Category: Blog

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

I just had the opportunity to lead a Fortune 500 company’s CMS application. The customer was excited by the benefits of an holistic information plan, including material modify, multichannel marketing, and robot delivery—designing content to be comprehensible to bots, Google knowledge panels, snippets, and voice user interfaces.

A content type is essential to an omnichannel content strategy, and it required conceptual types to be given names that don’t depend on how the content is presented. Our goal was to allow writers to create original content that could be used wherever they felt was most useful. However, as the project progressed, I realized that the entire group had to be aware of a new design in order to support material reuse on the level that my customer needed.

Despite our best purposes, we kept drawing from what we were more common with: design techniques. Unlike web-focused information strategies, an holistic information strategy doesn’t rely on WYSIWYG equipment for design and structure. Our inclination to approach the material model using our well-known design-system thinking consistently stifled our attention from one of the main objectives of a willing model: delivering content to audiences across multiple marketing channels.

Two fundamental tenets must be followed in order to create a successful information type

We needed to explain to our designers, developers, and stakeholders that we were doing something completely different from their previous internet projects, where everyone assumed that content would fit into layouts as physical building blocks. The earlier approach made the designs feel more recognizable and intuitive, at first, at least because it was more common and also more intuitive. We discovered two guiding principles that helped the group grasp how a willing model and the design processes we were familiar with were:

1. Instead of design, vocabulary must be used by content versions.
2. Additionally, information that belongs together should be linked to material models.

Lexical material models

A conceptual content type uses form and attribute names that reflect the content’s intended purpose and not how it will be displayed. For instance, in a nonsemantic design, groups may make varieties like teasers, press blocks, and cards. Although these types may make it simple to present information, they don’t aid in understanding the meaning of the information, which would have opened the door to the information presented in each advertising channel. In comparison, a conceptual content type uses kind names like “product,”” service,” and “testimonial” to allow for each delivery channel to interpret and use the content as it sees fit.

A great place to start when creating a conceptual content concept is by reviewing the types and qualities that Schema has defined. com, a community-driven tool for type meanings that are comprehensible to platforms like Google search.

A semantic information model has many advantages:

A semantic material type decouples information from its presentation but that teams can change the website’s design without having to restructure its content, even if your team doesn’t worry about omnichannel content. In this way, content can withstand disruptive website redesigns.
• A semantic content model also gives you an advantage in the market. by including structured, schema-based data. org’s types and properties, a website can provide hints to help Google understand the content, display it in search snippets or knowledge panels, and use it to answer voice-interface user questions. Potential customers could access your content without ever visiting your website.
• Beyond those practical advantages, you’ll also require an omnichannel content delivery model. Delivery channels must be able to understand the same content in order to use it across multiple marketing channels. For instance, if your content model provided a list of questions and answers, it could be used as a voice interface or by a bot to answer frequently asked questions ( FAQ ) pages.

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

Content models that connect

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

Consider creating an essay or article. An article’s meaning and usefulness depends upon its parts being kept together. Without the context of the entire article, would one of the headings or paragraphs have any meaning on their own? Our well-known design-system thinking on our project frequently led us to want to develop content models that would divide content into distinct chunks to fit the web-centric layout. Similar effects could have been felt to an article that had its headline removed. Content that belonged together became challenging to manage and nearly impossible for multiple delivery channels to understand because we were cutting content into separate pieces based on layout.

To illustrate, let’s look at how connecting related content applies in a real-world scenario. The client’s design team created a challenging layout for a software product page that included numerous tabs and sections. The content model lacked instincts, so we had to follow our instincts. Shouldn’t we make adding any number of tabs in the future as simple and flexible as possible?

We felt like we needed a content type called “tab section” because our design-system instincts were so well-known, so that multiple tab sections could be added to a page. Each tab section would display a variety of content types. One tab might provide the software’s overview or its specifications. Another tab might provide a list of resources.

Our tendency to divide the content model into “tab section” pieces would have resulted in a cumbersome editing process and an unnecessary complexity of the model, as well as content that wasn’t understandable by other delivery channels. How would a different system have been able to determine which “tab section” referred to a product’s specifications or resource list, for instance? Would that system have had to have used tab sections and content blocks to calculate these terms? This would have prevented the tabs from ever being rearranged, and it would have required adding logic to each other delivery channel to interpret the layout of the design system. Additionally, it would have been difficult to migrate to a new content model in response to the new page redesign if the customer had decided against displaying this content in a tab layout.

We had a breakthrough when we discovered that our customer had a specific purpose in mind for each tab: it would reveal specific information such as the software product’s overview, specifications, related resources, and pricing. Our desire to concentrate on what was visually and historically significant had obscured the purpose of the designs once implementation began. With a little digging, it didn’t take long to realize that the concept of tabs wasn’t relevant to the content model. What was important was the meaning of the content they were planning to display in the tabs.

In fact, the customer could have chosen to switch to another format, using tabs, elsewhere. Based on the meaningful attributes the customer had desired to display on the web, we created content types for the software product. There were obvious semantic attributes like name and description as well as rich attributes like screenshots, software requirements, and feature lists. The software’s product information stayed together because it wasn’t sliced across separate components like “tab sections” that were derived from the content’s presentation. Any delivery channel—including future ones—could understand and present this content.

