation so that teams can evolve the website’s design without needing to refactor its content. In this way, content can withstand irrational website redesigns.
• A semantic content model also gives you a competitive advantage. By adding structured data based on Schema. Using its types and properties, a website can provide hints to help Google understand the content, display it in search snippets or knowledge panels, and use it to respond to voice-interface user questions. Potential customers could access your content without ever visiting your website.
• Beyond those practical benefits, you’ll also need a semantic content model if you want to deliver omnichannel content. Delivery channels must be able to comprehend the same content in order to use it across multiple marketing channels. For instance, if your content model provided a list of questions and answers, it could be easily displayed on a frequently asked questions ( FAQ ) page as well as be used by a bot to answer frequently asked questions.

For example, using a semantic content model for articles, events, people, and locations lets A List Apart provide cleanly structured data for search engines so that users can read the content on the website, in Google knowledge panels, and even with hypothetical voice interfaces in the future.

Content models that connect

Instead of slicing up related content across disparate content components, I’ve come to the realization that the best models are those that are semantic and also connect related content components ( such as a FAQ item’s question and answer pair ). A good content model connects content that should remain together so that multiple delivery channels can use it without needing to first put those pieces back together.

Consider creating an essay or article. The piece of an article’s meaning and usefulness depend on how well it is organized. Would one of the headings or paragraphs be meaningful on their own without the context of the full article? Our well-known design-system thinking on our project frequently led us to want to develop content models that would divide content into distinct chunks to fit the web-centric layout. Similar effects could have been felt to an article that had its headline removed. Because we were slicing content into standalone pieces based on layout, content that belonged together became difficult to manage and nearly impossible for multiple delivery channels to understand.

Let’s take a look at how connecting related content works in a real-world setting to illustrate. A complex layout for a software product page that included multiple tabs and sections was presented by the client’s design team. Our instincts were to follow suit with the content model. Shouldn’t we make adding any number of tabs in the future as simple and flexible as possible?

We felt like we needed a “tab section” content type because our design-system instincts allowed for the addition of multiple tab sections to a page because they were so well-versed. Each tab section would display various types of content. The software’s overview or specifications might be available in one tab. A list of resources might be provided by another tab.

Our inclination to break down the content model into “tab section” pieces would have led to an unnecessarily complex model and a cumbersome editing experience, and it would have also created content that couldn’t have been understood by additional delivery channels. How would another system have resorted to counting tab sections and content blocks, for instance, if it had been able to identify a product’s “tab section” when referring to its specifications or resource list? This would have prevented the tabs from ever being rearranged, and it would have required adding logic to each other delivery channel to interpret the layout of the design system. Furthermore, if the customer were to have no longer wanted to display this content in a tab layout, it would have been tedious to migrate to a new content model to reflect the new page redesign.

Our customer had a breakthrough when we realized that for each tab, their customer had a specific purpose in mind: it would reveal specific information like the software product’s overview, specifications, related resources, and pricing. Once implementation began, our inclination to focus on what’s visual and familiar had obscured the intent of the designs. It wasn’t long after a little digging that the idea of tabs wasn’t applicable to the content model. What was important was the meaning of the information that they intended to display in the tabs.

In fact, the customer could have decided to display this content in a different way—without tabs—somewhere else. In response to this realization, we created content types for the software product based on the meaningful attributes the client wanted to display on the web. There were both obvious semantic attributes like name and description and rich ones like screenshots, software requirements, and feature lists. The software’s product information stayed together because it wasn’t sliced across separate components like “tab sections” that were derived from the content’s presentation. Any delivery channel, including those that follow, could comprehend and display this content.

Conclusion

In this omnichannel marketing project, we discovered that the best way to keep our content model on track was to ensure that it was semantic ( with type and attribute names that reflected the meaning of the content ) and that it kept content together that belonged together ( instead of fragmenting it ). These two ideas made it easier for us to decide what to do with the content model based on the design. Remember: If you’re developing a content model to support an omnichannel content strategy, or even if you just want to make sure Google and other interfaces understand your content, remember:

• A design system isn’t a content model. Team members may be persuaded to combine them and have their content model resemble their design system, so you should guard the semantic and contextual integrity of the content strategy throughout the entire implementation process. Without the use of a magic decoder ring, every delivery channel will be able to consume the content.
• If your team is struggling to make this transition, you can still reap some of the benefits by using Schema. structured data from org–based on your website. The advantage of search engine optimization is a compelling argument on its own, even if additional delivery channels are not in the works.
• Additionally, remind the team that decoupling the content model from the design will let them update the designs more easily because they won’t be held back by the cost of content migrations. They will be prepared for the upcoming big thing, and they will be able to create new designs without compromising the compatibility between the content and the design.

