Category: Blog

Some members of the elite running group were beginning to think it was impossible to run a hour 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.

However, on May 6, 1956, Roger Bannister caught people by shock. 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 presently knew that the four-minute hour could be accomplished 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, a year later, three runners all managed to cross the four-minute hurdle in the same culture. 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 man 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 pretty 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, we are not required to follow any specific environmental standards in the world of websites and apps, and we have only recently developed the tools and methods to do so.

The main objective in green web layout is to reduce carbon emissions. However, it’s nearly impossible to accurately assess the amount of CO₂ that a website merchandise produces. 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. What then do we do?

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

1. Transfer of data
2. Electricity’s carbon 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 easiest way to calculate data transfer for a second visit for web pages is to measure the site weight, which is the page’s transfer size in kilobytes when someone first visits the page. It’s very easy to measure using the engineer equipment in any modern internet browser. Frequently, the statistics for the total data transfer of any web application are 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 problem 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 may be aware of the idea of performance budgeting as a method for directing a project team to deliver faster user experiences. 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 weight to compare the new website to the old one. 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 beyond the first visit and measuring page weight budgets for scenarios beyond this level of detail 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 carbon emissions and energy consumption data, 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.

Electricity’s carbon 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 produced. 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 have some control over where our projects are hosted, we do not have complete control over the energy supply of web services. 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 ).

However, we don’t want to move our servers too far away from our users because it requires a lot of 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 determine 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 calculate the distance between San Francisco and London, which is 5,300 miles. That’s a long way! We can see how significantly lessening the distance and energy needed to transmit the data would be if it was hosted somewhere in North America, ideally on the West Coast. 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 a layer of abstraction that isn’t as intuitive, carbon budgets do focus our minds on the main thing we’re trying to reduce, and this is in line with 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 phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or even smart TVs, as front-end web technologies advance. 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 allow us to create applications where the” thinking” process is performed either 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 data is processed in a web browser, which means more energy is used by the user’s devices. 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 those who have 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 harms the environment, but it places a disproportionate financial burden on the poorest members of society.

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 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.

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

At the time, I didn’t realize yet how to functionally incorporate morality. Yes, I had found some tools that had worked for me in past projects, such as using checklists, notion monitoring, and “dark truth” sessions, but I didn’t manage to use those in every task. I was still battling for time and support, and I only managed to get a good deal of a higher ( moral ) design quality, which is not what I would consider to be structurally integrated.

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

Control the program

Unfortunately, we’re trapped in a capitalist structure that reinforces materialism and inequality, and it’s obsessed with the 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 last years, those goals have twisted our well-intended human-centered mentality into a powerful system that promotes 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 intentions, and even though we like to suggest that we create solutions for people, we’re a part of the problem.

What can we do to alter this?

We can begin by acting at the appropriate amount within the structure. Donella H. Meadows, a system scholar, previously listed ways to influence a system in order of success. When you apply these to architecture, you get:

At the lowest level of effectiveness, you can change numbers such as accessibility results or the number of layout views. None of that will, however, alter a company’s manner.
• 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.
• Focusing rather on feedback rings such as management power, staff identification, or design-system purchases can help a business become better at achieving its objectives. But that doesn’t change the objectives themselves, which means that the organization will still work against your ethical-design ideals.
• The next level, information flows, is what most ethical-design initiatives focus on now: the exchange of ethical methods, toolkits, articles, conferences, workshops, and so on. Ethics design has largely remained theoretical in this area. We’ve been focusing all of this time on the wrong system level.
• Take rules, for example—they beat knowledge every time. There can be widely accepted rules, such as how finance works, or a scrum team’s definition of done. However, unofficial rules meant to keep profits, frequently revealed through comments like” the client didn’t ask for it” or “don’t make it too big” can also smother ethical design.
• It is difficult to change the laws without exercising official authority. That’s why the next level is so influential: self-organization. Experimentation, bottom-up initiatives, passion projects, self-steering teams—all of these are examples of self-organization that improve the resilience and creativity of a company. It’s exactly this diversity of viewpoints that’s needed to structurally tackle big systemic issues like consumerism, wealth inequality, and climate change.
• Yet even stronger than self-organization are objectives and metrics. Every employee of our businesses works hard to increase their profits, which is why everything we do is done. And once I realized that profit is nothing more than a measure, I realized just how crucial a very specific, defined metric can be in terms of moving a business in a certain direction.

The takeaway? We must first change the company’s measurable goals from the bottom up if we truly want to incorporate ethics into our daily design practice.

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.

But in our hearts, we all know that the three dimensions aren’t equally weighted: it’s viability that ultimately controls whether a product will go live. Therefore, this might be a more accurate representation:

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 feasibility and viability are important factors in the company’s efforts to accomplish what they stated. It makes intuitive sense: to achieve most anything, you need resources, people, and money. ( Fun fact: the Italian language knows no difference between feasibility and viability, both are simply fattibilità. )

However, merely switching between what is desirable and what is acceptable isn’t enough to produce an ethical result. Consumption is still associated with desirability because the associated activities aim to determine what people want, regardless of whether or not it benefits them. Desirability objectives, such as user satisfaction or conversion, don’t consider whether a product is healthy for people. They don’t stop us from developing products that deceive or deceive people, or do they prevent us from reducing society’s wealth inequality. They are ineffective for maintaining 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. Many similar models exist, 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’s no one way to do this because it highly depends on your culture, values, and industry. However, I’ll give you the version I created for a group of coworkers at a design firm. Consider it a template to get started.

Pursue well-being, 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 calm, transparent, nonaddictive, and nonmisleading. We respect our users ‘ time, attention, and privacy, and help them make healthy and respectful choices.

An objective on the societal level forces us to consider our impact beyond just the user, widening our attention to the economy, communities, and other indirect stakeholders. We called this objective equity:

We develop goods and services that benefit society. We consider economic equality, racial justice, and the inclusivity and diversity of people as teams, users, and customer segments. We listen to local culture, communities, and those we affect.

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

We develop goods and services that reward reuse and sufficiency. Our solutions support the circular economy: we create value from waste, repurpose products, and prioritize sustainable choices. We deliver functionality instead of ownership, and we limit energy use.

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

Measure impact

But defining these objectives still isn’t enough. What truly caught the attention of senior management was the fact that we created a way to measure every design project’s well-being, equity, and sustainability.

This overview lists example metrics that you can use as you pursue well-being, equity, and sustainability:

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

The system will produce military spending if the desired system state is national security, which is defined as the amount of money spent on the military. It may or may not produce 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 instead we measured success through metrics for ( digital ) well-being, such as ( reduced ) screen time or software energy consumption?

There’s another important message here. Even if we set an objective to build a calm interface, if we were to choose the wrong metric for calmness—say, the number of interface elements—we could still end up with a screen that induces anxiety. The wrong metric can completely destroy 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 makes you think about what we as designers have control over: what can I add or change in my design process to achieve the desired level of success? The response to this query provides a lot of insight and clarity.