Conclusion

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

• A design system isn’t a content model. You should maintain the semantic value and contextual structure of the content strategy throughout the entire implementation process because team members might be tempted to combine them and to make your content model resemble your design system. This will enable each delivery channel to consume the content without the need for a magic decoder ring.
• If your team is having trouble making this transition, Schema can still offer some of the advantages. org–based structured data in your website. The advantage of search engine optimization is a compelling argument on its own, even if additional delivery channels are not in the works.
• Remind the team that separating the content model from the design will allow them to update the designs more quickly because they won’t be hindered by the cost of content migrations. They will be prepared for the upcoming big thing, and they will be able to create new designs without compromising the compatibility between the content and the design.

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

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

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

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

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

A gauntlet between research and screen design

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

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

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

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

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

Getting in the same curiosity-boat

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

Mark Twain

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

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

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

But how we do this is important. However much we might want to, we can’t just tell everyone, “YOU ARE WRONG!” Instead, we need to facilitate and guide our team members to self-identify holes in their picture. When stakeholders take ownership of assumptions and gaps in understanding, BAM! Suddenly, UX research is not such a hard sell, and everyone is aboard the same curiosity-boat.

Say your users are doctors. And you have no idea how doctors use the system you are tasked with redesigning.

You might try to sell research by honestly saying: “We need to understand doctors better! What are their pain points? How do they use the current app?” But here’s the problem with that. Those questions are vague, and the answers to them don’t feel acutely actionable.

Instead, you want your stakeholders themselves to ask super-specific questions. This is more like the kind of conversation you need to facilitate. Let’s listen in:

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

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

“Is it a ‘primary doctor’ or just a ‘primary caregiver’… Can’t that role be a nurse practitioner?”

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

“So are caregivers in scope for this redesign?”

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

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

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

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

The two questions

But how do we get to these kinds of meaty questions diplomatically, efficiently, collaboratively, and reliably? 

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

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

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

Prep work: Noun foraging

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

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

Here are just a few great noun foraging sources:

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

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

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

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

1. Structure
2. Instances
3. Purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

First I’d look at my own email client, which happens to be Gmail. I’d then look at Outlook and the new HEY email. I’d look at Yahoo, Hotmail…I’d even look at Slack and Basecamp and other so-called “email replacers.” I’d read some articles, reviews, and forum threads where people are complaining about email. While doing all this, I would look for and write down the nouns.

(Before moving on, feel free to go noun foraging for this hypothetical product, too, and then scroll down to see how much our lists match up. Just don’t get lost in your own emails! Come back to me!)

Drumroll, please…

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

• email message
• thread
• contact
• client
• rule/automation
• email address that is not a contact?
• contact groups
• attachment
• Google doc file / other integrated file
• newsletter? (HEY treats this differently)
• saved responses and templates

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

Aside: here are some real nouns foraged during my own past project work that I needed my stakeholders to help me understand:

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

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

Facilitate an Object Definition Workshop

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

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

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

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

1. What is this thing?

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

As your discussion unfolds, capture any agreed-upon definitions. And when uncertainty emerges, quietly (but visibly) start an “open questions” parking lot. 😉

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

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

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

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

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

OK, moving on. 

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

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

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

Stakeholder 1: Yes! Definitely.

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

Continue to build out your growing glossary of objects. And continue to capture areas of uncertainty in your “open questions” parking lot.

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

4. What’s the relationship between these objects?

You: Are saved responses and templates related in any way?

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

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

Listen. Capture uncertainty. Once the list of “open questions” grows to a critical mass, pause to start assigning questions to groups or individuals. Some questions might be for the dev team (hopefully at least one developer is in the room with you). One question might be specifically for someone who couldn’t make it to the workshop. And many questions will need to be labeled “user.” 

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

5. Is this object in scope?

Your next question narrows the team’s focus toward what’s most important to your users. You can simply ask, “Are saved responses in scope for our first release?,” but I’ve got a better, more devious strategy.

By now, you should have a list of clearly defined objects. Ask participants to sort these objects from most to least important, either in small breakout groups or individually. Then, like you did with the definitions, have everyone reveal their sort order at once. Surprisingly—or not so surprisingly—it’s not unusual for the VP to rank something like “saved responses” as #2 while everyone else puts it at the bottom of the list. Try not to look too smug as you inevitably expose more misalignment.

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

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

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

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

6. Create a visual representation of the objects’ relationships

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

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

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

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

Light the fuse

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

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

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

With this methodology, we are cornering our decision-makers into advocating for user research as they themselves label questions as high-risk. Sorry, not sorry. 

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

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

Final words: Hold the screen design!

Seriously, if at all possible, do not ever design screens again without first answering these fundamental questions: what are the objects and how do they relate?

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

I sincerely hope this helps you win time and budget to go talk to your users and gain clarity on what you are designing before you start building screens. If you find success using noun foraging and the Object Definition Workshop, there’s more where that came from in the rest of the ORCA process, which will help prevent even more late-in-the-game scope tugs-of-war and strategy pivots. 

All the best of luck! Now go sell research!

CSS is all about appearance containers. In fact, the whole website is made of containers, from the computer viewport to components on a webpage. However, there are times when we have a fresh element that forces us to reevaluate our design strategy.

Square features, for instance, make it fun to play with round picture areas. Finding the best way to organize articles that stays out of reach with smart screen notches and electronic keyboards is challenging. And two display or portable devices make us reassess how to best utilize available space in a number of various device postures.