By firmly defending these ideas, you’ll help your team view content as the most important component of your user experience and as the most effective way to engage with your audience.

This section will provide you with that plan of action. It covers how to incorporate safety principles into your design work in order to make tech that’s secure, how to persuade your stakeholders that this work is important, and how to respond to the critique that what we really need is more diversity. ( Spoiler: we do, but diversity alone is not the solution to fixing unethical, unsafe technology. )

The procedure for diverse safety

Your objectives when designing for protection are as follows:

• determine way your product can be used for misuse,
• style ways to prevent the maltreatment, and
• offer assistance for harmed people to regain control and power.

The Process for Inclusive Safety is a tool to help you reach those goals ( Fig 5.1 ). It’s a method I developed in 2018 to better understand the different methods I used to create products that were designed with safety in mind. Whether you are creating an entirely new product or adding to an existing element, the Process can help you produce your product secure and diverse. The Process includes five public areas of action:

• conducting exploration
• Creating themes
• Pondering issues
• Designing options
• Testing for health

The Process is meant to be flexible; in some situations, it didn’t make sense for groups to adopt every step. Use the parts that are related to your special function and environment, this is meant to be something you can put into your existing style process.

And once you use it, if you have an idea for making it better or simply want to give perspective of how it helped your group, please get in touch with me. It’s a living document, which I hope technicians may use as a practical and useful tool throughout their day-to-day tasks.

If you’re working on a product especially for a resilient team or survivors of some form of injury, such as an application for survivors of domestic violence, sexual abuse, or drug addiction, be sure to read Section 7, which covers that position directly and should be handled a bit different. The principles set forth here are for putting safety first when designing a more general product with a broad user base ( which, as we already know from statistics, will include some groups that should be protected from harm ). Chapter 7 is focused on products that are specifically for vulnerable groups and people who have experienced trauma.

Step 1: Conduct research

A thorough analysis of how your technology might be used for abuse as well as specialized insights into the experiences of those who have witnessed and perpetrated that kind of abuse should be included in design research. At this stage, you and your team will investigate issues of interpersonal harm and abuse, and explore any other safety, security, or inclusivity issues that might be a concern for your product or service, like data security, racist algorithms, and harassment.

broad-based research

Your project should begin with broad, general research into similar products and issues around safety and ethical concerns that have already been reported. For example, a team building a smart home device would do well to understand the multitude of ways that existing smart home devices have been used as tools of abuse. If your product involves artificial intelligence, be aware of the potential for racism and other issues that have been reported in other AI products. Nearly all types of technology have some kind of potential or actual harm that’s been reported on in the news or written about by academics. For these studies, Google Scholar is a useful resource.

Specific research: Survivors

When possible and appropriate, include direct research ( surveys and interviews ) with people who are experts in the forms of harm you have uncovered. In order to have a better understanding of the subject and be better positioned to prevent retraumatize survivors, you should interview advocates working in the area of your research first. If you’ve uncovered possible domestic violence issues, for example, the experts you’ll want to speak with are survivors themselves, as well as workers at domestic violence hotlines, shelters, other related nonprofits, and lawyers.

It is crucial to pay people for their knowledge and lived experiences, especially when interviewing survivors of any kind of trauma. Don’t ask survivors to share their trauma for free, as this is exploitative. While some survivors may not want to be paid, you should always make the offer in the initial ask. Alternative to paying is to donate to a cause fighting the kind of violence the interviewee experienced. We’ll talk more about how to appropriately interview survivors in Chapter 6.

Abusers specifically: research

It’s unlikely that teams aiming to design for safety will be able to interview self-proclaimed abusers or people who have broken laws around things like hacking. Don’t make this a goal, rather, try to get at this angle in your general research. Attempt to understand how abusers or bad actors use technology to harm others, how they use it against others, and how they justify or explain the abuse.

