Category: Blog

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

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

Use story as a framework to complete research

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see studies as being dispensable. If finances or timelines are small, analysis tends to be one of the first points to go. Instead of investing in study, some goods professionals rely on manufacturers or—worse—their personal judgment to make the “right” options for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get clubs some of the way, but that strategy is so easily miss out on solving people ‘ real problems. To remain user-centered, this is something we should avoid. User research elevates design. It keeps it on track, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay ahead of your competitors.

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

Act one: setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act two: conflict

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act three: resolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set your kitchen timer

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

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

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

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

Kickstart: Whet your appetite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hit that test kitchen

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

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

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

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

Verify your ingredients

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

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

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

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

Compose your recipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better kitchens require better architecture

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

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

You can definitely stand the heat …

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

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

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

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 get into a routine pattern, a brand-new concept or technology emerges to shake things up and completely alter our planet.

How we got below

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

the development of online requirements

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

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

These new methods, requirements, and technologies greatly reenergized the sector. Web style flourished as creators and designers explored more different styles and designs. However, we also depend on numerous hacks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes ( such as rounded or angled corners ) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks ). All kinds of nested floats or absolute positioning ( or both ) were necessary for complicated layouts. Display and photo substitute for specialty styles was a great start toward varying the designs from the big five, but both tricks introduced convenience and efficiency issues. Additionally, JavaScript libraries made it simple for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, even at the expense of double or even quadrupling the download size of basic websites.

The web as software platform

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

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

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

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

Where we are now

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

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

With a few commands and a few lines of code, we can currently prototype almost any concept. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. However, as we upgrade and maintain these frameworks, we eventually pay the upfront costs that these frameworks may initially save in terms of our technical debt.

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

Where do we go from here?

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

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

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

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

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

Play, experiment, and be weird! The ultimate experiment is this web that we’ve created. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be brave and try something new. Build a playground for ideas. Create absurd experiments in your own crazy science lab. Start your own small business. There is no better place for being more creative, risk-taking, and expressing our creativity.

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

Go ahead and create a masterpiece.

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

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

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. He argues to be accurate that the state of image research is currently very poor, especially for some graphic types, in large part due to the absence of contextual contexts in which to look at images ( as a result of having separate “foundation” models for words analysis and image analysis ). Today’s models aren’t trained to distinguish between images that are contextually relevant ( should probably have descriptions ) and those that are purely decorative ( couldn’t possibly need a description ) either. Nonetheless, I still think there’s possible in this area.

As Joe points out, far text editing via human-in-the-loop should be a given. And if AI can intervene to provide a starting place for alt text, even if the swift might say What is this BS? That’s not correct at all … Let me try to offer a starting point— I think that’s a win.

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

While complex images—like graphs and charts—are challenging to describe in any sort of succinct way ( even for humans ), the image example shared in the GPT4 announcement points to an interesting opportunity as well. Let’s say you came across a map that 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. ) If your website knew that that picture was a pie graph ( because an ship model concluded this ), imagine a world where people could ask questions like these about the creative:

• Do more people use smartphones or other types of smartphones?
• How many more are there?
• Is there a group of people that don’t fall into either of these buckets?
• What number is that?

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

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

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

Matching algorithms

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

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

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

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

Other ways that AI can assist people with disabilities

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

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

The importance of diverse teams and data

Our differences must be acknowledged as important. The intersections of the identities we 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. Our differences must be reflected in the data we use to develop new models, and those who provide it need to be compensated for doing so. 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 is written by people who have a range of disabilities and that is well represented in the training data.

Want a model that uses ableist language without using it? You may be able to use existing data sets to build a filter that can intercept and remediate ableist language before it reaches readers. Despite this, AI models won’t soon replace human copy editors when it comes to sensitivity reading.

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

I have no doubts about how dangerous AI will be for people today, tomorrow, and for the rest of the world. However, I also think we should acknowledge this and make thoughtful, thoughtful, and intentional changes to 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 supporting the development of this article, Ashley Bischoff for providing me with invaluable editorial support, and, of course, Joe Dolson for the prompt.

I am a creative. What I do is alchemy. It is a mystery. I do not so much do it, as let it be done through me.

I am a creative. Not all creative people like this label. Not all see themselves this way. Some creative people see science in what they do. That is their truth, and I respect it. Maybe I even envy them, a little. But my process is different—my being is different.

Apologizing and qualifying in advance is a distraction. That’s what my brain does to sabotage me. I set it aside for now. I can come back later to apologize and qualify. After I’ve said what I came to say. Which is hard enough. 

Except when it is easy and flows like a river of wine.

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

Sometimes I work and work and work until the idea comes. Sometimes it comes instantly and I don’t tell anyone for three days. Sometimes I’m so excited by the idea that came instantly that I blurt it out, can’t help myself. Like a boy who found a prize in his Cracker Jacks. Sometimes I get away with this. Sometimes other people agree: yes, that is the best idea. Most times they don’t and I regret having  given way to enthusiasm. 

Enthusiasm is best saved for the meeting where it will make a difference. Not the casual get-together that precedes that meeting by two other meetings. Nobody knows why we have all these meetings. We keep saying we’re doing away with them, but then just finding other ways to have them. Sometimes they are even good. But other times they are a distraction from the actual work. The proportion between when meetings are useful, and when they are a pitiful distraction, varies, depending on what you do and where you do it. And who you are and how you do it. Again I digress. I am a creative. That is the theme.

Sometimes many hours of hard and patient work produce something that is barely serviceable. Sometimes I have to accept that and move on to the next project.

Don’t ask about process. I am a creative.

I am a creative. I don’t control my dreams. And I don’t control my best ideas.

I can hammer away, surround myself with facts or images, and sometimes that works. I can go for a walk, and sometimes that works. I can be making dinner and there’s a Eureka having nothing to do with sizzling oil and bubbling pots. Often I know what to do the instant I wake up. And then, almost as often, as I become conscious and part of the world again, the idea that would have saved me turns to vanishing dust in a mindless wind of oblivion. For creativity, I believe, comes from that other world. The one we enter in dreams, and perhaps, before birth and after death. But that’s for poets to wonder, and I am not a poet. I am a creative. And it’s for theologians to mass armies about in their creative world that they insist is real. But that is another digression. And a depressing one. Maybe on a much more important topic than whether I am a creative or not. But still a digression from what I came here to say.

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

Some people who hate being called creative may be closeted creatives, but that’s between them and their gods. No offense meant. Your truth is true, too. But mine is for me. 

Creatives recognize creatives.