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

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

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

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

PWAs on desktop are ultimately limited to the window they appear in, which is a rectangle with a title bar at the top.

Here’s what a typical desktop PWA app looks like:

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

What if we could look beyond this box and reclaim the entire window of the app? Doing so would give us a chance to make our apps more beautiful and feel more integrated in the operating system.

This is exactly what the Window Controls Overlay provides. This new PWA functionality makes it possible to take advantage of the full surface area of the app, including where the title bar normally appears.

About the window and title bar controls

Let’s start with an explanation of what the title bar and window controls are.

The title bar, which typically contains the app’s name, appears at the top of an app window. Window controls are the affordances, or buttons, that make it possible to minimize, maximize, or close the app’s window, and are also displayed at the top.

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s use the feature

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

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

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

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

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

And on Windows:

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

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

Enabling Window Controls Overlay

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

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

Using the overlay of Window Controls

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

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

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

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

Here is what the app looks like now:

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

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

CSS to avoid window controls

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

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

You can use these variables in conjunction with the CSS env function to position your content where the title bar would have been and make sure it doesn’t overlap with the window controls. In our case, we’ll use two of the variables to position our header, which contains the logo, search bar, and NEW button.

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

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

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

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

changing the window’s background color allows it to blend in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the function we’ll use:

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

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

Dragging the window

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

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

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

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

-webkit-app-region: drag;

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

-webkit-app-region: no-drag; 

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

adapting to window resizing

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

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

The API offers three intriguing features:

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the window is too small, we can move the header down using the above CSS code to avoid hitting the window control buttons, and we can also lower the thumbnails accordingly.

Thirty pixel of creative challenge

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

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

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

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

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

The mobile-first style approach is great—it focuses on what really matters to the consumer, it’s well-practiced, and it’s been a popular style design for years. But developing your CSS mobile-first should also be fantastic, too…right?

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

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

Benefits of mobile-first

Some of the points to enjoy with mobile-first CSS growth —and why it’s been the de facto growth strategy for thus long—make a lot of feeling:

Development order. One thing you definitely get from mobile-first is a great development hierarchy—you only focus on the cellular view and get developing.

Tried and tested. It has been a tried-and-true method that has worked for years because it solves a trouble flawlessly.

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

Prevents desktop-centric growth. It can be tempting to first focus on the desktop perspective because desktop computers are used for growth. No one wants to spend their time retrofitting a desktop-centric website to function on mobile devices, but thinking about wireless from the beginning prevents us from getting stuck in the future!

Drawbacks of mobile-first

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

More difficulty. The more unwanted script you inherit from lower thresholds, the higher up the order you go.

Higher CSS precision. A group name declaration’s default style has then a higher specificity that has been returned to the browser’s default value. When you want to preserve the CSS candidates as simple as possible, this can cause a headache on massive projects.

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

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

The issue of home value surpasses

Overwriting values is not necessarily essentially bad; CSS was created to do that. However, sharing incorrect values is counterproductive and can be burdensome and inadequate. When you have to replace styles to restore them to their defaults, which may cause issues after, especially if you are using a combination of bespoke CSS and power classes, it can also lead to more fashion specificity. We won’t be able to use a utility class for a style that has been upgraded to have a higher specificity.

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

This approach opens up some opportunities, as you can look at each breakpoint as a clean slate. If a component’s layout looks like it should be based on Flexbox at all breakpoints, it’s fine and can be coded in the default style sheet. However, if it appears that Grid would be much better for screens with large screens and Flexbox would be better for mobile, both can be accomplished entirely independently when the CSS is placed into closed media query ranges. Additionally, having a thorough understanding of any given component in all breakpoints upfront is necessary for developing simultaneously. This can help identify issues in the design more quickly during the development process. We don’t want to travel down the rabbit hole while creating complex mobile components, only to discover that the desktop designs are just as complex and incompatible with the HTML we created for the mobile view!

Though this approach isn’t going to suit everyone, I encourage you to give it a try. There are plenty of tools out there to help with concurrent development, such as Responsively App, Blisk, and many others.

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

Closed media query ranges in practice

In classic mobile-first CSS we overwrite the styles, but we can avoid this by using media query ranges. To illustrate the difference ( I’m using SCSS for brevity ), let’s assume there are three visual designs:

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

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

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

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

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

The goal is to: 

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

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

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

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

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

separating the CSS from combining it

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

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

Which HTTP version are you using?

To determine which version of HTTP you're using, go to your website and open your browser's dev tools. Next, go to the Network tab and check whether the Protocol column is visible. If "h2" is listed under Protocol, it means HTTP/2 is being used.

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

Also, if your site is still using HTTP/1... WHY?!! What are you anticipating? Excellent user support exists for HTTP/2.

Splitting the CSS

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

We can see that the mobile and default CSS are loaded with" Highest" priority in the following example of a website that is visited on a mobile breakpoint. The remaining CSS files ( print, tablet, and desktop ) are still downloaded in case they'll be needed later, but with" Lowest" priority.

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

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

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

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

Moving on

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

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

In the end, simplifying CSS rule creation whenever possible is a more effective strategy than circling around with overrides. But whichever methodology you choose, it needs to suit the project. Mobile-first may—or may not—turn out to be the best choice for what's involved, but first you need to solidly understand the trade-offs you're stepping into.