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

Practice daily ethical design

Only then do you have the opportunity to structurally practice ethical design once you have defined your goals and have a reasonable idea of the potential metrics for your design project. It” simply” turns into a matter of using your imagination and sprinkling from the knowledge and tools that are already at your disposal.

I think this is quite exciting! It introduces a whole new set of difficulties and considerations for the design process. Should you stick to that time-consuming video or would a brief illustration suffice? Which typeface is the most calm and inclusive? What fresh techniques and tools do you employ? When is the website’s end of life? How can you offer the same service to users with less focus? 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

The most crucial meeting that it is so easy to forget to include is the kickoff. It consists of two major phases: 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, shares their hopes for the outcome and their contributions to it. Assumptions are raised and discussed. The goal is to reach the same level of understanding, which will help to prevent mistakes and surprises later on in the project.

For example, for a recent freelance project that aimed to design a digital platform that facilitates US student advisors ‘ documentation and communication, we conducted an online kickoff with the client, a subject-matter expert, and two other designers. 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 kickoff’s primary goal is the stated above. But just as important as expressing expectations is agreeing on what success means for the project—in terms of desirability, viability, feasibility, and ethics. What are the objectives in each dimension?

You need to be sure that you can trust success at this early stage because it will determine the project’s future. The design team can raise diversity as a specific success criterion during the kickoff if, for instance, they want to create an inclusive app for a diverse user group. The team can follow-up on that promise throughout the project if the client consents. As we agreed in our first meeting, having a diverse user group that includes A and B is essential to creating a successful product. So we perform activity X and adhere to the research procedure Y. Compare those odds to a situation where the team had to ask for permission halfway through the project and didn’t agree to it in advance. The client might argue that that was in excess of the agreed scope, and she would be correct.

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

We went through each dimension, writing down ideas on digital sticky notes. Then we exchanged ideas and verbally agreed on the most crucial ones. Our client, for instance, agreed that the platform’s success depends heavily on sustainability and progressive enhancement. Additionally, the subject-matter expert stressed the importance of including students from underprivileged and low-income groups in the design process.

In a project brief that adequately described these elements, we consolidated our ideas and agreed on them after the kickoff.

the project’s origin and purpose: why are we doing 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 scope, process, and role descriptions: how will we achieve it?

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

Over the past year, quite a few colleagues have asked me,” Where do I start with ethical design”? Create a session with your stakeholders to ( re)define success, which is what my response has always been. Even though you might not always be entirely successful in coming to terms with goals that address all responsibility objectives, that consistently beats the status quo. If you want to be an ethical, responsible designer, there’s no skipping this step.

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

And for those who identify as service designers, UX designers, or UI designers, stay away from the toolkits, meetups, and conferences for a while if you truly want to have a positive, meaningful impact. Instead, gather your colleagues and define goals for well-being, equity, and sustainability through design. Engage your stakeholders in a workshop to find ways to accomplish and evaluate those ethical objectives. Take their input, make it concrete and visible, ask for their agreement, 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 colleagues expressed doubts such as” What will the client think of this”?,” Will they take me seriously”?, and “Can’t we just do it within the design team instead”? A product manager once questioned why ethics couldn’t just be a set process for design, avoiding having to put forth an effort to define ethical goals. It’s a tempting idea, right? Without having to deliberate about the appropriate values or key performance indicators, we wouldn’t have to discuss them with stakeholders. It would let us focus on what we like and do best: designing.

But as systems theory tells us, that’s not enough. That uncomfortable space is where we need to be if we truly want to make a difference, for those of us who aren’t from marginalized groups and have the privilege of speaking up and being heard. We can’t remain within the design-for-designers bubble, enjoying our privileged working-from-home situation, disconnected from the real world out there. If we only talk about ethical design and keep it in articles and toolkits, then we are not designing ethically, for those of us who have the opportunity to speak up and be heard. It’s just theory. By challenging them to redefine success in business, we must actively engage with our coworkers and clients.

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

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

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

Square features, for instance, make it fun to play with round picture areas. Mobile screen notches and electronic keyboards present difficulties in how to best coordinate content that stays out of reach. And two display or portable devices make us reassess how to best utilize available space in a number of various device postures.

These new evolutions of the internet system made it both more demanding and more exciting to design products. They give us a fantastic opportunity to leave our triangular containers.

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

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

PWAs are really exciting as a style area because they challenge us to consider how blending online and device-native customer interfaces may be. On desktop products in certain, we have more than 40 years of history telling us what software may look like, and it can be hard to break out of this mental concept.

PWAs on pc are ultimately limited to the glass they appear in, which is a square with a name bar at the top.

Here’s what a standard pc PWA app looks like:

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

What if we could assume differently and regain the full glass of the app? Doing so would give us a chance to create our programs more wonderful and feel more included in the operating system.

The Window Controls Overlay offers precisely this. This innovative PWA operation makes it possible to take advantage of the full floor area of the app, including where the name bar usually appears.

About the windows and title table settings

Let’s begin with an explanation of what the title bar and screen controls are.

The title bar is the screen at the top of an application that typically contains the phone’s name. Window controls are the affordances, or buttons, that make it possible to reduce, increase, or near the app’s windows, and are also displayed at the top.

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

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

Spotify displays album artwork all the way to the top edge of the application window.

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

The purpose of this feature is to give you the ability to use this space with your own content while also giving a way to take account of the window control buttons. And it enables you to offer this modified experience on a range of platforms while not adversely affecting the experience on browsers or devices that don’t support Window Controls Overlay. PWAs are all about progressive enhancement, so this feature is a chance to make your app use this extra space when it’s available.

Let’s use the feature

We’ll be developing a demo app for the remainder of this article to learn more about how to use the feature.

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

The app has two pages. The first lists your existing CSS designs:

The second page enables the creation and editing of CSS designs:

Since I’ve added a simple web manifest and service worker, we can install the app as a PWA on desktop. What it appears to be on macOS is shown below:

And on Windows:

The first page’s white title bar is a waste of space, despite our app’s attractive design. In the second page, it would be really nice if the design area went all the way to the top of the app window.

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

Enabling Window Controls Overlay

The film is still in its experimental phase right now. To try it, you need to enable it in one of the supported browsers.

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

Using the overlay of Window Controls

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

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

On the surface, the feature is incredibly simple to use. This manifest change is the only thing we need to make the title bar disappear and turn the window controls into an overlay.

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

Here is what the app looks like now:

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

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

CSS to avoid the window controls

Along with the feature, new CSS environment variables have been introduced:

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

You can position your content where the title bar would have been by using these variables with the CSS env function to prevent it from overlapping with the window controls. In our case, we’ll use two of the variables to position our header, which contains the logo, search bar, and NEW button.

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

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

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

Our header now adapts to its surroundings, and it doesn’t seem like the window control buttons were left out. The app looks a lot more like a native app.