Creatives recognize creatives like queers recognize queers, like real rappers recognize real rappers, like cons know cons. Creatives feel massive respect for creatives. We love, honor, emulate, and practically deify the great ones. To deify any human is, of course, a tragic mistake. We have been warned. We know better. We know people are just people. They squabble, they are lonely, they regret their most important decisions, they are poor and hungry, they can be cruel, they can be just as stupid as we can, because, like us, they are clay. But. But. But they make this amazing thing. They birth something that did not exist before them, and could not exist without them. They are the mothers of ideas. And I suppose, since it’s just lying there, I have to add that they are the mothers of invention. Ba dum bum! OK, that’s done. Continue.

Creatives belittle our own small achievements, because we compare them to those of the great ones. Beautiful animation! Well, I’m no Miyazaki. Now THAT is greatness. That is greatness straight from the mind of God. This half-starved little thing that I made? It more or less fell off the back of the turnip truck. And the turnips weren’t even fresh.

Creatives knows that, at best, they are Salieri. Even the creatives who are Mozart believe that. 

I am a creative. I haven’t worked in advertising in 30 years, but in my nightmares, it’s my former creative directors who judge me. And they are right to do so. I am too lazy, too facile, and when it really counts, my mind goes blank. There is no pill for creative dysfunction.

I am a creative. Every deadline I make is an adventure that makes Indiana Jones look like a pensioner snoring in a deck chair. The longer I remain a creative, the faster I am when I do my work and the longer I brood and walk in circles and stare blankly before I do that work. 

I am still 10 times faster than people who are not creative, or people who have only been creative a short while, or people who have only been professionally creative a short while. It’s just that, before I work 10 times as fast as they do, I spend twice as long as they do putting the work off. I am that confident in my ability to do a great job when I put my mind to it. I am that addicted to the adrenaline rush of postponement. I am still that afraid of the jump.

I am not an artist.

I am a creative. Not an artist. Though I dreamed, as a lad, of someday being that. Some of us belittle our gifts and dislike ourselves because we are not Michelangelos and Warhols. That is narcissism—but at least we aren’t in politics.

I am a creative. Though I believe in reason and science, I decide by intuition and impulse. And live with what follows—the catastrophes as well as the triumphs. 

I am a creative. Every word I’ve said here will annoy other creatives, who see things differently. Ask two creatives a question, get three opinions. Our disagreement, our passion about it, and our commitment to our own truth are, at least to me, the proofs that we are creatives, no matter how we may feel about it.

I am a creative. I lament my lack of taste in the areas about which I know very little, which is to say almost all areas of human knowledge. And I trust my taste above all other things in the areas closest to my heart, or perhaps, more accurately, to my obsessions. Without my obsessions, I would probably have to spend my time looking life in the eye, and almost none of us can do that for long. Not honestly. Not really. Because much in life, if you really look at it, is unbearable.

I am a creative. I believe, as a parent believes, that when I am gone, some small good part of me will carry on in the mind of at least one other person.

Working saves me from worrying about work.

I am a creative. I live in dread of my small gift suddenly going away.

I am a creative. I am too busy making the next thing to spend too much time deeply considering that almost nothing I make will come anywhere near the greatness I comically aspire to.

I am a creative. I believe in the ultimate mystery of process. I believe in it so much, I am even fool enough to publish an essay I dictated into a tiny machine and didn’t take time to review or revise. I won’t do this often, I promise. But I did it just now, because, as afraid as I might be of your seeing through my pitiful gestures toward the beautiful, I was even more afraid of forgetting what I came to say. 

There. I think I’ve said it. 

Picture this: You’re in a meeting room at your tech company, and two people are having what looks like the same conversation about the same design problem. One is talking about whether the team has the right skills to tackle it. The other is diving deep into whether the solution actually solves the user’s problem. Same room, same problem, completely different lenses.

This is the beautiful, sometimes messy reality of having both a Design Manager and a Lead Designer on the same team. And if you’re wondering how to make this work without creating confusion, overlap, or the dreaded “too many cooks” scenario, you’re asking the right question.

The traditional answer has been to draw clean lines on an org chart. The Design Manager handles people, the Lead Designer handles craft. Problem solved, right? Except clean org charts are fantasy. In reality, both roles care deeply about team health, design quality, and shipping great work. 

The magic happens when you embrace the overlap instead of fighting it—when you start thinking of your design org as a design organism.

The Anatomy of a Healthy Design Team

Here’s what I’ve learned from years of being on both sides of this equation: think of your design team as a living organism. The Design Manager tends to the mind (the psychological safety, the career growth, the team dynamics). The Lead Designer tends to the body (the craft skills, the design standards, the hands-on work that ships to users).

But just like mind and body aren’t completely separate systems, so, too, do these roles overlap in important ways. You can’t have a healthy person without both working in harmony. The trick is knowing where those overlaps are and how to navigate them gracefully.

When we look at how healthy teams actually function, three critical systems emerge. Each requires both roles to work together, but with one taking primary responsibility for keeping that system strong.

The Nervous System: People & Psychology

Primary caretaker: Design Manager
Supporting role: Lead Designer

The nervous system is all about signals, feedback, and psychological safety. When this system is healthy, information flows freely, people feel safe to take risks, and the team can adapt quickly to new challenges.

The Design Manager is the primary caretaker here. They’re monitoring the team’s psychological pulse, ensuring feedback loops are healthy, and creating the conditions for people to grow. They’re hosting career conversations, managing workload, and making sure no one burns out.

But the Lead Designer plays a crucial supporting role. They’re providing sensory input about craft development needs, spotting when someone’s design skills are stagnating, and helping identify growth opportunities that the Design Manager might miss.

Design Manager tends to:

• Career conversations and growth planning
• Team psychological safety and dynamics
• Workload management and resource allocation
• Performance reviews and feedback systems
• Creating learning opportunities

Lead Designer supports by:

• Providing craft-specific feedback on team member development
• Identifying design skill gaps and growth opportunities
• Offering design mentorship and guidance
• Signaling when team members are ready for more complex challenges

The Muscular System: Craft & Execution

Primary caretaker: Lead Designer
Supporting role: Design Manager

The muscular system is about strength, coordination, and skill development. When this system is healthy, the team can execute complex design work with precision, maintain consistent quality, and adapt their craft to new challenges.

The Lead Designer is the primary caretaker here. They’re setting design standards, providing craft coaching, and ensuring that shipping work meets the quality bar. They’re the ones who can tell you if a design decision is sound or if we’re solving the right problem.

But the Design Manager plays a crucial supporting role. They’re ensuring the team has the resources and support to do their best craft work, like proper nutrition and recovery time for an athlete.