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

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

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

Control the system

Unfortunately, we’re trapped in a capitalist structure that reinforces materialism and inequality, and it’s obsessed with the dream of infinite growth. Sea levels, temperature, and our demand for energy continue to rise unquestioned, while the divide between rich and poor continues to increase. Owners expect ever-higher returns on their investments, and firms feel forced to set short-term goals that reflect this. Over the last years, those goals have twisted our well-intended human-centered mentality into a powerful system that promotes ever-higher levels of consumption. When we’re working for an organization that pursues “double-digit growth” or “aggressive sales targets” ( which is 99 percent of us ), that’s very hard to resist while remaining human friendly. Yet with our best intentions, and even though we like to suggest that we create solutions for people, we’re a part of the problem.

What can we do to alter this?

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

At the lowest level of effectiveness, you can change numbers such as accessibility results or the number of layout views. However, none of that will alter a company’s course.
• Similarly, affecting buffers ( such as team budgets ), stocks ( such as the number of designers ), flows ( such as the number of new hires ), and delays ( such as the time that it takes to hear about the effect of design ) won’t significantly affect a company.
• Focusing rather on feedback rings such as management power, staff identification, or design-system purchases can help a business become better at achieving its objectives. But that doesn’t alter the goals themselves, which means that the business may also work against your ethical-design ideals.
• The next level, data flows, is what most ethical-design activities focus on then: the transfer of moral techniques, toolkits, articles, conferences, workshops, and so on. This is where ethical design has largely remained theoretical. We’ve been focusing all of this time on the wrong system level.
• Take rules, for example—they beat knowledge every time. There can be widely accepted rules, such as how finance works, or a scrum team’s definition of done. However, unofficial rules intended to maintain profits can also smother ethical design, which are frequently revealed through statements like” the client didn’t ask for it” or “don’t make it too big.”
• It is difficult to change the laws without exercising official authority. That’s why the next level is so influential: self-organization. Experimentation, bottom-up initiatives, passion projects, self-steering teams—all of these are examples of self-organization that improve the resilience and creativity of a company. It’s exactly this diversity of viewpoints that’s needed to structurally tackle big systemic issues like consumerism, wealth inequality, and climate change.
• Yet even stronger than self-organization are objectives and metrics. Our businesses want to earn more money, which means that everyone in the company makes an effort to earn more money. And once I realized that profit is merely a measure, I realized how crucial a very specific, defined metric can be in the direction of a company.

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

Redefine success

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

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

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

A genuinely purpose-driven company would try to reverse this dynamic: it would recognize finance for what it was intended for: a means. Therefore, both feasibility and viability are important factors in the company’s efforts to accomplish what they stated. It makes intuitive sense: to achieve most anything, you need resources, people, and money. ( Fun fact: the Italian language knows no difference between feasibility and viability, both are simply fattibilità. )

However, it is insufficient to substitute a desirable for a viable outcome for an ethical one. Consumption is still associated with desirability because the associated activities aim to determine what people want, whether it’s beneficial or not. Desirability objectives, such as user satisfaction or conversion, don’t consider whether a product is healthy for people. They don’t stop us from developing products that deceive or deceive people, or do they prevent us from reducing the wealth gap in society. They are unable to restore a healthy relationship with nature.

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

This is hardly a new idea. Many similar models exist, some calling the fourth dimension accountability, integrity, or responsibility. What I’ve never seen before, however, is the necessary step that comes after: to influence the system as designers and to make ethical design more practical, we must create objectives for ethical design that are achievable and inspirational. There’s no one way to do this because it highly depends on your culture, values, and industry. However, I’ll share the version I created with a group of design agency coworkers. Consider it a template to get started.

Pursue well-being, equity, and sustainability

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, the global goal on the global level aims to keep us in harmony with our only true home, humanity. Referring to it simply as sustainability, our definition was:

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

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

Measure impact

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

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

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

The system will produce military spending if the desired system state is national security, which is defined as the amount of money spent on the military. It may or may not produce national security”.

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

There’s another important message here. Even if we set an objective to build a calm interface, if we were to choose the wrong metric for calmness—say, the number of interface elements—we could still end up with a screen that induces anxiety. Choosing the incorrect metric can completely derail good intentions.

Additionally, choosing the right metric is enormously helpful in focusing the design team. When you perform the task of selecting metrics for our goals, you are made to consider what success looks like in terms of words and how you can demonstrate that you have met your ethical goals. It also makes you think about what we as designers have control over: what can I add or change in my design process to achieve the desired level of success? The response to this query provides a lot of focus and clarity.

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

Practice daily ethical design

Only then do you have a chance to structurally practice ethical design once you have defined your objectives and have a reasonable idea of the potential metrics for your design project. It” simply” becomes a matter of using your imagination and sifting through the knowledge and tools that are already at your disposal.

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

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

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

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

The most crucial meeting that it is so easy to forget to include is the kickoff. It consists of two major phases: 1 ) the alignment of expectations, and 2 ) the definition of success.

In the first phase, the entire ( design ) team goes over the project brief and meets with all the relevant stakeholders. Everyone gets to know one another, shares their hopes for the outcome and their contributions to it. Assumptions are raised and discussed. The goal is to reach the same level of understanding and, in turn, to prevent mistakes and surprises later on in the project.