Step 2: Create archetypes

Use your research’s findings to create the archetypes of abuser and survivor once you’ve finished your research. Archetypes are not personas, as they’re not based on real people that you interviewed and surveyed. Instead, they’re based on your research into likely safety issues, much like when we design for accessibility: we don’t need to have found a group of blind or low-vision users in our interview pool to create a design that’s inclusive of them. Instead, we base those designs on existing research and what this group requires. Personas typically represent real users and include many details, while archetypes are broader and can be more generalized.

The abuser archetype is someone who views a product as a means of harm ( Fig. 5.2 ). They may be trying to harm someone they don’t know through surveillance or anonymous harassment, or they may be trying to control, monitor, abuse, or torment someone they know personally.

Someone who is being abused with the product is the survivor archetype. There are various situations to consider in terms of the archetype’s understanding of the abuse and how to put an end to it: Do they need proof of abuse they already suspect is happening, or are they unaware they’ve been targeted in the first place and need to be alerted ( Fig 5.3 )?

You may want to make multiple survivor archetypes to capture a range of different experiences. They may be aware of the abuse is occurring but not be able to stop it, such as when a stalker keeps figuring out where they are from ( Fig. 5.4), or they may be aware that it is happening but are unable to stop it ( such as when an abuser locks them out of IoT devices ). Include as many of these scenarios as you need to in your survivor archetype. These will be used later when you create solutions to help your survivor archetypes achieve their goals of preventing and ending abuse.

It may be useful for you to create persona-like artifacts for your archetypes, such as the three examples shown. Focus on their objectives rather than the demographic details we frequently see in personas. The goals of the abuser will be to carry out the specific abuse you’ve identified, while the goals of the survivor will be to prevent abuse, understand that abuse is happening, make ongoing abuse stop, or regain control over the technology that’s being used for abuse. Later, you’ll think about how to help the survivor’s goals and the abuser’s goals.

And while the “abuser/survivor” model fits most cases, it doesn’t fit all, so modify it as you need to. For example, if you uncovered an issue with security, such as the ability for someone to hack into a home camera system and talk to children, the malicious hacker would get the abuser archetype and the child’s parents would get survivor archetype.

3. Brainstorming issues

After creating archetypes, brainstorm novel abuse cases and safety issues. You’re trying to identify entirely new safety issues that are unique to your product or service by using the term” Novel” in terms of things you’ve not found in your research. The goal with this step is to exhaust every effort of identifying harms your product could cause. You aren’t worrying about how to prevent the harm yet—that comes in the next step.

How else could your product be used for any kind of abuse besides what you’ve already found in your research? I recommend setting aside at least a few hours with your team for this process.

Try conducting a Black Mirror brainstorming session if you want to start somewhere. This exercise is based on the show Black Mirror, which features stories about the dark possibilities of technology. Try to figure out how your product would be used in an episode of the show—the most wild, awful, out-of-control ways it could be used for harm. Participants typically end up having a good deal of fun when I’ve led Black Mirror brainstorms ( which I think is great because having fun when designing for safety! ). I recommend time-boxing a Black Mirror brainstorm to half an hour, and then dialing it back and using the rest of the time thinking of more realistic forms of harm.

You may still not feel confident that you have found every possible source of harm after identifying as many opportunities for abuse as possible. A healthy amount of anxiety is normal when you’re doing this kind of work. It’s common for teams designing for safety to worry,” Have we really identified every possible harm? What if something is missing? If you’ve spent at least four hours coming up with ways your product could be used for harm and have run out of ideas, go to the next step.

It’s impossible to say 100 % assurance that you’ve done everything, but instead of aiming for 100 %, acknowledge that you’ve done it and will continue to prioritize safety in the future. Once your product is released, your users may identify new issues that you missed, aim to receive that feedback graciously and course-correct quickly.

Step 4: Design solutions

You should now be able to identify potential harm-causing uses for your product as well as survivor and abuser archetypes describing opposing user objectives. The next step is to identify ways to design against the identified abuser’s goals and to support the survivor’s goals. This is a good idea to include this one alongside other areas of your design process where you’re offering solutions to the various issues your research has identified.

Some questions to ask yourself to help prevent harm and support your archetypes include:

• Can you design your product in such a way that the identified harm cannot happen in the first place? What barriers can you place to stop the harm from occurring if not?
• How can you make the victim aware that abuse is happening through your product?
• How can you explain to the victim what they must do to stop the problem?
• Can you identify any types of user activity that would indicate some form of harm or abuse? Could your product help the user access support?