Lead Designer tends to:

• Definition of design standards and system usage
• Feedback on what design work meets the standard
• Experience direction for the product
• Design decisions and product-wide alignment
• Innovation and craft advancement

Design Manager supports by:

• Ensuring design standards are understood and adopted across the team
• Confirming experience direction is being followed
• Supporting practices and systems that scale without bottlenecking
• Facilitating design alignment across teams
• Providing resources and removing obstacles to great craft work

The Circulatory System: Strategy & Flow

Shared caretakers: Both Design Manager and Lead Designer

The circulatory system is about how information, decisions, and energy flow through the team. When this system is healthy, strategic direction is clear, priorities are aligned, and the team can respond quickly to new opportunities or challenges.

This is where true partnership happens. Both roles are responsible for keeping the circulation strong, but they’re bringing different perspectives to the table.

Lead Designer contributes:

• User needs are met by the product
• Overall product quality and experience
• Strategic design initiatives
• Research-based user needs for each initiative

Design Manager contributes:

• Communication to team and stakeholders
• Stakeholder management and alignment
• Cross-functional team accountability
• Strategic business initiatives

Both collaborate on:

• Co-creation of strategy with leadership
• Team goals and prioritization approach
• Organizational structure decisions
• Success measures and frameworks

Keeping the Organism Healthy

The key to making this partnership sing is understanding that all three systems need to work together. A team with great craft skills but poor psychological safety will burn out. A team with great culture but weak craft execution will ship mediocre work. A team with both but poor strategic circulation will work hard on the wrong things.

Be Explicit About Which System You’re Tending

When you’re in a meeting about a design problem, it helps to acknowledge which system you’re primarily focused on. “I’m thinking about this from a team capacity perspective” (nervous system) or “I’m looking at this through the lens of user needs” (muscular system) gives everyone context for your input.

This isn’t about staying in your lane. It’s about being transparent as to which lens you’re using, so the other person knows how to best add their perspective.

Create Healthy Feedback Loops

The most successful partnerships I’ve seen establish clear feedback loops between the systems:

Nervous system signals to muscular system: “The team is struggling with confidence in their design skills” → Lead Designer provides more craft coaching and clearer standards.

Muscular system signals to nervous system: “The team’s craft skills are advancing faster than their project complexity” → Design Manager finds more challenging growth opportunities.

Both systems signal to circulatory system: “We’re seeing patterns in team health and craft development that suggest we need to adjust our strategic priorities.”

Handle Handoffs Gracefully

The most critical moments in this partnership are when something moves from one system to another. This might be when a design standard (muscular system) needs to be rolled out across the team (nervous system), or when a strategic initiative (circulatory system) needs specific craft execution (muscular system).

Make these transitions explicit. “I’ve defined the new component standards. Can you help me think through how to get the team up to speed?” or “We’ve agreed on this strategic direction. I’m going to focus on the specific user experience approach from here.”

Stay Curious, Not Territorial

The Design Manager who never thinks about craft, or the Lead Designer who never considers team dynamics, is like a doctor who only looks at one body system. Great design leadership requires both people to care about the whole organism, even when they’re not the primary caretaker.

This means asking questions rather than making assumptions. “What do you think about the team’s craft development in this area?” or “How do you see this impacting team morale and workload?” keeps both perspectives active in every decision.

When the Organism Gets Sick

Even with clear roles, this partnership can go sideways. Here are the most common failure modes I’ve seen:

System Isolation

The Design Manager focuses only on the nervous system and ignores craft development. The Lead Designer focuses only on the muscular system and ignores team dynamics. Both people retreat to their comfort zones and stop collaborating.

The symptoms: Team members get mixed messages, work quality suffers, morale drops.

The treatment: Reconnect around shared outcomes. What are you both trying to achieve? Usually it’s great design work that ships on time from a healthy team. Figure out how both systems serve that goal.

Poor Circulation

Strategic direction is unclear, priorities keep shifting, and neither role is taking responsibility for keeping information flowing.

The symptoms: Team members are confused about priorities, work gets duplicated or dropped, deadlines are missed.

The treatment: Explicitly assign responsibility for circulation. Who’s communicating what to whom? How often? What’s the feedback loop?

Autoimmune Response

One person feels threatened by the other’s expertise. The Design Manager thinks the Lead Designer is undermining their authority. The Lead Designer thinks the Design Manager doesn’t understand craft.

The symptoms: Defensive behavior, territorial disputes, team members caught in the middle.

The treatment: Remember that you’re both caretakers of the same organism. When one system fails, the whole team suffers. When both systems are healthy, the team thrives.

The Payoff

Yes, this model requires more communication. Yes, it requires both people to be secure enough to share responsibility for team health. But the payoff is worth it: better decisions, stronger teams, and design work that’s both excellent and sustainable.

When both roles are healthy and working well together, you get the best of both worlds: deep craft expertise and strong people leadership. When one person is out sick, on vacation, or overwhelmed, the other can help maintain the team’s health. When a decision requires both the people perspective and the craft perspective, you’ve got both right there in the room.

Most importantly, the framework scales. As your team grows, you can apply the same system thinking to new challenges. Need to launch a design system? Lead Designer tends to the muscular system (standards and implementation), Design Manager tends to the nervous system (team adoption and change management), and both tend to circulation (communication and stakeholder alignment).

The Bottom Line

The relationship between a Design Manager and Lead Designer isn’t about dividing territories. It’s about multiplying impact. When both roles understand they’re tending to different aspects of the same healthy organism, magic happens.

The mind and body work together. The team gets both the strategic thinking and the craft excellence they need. And most importantly, the work that ships to users benefits from both perspectives.

So the next time you’re in that meeting room, wondering why two people are talking about the same problem from different angles, remember: you’re watching shared leadership in action. And if it’s working well, both the mind and body of your design team are getting stronger.

As a product builder over too many years to mention, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen promising ideas go from zero to hero in a few weeks, only to fizzle out within months.

Financial products, which is the field I work in, are no exception. With people’s real hard-earned money on the line, user expectations running high, and a crowded market, it’s tempting to throw as many features at the wall as possible and hope something sticks. But this approach is a recipe for disaster. Here’s why:

The pitfalls of feature-first development

When you start building a financial product from the ground up, or are migrating existing customer journeys from paper or telephony channels onto online banking or mobile apps, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of creating new features. You might think, “If I can just add one more thing that solves this particular user problem, they’ll love me!” But what happens when you inevitably hit a roadblock because the narcs (your security team!) don’t like it? When a hard-fought feature isn’t as popular as you thought, or it breaks due to unforeseen complexity?