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

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

It’s crucial to reach an understanding of what success means at this early stage because you can depend on it for the duration of the project. The design team can use diversity as a specific success factor during the kickoff if, for instance, they want to create an inclusive app for a diverse user group. If the client consents, the team will be able to recite that promise throughout the project. To create a successful product, we agreed in our first meeting that a diverse user group that includes A and B is necessary. Therefore, we conduct activity X and follow the research procedure Y. Compare those odds to a scenario where the team had to request permission halfway through the project and didn’t agree to it in advance. The client might argue that that was in excess of the agreed scope, and she would be correct.

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

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

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

the project’s origin and purpose: why are we doing this project?
• the problem definition: what do we want to solve?
• the concrete goals and metrics for each success dimension: what do we want to achieve?
• the scope, process, and role descriptions: how will we achieve it?

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

Conclusion

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

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

And for those who identify as service designers, UX designers, or UI designers, steer clear of the toolkits, meetups, and conferences for a while if you truly want to have a positive, meaningful impact. Instead, gather your colleagues and define goals for well-being, equity, and sustainability through design. Engage your stakeholders in a workshop and challenge them to think about ways to accomplish and evaluate those ethical objectives. Take their input, make it concrete and visible, ask for their agreement, and hold them to it.

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

Of course, engaging your stakeholders in this way can be uncomfortable. Many of my colleagues expressed doubts such as” What will the client think of this”?,” Will they take me seriously”?, and “Can’t we just do it within the design team instead”? In fact, a product manager once questioned why ethics couldn’t just be a set process in design; to simply do it without making the effort to define ethical goals. It’s a tempting idea, right? With stakeholders, we wouldn’t have to go through contentious discussions about what values or which key-performance indicators to use. It would let us focus on what we like and do best: designing.

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Started

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

Popular circumstances for launching a personalization task:

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

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

From top to bottom, the rates include:

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

We’ll go through each of these amounts sequentially. An associated deck of cards serves as an example of each level’s specific examples to make this more practical. We’ve found them useful in brainstorming about customisation, and we’ll provide cases for you here.

Starting at the top

The elements of the pyramids are as follows:

North Star

Ultimately, you want a North Star in your personalization program, whether big or small. The North Star identifies the (one ) overall goal of the personalization program. What do you wish to perform? North Stars cast a ghost. The bigger the sun, the bigger the dark. Example of North Starts may contain:

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

Goals

As in any great UX style, personalization may help promote designing with client intentions. Objectives are the military and tangible indicators that will show the success of the overall program. Start with your existing analytics and assessment system, as well as indicators you can benchmark against. In some cases, new targets may be suitable. The most important thing to consider is that personalisation is more of a means of achieving an objective than a desired result. Common targets include:

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

Touchpoints

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

Channel-level Touchpoints

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

Wireframe-level Touchpoints

• Web overlay
• Web call bar
• Web symbol
• Web content wall
• Web list

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

Contexts and Campaigns

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

Personalization Context Model:

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

Personalization Content Model:

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

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

User Sections

Based on customer research, user segments can be created prescriptively or dynamically ( for example, using principles and logic tied to user behavior, or through A/B testing ). You will need to think about how to treat the logged-in visitor, the guest or returning visitor for whom you may have a stateful cookie ( or another post-cookie identifier ), or the authenticated visitor who is logged in at the very least. The personalisation tower has some of the following cases:

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

Actionable Data

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

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

When it comes to recognizing and making decisions about various audiences and their signals, profiling has evolved. As user data volume and time and confidence increase, it varies more granularly to more precise constructs about ever-smaller cohorts of users.

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

Pulling it Together

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

One can begin to chart the entire course of a card’s “hand” from leadership focus to tactical and tactical execution. It is also at the heart of the way that both co-authors have organized workshops to build a backlog of programs, which would make a good subject for a separate article.

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

Lay Down Your Cards

Any sustainable personalization strategy must consider near, mid and long-term goals. There is simply no “easy button” where a personalization program can be installed and run without waiting for any meaningful results, even with the market leader CMS platforms like Sitecore and Adobe or the most innovative composable CMS DXP available today. That said, there is a common grammar to all personalization activities, just like every sentence has nouns and verbs. These cards attempt to map that territory.

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

That said, this is a guide for developers, and to that conclusion, I’d like to begin with a story—well, a voyage, actually. Along the way, I’m going to render myself a little vulnerable. I call it:

The Tale of Justin’s Preposterous Pate

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

But I drained HTML and JavaScript novels into the wee hours of the morning and self-taught myself how to code during my freshman year rather than student and go into print like many of my companions. I needed to understand what my design choices would ultimately think when rendered in a website, which I did not want to do.

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

Those are amazing factors between non-career relationships and the world of design, even though I’m talking about a different time. What are your main passions, or ideals, that elevate medium? The main themes remain the same, much like the clear parallels between what fulfills you, who is independent of the physical or digital worlds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collaboration and connection transcend media, which have a huge impact on my design career.

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

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

Today’s web design has been in a period of stagnation. There’s a good chance you’ve seen a website with a hero image or banner with text overlay ( possibly with a lovely rotating carousel of images ), a call to action, and three columns of sub-content directly beneath. Perhaps there are selections that vaguely relate to their respective content in an icon library.

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

Pixel Problems

Websites built during this time were frequently built and built on Macs whose desktops and OSs looked something like this. This is Mac OS 7.5, but 8 and 9 weren’t that different.

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

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

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

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

These are some of my creations that made use of ResEdit, the only program I had at the time, to create icons. ResEdit was a clumsy, built-in Mac OS utility that wasn’t really designed for what we were using it for. At the core of all of this work: Research. Challenge. Problem- solving. Again, these core connection-based values are agnostic of medium.