Changing the window controls the background color so that it blends in

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

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

We can change the theme color of the app to fix this. There are a couple of ways to define it:

The theme_color manifest member in the web app manifest file can be used by PWAs to define a theme color. This color is then used by the OS in different ways. It serves as a background color for the title bar and window controls on desktop computers.
• Websites can use the theme-color meta tag as well. It’s used by browsers to customize the color of the UI around the web page. For PWAs, this color can override the manifest theme_color.

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

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

Here is the function we’ll use:

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

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

Dragging the window

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

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

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

To make any element of the app become a dragging target for the window, we can use the following:

-webkit-app-region: drag;

Additionally, it is possible to specify explicitly that an element be non-draggable:

-webkit-app-region: no-drag; 

These options can be useful for us. We can rename the entire header as a dragging target, but we can also make the NEW button and search field non-draggable so they can still be used as they normally are.

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

...

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

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

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

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

With the above code, users can click and drag where the title bar used to be. Users are expecting to be able to move windows on their desktops, and we don’t violate this expectation, which is good.

adapting to window resizing

It may be useful for an app to know both whether the window controls overlay is visible and when its size changes. The search field, logo, and button would need to be pushed down a little bit if the user made the window very narrow.

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

The API offers three intriguing features:

• navigator.windowControlsOverlay.visiblelets us know whether the overlay is visible.
• navigator.windowControlsOverlay.getBoundingClientRect()lets us know where the title bar area is located and how big it is.
• navigator.windowControlsOverlay.ongeometrychangelets us know when the size or visibility changes.

Let’s use this to illustrate how large the title bar area is, and move the header down if it’s too small.

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

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

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

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

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

Thirty pixel of creative challenge

Using the Window Controls Overlay feature, we were able to take our simple demo app and turn it into something that feels so much more integrated on desktop devices. Something that transcends the typical window restrictions and offers a user with a unique experience.

In reality, this feature only gives us about 30 pixels of extra room and comes with challenges on how to deal with the window controls. However, these additional space and those difficulties can be used to create creative challenges.

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

So let’s embrace this. Use the common technologies at our disposal and experiment with new concepts to create personalized experiences for all devices using just one codebase!

If you get a chance to try the Window Controls Overlay feature and have feedback about it, you can open issues on the spec’s repository. You can help improve this feature’s development, which is still in its early stages. Or, you can take a look at the feature’s existing documentation, or this demo app and its source code.

Do you find yourself designing screens with only a vague idea of how the things on the screen relate to the things elsewhere in the system? Do you leave stakeholder meetings with unclear directives that often seem to contradict previous conversations? You know a better understanding of user needs would help the team get clear on what you are actually trying to accomplish, but time and budget for research is tight. When it comes to asking for more direct contact with your users, you might feel like poor Oliver Twist, timidly asking, “Please, sir, I want some more.” 

Here’s the trick. You need to get stakeholders themselves to identify high-risk assumptions and hidden complexity, so that they become just as motivated as you to get answers from users. Basically, you need to make them think it’s their idea. 

In this article, I’ll show you how to collaboratively expose misalignment and gaps in the team’s shared understanding by bringing the team together around two simple questions:

1. What are the objects?
2. What are the relationships between those objects?

A gauntlet between research and screen design

These two questions align to the first two steps of the ORCA process, which might become your new best friend when it comes to reducing guesswork. Wait, what’s ORCA?! Glad you asked.

ORCA stands for Objects, Relationships, CTAs, and Attributes, and it outlines a process for creating solid object-oriented user experiences. Object-oriented UX is my design philosophy. ORCA is an iterative methodology for synthesizing user research into an elegant structural foundation to support screen and interaction design. OOUX and ORCA have made my work as a UX designer more collaborative, effective, efficient, fun, strategic, and meaningful.

The ORCA process has four iterative rounds and a whopping fifteen steps. In each round we get more clarity on our Os, Rs, Cs, and As.

I sometimes say that ORCA is a “garbage in, garbage out” process. To ensure that the testable prototype produced in the final round actually tests well, the process needs to be fed by good research. But if you don’t have a ton of research, the beginning of the ORCA process serves another purpose: it helps you sell the need for research.

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

Getting 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 expose what this classic comic so beautifully illustrates:

This is one reason why so many UX designers are frustrated in their job and why many projects fail. And this is also why we often can’t sell research: every decision-maker is confident in their own mental picture. 

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

But how we do this is important. 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 take ownership of assumptions and gaps in understanding, BAM! Suddenly, UX research is not such a hard sell, and everyone is aboard the same curiosity-boat.

Say your users are doctors. 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 their pain points? How do they use the current app?” But here’s the problem with that. 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 is more like the kind of conversation you need to facilitate. Let’s listen in:

“Wait a sec, how often 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 role be 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?”

Now we are getting somewhere. Do you see how powerful it can be getting stakeholders to debate these questions themselves? The diabolical goal here is to shake their confidence—gently and diplomatically.

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 this will, hands down, result in a more confusing, more complex, and less intuitive software product.

The two questions

But how do we get to these kinds of meaty questions diplomatically, efficiently, 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 objects?
2. What are the relationships between those objects?

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

Prep work: Noun 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.

Basically, look for nouns that are particular to the business or industry of your project, and do it across at least a few sources. I call this noun foraging.

Here are just a few great noun foraging sources:

• the product’s marketing site
• the product’s competitors’ marketing sites (competitive analysis, anyone?)
• the existing product (look at labels!)
• user interview transcripts
• notes from stakeholder interviews or vision docs from stakeholders

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

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

Think of a library app, for example. Is “book” an object?

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

Instance: what are some examples of this potential “book” object? Can you name a few? The Alchemist, Ready Player One, Everybody Poops… OK, check!

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!

As you are noun foraging, focus on capturing the nouns that have SIP. 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 coming to your digital place to play with your dropdown! They are coming for the VALUABLE THINGS and what they can do with them. Those things, or objects, are what we are trying to identify.

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

First I’d look at my own email client, which happens to be Gmail. I’d then look at Outlook and the new HEY email. I’d look at Yahoo, Hotmail…I’d even look at Slack and Basecamp and other so-called “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 hypothetical product, too, and then scroll down to see how much our lists match up. Just don’t get lost in your own emails! Come 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 groups
• attachment
• Google doc file / other integrated file
• newsletter? (HEY treats this differently)
• saved responses and templates

Scan your list of nouns and pick out words that you are completely clueless about. In our email example, it might be client or automation. 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 foraged during my own past project work that I needed my stakeholders to help me understand:

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

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

Facilitate an Object Definition Workshop

You could actually start your workshop with noun foraging—this activity can be done collaboratively. 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. Affinity mapping is your friend here!

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 love presenting screenshots of documents and screens with all the nouns already highlighted. 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 let them know that you’re looking for gaps in the team’s understanding so that you can prove 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. 

Then, let the question whack-a-mole commence.

1. What is this thing?

Want to have some real 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 show their cards at the same time 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 emerges, quietly (but visibly) start an “open questions” parking lot. 😉

After definitions solidify, here’s a great follow-up:

2. Do our users know what these things are? What do users call this thing?

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

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

If a more user-friendly term emerges, ask the group if they can agree to use only that term moving forward. This way, the team can better align to the users’ language and mindset.