This is where the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) comes in. Jason Fried’s book Getting Real and his podcast Rework often touch on this idea, even if he doesn’t always call it that. An MVP is a product that provides just enough value to your users to keep them engaged, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming or difficult to maintain. It sounds like an easy concept but it requires a razor sharp eye, a ruthless edge and having the courage to stick by your opinion because it is easy to be seduced by “the Columbo Effect”… when there’s always “just one more thing…” that someone wants to add.

The problem with most finance apps, however, is that they often become a reflection of the internal politics of the business rather than an experience solely designed around the customer. This means that the focus is on delivering as many features and functionalities as possible to satisfy the needs and desires of competing internal departments, rather than providing a clear value proposition that is focused on what the people out there in the real world want. As a result, these products can very easily bloat to become a mixed bag of confusing, unrelated and ultimately unlovable customer experiences—a feature salad, you might say.

The importance of bedrock

So what’s a better approach? How can we build products that are stable, user-friendly, and—most importantly—stick?

That’s where the concept of “bedrock” comes in. Bedrock is the core element of your product that truly matters to users. It’s the fundamental building block that provides value and stays relevant over time.

In the world of retail banking, which is where I work, the bedrock has got to be in and around the regular servicing journeys. People open their current account once in a blue moon but they look at it every day. They sign up for a credit card every year or two, but they check their balance and pay their bill at least once a month.

Identifying the core tasks that people want to do and then relentlessly striving to make them easy to do, dependable, and trustworthy is where the gravy’s at.

But how do you get to bedrock? By focusing on the “MVP” approach, prioritizing simplicity, and iterating towards a clear value proposition. This means cutting out unnecessary features and focusing on delivering real value to your users.

It also means having some guts, because your colleagues might not always instantly share your vision to start with. And controversially, sometimes it can even mean making it clear to customers that you’re not going to come to their house and make their dinner. The occasional “opinionated user interface design” (i.e. clunky workaround for edge cases) might sometimes be what you need to use to test a concept or buy you space to work on something more important.

Practical strategies for building financial products that stick

So what are the key strategies I’ve learned from my own experience and research?

1. Start with a clear “why”: What problem are you trying to solve? For whom? Make sure your mission is crystal clear before building anything. Make sure it aligns with your company’s objectives, too.
2. Focus on a single, core feature and obsess on getting that right before moving on to something else: Resist the temptation to add too many features at once. Instead, choose one that delivers real value and iterate from there.
3. Prioritize simplicity over complexity: Less is often more when it comes to financial products. Cut out unnecessary bells and whistles and keep the focus on what matters most.
4. Embrace continuous iteration: Bedrock isn’t a fixed destination—it’s a dynamic process. Continuously gather user feedback, refine your product, and iterate towards that bedrock state.
5. Stop, look and listen: Don’t just test your product as part of your delivery process—test it repeatedly in the field. Use it yourself. Run A/B tests. Gather user feedback. Talk to people who use it, and refine accordingly.

The bedrock paradox

There’s an interesting paradox at play here: building towards bedrock means sacrificing some short-term growth potential in favour of long-term stability. But the payoff is worth it—products built with a focus on bedrock will outlast and outperform their competitors, and deliver sustained value to users over time.

So, how do you start your journey towards bedrock? Take it one step at a time. Start by identifying those core elements that truly matter to your users. Focus on building and refining a single, powerful feature that delivers real value. And above all, test obsessively—for, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker (whomever you believe!!), “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

In a way that other genres doesn’t, science fiction poses questions about mankind and the nature of existence while dealing with intellectual and social issues. However, some people have felt the need to make joy of science fiction, even writing complex parody, despite the seriousness of it. We just experienced a]…

The first article on Den of Geek was The Doctor Who Parodies That Were Truly Interviews.

Science fiction is very critical company, dealing with intellectual and cultural themes in ways that other genres just doesn’t, asking questions about society and the nature of living. However, some people have felt the need to make joy of science fiction, even writing complex parodies, despite the seriousness of it. Recently, we lately examined the complex connection Star Trek has had with the different functions that have parodied it.

But perhaps even more than Star Trek, the biggest destination for people looking for something the parody has been Doctor Who. We don’t know why, but all those pieces looked actually convincing to us, and the specific results are quite impressive when you consider the financial constraints they’re operating under.

There is one explanation though. Everyone who has ever chosen to “put on a awkwardly long scarf and shake the hammer” at some boxes” for a laugh” has a dark secret hidden in their hearts.

Every pastiche is a quietly honest audition in disguise.

And an even darker solution? They occasionally function.

The Lenny Henry Show

Lenny Henry’s Doctor Who picture in 1985 capabilities a Physician that wears a leather suit and has a friend who fancies him, and sees him battling Cybermen led by an evil Cyber Thatcher in the far off season of 2010. The Thatcher-parody Cybermen may be right out of Andrew Cartmel’s time on the show, but the leather coat, Black Time Lord, and implied TARDIS prior panky are all very The Who.

Henry hits all the correct information in the world of parodies-that-are-secretly-auditions. He delivers technobabble, does unusual things to the TARDIS unit, and of course, runs up and down loads of passageways.

And ultimately, the effort pays out.

Henry first appeared in the present as the criminal Daniel Barton in the film” Spyfall” just 35 years after his Doctor Who picture.

Every Episode of Popular Time Travel Show

The artist Alasdair Beckett-King is best known for his online pictures, which include Every Single Scandinavian Crime Drama, Every Mind-Bending Television Show, and ultimately, Every Episode of the bestselling Time Travel Show.

” Doctor Who made me feel a little hesitant because I don’t have an extensive knowledge of the lore,” Beckett-King says. ” Generally I write pictures on my own, but for that single I recruited my humor kids Declan Kennedy and Angus Dunican, who gave me lots of jokes. I think I was most enthusiastic about doing a sketchy effect of Dan Starkey’s Strax and spoofing the new-Who period visual effects.

The funny thing is that playing a cartoonish version of the Doctor is not all that unique from an artist taking the lead role in the present. In an interview with the Radio Times, Tom Baker said of playing the Doctor,” It&#8217, s really me trying to become interesting, or trying to be courageous in an interesting method”.

In the meantime, Beckett-King states in his picture that” I suppose I did end up playing the Physician as very like myself, more as a result of a deliberate attempt to put my mark on the personality.”

He continues,” I had no choice about doing a basic Doctor, because I didn’t really accomplish Tom Baker, except sometimes when aiming for Patrick Stewart and lost.” But I think veering between the basic and the unique is part of the fun of a parody: trying to do a supermarket own-brand version of the thing you’re spoofing and still reach all the common notes: a scarf, a jaunty hat, a faintly academic insouciance”.