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

This is K10k, short for Kaliber 1000. Michael Schmidt and Toke Nygaard founded K10k in 1998, which was the design news website during that time. With its pixel art-fueled presentation, ultra-focused care given to every facet and detail, and with many of the more influential designers of the time who were invited to be news authors on the site, well… it was the place to be, my friend. The work these people were doing gave rise to the idea of GUI Galaxy, which was inspired by their work.

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

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

I evolved—devolved, really—into a colossal asshole ( and in just about a year out of art school, no less ). What satisfied me was the praise and the press, which went on to completely alter my mind. They inflated my ego. I actually felt a little better than my fellow designers.

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

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

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

It’s true, I initially didn’t accept it, but after much reflection, I was able to accept it. I was soon able to accept, and process, and course correct. The realization laid me low, but the re-awakening was essential. I let go of the “reward” of admiration and turned my attention to the issues that had plagued my art school career. Most importantly: I got back to my core values.

Always Students

Following that short-term regression, I was able to push forward in my personal design and career. And as I grew older, I could reflect on my own thoughts to help me develop further and make necessary course corrections.

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

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

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

Working with the Fermilab team to iterate and make improvements to the interface, I cut my teeth on usability testing. To me, their language and the topics they discussed seemed to me to be foreign languages. And by accepting that I was just a student and working under the impression that I was just a student, I made myself available to them in order to form that crucial bond.

I also had my first ethnographic observational experience, which involved visiting the Fermilab location and observing how the physicists used the tool in their own environments, on their own terminals. One takeaway was that the data columns ended up using white text on a dark gray background rather than black text-on-white because of the level of ambient light-driven contrast in the facility. They could read through a lot of data at once and relieve their strain in the process. Additionally, since Fermilab and CERN are government entities with stringent accessibility requirements, my knowledge expanded. The barrier-free design was another essential form of connection.

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

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

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

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

I’ve been fascinated by shows since I was a child. I loved the figures and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I aspired to be an artist. And I hoped that I would have the same opportunities as Indiana Jones did, leading to thrilling adventures. I also dreamed up suggestions for videos that my friends and I could create and sun in. But they never advanced. However, I did end up working in user experience ( UI). Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer research is story. And to get the most out of customer studies, you must tell a compelling story that involves stakeholders, including the product team and decision-makers, and piques their interest in learning more.

Think of your preferred 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 provides an overview of what is happening now, and it also serves as a primer for the characters and the difficulties and issues they face. Act two sets the scene for the fight and the action begins. Here, difficulties grow or get worse. The decision is the third and final action. This is where the problems are resolved and the figures grow 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 when conducting analysis.

Unfortunately, many people now believe that study is unprofitable. If finances or timelines are small, analysis tends to be one of the first points to go. Some goods managers rely on developers or, worse, their own mind to make the “right” decisions for customers based on their experience or accepted best practices rather than investing in research. That may lead some groups, but that approach can so easily miss the chance to solve people ‘ real issues. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. User study improves style. It provides opportunities and problems while keeping it on record. Being aware of the issues with your goods and reacting to them can help you stay ahead of your competition.

Each action in the three-act construction corresponds to a specific stage of the process, and each stage is crucial to delivering the full narrative. Let’s take a look at the various functions and how they relate to consumer study.

Act one: installation

Fundamental analysis comes in handy because the setup is all about comprehending the background. Foundational research aids in understanding people and identifying their issues ( also known as conceptual, discovery, or preliminary research ). You’re learning about what exists now, the obstacles people have, and how the problems affect them—just like in the videos. You can conduct contextual inquiries or diary studies ( or both! ) to conduct foundational research. ), which can assist you in identifying both prospects and issues. It doesn’t need to get a great investment in time or money.

What is the least practical ethnography that Erika Hall can do is spend fifteen minutes with a consumer and say,” Walk me through your day yesterday. That’s it. Current that one ask. Opened up and spend fifteen minutes listening. Do everything in your power to keep yourself and your pursuits out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography”. According to Hall, “[This ] will probably prove quite fascinating. In the unlikely event that you don’t learn anything new or helpful, move on with more assurance in your direction.

This makes total sense to me. And I adore how users research is now so simple. You don’t need to make a lot of paperwork; you can only attract people and do it! This can offer a wealth of knowledge about your customers, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their life. That’s exactly what work one is all about: understanding where people are coming from.

Jared Spool discusses the significance of basic research and how it may comprise the majority of your study. If you can pick from any further user data that you can get your hands on, such as surveys or analytics, that can complement what you’ve heard in the fundamental studies or even time to areas that need more research. All of this information helps to give a more in-depth picture of the state of issues and all of its flaws. And that’s the start of a gripping tale. It’s the place in the story where you realize that the principal characters—or the people in this case—are facing issues that they need to conquer. This is where you begin to develop compassion for the characters and support their success, much like in films. And presumably, participants are now doing the same. Their love may be with their company, which could be losing wealth because people didn’t complete certain tasks. Or perhaps they feel something for the challenges of customers. In either case, work one serves as your main strategy to pique the interest and interest of the participants.