In some products, it’s possible to proactively detect harm is occurring. For example, a pregnancy app might be modified to allow the user to report that they were the victim of an assault, which could trigger an offer to receive resources for local and national organizations. Although it’s not always possible to be this proactive, it’s worthwhile to spend an hour discussing whether any kind of user activity would indicate harm or abuse and how your product could help them in a secure manner.

That said, use caution: you don’t want to do anything that could put a user in harm’s way if their devices are being monitored. If you do offer some kind of proactive help, always make it voluntary, and think through other safety issues, such as the need to keep the user in-app in case an abuser is checking their search history. In the next chapter, we’ll walk through a good illustration of this.

Step 5: Test for safety

The final step is to evaluate your prototypes from the perspective of your archetypes, who wants to harm the product and the victim of the harm who needs to regain control over the technology. Just like any other kind of product testing, at this point you’ll aim to rigorously test out your safety solutions so that you can identify gaps and correct them, validate that your designs will help keep your users safe, and feel more confident releasing your product into the world.

Ideally, safety testing happens along with usability testing. If you work for a company that doesn’t conduct usability testing, you might be able to use safety testing to deftly perform both. A user who uses your design while trying to use it against someone else can also be encouraged to point out interactions or other design details that don’t make sense.

You’ll want to conduct safety testing on either your final prototype or the actual product if it’s already been released. It’s okay to test an existing product that wasn’t created with safety goals in mind right away; “etrofitting” it for safety is a good thing.

Remember that testing for safety involves testing from the perspective of both an abuser and a survivor, though it may not make sense for you to do both. Alternatively, if you made multiple survivor archetypes to capture multiple scenarios, you’ll want to test from the perspective of each one.

You as the designer are probably too closely acquainted with the product and its design at this point, just like other usability testing techniques, and you know the product too well. Instead of doing it yourself, set up testing as you would with other usability testing: find someone who is not familiar with the product and its design, set the scene, give them a task, encourage them to think out loud, and observe how they attempt to complete it.

testing for abuse

The goal of this testing is to understand how easy it is for someone to weaponize your product for harm. Unlike with usability testing, you want to make it impossible, or at least difficult, for them to achieve their goal. Use your product in an effort to achieve the goals in the abuser archetype you created earlier.

For example, for a fitness app with GPS-enabled location features, we can imagine that the abuser archetype would have the goal of figuring out where his ex-girlfriend now lives. You’d make every effort to track down another user’s location who has their privacy settings turned on with this in mind. You might try to see her running routes, view any available information on her profile, view anything available about her location ( which she has set to private ), and investigate the profiles of any other users somehow connected with her account, such as her followers.

If by the end of this you’ve managed to uncover some of her location data, despite her having set her profile to private, you know now that your product enables stalking. Reverting to step 4 and figuring out how to stop this from occurring is your next step. You may need to repeat the process of designing solutions and testing them more than once.

Testing for Survivors

Testing for Survivors involves identifying how to give information and power to the survivor. It might not always make sense based on the product or context. Thwarting the attempt of an abuser archetype to stalk someone also satisfies the goal of the survivor archetype to not be stalked, so separate testing wouldn’t be needed from the survivor’s perspective.

However, there are cases where it makes sense. A survivor archetype’s goal would be to discover who or what causes the temperature change when they aren’t doing it themselves, for instance. You could test this by looking for the thermostat’s history log and checking for usernames, actions, and times, if you couldn’t find that information, you would have more work to do in step 4.

Another goal might be regaining control of the thermostat once the survivor realizes the abuser is remotely changing its settings. Are there any instructions that explain how to remove a user and change the password, and are they simple to locate? For your test, this would involve trying to figure out how to do this. This might again reveal that more work is needed to make it clear to the user how they can regain control of the device or account.

Stress testing

To make your product more inclusive and compassionate, consider adding stress testing. This concept comes from Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher. The authors noted that personas typically focus on happy people, but that happy people are frequently anxious, stressed out, unhappy, or even go through a bad day. These are called” stress cases”, and testing your products for users in stress-case situations can help you identify places where your design lacks compassion. More information about how to incorporate stress cases into your design can be found in Design for Real Life, as well as in many other effective methods for designing with compassion.

Here’s the strategy. To encourage stakeholders to determine high-risk assumptions and buried complexity, you must work with them to mobilize them as much as you do to obtain answers from users. Essentially, you need to make them think it’s their plan.