Not long after Every Popular Time Travel Show episode was released, Beckett-King was cast in the BBC-produced audio series Doctor Who: Redacted.

Who asserts that manufacturing is ineffective? Me, I say that”, Beckett-King laughs. ” I don’t know why I was cast, but I wonder if the sketch played a role in the plot. Despite being an interdimensional turd in a jar, I played an alien foetus known as” The Floater” who was attempting to kill the Doctor. I respect the hustle. Although it was a comic character, I tried to approach it the way I usually do spoof plays, playing it as best I could.

Inspector Spacetime

Inspector Spacetime started off as a one-note gag in the sitcom Community ( created by Dan Harmon of Rick and Morty, if you want to talk” stuff that really wishes it were Doctor Who” ). Abed discovers” Inspector Spacetime,” a series about a detective who travels through space and time in a phone box fighting robotic bins called” Blorgons,” after learning that one of his new favorite shows dies after six episodes ( it’s British ).

No one from the show-within-a-show has ever appeared on Doctor Who (yet ), but Abed does run into a Matt Lucas superfan who later becomes the Doctor’s companion Nardole.

Doctor Who Night

Let’s talk about Doctor Who’s” Wilderness Years,” the 16 years between Christopher Eccleston’s grabbing Billie Piper’s hand at the start of” Rose,” and Paul McGann’s film.

Why should we discuss a protracted Doctor Who hiatus? No reason. No explanation at all. Because Doctor Who is undoubtedly alive and well, and there will be a UNIT miniseries in 2026, producer Jane Tranter has stated that “it will continue to grow, one way or the other,” even though Russell T. Davies is no longer writing for Channel 4 and Google’s News tab for” Doctor Who” frequently brings up articles about medical malpractice, we’re fine! We are fine.

Anyway, on November 13, 1999, BBC 2’s” Doctor Who Night” was a brief flash of light in the darkness during the final ( sorry, I mean, only ) Wilderness Years. There were documentaries, introductions, and a host of fan theories that Tom Baker is the” Curator” from” The Day of the Doctor” ( they only managed the final episode of” The Daleks” and a rerun of Paul McGann’s move ), as well as a few short sketches starring Mark Gatiss and David Walliams.

Those sketches included” The Pitch of Fear”, which imagined Sydney Newman pitching Doctor Who as a show that would run for 26 years,” The Kidnappers”, the weakest of the three that saw Gatiss and Walliams playing obsessive fans who’ve kidnapped Peter Davison, and finally,” The Web of Caves”. The three are obviously having the fun the most with this outright Who parody, which is the only one of their own. Walliams plays an ineffective Doctor Who baddie, and it was shot in black and white in a quarry. Gatiss plays the Doctor, again, not as an outright impression of any one incarnation, but as an audition for his own spin. When he exits the TARDIS and asks,” Where have you bought me to this time, old girl,” he is not performing a sketch, but he is actually living out a fantasy.

And sure enough, Mark Gatiss was a part of Doctor Who when he returned, writing several episodes of the show as Professor Richard Lazarus from” The Lazarus Experiment,” and Walliams would later appear as the oppressive, cowardly alien Gibbis in” The God Complex.”

Curse of the Fatal Death

In many ways, the Wilderness Years were at their peak in 1999. Fans were also given a Comic Relief sketch titled” The Curse of the Fatal Death” along with” Doctor Who Night.” Once again, the Doctor here is not an impression of an existing Doctor, but a new” Ninth” Doctor, played by Rowan Atkinson with just a tiny whiff of Blackadder. There are plenty of jokes in there, but those jokes come with production values at the more refined end of the classic series and a sense that everyone involved was just really hoping to create some Doctor Who.

According to Beckett-King,” I’m pretty certain the first Who I ever saw was the Comic Relief parody with Rowan Atkinson, and based on that, I wanted to grow up wearing tank tops and be Doctor Who.” ” I still think of the Doctor as ‘ Doctor Who’, to the irritation of Whovians everywhere. So I came to Who through parody, just like I did Citizen Kane through The Simpsons.

Curse of the Fatal Death may be the most successful Doctor Who parody ever in terms of future CV performance. The Doctor dies and regenerates multiple times over the course of the episode, and among others he turns into Hugh Grant, who got offered the role for real when Russell T Davies revived the show.

Grant has stated that I was offered the role of the Doctor a few years ago and was extremely pleased. The issue with those things is that only when you see them on screen that you think,” Damn, that was good, why did I say no?” &#8217, But then, knowing me, I&#8217, d probably make a mess of it. &#8221,

Richard E. Grant would later reprise his role as the Ninth Doctor in the animated film” Scream of the Shalka,” but some people preferred that role over others. Russell T Davies has told Doctor Who Magazine,” I thought he was terrible. I believed, to be honest, that he took the money and ran. It was a sluggish performance. He was never on our list to play the Doctor. &#8221,

However, when the episode” Rogue,” which was produced during Davies ‘ second tenure as showrunner, revealed all the Doctor’s previous incarnations, Richard E. Grant’s face was in there when he made a comeback as the Great Intelligence in season seven.

But the big success story from” Curse of the Fatal Death “was the writer, one Steven Moffat, and here’s where things get weird. Since it is obvious that Moffat eventually left to write some of the most beloved Doctor Who episodes in the 2005 revival before taking on the role of showrunner.

And if you watch Curse of the Fatal Death after watching Moffat’s Doctor Who series, you start to notice some things. Like that the Doctor faces the Master and the Daleks at the same time, which the Doctor wouldn’t actually do at the same time until” The Magician’s Apprentice /The Witch’s Familiar, “written by Moffat. Even a joke about the Daleks ‘ need for chairs is included in both of them.

Fans have come to know as” Timey Wimey,” a phrase coined by and used to describe many of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who plots, and which features a lot of characters going back in time to set events up that they can exploit in the present.

In” The Curse of the Fatal Death,” The Doctor uses up their final regenerations, and then the universe, unable to do without him, allows the Doctor to regenerate into a Thirteenth, female incarnation ( Joanna Lumley ). The Doctor would use up their final regenerations under Steven Moffat, and when the universe could not do without him, Gallifrey grants the Doctor a Thirteenth, female incarnation ( Jodie Whittaker ). The Curse of the Fatal Death is “practically a speed run of everything Moffat wanted to do with it,” according to the author. It isn’t just an audition for writing Doctor Who.

The first article on Den of Geek was The Doctor Who Parodies That Were Truly Interviews.