When stakeholders begin to understand the value of basic research, that is open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making approach. And that can influence product teams ‘ focus on improving. Everyone benefits from this, including the product, users, and stakeholders. It’s like winning an Oscar in movie terms—it often leads to your product being well received and successful. And this might encourage producers to repeat the process with other goods. Knowing how to tell a good story is the only way to convince stakeholders to care about doing more research, and storytelling is the key to this process.

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 approving the issues you raised 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 might be caused by unmet needs or issues with a flow or process that is causing users to fall asleep. More issues will come up in the process, much like in act two of a movie. It’s here that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this act.

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

The plot may get lost if you try to tell a story with too many characters, which also applies to storytelling. 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 problems that need to be solved while also highlighting the worth of conducting the research in the first place.

Usability tests have been conducted in person for tens of thousands of years, but remote testing can also be done using software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing tools. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You might interpret in-person usability tests as a form of theater watching as opposed to remote testing. Each has advantages and disadvantages. In-person usability research is a much richer experience. The sessions can be had by stakeholders with other stakeholders. Additionally, you get real-time reactions, including surprises, disagreements, 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 conducting usability testing in the field is like watching a play that is staged and controlled, where any two sessions may be very different from one another. You can conduct usability testing in the real world by creating a replica of the environment where users interact with the product and then conducting your research there. Or you can go out to meet users at their location to do your research. With either option, you can see how things work in context, how things change, and how conversion can change completely in different ways depending on the circumstances. You have less control over how these sessions end as researchers, but this can occasionally help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests add a level of detail that is frequently absent from remote usability tests.

That’s not to say that the “movies” —remote sessions—aren’t a good option. Remote sessions can reach a wider audience. They make it possible for much more people to participate in the research and learn what’s happening. Additionally, they make the doors accessible to a much wider range 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 advantage of usability testing, whether conducted remotely or in person, is that you can ask real users questions to understand their reasoning and understanding of the problem. This can help you identify issues as well as understand why they were initially issues. Furthermore, you can test hypotheses and gauge whether your thinking is correct. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer understanding of how useful the designs are and whether or not they fulfill their intended purpose. Act two is where the excitement is at the heart of the narrative, but there are also potential surprises. This is equally true of usability tests. Unexpected things that participants say frequently alter the way you look at things, and these unexpected revelations can lead to unexpected turns in the narrative.

Unfortunately, user research can occasionally be viewed as unreliable. And too often usability testing is the only research process that some stakeholders think that they ever need. In fact, if the designs you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a thorough understanding of your users ( foundational research ), there isn’t much to be gained by conducting usability testing in the first place. Because you narrow down the subject matter of your feedback without understanding the needs of the users. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. In the context of a usability test, it’s just feedback on a particular design.

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

In act two, stakeholders will hopefully be able to observe the story develop during the user sessions, which reveal the conflict and tension in the current design’s highs and lows. And in turn, this can encourage stakeholders to take action on the issues raised.

Act three: resolution

The third act is about resolving the issues raised by the first two acts, whereas the first two are about comprehending the context and the tensions that can compel action. While the first two acts require an audience, the final act requires that they remain engaged throughout. 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 entire team to discuss what is possible within the project’s constraints, ask questions, and discuss user feedback together. And it gives the UX design and research teams more time to clarify, suggest alternatives, or provide more context for their choices. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

Voiceover narration of this act is typically used with audience input. The researcher serves as the narrator, who depicts the issues and what the product’s potential future might look like given what the team has learned. They give the stakeholders their recommendations and their guidance on creating this vision.

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

This kind of structure is in line with research findings, particularly those from usability tests. It provides evidence for “what is “—the problems that you’ve identified. And your suggestions for how to deal with them are “what could be.” And so forth and forth.

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be visual, like quick sketches of how a new design could function to solve a problem. These can help create momentum and conversation. 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. The denouement of the story is where you make the main points or problems and what they mean for the product. This stage provides stakeholders with the next steps, and hopefully, the motivation to take those steps as well!

While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. The three-act structure of user research contains all the components of a good story:

Act one: You encounter both the users and the antagonists ( the issues affecting users ). This is the beginning of the plot. Researchers might employ techniques like contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics in act one. These techniques can produce personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards as output.

Act two: Next, there’s character development. The protagonists face problems and difficulties, which they must overcome, and there is conflict and tension. Researchers might employ heuristics evaluation, usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and other methods in act two. The output of these can include usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices.

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

The researcher performs a number of tasks: they are the producer, the director, and the storyteller. Although the participants are only a small part in the study, they are significant characters. And the stakeholders are the audience. However, the most crucial thing is to create the right narrative and use storytelling to research user stories. By the end, the parties should have a goal and a desire to solve the product’s flaws.

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

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

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

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

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

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the audio

Take into account Spotify’s DJ feature, which was introduced last month.

We’re used to seeing the polished final outcome of a personalization have. A personal have had to be conceived, budgeted, and prioritized before the year-end prize, the making-of-backstory, or the behind-the-scenes success chest. A delay of thought-provoking tips to enhance customer experiences is present before any personalization function is implemented in your product or service.

So how do you understand where to position your personalization bet? How can you create regular interactions that didn’t irritate users or worse, breed trust? We’ve discovered that several budgeted programs initially needed one or more workshops to join key stakeholders and domestic customers of the technology to justify their continuing investments. Make it matter.

We’ve closely monitored the same evolution with our consumers, from major software to young companies. How effective these prepersonalization hobbies are, in our experience working on small and large personalization initiatives, depends on a program’s best track record, including its ability to weather challenging concerns, work steadily toward shared answers, and manage its design and engineering efforts.