OK, moving on. 

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

3. Are these the same thing? Or are these different? If they are not the same, how are they different?

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

Stakeholder 1: Yes! Definitely.

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. 

Continue to build out your growing glossary of objects. 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: Are saved responses and templates related in any way?

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 happen when the user is constructing the saved response? Or when they apply the saved response to an email? How does that actually work?

Listen. Capture uncertainty. Once the list of “open questions” grows to a critical mass, pause to start assigning questions to 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 specifically for someone who couldn’t make it to 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 question narrows the team’s focus toward what’s most important 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 sort these objects from most to least important, either in small breakout groups or individually. Then, like you did with the definitions, have everyone reveal their sort order at once. Surprisingly—or not so surprisingly—it’s not unusual for the VP to rank something like “saved responses” as #2 while everyone else puts it at the bottom of the list. Try not to look too smug as you inevitably expose more misalignment.

I did this for a startup a few years ago. We posted the three groups’ wildly different sort orders on the whiteboard.

The CEO stood back, looked at it, and said, “This is why we haven’t been able to move forward in two years.”

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 done a bit of this while trying to determine if two things are different, but this time, ask the team about every potential relationship. For each object, ask how it relates to all the other objects. In what ways are the objects connected? To visualize all the connections, pull out your trusty boxes-and-arrows technique. Here, we are connecting our objects with verbs. I like to keep my verbs to simple “has a” and “has many” statements.

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

• Can a saved response have attachments?
• Can a saved response use a template? If so, if an email uses a saved response with a template, can the user override that 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.jpg attached. I’ve changed my professional photo and I want to alert everyone to update it.” 

Solid answers might emerge directly from the workshop participants. Great! Capture that new shared understanding. But when uncertainty surfaces, continue to add questions to your growing parking lot.

Light the fuse

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

Before your workshop wraps up, have the group reflect on the list of open questions. Make plans for getting answers internally, then focus on the questions that need to be brought before users.

Here’s your final step. 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 methodology, we are cornering our decision-makers into advocating for user research as they themselves label questions as high-risk. Sorry, not sorry. 

Now is your moment of truth. 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 open-ended and don’t lead the user into any default answers.

Final words: Hold the screen design!

Seriously, if at all possible, do not ever design screens again without first answering these fundamental questions: 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 helps you win time and budget to go talk to your users and gain clarity on what you are designing before you start building 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. 

All the best of luck! Now go sell research!

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

Because successful personalisation is so dependent on each group’s skill, technology, and market position, there are no Lonely Planet and some tour guides for those of you who want to personalize.

However, you can make sure your team has properly packed its carriers.

There’s a DIY method to increase your chances for victory. You’ll at least at least disarm your boss ‘ irrational exuberance. You’ll need to properly prepare before the celebration.

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the song

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

We’re used to seeing the polished final outcome of a personalization function. A personal have had to be developed, budgeted, and given priority before the year-end prize, the making-of-backstory, or the behind-the-scenes success chest. Before any customisation function is implemented in your product or service, it lives among a long list of thought-provoking concepts that can be used to enhance customer experience more automatically.

So how do you understand where to position your personalization bet? How can you create regular interactions that didn’t irritate users or worse, breed trust? We’ve found that for many well-known budgeted programs to support their continued investments, they initially required one or more workshops to join vital technologies users and stakeholders. Create it count.

We’ve closely monitored the same evolution with our consumers, from major software to young companies. How effective these prepersonalization actions play out, in our experiences working on small and large customisation efforts, and how effective is the program’s supreme track record and its ability to weather challenging questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and manage its design and engineering efforts.

Time and again, we’ve seen successful workshops individual coming success stories from fruitless efforts, saving many time, resources, and social well-being in the process.

A personalization process involves a year-long process of testing and feature creation. Your technical load is not experiencing a switch-flip. It’s ideal managed as a queue that usually evolves through three methods:

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

We think there is a basic language, a set of “nouns and verbs” that your business can use to create experiences that are personalized, personalized, or automated, which is why we created our democratic personalization platform and why we’re field-testing an following deck of cards. These cards are not necessary for you. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.

Set the timer for your kitchen.

How long does a prepersonalization workshop take to prepare? The surrounding assessment activities that we recommend including can ( and often do ) span weeks. We suggest aiming for two to three days for the core workshop. Here’s a summary of our more general approach as well as information on the crucial first-day activities.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

Kickstart: This specifies the terms of your engagement as you concentrate on both your team’s and your team’s readiness and drive.
1. Plan your work: This is where the card-based workshop activities take place, giving you a plan of attack and the scope of work.
2. Work your plan: This phase is all about creating a competitive environment for team participants to individually pitch their own pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept project, its business case, and its operating model.

Give yourself at least two days, divided into two long time periods, to work through those initial two phases more effectively.

Kickstart: Apt your appetite

We call the first lesson the “landscape of connected experience“. It looks at the possibilities for personalization at your company. Any UX that necessitates the orchestration of multiple systems of record on the backend is a connected experience, in our opinion. This could be a content-management system combined with a marketing-automation platform. It might be a customer-data platform combined with a digital asset manager.

Give examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike, as examples of consumer and business-to-business examples. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions ( such as onboarding sequences or wizards ), notifications, and recommenders. These are in the cards, which we have a catalog of. To jog your mind, here are 142 different interactions.

This is all about setting the table. What potential avenues might the practice take in your organization? Here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework for a broad perspective.

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

Next, have your team plot each concept on the following 2x grid, which lists the four enduring justifications for a personalized experience. This is crucial because it emphasizes how personalization can affect your own methods of working as well as your external customers. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Each team member should vote on where they see your product or service putting its emphasis. You can’t give them all a priority, of course. Here, the goal is to show how various departments may view their own benefits from the effort, which can vary from one department to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final kickstart activity is about filling in the personalization gap. Is the customer journey well documented in your business? Will data and privacy compliance be too big of a challenge? Do you have any needs for content metadata that you must address? ( We’re pretty sure you do; it’s just a matter of recognizing the need’s magnitude and its solution. ) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. For instance, our Detractor card lists six intractable behaviors that prevent progress.

It is crucial to your success to effectively coexist and manage expectations. Consider the potential barriers to your future progress. Ask the participants to list specific actions you can take to help your organization overcome or reduce those obstacles. As research has shown, personalization initiatives face a number of common obstacles.

You should have at this point discussed sample interactions, emphasized a significant benefit area, and identified significant gaps. Good—you’re ready to continue.

Hit the test kitchen

Next, let’s take a look at what you’ll need to create personalization recipes. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. They give you a variety of options for how your organization can conduct its activities because of their broad and potent capabilities. This raises the question: When creating a connected experience, where do you start?

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

Over the course of the workshop, the ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together. And by creating “dishes,” you can expect individual team members to create personalized interactions that either serve their or others ‘ needs.