By bringing the group up around two straightforward issues, I’ll show you how to collectively introduce alignment and cracks in the team’s shared knowledge.

1. What are the materials?
2. What are the interactions between those things?

A cross between screen design and analysis

These two issues correlate to the first two methods of the ORCA approach, which may be your new best friend when it comes to reducing speculation. Delay, what’s ORCA? Glad you asked.

ORCA stands for Things, Relationships, CTAs, and Values, and it outlines a process for creating good object-oriented user experience. My style philosophy is based on object-oriented UX. ORCA is an iterative strategy for synthesizing person study into an elegant fundamental foundation to help monitor and conversation design. My work as a UX designer has become more creative, successful, fun, proper, and important thanks to OOUX and ORCA.

The ORCA approach has four incremental shells and a staggering fifteen steps. In each round we get more precision on our System, Rupees, Computer, and As.

I occasionally refer to ORCA as a “garbage in, garbage out” procedure. To ensure that the observable design produced in the last round truly tests properly, the procedure needs to be fed by good research. The beginning of the ORCA approach, however, serves another purpose: it helps you buy the need for research if you don’t have a ton of study.

In other words, the ORCA process serves as a gauntlet between research and design. You can gracefully ride the killer whale from research to design with good research. But without good research, the process effectively spits you back into research and with a cache of specific open questions.

Getting back in the same curiosity-boat

What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.

Mark Twain

The first two steps of the ORCA process—Object Discovery and Relationship Discovery—shine a spotlight on the dark, dusty corners of your team’s misalignments and any inherent complexity that’s been swept under the rug. It begins to reveal what this timeless comic so skillfully demonstrates:

This is one reason why so many UX designers are frustrated in their job and why many projects fail. Every decision-maker is confident in their own mental picture, which is another reason why we frequently can’t sell research.

Once we expose hidden fuzzy patches in each picture and the differences between them all, the case for user research makes itself.

However, it is crucial how we go about doing this. However much we might want to, we can’t just tell everyone,” YOU ARE WRONG”! Instead, we need to facilitate and guide our team members to self-identify holes in their picture. When stakeholders accept responsibility for their beliefs and understanding gaps, BAM! Suddenly, UX research is not such a hard sell, and everyone is aboard the same curiosity-boat.

Let’s say your users are physicians. And you have no idea how doctors use the system you are tasked with redesigning.

You might try to sell research by honestly saying:” We need to understand doctors better! What are the issues they face? How do they use the current app”? Here’s the issue with that, though. Those questions are vague, and the answers to them don’t feel acutely actionable.

Instead, you want your stakeholders themselves to ask super-specific questions. This conversation is more appropriate for facilitating than engaging in. Let’s listen in:

” Wait a sec, how frequently do doctors share patients?” Does a patient in this system have primary and secondary doctors”?

” Can a patient even have more than one primary doctor”?

Is it a “primary doctor” or just a “primary caregiver” ?Can’t that position be considered a nurse practitioner?

” No, caregivers are something else… That’s the patient’s family contacts, right”?

” So are caregivers in scope for this redesign”?

” Yeah, because if a caregiver is present at an appointment, the doctor needs to note that. Like, tag the caregiver on the note… Or on the appointment”?

We are currently going somewhere. Do you see how powerful it can be getting stakeholders to debate these questions themselves? Here, the diabolical goal is to diplomatically and diplomatically shake their confidence.

When these kinds of questions bubble up collaboratively and come directly from the mouths of your stakeholders and decision-makers, suddenly, designing screens without knowing the answers to these questions seems incredibly risky, even silly.

If we create software without understanding the real-world information environment of our users, we will likely create software that does not align to the real-world information environment of our users. And most likely as a result of this, the software product will be more confusing, more complicated, and less intuitive.

The two questions

But how do we approach these types of contentious inquiries diplomatically, effectively, collaboratively, and reliably?

We can do this by starting with those two big questions that align to the first two steps of the ORCA process:

1. What are the materials?
2. What are the interactions between those things?

In practice, getting to these answers is easier said than done. I’m going to demonstrate how an Object Definition Workshop can be organized using these two straightforward questions. During this workshop, these” seed” questions will blossom into dozens of specific questions and shine a spotlight on the need for more user research.

Work in preparation: Noun for foraging

In the next section, I’ll show you how to run an Object Definition Workshop with your stakeholders ( and entire cross-functional team, hopefully ). But first, you need to do some prep work.