For anyone looking to see classic mythological icons duke it out for divine supremacy, the fast-paced and fun to play trading card game Rush of Ikorr presents an epic opportunity to see myths and monsters throw down. Players pick from a variety of starter decks based on different global pantheons, drawn from mythological figures Ancient […]

The post Rush of Ikorr Brings Classic Mythology to Trading Card Games appeared first on Den of Geek.

Science fiction is very serious business, dealing with philosophical and social themes in ways that other genres simply can’t, asking questions about humanity and the nature of existence. Unfortunately, while science fiction is very, very serious, sometimes people have felt the need to make fun of it, even creating elaborate parodies. Recently we had a look at the complicated relationship Star Trek has had with the various works that have parodied it.

But perhaps even more than Star Trek, the biggest target for folks looking for something the spoof has been Doctor Who. We don’t know why, all those sets looked really convincing to us, and the special effects are pretty impressive if you think about the budget constraints they’re working under.

There is one reason though. One dark secret nestled in the heart of everyone who has ever decided to put on a comically long scarf and shake the screwdriver at some bins “for a laugh.”

Every parody is secretly a completely sincere audition.

And an even darker secret? Sometimes they work.

The Lenny Henry Show

Lenny Henry’s Doctor Who sketch in 1985 features a Doctor that wears a leather jacket and has a companion who fancies him, and sees him battling Cybermen led by an evil Cyber Thatcher in the far off year of 2010. While the leather jacket, Black Time Lord and implied TARDIS hanky panky are all extremely Nu Who, the Thatcher-parody Cybermen could be straight out of Andrew Cartmel’s era on the show.

As parodies-that-are-secretly-auditions go, Henry hits all the right notes. He delivers technobabble, does weird stuff to the TARDIS console, and of course, runs up and down lots of corridors.

And the work pays off, eventually.

A mere 35 years after his Doctor Who sketch, Henry appeared in the show itself as the villain Daniel Barton in the story “Spyfall.”

Every Episode of Popular Time Travel Show

The comedian Alasdair Beckett-King is best known for his online sketches, including Every Single Scandinavian Crime Drama, Every Mind-Bending TV Show, and eventually, inevitably, Every Episode of Popular Time Travel Show.

“I was quite nervous about doing Doctor Who because I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the lore,” Beckett-King says. “Usually I write sketches on my own, but for that one I recruited my comedy pals Declan Kennedy and Angus Dunican, who gave me lots of gags. I think I was most excited about spoofing the new-Who era visual effects, and doing a dodgy impression of Dan Starkey’s Strax.”

The thing is, the way a comedian approaches playing a parodic version of the Doctor is not all that different from an actor taking on the lead role in the show. In an interview with the Radio Times, Tom Baker said of playing the Doctor, “It’s just me trying to be amusing, or trying to be heroic in an amusing way.”

Meanwhile, when Beckett-King performed his sketch he says, “I suppose I did end up playing the Doctor as quite like myself, more due to a lack of acting range than a deliberate attempt to place my stamp on the character.”

He adds, “I had no choice about doing a generic Doctor, because I can’t really do Tom Baker, except occasionally when aiming for Patrick Stewart and missing. But I think veering between the generic and the specific is part of the fun of a parody: trying to do a supermarket own-brand version of the thing you’re spoofing and still hit all the familiar notes: a scarf, a jaunty hat, a vaguely professorial insouciance.”

Not long after Every Episode of Popular Time Travel Show went out, Beckett-King found himself in the BBC produced audio series Doctor Who: Redacted.

“Who says MANIFESTING doesn’t work? Me, I say that,” Beckett-King laughs. “I don’t know why I was cast, but I do wonder if the sketch was part of the reason. I played an alien foetus nicknamed ‘The Floater’ who was trying to kill the Doctor, in spite of being an interdimensional turd in a jar. I respect the hustle. It was a comic character, but I tried to approach it the way I generally approach spoofs – by playing it straight as I could.”

Inspector Spacetime

Inspector Spacetime started off as a one-note gag in the sitcom Community (created by Dan Harmon of Rick and Morty, if you want to talk “stuff that really wishes it were Doctor Who”). The character Abed becomes bereft at learning that one of his new favourite shows dies after six episodes (it’s British), only to then discover “Inspector Spacetime,” a series about a detective who travels through space and time in a phone box fighting robotic bins called “Blorgons.”

Nobody from the show-within-a-show has appeared on Doctor Who (yet), but Abed does meet an Inspector Spacetime superfan played by Matt Lucas … who goes on to become the Doctor’s companion Nardole.

Doctor Who Night

Let’s talk about Doctor Who’s “Wilderness Years,” the 16 years between Sylvester McCoy’s final story, “Survival” and Christopher Eccleston grabbing Billie Piper’s hand at the start of “Rose,” with only Paul McGann’s movie in between.

Why should we talk about lengthy Doctor Who hiatuses? No reason. No reason at all. Because obviously Doctor Who is alive and well and we’ve got a UNIT miniseries coming out in 2026 and producer Jane Tranter has said “it will keep going, one way or another” even if Russell T Davies is off writing for Channel 4 and searching Google’s News tab for “Doctor Who” mostly brings up articles about medical malpractice… we’re fine! We are fine.

Anyway, during the last (sorry, I mean, only) Wilderness Years, a brief crack of light in the darkness was BBC 2’s “Doctor Who Night” on November 13, 1999. It featured documentaries, introductory segments filmed by an ambiguously-in-character Tom Baker (cue a slew of fan theories that he’s the “Curator” from “The Day of the Doctor”), a disappointing paucity of actual Doctor Who episodes (they only managed the final episode of “The Daleks” and a rerun of Paul McGann’s move), and a selection of short sketches starring Mark Gatiss and David Walliams.

Those sketches included “The Pitch of Fear,” which imagined Sydney Newman pitching Doctor Who as a show that would run for 26 years, “The Kidnappers,” the weakest of the three that saw Gatiss and Walliams playing obsessive fans who’ve kidnapped Peter Davison, and finally, “The Web of Caves.” This is the only outright Who parody of the three, and is obviously the one where they’re having the most fun. It’s shot in black and white, in a Quarry, with Walliams as an ineffectual Doctor Who baddie. Gatiss plays the Doctor, again, not as an outright impression of any one incarnation, but as an audition for his own spin. When he steps out of the TARDIS and says, “Where have you bought me to this time old girl,” he’s not performing a sketch, he’s living out a fantasy.

And sure enough, when Doctor Who came back, Mark Gatiss was involved, writing several episodes of the show and appearing in it as Professor Richard Lazarus of “The Lazarus Experiment,” while Walliams would later turn up as the cowardly, oppressor appeasing alien Gibbis in “The God Complex.”