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

Verify your ingredients

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

This isn’t just about discovering requirements. The team can: Identify your personalizations as a series of if-then statements by documenting them as a series of if-then statements.

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

This enables you to streamline your technical and design efforts while delivering a common color palette of the fundamental motifs of your personalized or automated experience.

Compose your recipe

What elements are significant to you? Consider a who-what-when-why construct:

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

We first developed these cards and card categories five years ago. We regularly test their suitability with clients and audience members at conferences. And we still come across fresh possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

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

1. A guest or an unidentified visitor interacts with a product title and receives a banner or alert bar that makes it simpler for them to read the related title, saving time.
2. Welcome automation: When there’s a newly registered user, an email is generated to call out the breadth of the content catalog and to make them a happier subscriber.
3. Winback automation: A user receives an email before their subscription expires or after a recent failed renewal to request that they reconsider renew or request that they be reminded to do so.

We’ve also found that cocreating the recipes themselves can sometimes be the most effective way to start brainstorming about what these cards might be for your organization. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

The workshop’s later stages could be characterized as shifting from focusing on a cookbook to a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual” cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team using a standard jobs-to-be-done format to ensure consistency and outcomes, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and production delivery.

Better kitchens require better architecture

For those who are actually delivering it, simplifying a customer experience is a challenging task. Beware of anyone who contradicts your advice. With that being said,” Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes“.

A team overfitting: they aren’t designing with their best data, is what causes personalization to become a laugh line. Every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, which causes a drag on the effectiveness of personalization, much like a sparse pantry. Your AI’s output quality, for example, is indeed limited by your IA. Before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture, Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable.

You can’t stand the heat, unquestionably…

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a deliberate and cooperative approach will produce the desired outcome. Banish the ideal kitchen. Instead, hit the test kitchen to save time, preserve job satisfaction and security, and safely dispense with the fanciful ideas that originate upstairs of the doers in your organization. There are mouths to feed and meals to be served.

This framework of the workshop gives you a strong chance at long-term success as well as solid ground. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. However, you’ll have solid ground for success if you use the same cookbook and the same recipes. We created these activities so that you can anticipate the needs of your organization before the hazards become overwhelming.

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

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

How we got below

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

The beginning of website standards

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

Server-side language like PHP, Java, and.NET took Perl as the primary back-end computers, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the garbage bin. With these better server-side instruments came the first time of online applications, starting with content-management systems ( especially in the blog space with tools like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress ). AJAX opened the door to sequential connection between the front end and back end in the mid-2000s. Immediately, websites may update their information without needing to refresh. A grain of JavaScript systems, including Prototype, YUI, and jQuery, were created to aid designers in creating more trustworthy client-side interactions across browsers with wildly varying standards support. Techniques like photo alternative enable skilled manufacturers and developers to use fonts of their choosing. And technology like Flash made it possible to include movies, sports, and even more engagement.

These new technology, standards, and approaches reinvigorated the market in many ways. As manufacturers and designers explored more diversified styles and designs, website design flourished. However, we also relied heavily on tricks. When it came to basic layout and text styling, early CSS was a significant improvement over table-based layouts, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes ( such as rounded or angled corners ) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks ). All kinds of nested floats or absolute positioning ( or both ) were necessary for complicated layouts. The big five typefaces were initially influenced by display and photo replacement, but both tricks caused accessibility and performance issues. Additionally, JavaScript libraries made it simple to add a dash of conversation to pages without having to spend the money to double or even quadruple the get size for basic websites.

The internet as technology platform

The interplay between the front end and the back end continued to grow, which led to the development of the present time of current web applications. Between expanded server-side programming languages ( which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others ) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Alongside these equipment came others, including creative type control, build technology, and shared bundle libraries. What was once mainly a repository for linked papers has evolved into a world of possibilities.

At the same time, wireless equipment became more ready, and they gave us online access in our wallets. Mobile applications and flexible style opened up possibilities for fresh relations anytime, anywhere.

The development of social media and other centralized resources for people to connect and use resulted from this blend of potent portable devices and potent development resources. As it became easier and more popular to interact with others immediately on Twitter, Facebook, and yet Slack, the need for held private websites waned. Social media provided links on a worldwide scale, with both the positive and negative effects.

Want to learn more about how we came to be where we are today, along with some other suggestions for improvement? ” Of Time and the Web” was written by Jeremy Keith. Or check out the” Web Design History Timeline” at the Web Design Museum. Additionally, Neal Agarwal takes a fascinating journey of” Internet Artifacts.”

Where we are now

In the last couple of years, it’s felt like we’ve begun to achieve another big tone place. As social-media programs bone and fade, there’s been a growing interest in owning our personal information again. There are many different ways to create websites, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all kinds. Social media fracturing also has a price: we lose essential infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other tools of the IndieWeb can help with this, but they’re still relatively underimplemented and hard to use for the less nerdy. We can create incredible personal websites and update them frequently, but without discovery and connection, it can feel as though we could as well be yelling into the void.

Browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other standards like web components has accelerated, especially through efforts like Interop. In a fraction of the time that they once did, new technologies receive universal support. I frequently find out about a new feature and check its browser support only to discover that its coverage is already over 80 %. Browser support is frequently the only obstacle to using newer techniques today, rather than the time it takes to train and adopt new techniques.

Today, with a few commands and a couple of lines of code, we can prototype almost any idea. With all the tools we currently have, it is simpler than ever to launch a new venture. However, the upfront cost these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes down as the maintenance and upgrading they become a part of our technical debt.

Adopting new standards can sometimes take longer if we rely on third-party frameworks because we might have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks—which used to let us adopt new techniques sooner—have now become hindrances instead. Users must wait for scripts to load before being able to read or interact with pages because these same frameworks frequently come with performance costs. And when scripts fail ( whether through poor code, network issues, or other environmental factors ), there’s often no alternative, leaving users with blank or broken pages.

Where do we go from here?

Today’s hacks help to shape tomorrow’s standards. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks —for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we refuse to acknowledge that they are hacks or when we choose not to replace them. What can we do to create the web’s future, then?

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

Start from standards. Standards change over time, but browsers have done a remarkably good job of staying current with outdated standards. The same isn’t always true of third-party frameworks. Even the most advanced HTML from the 1990s still function flawlessly today. The same can’t be said about websites created with frameworks even after a few years.

Design with care. Whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes, consider the impacts of each decision. Many modern tools have the convenience of having the ability to understand the underlying decisions that have led to their creation and to not always consider the effects those decisions can have. Use the time saved by modern tools to think more carefully and make decisions with care rather than rushing to “move fast and break things”

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

Play, experiment, and be weird! This web that we’ve built is the ultimate experiment. Despite being the single largest human endeavor in human history, each of us has the ability to make their own money there. Be courageous and try new things. Build a playground for ideas. In your own bizarre science lab, conduct absurd experiments. Start your own small business. There has never been a more empowering place to be creative, take risks, and explore what we’re capable of.