In essence, look for nouns that are specific to the subject matter or industry of your project and use at least a few sources. I call this noun foraging.

Just a few excellent noun foraging sources can be found:

• the product’s marketing site
• the product’s competitors ‘ marketing sites ( competitive analysis, anyone? )
• the already-existing product ( check the labels! )!
• user interview transcripts
• vision documents or notes from stakeholder interviews

Put your detective hat on, my dear Watson. Get resourceful and leverage what you have. Use those if all you have is a marketing website, some screenshots of the current legacy system, and access to customer service chat logs.

As you peruse these sources, watch for the nouns that are used over and over again, and start listing them ( preferably on blue sticky notes if you’ll be creating an object map later! …

You’ll want to focus on nouns that might represent objects in your system. If you are having trouble determining if a noun might be object-worthy, remember the acronym SIP and test for:

1. Structure
2. Instances
3. Purpose

Consider, for instance, a library app. Is “book” an object?

Can you think of a few attributes for this potential object? Title, author, publish date … Yep, it has structure. Check!

What are some instances of this potential “book” object? Can you name a few? Check out The Alchemist, Ready Player One, and Everybody Poops!

Purpose: why is this object important to the users and business? Well, “book” is what our library client is providing to people and books are why people come to the library … Check, check, check!

Focus on capturing the nouns that have SIP as you are noun foraging. Avoid capturing components like dropdowns, checkboxes, and calendar pickers—your UX system is not your design system! Components are just the packaging for objects—they are a means to an end. No one is using your dropdown to play in your digital space! They are coming for the VALUABLE THINGS and what they can do with them. We are attempting to identify those things or objects.

Let’s say we work for a startup disrupting the email experience. This is how I’d start my noun foraging.

I’d like to take a look at my own email client, which turns out to be Gmail. I’d then look at Outlook and the new HEY email. I would examine Hotmail, Yahoo, and even Basecamp and other’email replacers’. I’d read some articles, reviews, and forum threads where people are complaining about email. While doing all this, I would look for and write down the nouns.

( Before moving on, feel free to go noun foraging for this fictitious product as well, and then scroll down to see how closely our lists correspond. Just don’t get lost in your own emails! Rejoice back to me!

Drumroll, please…

Here are a few nouns I came up with during my noun foraging:

• email message
• thread
• contact
• client
• rule/automation
• email address that is not a contact?
• contact organizations
• attachment
• Google doc file / other integrated file
• newsletter? ( HEY views this in a different way )
• saved responses and templates

Scan your list of nouns and pick out words that you are completely clueless about. It might be automation or a client in our email example. Do as much homework as you can before your session with stakeholders: google what’s googleable. But other terms might be so specific to the product or domain that you need to have a conversation about them.

Aside: Here are some real nouns that I needed my stakeholders to understand during my own past project work:

• Record Locator
• Home Incentive
• Augmented Line Item
• Curriculum-Based Measurement Probe

A list of nouns that represent potential objects and a short list of nouns that need to be further defined are really all you need to prepare for the workshop session.

Facilitate an Object Definition Workshop

You could start your workshop by doing noun foraging; this can be done in concert. If you have five people in the room, pick five sources, assign one to every person, and give everyone ten minutes to find the objects within their source. When the time’s up, come together and find the overlap. Your friend here is affinity mapping!

If your team is short on time and might be reluctant to do this kind of grunt work ( which is usually the case ) do your own noun foraging beforehand, but be prepared to show your work. I enjoy showing screenshots of documents and screens that have all the highlighted nouns. Bring the artifacts of your process, and start the workshop with a five-minute overview of your noun foraging journey.

HOT TIP: before jumping into the workshop, frame the conversation as a requirements-gathering session to help you better understand the scope and details of the system. You don’t need to tell them you‘re looking for gaps in the team’s understanding so that you can demonstrate the need for more user research; that will be our little secret. Instead, go into the session optimistically, as if your knowledgeable stakeholders and PMs and biz folks already have all the answers.

Let the whack-a-mole question then begin.

1. What is this thing?

Want to have some genuine fun? At the beginning of your session, ask stakeholders to privately write definitions for the handful of obscure nouns you might be uncertain about. Then, have everyone present their cards at once, and see if you get different definitions (you will ). This is gold for exposing misalignment and starting great conversations.