Curse of the Fatal Death

1999 was in many ways a highpoint of the Wilderness Years. In addition to getting “Doctor Who Night,” fans were also treated to a Comic Relief sketch “The Curse of the Fatal Death.” Once again, the Doctor here is not an impression of an existing Doctor, but a new “Ninth” Doctor, played by Rowan Atkinson with just a tiny whiff of Blackadder. It has plenty of gags, but those gags come with production values at the more polished end of the classic series, and real sense that everyone involved just really wanted to make some Doctor Who.

“I’m pretty certain the first Who I ever saw was the Comic Relief parody with Rowan Atkinson, and based on that I wanted to grow up to wear tank tops and be Doctor Who,” Beckett-King recalls. “I still think of the Doctor as ‘Doctor Who’, to the irritation of Whovians everywhere. So, I came to Who through parody, like I came to Citizen Kane via The Simpsons.”

As far as future CV performance goes, Curse of the Fatal Death may be the most successful Doctor Who parody ever. The Doctor dies and regenerates multiple times over the course of the episode, and among others he turns into Hugh Grant, who got offered the role for real when Russell T Davies revived the show.

Grant has said, “I was offered the role of the Doctor a few years back and was highly flattered. The danger with those things is that it’s only when you see it on screen that you think, ‘Damn, that was good, why did I say no?’ But then, knowing me, I’d probably make a mess of it.”

Another incarnation, Richard E. Grant would later go on to play the Ninth Doctor in the animated revival “Scream of the Shalka,” although some enjoyed that more than others. Russell T Davies has told Doctor Who Magazine, “I thought he was terrible. I thought he took the money and ran, to be honest. It was a lazy performance. He was never on our list to play the Doctor.”

Yet Richard E. Grant returned to play the Great Intelligence in season seven, and when the episode “Rogue,” under Davies’ second tenure as showrunner, revealed all the Doctor’s past incarnations, Richard E. Grant’s face was in there.

But the big success story from “Curse of the Fatal Death” was the writer, one Steven Moffat, and here’s where things get weird. Because obviously Moffat eventually went on to write some of the best beloved episodes of the Doctor Who 2005 revival, and then became the showrunner himself.

And if you watch Curse of the Fatal Death having seen Moffat’s series of Doctor Who, you start to notice certain things. Like that the Doctor faces the Master and the Daleks at the same time, which the Doctor wouldn’t actually do at the same time until “The Magician’s Apprentice /The Witch’s Familiar,” written by Moffat. Both even feature a joke about why the Daleks would have chairs.

And the plotline features a lot of characters going backwards in time to set events up that they can take advantage of in the present, something fans have come to know as “Timey Wimey,” a phrase coined by, and used to describe, a lot of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who plots.

In “The Curse of the Fatal Death,” The Doctor uses up their final regenerations, and then the universe, unable to do without him, allows the Doctor to regenerate into a Thirteenth, female incarnation (Joanna Lumley). Under Steven Moffat, the Doctor would use up their final regenerations, then realising the universe is unable to do without him, Gallifrey allows the Doctor to regenerate into a Thirteenth, female incarnation (Jodie Whittaker). “The Curse of the Fatal Death” isn’t just an audition for writing Doctor Who, it’s practically a speed run of everything Moffat wanted to do with it.

The post The Doctor Who Parodies That Were Actually Auditions appeared first on Den of Geek.

As you probably already know, Warner Bros. Pictures is having a very good drop that follows a fantastic flower and a fantastic summer. That’s because the studio’s fourth and supposedly final mainline Conjuring picture, The Conjuring: Last Rites, proved that there is still life in the demonic thing, even as trades ]… ]

The Conjuring Box Office, Warner Bros, and the Diverse Slate initially appeared on Den of Geek.

Science fiction is a very serious business that addresses intellectual and social issues in ways that different genres just doesn’t, while also posing questions about society and the nature of existence. However, while science fiction is very, very severe, often citizens have felt the need to make fun of it, yet creating elaborate caricatures. Recently, we just examined the complex connection Star Trek has had with the different functions that have parodied it.

The main goal for people looking for something the pastiche has, perhaps even more than Star Trek, been Doctor Who. We don’t understand why, all those pieces looked actually convincing to us, and the special effects are quite amazing if you think about the budget considerations they’re working under.

However, there is one explanation. One dark underground nestled in the heart of everyone who has actually decided to put on a awkwardly long robe and shake the hammer at some boxes” for a laugh”.

Every parody is a secretly sincere audition in disguise.

And what’s the secret behind it all? Sometimes they work.

The Lenny Henry Show

A Doctor in a leather jacket and with a companion who fancies him, as depicted in a 1985 Lenny Henry Doctor Who sketch, battles Cybermen led by an evil Cyber Thatcher in the distant year of 2010 and in the far future. While the leather jacket, Black Time Lord and implied TARDIS hanky panky are all extremely Nu Who, the Thatcher-parody Cybermen could be straight out of Andrew Cartmel’s era on the show.

Henry hits all the right notes in the world of parodies-that-are-secretly-auditions. He writes technobabble, sends strange things to the TARDIS console, and runs up and down numerous corridors.

And the work pays off, eventually.

Henry first appeared in the show as the villain Daniel Barton in the story” Spyfall” just 35 years after his Doctor Who sketch.

Every episode of the well-known time travel television program

The comedian Alasdair Beckett-King is best known for his online sketches, including Every Single Scandinavian Crime Drama, Every Mind-Bending TV Show, and eventually, inevitably, Every episode of the well-known time travel television program.

” Doctor Who made me feel a little hesitant because I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the lore,” Beckett-King says. ” Usually I write sketches on my own, but for that one I teamed up with my comedy pals, Declan Kennedy and Angus Dunican, who gave me a lot of jokes. I think I was most excited about spoofing the new-Who era visual effects, and doing a dodgy impression of Dan Starkey’s Strax”.

The funny thing is that playing a parodic version of the Doctor is not all that different from an actor taking the lead role in the show. Tom Baker said in an interview with the Radio Times,” It&#8217, s just me trying to be amusing, or trying to be heroic in an amusing way,” when he spoke of playing the Doctor.

Meanwhile, when Beckett-King performed his sketch he says,” I suppose I did end up playing the Doctor as quite like myself, more due to a lack of acting range than a deliberate attempt to place my stamp on the character”.