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

Go forth and make

As designers and developers for the web ( and beyond ), we’re responsible for building the future every day, whether that may take the shape of personal websites, social media tools used by billions, or anything in between. Let’s imbue our values into the things that we create, and let’s make the web a better place for everyone. Create something that you are only qualified to make for yourself. Then share it, make it better, make it again, or make something new. Learn. Make. Share. Grow. Rinse and repeat. Every time you think that you’ve mastered the web, everything will change.

I’d like you to consider this a “yes … and” piece to complement Joe’s post. Instead of refuting everything he’s saying, I’m pointing out some areas where AI may produce real, positive impacts on people with disabilities. To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t true threats or pressing problems with AI that need to be addressed—there are, and we’ve needed to address them, like, yesterday—but I want to take a little time to talk about what’s possible in hope that we’ll get there one day.

Other text

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

As Joe mentions, human-in-the-loop publishing of alt word should definitely be a factor. And if AI can intervene and provide a starting point for alt text, even if the swift reads,” What is this BS?” That’s certainly correct at all … Let me try to offer a starting point— I think that’s a win.

If we can specifically teach a design to consider image usage in context, it might be able to help us more swiftly distinguish between images that are likely to be beautiful and those that are more descriptive. That will clarify which situations require image descriptions, and it will increase authors ‘ effectiveness in making their sites more visible.

The image example provided in the GPT4 announcement provides an interesting opportunity as well, even though complex images like graphs and charts are challenging to describe in any kind of succinct way ( even for humans ). Let’s say you came across a map that was simply the description of the chart’s name and the type of representation it was: Pie map comparing smartphone usage to have phone usage in US households earning under$ 30, 000 annually. ( That would be a pretty bad alt text for a chart because it would frequently leave many unanswered questions about the data, but let’s just assume that that was the description in place. ) Imagine a world where people could ask questions about the vivid if their browser knew that the image was a dessert chart ( because an ship model concluded this ).

• Would more people use smartphones or other types of phones?
• How many more?
• Exists a group of people who don’t fall under either of these categories?
• How many is that?

Setting aside the realities of large language model ( LLM) hallucinations—where a model just makes up plausible-sounding “facts” —for a moment, the opportunity to learn more about images and data in this way could be revolutionary for blind and low-vision folks as well as for people with various forms of color blindness, cognitive disabilities, and so on. It might also be helpful in education settings to assist those who can view these graphs as they are able to comprehend the information in the charts.

What if you could request your website to make a complicated map simpler? What if you asked it to separate a single line from a range curve? What if you could request your computer to transform the different lines ‘ colors so they match your color blindness better? What if you demanded that it switch shades in favor of habits? Given these resources ‘ chat-based interface and our existing ability to manipulate photos in today’s AI devices, that seems like a chance.

Now imagine a specially designed model that could take the data from that map and transfer it to another format. For example, perhaps it could turn that pie chart ( or better yet, a series of pie charts ) into more accessible ( and useful ) formats, like spreadsheets. That would be awesome!

Matching techniques

When Safiya Umoja Noble chose to put her reserve Algorithms of Oppression, she hit the nail on the head. Although her book focused on the way that search engines can foster racism, I believe it’s equally true that all machine types have the potential to foster issue, prejudice, and hatred. We all know that poorly designed and maintained algorithms are incredibly harmful, whether it’s Twitter that keeps bringing you the most recent tweet from a drowsy billionaire, YouTube that keeps us in a q-hole, or Instagram that keeps us guessing what natural bodies look like. A large portion of this is attributable to the lack of diversity in those who create and shape them. When these platforms are built with inclusively baked in, however, there’s real potential for algorithm development to help people with disabilities.

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

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

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

Other ways that AI can helps people with disabilities

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

Voice preservation. You may have seen the VALL-E paper or Apple’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day announcement or you may be familiar with the voice-preservation offerings from Microsoft, Acapela, or others. It’s possible to train an artificial intelligence model to mimic your voice, which can be incredibly helpful for those who have ALS ( Lou Gehrig’s disease ) or motor-neuron disease or other medical conditions that can make it difficult to talk. This is, of course, the same tech that can also be used to create audio deepfakes, so it’s something that we need to approach responsibly, but the tech has truly transformative potential.
• Voice recognition. Researchers are assisting people with disabilities in the collection of recordings of people with atypical speech, thanks to the assistance of the Speech Accessibility Project. As I type, they are actively recruiting people with Parkinson’s and related conditions, and they have plans to expand this to other conditions as the project progresses. More people with disabilities will be able to use voice assistants, dictation software, and voice-response services as a result of this research, which will lead to more inclusive data sets that enable them to use their computers and other devices more effectively and with just their voices.
• Text transformation. The most recent generation of LLMs is quite capable of changing existing text without giving off hallucinations. This is incredibly empowering for those who have cognitive disabilities and who may benefit from text summaries, simplified versions, or even text that has been prepared for Bionic Reading.

the value of various teams and data

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

Want a model that doesn’t demean or patronize or objectify people with disabilities? Make sure that you include information about disabilities that has been written by people with a variety of disabilities in the training data.

Want a model that doesn’t use ableist language? You might be able to use already-existing data sets to create a filter that can read and interpret ableist language before it is read. That being said, when it comes to sensitivity reading, AI models won’t be replacing human copy editors anytime soon.

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

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

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

I am a artistic. What I do is alchemy. It is a puzzle. Instead of letting it get done by me, I do it.

I am a artistic. Not all aspiring artists approve of this tag. No everyone sees themselves in this way. Some innovative people incorporate technology into their work. That is their reality, and I regard it. Sometimes I even envy them, a minor. But my approach is different—my becoming is unique.

Apologizing and qualifying in progress is a diversion. My brain uses that to destroy me. I’ll leave it alone for today. I may come back later to make amends and count. After I’ve said what I originally said. Which is challenging enough.

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

Sometimes it does go that approach. Maybe what I need to make arrives right away. I’ve learned to avoid saying it right away because people think you don’t work hard enough when you know it’s the best idea when you’re on the go and you know it’s the best idea.

Maybe I work and work and work until the thought strikes me. It occasionally arrives right away, but I don’t remind people for three weeks. Sometimes I blurt out the plan so quickly that I didn’t stop myself. like a child who discovered a medal in one of his Cracker Jacks. Often I get away with this. Maybe other people agree: yes, that is the best idea. Most times they don’t and I regret having given way to joy.

Passion should only be saved for the meet, when it will matter. Certainly the informal get-together that comes before that meeting with two more discussions. Anyone knows why we have all these discussions. We keep saying we’re going to get rid of them, but we just keep trying to find different ways to get them. They occasionally yet are good. But occasionally they are a hindrance to the actual labor. The percentages between when conferences are important, and when they are a sad distraction, vary, depending on what you do and where you do it. And who you are and how you go about doing it. Once I digress. I am a artistic. That is the style.

Often, a lot of hours of diligent and diligent work ends up with something that is barely useful. Often I have to accept that and move on to the next task.

Don’t question about method. I am a artistic.