As your discussion unfolds, capture any agreed-upon definitions. And when uncertainty appears, quietly ( but clearly ) begin a parking lot with “open questions.” � �

Here’s a fantastic follow-up after definitions solidify:

2. Do our users know what these things are? What is the name of this object?

Stakeholder 1: They probably call email clients “apps”. But I’m not certain.

Stakeholder 2: Automations are often called “workflows”, I think. Or, maybe users think workflows are something different.

Ask the group to decide whether to use only that term in the near future if it becomes more user-friendly. This way, the team can better align to the users ‘ language and mindset.

Okay, let’s get to the next part.

If you have two or more objects that seem to overlap in purpose, ask one of these questions:

3. Do these two things exist the same? Or are these different? What distinguishes them from one another if they are different?

You: Is a saved response the same as a template?

Stakeholder 1: Yes! Absolutely.

Stakeholder 2: I don’t think so… A saved response is text with links and variables, but a template is more about the look and feel, like default fonts, colors, and placeholder images.

Your expanding glossary of objects should continue to grow. And continue to capture areas of uncertainty in your “open questions” parking lot.

If you successfully determine that two similar things are, in fact, different, here’s your next follow-up question:

4. What’s the relationship between these objects?

You: Do saved responses and templates have any connection to each other?

Stakeholder 3: Yeah, a template can be applied to a saved response.

You, always with the follow-ups: When is the template applied to a saved response? Does that occur when the user is creating the saved response? Or when they apply the saved response to an email? How does that actually operate?

Listen. Capture uncertainty. When the number of “open questions” reaches a critical mass, pause to begin asking questions of groups or individuals. Some questions might be for the dev team ( hopefully at least one developer is in the room with you ). One question might be specific for someone who was unable to attend the workshop. And many questions will need to be labeled “user”.

Do you see how we are building up to our UXR sales pitch?

5. Is this object in scope?

Your next query makes the team’s attention narrow to what’s most crucial to your users. You can simply ask,” Are saved responses in scope for our first release”?, but I’ve got a better, more devious strategy.

By now, you should have a list of clearly defined objects. Ask participants to arrange these items either in small breakout groups or independently according to their importance. Then, like you did with the definitions, have everyone reveal their sort order at once. Unsurprisingly, it’s not unusual for the VP to place something like” saved responses” at the top of the list while everyone else places it at the bottom. Try not to look too smug as you inevitably expose more misalignment.

I did this for a startup a few years ago. The three groups ‘ wildly different sort orders were displayed on the whiteboard.

The CEO nodded his head and said,” This is why we haven’t been able to move forward in two years,” taking a step back.

Admittedly, it’s tragic to hear that, but as a professional, it feels pretty awesome to be the one who facilitated a watershed realization.

Once you have a good idea of in-scope, clearly defined things, this is when you move on to doing more relationship mapping.

6. Create a visual representation of the objects ‘ relationships

We’ve already tried to figure out what two things are different, but this time, we wanted to ask the team about every possible relationship. For each object, ask how it relates to all the other objects. In what ways are the objects connected? Pull out your dependable boxes and arrows technique to see all the connections. Here, we are connecting our objects with verbs. I prefer to use simple “has a” and “has many” statements in my verbs.

This system modeling activity brings up all sorts of new questions:

• Can attachments be included in a saved response?
• Can a saved response use a template? If so, can the recipient override the template if an email uses a saved response with a template?
• Do users want to see all the emails they sent that included a particular attachment? For example,” show me all the emails I sent with ProfessionalImage. attached .jpg I’ve changed my professional photo and I want to alert everyone to update it”.

The workshop participants might provide solid responses directly. Great! Capture that new shared understanding. However, keep adding questions to your expanding parking lot as uncertainty arises.

Light the fuse

You’ve set up the explosives strategically along the floodgates. Now you simply have to light the fuse and BOOM. Watch the buy-in for user research flooooow.

Have the group reflect on the list of open questions before the workshop ends. Make plans for getting answers internally, then focus on the questions that need to be brought before users.

This is your final move. Take those questions you’ve compiled for user research and discuss the level of risk associated with NOT answering them. Ask, “if we design without an answer to this question, if we make up our own answer and we are wrong, how bad might that turn out”?

With this approach, we are making our decision-makers fight for user research because they themselves define questions as high-risk. Sorry, not sorry.