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

A yearlong project involving tests and feature development is a customisation practice. Your software load is not experiencing a switch-flip. It’s ideal managed as a queue that usually evolves through three actions:

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

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

Set the timer for your kitchen.

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

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

Kickstart: This specifies the terms of engagement as you concentrate on the potential, the readiness and drive of your team, and your leadership.
1. The card-based workshop activities center on a plan of attack and the scope of work, which is outlined in the plan of action.
2. Work your plan: This phase is all about creating a competitive environment for team participants to individually pitch their own pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept project, its business case, and its operating model.

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

Kickstart: Apt your appetite

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

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

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

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature ( or something similar ). We categorize connected experiences in our cards according to their functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Build your own size in this. 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.

The following 2 2 grid, which lists the four enduring justifications for a personalized experience, should be used as the starting point for each idea. This is crucial because it emphasizes how personalization can affect your own ways of working as well as your external customers. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

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

The third and final KickStart activity is about filling in the personalization gap. How well documented is your customer journey? Will data and privacy compliance be too big of a challenge? Do you have any needs for content metadata that you must address? It’s just a matter of acknowledging the magnitude of that need and finding a solution ( we’re fairly certain that you do ). In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. For instance, our Detractor card lists six intractable stakeholder attitudes that prevent progress.

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

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

Hit the test kitchen

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

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

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

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

Verify your ingredients

You’ll ensure that you have everything you need to create your desired interaction ( or that you can determine what needs to be added to your pantry like a good product manager ) and that you have validated with the right stakeholders present. These elements include the audience you’re targeting, the content and design elements, the interaction’s context, and your overall ensemble.

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

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

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

Compose your recipe

What elements are most important to you? Consider the construct of a who-what-when-why

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

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

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

1. When a visitor or an unidentified visitor interacts with a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it simpler for them to read a related title, 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: A user receives an email before their subscription expires or after a recent failed renewal to request that they reconsider or remind them to do so.

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

The workshop’s later stages, which shift from focusing on cookbooks to focusing on customers, might seem more nuanced. Individual” cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team using a standard jobs-to-be-done format to ensure consistency and outcomes, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and production delivery.

Better kitchens require better architecture

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

When a team is overfitting, it’s because they aren’t designing with their best data, which is why personalization turns into a laugh line. Every organization has technical debt in addition to its organizational debt, which reduces the effectiveness of personalization, much like a sparse pantry. Your AI’s output quality, for example, is indeed limited by your IA. Before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture, Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was beyond belief.

You can’t stand the heat, in fact…

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

You have a better chance of lasting success and sound beginnings with this workshop framework. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. However, if you use the same cookbook and the same recipe combination, you’ll have solid ground for success. We created these activities to ensure that your organization’s needs are clear and concise before the risks start to accumulate.

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

The same holds true for those of us who are currently employed in design and development. Having worked on the web for about three years at this point, I’ve seen the typical wax and wane of concepts, strategies, and systems. Every day we as developers and designers 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 beginning of website standards

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

Server-side language like PHP, Java, and.NET took Perl as the primary back-end computers, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the garbage bin. With these better server-side instruments came the first time of online applications, starting with content-management systems ( especially in the blog space with tools like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress ). AJAX opened the door to sequential connection between the front end and back end in the mid-2000s. Immediately, websites may update their information without needing to refresh. Developers created a crop of trusted client-side interactions across browsers with wildly varying standards assistance, such as Prototype, YUI, and jQuery. 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 technology, standards, and approaches reinvigorated the market in many ways. As manufacturers and designers explored more diversified styles and designs, website design flourished. However, we also depend on numerous tricks. When it came to basic layout and text styling, early CSS was a significant improvement over table-based layouts, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes ( such as rounded or angled corners ) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks ). All kinds of nested floats or absolute positioning ( or both ) were necessary for complicated layouts. The big five typefaces were initially influenced by beam and photo replacement, but both tricks caused accessibility and performance issues. Additionally, JavaScript libraries made it simple to add a dash of conversation to pages without having to spend the money to double or even quadruple the get size for basic websites.

The internet as application platform

The front-end and back-end harmony continued to improve, leading to the development of the current web application. Between expanded server-side programming languages ( which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others ) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Alongside these equipment came others, including creative type control, build technology, and shared bundle libraries. What was once mainly used for linked files turned into a world with limitless possibilities.

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

This fusion of potent portable devices and potent development resources contributed to the growth of social media and other centralized resources for people to use and interact with. As it became easier and more popular to interact with others immediately on Twitter, Facebook, and yet Slack, the need for held private websites waned. Social media provided relationships on a global level, with both the positive and negative effects.

Want a much more in-depth account of how we came to this, along with some other suggestions for improvement? ” Of Time and the Web” was written by Jeremy Keith. Or check out the” Web Design History Timeline” at the Web Design Museum. A fun visit of” Internet Artifacts” is also available from Neal Agarwal.

Where we are now

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

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

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

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

Where do we go from here?

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

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

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

Design with care. Whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes, consider the impacts of each decision. Many modern tools have the convenience of having the ability to always understand the decisions that underlie their creation and to never consider the effects those decisions may have. Use the time saved by modern tools to think more carefully and make decisions with care rather than rushing to “move fast and break things.”

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

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

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

Go forth and make

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