He continues,” I had no choice about doing a generic Doctor, because I can’t really do Tom Baker, except occasionally when aiming for Patrick Stewart and missing.” However, I believe that trying to do a supermarket own-brand version of the thing you’re spoofing with all the familiar elements like a scarf, a jaunty hat, and a vaguely professorial insouciance is a part of the fun of a parody.

Not long after Every episode of the well-known time travel television program went out, Beckett-King found himself in the BBC produced audio series Doctor Who: Redacted.

” Who says manipulating isn’t effective? Beckett-King laughs,” Me, I say that.” ” I don’t know why I was cast, but I do wonder if the sketch was part of the reason. Despite being an interdimensional turd in a jar, I played an alien foetus known as” The Floater” who was attempting to kill the Doctor. I appreciate the hustle. It was a comic character, but I tried to approach it the way I generally approach spoofs – by playing it straight as I could”.

Inspector Spacetime

If you want to talk” stuff that really wishes it was Doctor Who,” watch Inspector Spacetime on the sitcom Community ( created by Dan Harmon of Rick and Morty ). The character Abed becomes bereft at learning that one of his new favourite shows dies after six episodes ( it’s British ), only to then discover” Inspector Spacetime”, a series about a detective who travels through space and time in a phone box fighting robotic bins called” Blorgons”.

No one from the show-within-a-show has ever appeared on Doctor Who (yet ), but Abed does run into an Inspector Spacetime superfan Matt Lucas, who later becomes the Doctor’s companion Nardole.

Doctor Who Night

Let’s talk about Doctor Who’s” Wilderness Years”, the 16 years between Sylvester McCoy’s final story,” Survival” and Christopher Eccleston grabbing Billie Piper’s hand at the start of” Rose”, with only Paul McGann’s movie in between.

Why should we discuss protracted Doctor Who hiatuses? No justification. No reason at all. Because Doctor Who is undoubtedly alive and well, and there will be a UNIT miniseries in 2026, and producer Jane Tranter has stated that “it will continue to grow, one way or the other,” even though Russell T. Davies is no longer writing for Channel 4 and searching Google’s News tab for” Doctor Who” frequently brings up articles about medical malpractice, we’re fine. We are all fine.

Anyway, during the last ( sorry, I mean, only ) Wilderness Years, a brief crack of light in the darkness was BBC 2’s” Doctor Who Night” on November 13, 1999. There were documentaries, introductions, and a host of fan theories that Tom Baker is the” Curator” from” The Day of the Doctor” ( cue a slew of fan theories that he’s the” Curator” from” The Day of the Doctor” ), as well as a few sketchy short sketches starring Mark Gatiss and David Walliams.

The Pitch of Fear, which depicted Sydney Newman pitching Doctor Who as a 26-year-old show,” The Kidnappers,” which saw Gatiss and Walliams playing obsessive fans who’ve kidnapped Peter Davison, and” The Web of Caves,” were just a few sketches from those sketches. This is the only outright Who parody of the three, and is obviously the one where they’re having the most fun. Walliams plays an ineffective Doctor Who baddie, and it was shot in black and white in a quarry. Gatiss portrays the Doctor once more as an audition for his own style, not as an outright representation of any one person. When he steps out of the TARDIS and says,” Where have you bought me to this time old girl”, he’s not performing a sketch, he’s living out a fantasy.

And sure enough, Mark Gatiss was involved when Doctor Who returned, writing several episodes of the show and appearing as Professor Richard Lazarus of” The Lazarus Experiment,” Walliams would later appear as the cowardly, oppressor appeasing alien Gibbis in” The God Complex.”

Curse of the Fatal Death

1999 was in many ways a highpoint of the Wilderness Years. Fans were also given a Comic Relief sketch titled” The Curse of the Fatal Death” along with” Doctor Who Night.” Once again, Rowan Atkinson’s portrayal of the Doctor in this case is a new” Ninth” Doctor, with just a small hint of Blackadder. It has plenty of gags, but those gags come with production values at the more polished end of the classic series, and real sense that everyone involved just really wanted to make some Doctor Who.

According to Beckett-King,” I’m pretty certain the first Who I ever saw was the Comic Relief parody with Rowan Atkinson, and based on that, I wanted to grow up wearing tank tops and be Doctor Who.” ” To the annoyance of Whovians everywhere, I still think of the Doctor as” Doctor Who”. So, I came to Who through parody, like I came to Citizen Kane via The Simpsons“.

Curse of the Fatal Death may be the most successful Doctor Who parody ever in terms of future CV performances. The Doctor repeatedly regenerates throughout the episode, including turning into Hugh Grant, who was given the role when Russell T. Davies revived the show.

Grant has said, &#8220, I was offered the role of the Doctor a few years back and was highly flattered. The issue with those things is that only when you see them on screen do you realize,” Damn, that was good, why did I say no?” But knowing me, I’d probably make a mess of it. &#8221,

Richard E. Grant would later reprise his role as the Ninth Doctor in the animated film” Scream of the Shalka,” but some people preferred that role more than others. Russell T Davies once stated to Doctor Who Magazine,” I thought he was terrible. I thought he took the money and ran, to be honest. It was a sluggish performance. He was never put on our wish list to play the Doctor. &#8221,

However, Richard E. Grant made a comeback as the Great Intelligence in season seven, and Richard E. Grant’s face was revealed when the episode” Rogue,” which was produced by Davies in his second year as showrunner, was revealed.

However, Steven Moffat, the author of” Curse of the Fatal Death,” was the big success story, and this is where things start to get strange. Because obviously Moffat eventually went on to write some of the best beloved episodes of the Doctor Who 2005 revival, and then became the showrunner himself.

And if you watch Curse of the Fatal Death after watching Moffat’s Doctor Who series, you start to notice some things. Like that the Doctor and the Daleks are confronted at the same time, which the Doctor wouldn’t actually do until” The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar,” written by Moffat. Both even feature a joke about why the Daleks would have chairs.

And the plotline includes a lot of characters going back in time to create situations that they can exploit in the future, which fans have come to know as” Timey Wimey,” a term used to describe many of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who plots.

The Doctor uses up their final regenerations in” The Curse of the Fatal Death,” and the universe, unable to do without him, grants the Doctor a Thirteenth, female incarnation ( Joanna Lumley ). Under Steven Moffat, the Doctor would use up their final regenerations, then realising the universe is unable to do without him, Gallifrey allows the Doctor to regenerate into a Thirteenth, female incarnation ( Jodie Whittaker )”. The Fatal Death’s Curse is “practically a speed run of everything Moffat wanted to do with it.” It isn’t just an audition for writing Doctor Who.

The first post on Den of Geek was The Doctor Who Parodies That Were Actually Auditions.