Your moment of truth is right now. With everyone in the room, ask for a reasonable budget of time and money to conduct 6–8 user interviews focused specifically on these questions.

HOT TIP: if you are new to UX research, please note that you’ll likely need to rephrase the questions that came up during the workshop before you present them to users. Make sure your questions are non-repeated and don’t force the user to choose any default responses.

Final words: Hold the screen design!

Seriously, if at all possible, if you never design screens again without first addressing these fundamental inquiries: what are the objects and how do they relate?

I promise you this: if you can secure a shared understanding between the business, design, and development teams before you start designing screens, you will have less heartache and save more time and money, and ( it almost feels like a bonus at this point! ) users will be more receptive to what you put out into the world.

I sincerely hope this will give you the time and money to spend talking to your users and getting a clear understanding of what you are designing before you begin creating screens. If you find success using noun foraging and the Object Definition Workshop, there’s more where that came from in the rest of the ORCA process, which will help prevent even more late-in-the-game scope tugs-of-war and strategy pivots.

Wish you the best of luck! Now go sell research!

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

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

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

benefits of mobile-first technology

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

Development order. A good development hierarchy is something you can definitely expect from mobile-first; you just concentrate on the mobile view and start developing.

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

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

Inhibits desktop-centric growth. It can be tempting to first focus on the desktop perspective because desktop computers are used for growth. However, considering mobile from the beginning prevents us from getting stuck eventually; no one wants to spend their time getting a site that is focused on desktops to operate on mobile devices!

Drawbacks of mobile-first

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

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

higher CSS sensitivity A school name declaration with a restored default value for a style has a higher specificity today. This can be a pain on big projects when you want to preserve the CSS candidates as simple as possible.

Needs more regression analysis. All higher thresholds must be regression tested if changes to CSS at a lower see ( such as adding a new style ) are required.

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

Home value issue is overruled by the issue.

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

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

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

Although this strategy won’t work for everyone, I urge you to try it. There are plenty of tools available to support concurrent development, including Responsively App, Blisk, and many others.

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

Closed media query ranges are used in real life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The goal is to: 

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

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

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

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

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

Bundling versus separating the CSS

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

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

What version of HTTP do you use?

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

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

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

CSS is split in half.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving on

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

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

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

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

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

I made the decision to investigate deeper the causes of organization that prevent us from practicing regular social style. Today, after much research and experimentation, I believe that I’ve found the code that will let us functionally combine morality. And it’s unexpectedly easy! However, we must first move out to understand what we’re going through.

Control the system

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

What can we do to alter this?

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

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

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

Redefine success

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

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

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

A genuinely purpose-driven company would try to reverse this dynamic: it would recognize finance for what it was intended for: a means. Therefore, both the company’s goals and its viability are important in order to realize what they are trying to accomplish. It makes intuitive sense: to achieve most anything, you need resources, people, and money. Fun fact: the Italian language does not distinguish between viability and feasibility; both are merely fattibilità.

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

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

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

Ensure social justice, equity, and sustainability.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We create products and services that reward sufficiency and reusability. Our products are repurposed, given, and given priority to making sustainable choices in order to support the circular economy. We deliver functionality instead of ownership, and we limit energy use.

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

Measure impact

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

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

There’s a lot of power in measurement. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets done. This example was once shared by Donella Meadows:

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

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

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

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

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

Practice daily ethical design

Once you’ve defined your objectives and you have a reasonable idea of the potential metrics for your design project, only then do you have a chance to structurally practice ethical design. Making the decision to” simply” use your imagination and pick one of the many resources and knowledge resources at your disposal.

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

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

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

Kick it off or return to the pre-existing situation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the project’s history and purpose: What is the purpose of this project?
• the problem definition: what do we want to solve?
• the concrete goals and metrics for each success dimension: what do we want to achieve?
• the objectives, procedures, and role descriptions: how will we accomplish them?

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Of course, engaging your stakeholders in this way can be uncomfortable. Many of my coworkers had questions to ask, such as” Will they take this seriously?” and “Can’t we just do it within the design team instead”? In fact, a product manager once asked me why ethics couldn’t just be a structured part of the design process—to just do it without spending the effort to define ethical objectives. It’s a tempting thought, isn’t it? We wouldn’t have to have difficult discussions with stakeholders about what values or which key-performance indicators to pursue. It would let us focus on what we like and do best: designing.

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

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

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