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

I can nail aside, surround myself with information or photos, and maybe that works. I can go for a walk, and occasionally that functions. There is no connection between sizzling fuel and flowing pots, and I may be making dinner. I frequently have a sense of direction when I awaken. The idea that may have saved me disappears almost as frequently as I become aware and part of the world once more in a mindless weather of oblivion. For imagination, I believe, comes from that other world. The one we enter in aspirations, and possibly, before conception and after death. But that’s for authors to know, and I am not a writer. I am a artistic. And it’s for philosophers to build massive forces in their imaginative world that they claim to be true. But that is another diversion. And one that is miserable. Possibly on a much bigger issue than whether or not I am creative. But this is still a departure from what I said when I came below.

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

Some individuals who detest the idea of being called artistic perhaps been closeted artists, but that’s between them and their gods. No offence meant. Your wisdom is correct, too. However, mine is for me.

Creatives understand creatives.

Disadvantages are aware of cons, just like queers are aware of queers, just like real rappers are aware of actual rappers are aware of cons. Creatives feel large regard for creatives. We love, respect, emulate, and almost deify the excellent ones. To revere any man is, of course, a horrible mistake. We have been warned. We know much. We know people are really people. They dispute, they are depressed, they regret their most critical decisions, they are weak and thirsty, they can be cruel, they can be just as terrible as we can, if, like us, they are clay. But. But. However, they produce this incredible point. They give birth to something that may not exist before them and couldn’t occur without. They are the inspirations ‘ parents. And I suppose, since it’s only lying it, I have to put that they are the mother of technology. Ba ho backside! Okay, that’s done. Continue.

Creatives belittle our personal small successes, because we compare them to those of the wonderful people. Wonderful video! Also, I‘m no Miyazaki. Now THAT is glory. That is brilliance directly from God’s heart. This half-starved small item that I made? It essentially fell off the turnip truck’s again. And the carrots weren’t actually new.

Creatives knows that, at best, they are Salieri. Yet Mozart’s original artists believe that.

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

I am a innovative. Every project I create has a goal that makes Indiana Jones appear older and snoring in a balcony head. The more I pursue creativity, the faster I can complete my work, and the longer I obsess over my ideas and whizz around in circles before I can complete that task.

I can move ten times more quickly than those who aren’t imaginative, those who have just been creative for a short while, and those who have just had a short time of creative work. Only that I work twice as quickly as they do, putting the work out, just before I do it, When I put my mind to it, I am so confident in my ability to do a great career. I am that attached to the excitement scramble of delay. The climb also terrifies me.

I am not an actor.

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

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

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

I am a artistic. I lament my lack of taste in almost all of the areas of human understanding, which I know very little about. And I trust my preference above all other items in the regions closest to my soul, or perhaps, more precisely, to my passions. Without my passions, I may probably have to spend time staring living in the eye, which almost none of us can do for very long. No actually. No really. Because many in existence, if you really look at it, is terrible.

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

Working frees me from worrying about my job.

I am a innovative. I fear that my little product will disappear.

I am a artistic. I spend way too much time making the next thing, given that almost nothing I create did achieve the level of brilliance I conceive of.

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

There. I think I’ve said it.

Humility, a writer’s necessary value—that has a good ring to it. What about sincerity, an business manager’s important value? Or a surgeon’s? Or a teacher’s? They all good wonderful. When humility is our guiding light, the course is usually available for fulfillment, development, relation, and commitment. In this book, we’re going to discuss about why.

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

The Tale of Justin’s Preposterous Pate

When I was coming out of arts school, a long-haired, goateed novice, write was a known quantity to me, design on the web, however, was riddled with complexities to understand and learn, a problem to be solved. Though I had been fully trained in graphic design, font, and design, what fascinated me was how these classic skills may be applied to a budding online landscape. In the end, this topic may determine my career’s direction.

So I devoured HTML and JavaScript novels into the wee hours of the morning and self-taught myself how to code during my freshman year rather than student and go into print like many of my companions. I needed to understand the main ramifications of what my style choices may ultimately result in when rendered in a website.

The later ‘ 90s and early 2000s were the so-called” Wild West” of web design. Developers at the time were all trying to figure out how to incorporate design and visual connection into the online landscape. What were the laws? How may we break them and also engage, entertain, and present information? At a more micro level, how was my values, inclusive of modesty, admiration, and link, coincide in combination with that? I was looking for information.

Those are timeless considerations between non-career interactions and the world of design, even though I’m talking about a different era. What are your core passions, or values, that transcend medium? The main themes remain the same, much like the direct parallels between what fulfills you, who is agnostic of the physical or digital worlds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The site’s backbone was a homegrown CMS, with the presentation layer consisting of global design + illustration + news author collaboration. And the collaboration effort here, in addition to experimentation on a’ brand’ and content delivery, was hitting my core. We were creating a larger-than-anyone experience and establishing a global audience.

Collaboration and connection have a profound impact beyond the medium, which makes me a designer.

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

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

Today’s web design has been in a period of stagnation. There’s a good chance you’ve seen a website with a hero image, a banner with text overlays, perhaps with a lovely rotating carousel of images ( laying the snark on heavy there ), three columns of sub-content directly beneath, and three columns of sub-content, according to the theory. Perhaps there are selections that vaguely relate to their respective content in an icon library.

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

Pixel Problems

Websites built during this time period were frequently built using Macs with OS and desktops that resembled this. This is Mac OS 7.5, but 8 and 9 weren’t that different.

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

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

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

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

These are some of my creations that made use of ResEdit, the only program I had at the time, to create icons. ResEdit was a clunky, built-in Mac OS utility that was not specifically designed for our needs. At the core of all of this work: Research. Challenge. Problem- solving. Again, these core connection-based values are agnostic of medium.

One more design portal that I want to mention also serves as the second reason for my story to connect this all.

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

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

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

I evolved—devolved, really—into a colossal asshole ( and in just about a year out of art school, no less ). The praise and the press were the things that made me happy, and they went straight into my head. My ego was inflated by them. I actually felt a little better than my fellow designers.

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

I effectively stopped researching and discovering because I felt so confident in my abilities. When I used to lead myself to iterate through concepts or sketches, I leaped right into Photoshop. I drew my inspiration from the tiniest of sources ( and with no discernible bias ). Any criticism of my work from my fellow students was frequently vehemently dissented. The most tragic loss: I had lost touch with my values.

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

It was a gift I initially did not accept but which I, on the whole, was able to reflect on in depth. I was soon able to accept, and process, and course correct. The realization laid me low, but the re-awakening was essential. I let go of the “reward” of admiration and turned my attention to the issues that had sparked my passion for art school. Most importantly: I got back to my core values.

Always Students

Following that short-term regression, I was able to push forward in my personal design and career. And I was able to reflect on myself as I grew to support further development and course correction as needed.

As an example, let’s talk about the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC was created” to assist in answering some of the fundamental open questions in physics, which concern the fundamental laws governing the interactions and forces between elementary objects, the complex structure of space and time, and in particular the relationship between general relativity and quantum mechanics.” Thanks, Wikipedia.

In one of my earlier professional roles, I created the interface for the application that produced the LHC’s particle collision diagrams about fifteen years ago. These diagrams are the depiction of what is actually happening inside the Collider during any given particle collision event and are frequently regarded as works of art by themselves.

I had a fascinating experience designing the interface for this application because I collaborated with Fermilab physicists to understand both what the application was trying to achieve and how the physicists themselves would be using it. To that end, in this role,

Working with the Fermilab team to iterate and make improvements to the interface, I cut my teeth on usability testing. To me, how they spoke and what they talked about was like an alien tongue. And by accepting that I was just a student and working under the impression that I was just a student, I made myself available to them in order to form that crucial bond.

I also had my first ethnographic observational experience, where I observed how the physicists used the tool in their own environments, on their own terminals. One takeaway was that the facility’s high level of ambient light-driven contrast ultimately led to the use of white text on a dark gray background rather than black text-on-white. They were able to focus on their eyes while working during the day while poring over enormous amounts of data. Additionally, since Fermilab and CERN are government entities with strict accessibility standards, my knowledge in that field increased. The barrier-free design was another essential form of connection.

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

An evergreen willingness to listen, learn, understand, grow, evolve, and connect yields our best work. In particular, I want to focus on the words’ grow’ and ‘ evolve’ in that statement. If we are constantly improving our craft, we are also continuously making ourselves available for improvement. Yes, we have completed years of design research. or the intensive lab training offered at a UX bootcamp. Or the monogrammed portfolio of our creative work. Or, ultimately, decades of a career behind us.

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

The designer we are is our final form when we close our minds with an inner monologue of “knowing it all” or branding ourselves a” #thoughtleader” on social media. The creator who we can be will never be there.

As a UX skilled in today’s data-driven landscape, it’s extremely likely that you’ve been asked to design a personal digital experience, whether it’s a common website, user portal, or local application. Although there is still a lot of advertising hype surrounding personalization programs, there are still very some standardized methods for implementing personalized UX.

That’s where we come in. We set ourselves the challenge of developing a systematic personalization framework especially for UX practitioners after finishing dozens of personalization tasks over the past few years. The Personalization Pyramid is a designer-centric model for standing up human-centered customisation programs, spanning information, classification, content delivery, and general goals. By using this strategy, you will be able to understand the core components of a modern, UX-driven personalization system ( or at the very least understand enough to get started ).

Getting Started

For the sake of this article, we’ll believe you’re already familiar with the basics of online personalization. A nice guide can be found these: Website Personalization Planning. Although Graphic tasks in this field can take a variety of forms, they frequently start from the same place.

Popular circumstances for launching a personalization task:

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

A powerful personalization program does require the same fundamental building blocks regardless of where you begin. We’ve captured these as the “levels” on the tower. Whether you are a UX artist, scholar, or planner, understanding the core components may help make your contribution effective.

From top to bottom, the rates include:

North Star: What larger geopolitical goal is driving the personalization system?
1. Objectives: What are the specific, tangible benefits of the system?
2. Touchpoints: Where will the personalized experience become served?
3. Contexts and Campaigns: What personalization information does the person view?
4. User Segments: What constitutes a special, suitable market?
5. What trustworthy and credible information does our professional platform collect to enable personalization?
6. Natural Data: What wider set of data is potentially available ( now in our environment ) allowing you to optimize?

We’ll go through each of these amounts sequentially. An associated deck of cards was created to demonstrate specific examples from each level to make this more meaningful. We’ve found them useful in brainstorming about personalisation, and we’ll provide cases for you here.

Beginning at the Top

The elements of the pyramids are as follows:

North Star

What overall goal do you have with your personalization system ( big or small ) is a northern star. The personalisation program’s entire goal is described in The North Star. What do you wish to perform? North Stars cast a ghost. The bigger the sun, the bigger the darkness. Example of North Starts may include:

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

Goals

As in any great UX style, personalization may help promote designing with client intentions. The goals are the military and measurable indicators that will support the success of the entire program. Start with your existing analytics and assessment system, as well as indicators you can benchmark against. In some cases, new targets may be suitable. The most important thing to keep in mind is that personalisation is certainly a desired outcome. It is a means to an end. Common targets include:

• Conversion
• Time on work
• Net promoter score ( NPS)
• Consumer satisfaction

Touchpoints

The personalisation takes place at contacts. As a UX artist, this will be one of your largest areas of responsibility. The touchpoints you have will depend on how your personalization and the related technology are configured, and they should be based on enhancing a person’s encounter at a specific point in the journey. Touchpoints can be multi-device ( mobile, in-store, website ) but also more granular ( web banner, web pop-up etc. ). Here are some examples:

Channel-level Touchpoints

• Email: Role
• Email: Occasion of empty
• In-store display ( JSON endpoint )
• Native game
• Search

Wireframe-level Touchpoints

• Web overlay
• Web call club
• Web symbol
• Web content wall
• Web restaurant

If you’re designing for web interface, for instance, you will likely need to include personal “zones” in your wireframes. Based on our next move, context, and campaigns, the articles for these can be presented dynamically in touchpoints.

Contexts and Campaigns

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

Personalization Context Model:

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

Personalization Content Model:

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

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

User Segments

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

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

Actionable Data

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

First-party data represents multiple advantages on the UX front, including being relatively simple to collect, more likely to be accurate, and less susceptible to the” creep factor” of third-party data. Therefore, determining which method of data collection is best for your audiences should be a crucial component of your UX strategy. Here are some examples:

When it comes to recognizing and making decisions about various audiences and their signals, there is a trend of profiling. As user numbers increase in terms of time, confidence, and data volume, it varies more granularly.

Although some form of implicit or explicit data is typically required for any implementation ( more commonly known as first party and third-party data ), ML efforts are typically not cost-effective right away. This is because optimization requires a strong data backbone and content repository. These approaches, however, should be taken into account as part of the overall plan and may in fact help to speed up the organization’s progress overall. At this point, you will typically work with important stakeholders and product owners to create a profiling model. The profiling model includes a defining approach to setting up profiles, profile keys, profile cards, and pattern cards. A multi-faceted approach to profiling which makes it scalable.

Pulling it Together

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

One can begin to chart the entire course of a card’s “hand” from leadership focus to tactical and tactical execution. It serves as the foundation for the workshops that both co-authors have conducted to build a program backlog, which would make a good article topic.

In the meantime, it is important to note that each colored class of cards is helpful in understanding the range of options that you might have, as well as making informed choices about who, where, when, and how, will be made these choices.

Lay Down Your Cards

Any sustainable personalization strategy must consider near, mid and long-term goals. There is simply no “easy button” where a personalization program can be stood up and immediately see meaningful results, even with the leading CMS platforms like Sitecore and Adobe or the most exciting composable CMS DXP out there. That said, there is a common grammar to all personalization activities, just like every sentence has nouns and verbs. These cards attempt to map that territory.