Category: Blog

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. Despite there still be a lot of advertising hype surrounding personalization systems, there are still very some standardized methods for implementing personalized UX.

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

Getting Started

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

Popular circumstances for launching a personalization task:

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

A powerful personalization system may 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 become served?
3. Contexts and Campaigns: What personalization information does the person view?
4. User Divisions: 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. To make this more bearable, we created a deck of cards that accompany it to show particular examples from each stage. We’ve included examples for you here because we think they’re useful for customisation brainstorming sessions.

Beginning at the Top

The elements of the pyramids are as follows:

North Star

What overall goal do you have with your personalization system ( big or small ) is a northern star. The 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 darkness. Example of North Starts may include:

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 numerous 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 personal product experiences. Example: Standalone, branded encounters with personalization at their base, like the “algotorial” songs by Spotify quite as Discover Weekly.

Goals

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

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

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are where customisation takes place. 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 technologies 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 empty
• 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 acquire. Many personalization tools will refer to these as” campaigns” ( so, for example, a campaign on a web banner for new visitors to the website ). These will be displayed automatically to specific customer sections, as defined by consumer data. At this stage, we find it helpful to contemplate two distinct concepts: a framework design and a willing design. The framework helps you consider whether a consumer is engaging with the personalization process at the moment, such as when they are simply browsing the web or engaging in a deep dive. Think of it in conditions of activities for data recovery. The content model can then guide you in deciding which personalization to use in terms of 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 concepts abroad, so if you’d like to learn more, check out Colin’s Personalization Content Model and Jeff’s Personalization Context Model.

User Divisions

User segments can be created based on user research, either prescriptively or adaptively ( e .g., through rules and logic tied to set user behaviors or through A/B testing ). You will need to think about how to treat the unidentified or first-time visitor, the guest or returning visitor for whom you may have a stateful cookie ( or an equivalent post-cookie identifier ), or the logged-in visitor who is authenticated. 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 online existence. It’s a matter of examining what user data you can ethically collect, its inherent reliability and value, and how you can use it ( sometimes referred to as “data activation” ). Fortunately, the tide is turning to first-party information: a recent study by Twilio estimates some 80 % of firms are using at least some type of first-party information to personalize the customer experience.

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

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

Although having 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 content repository and data backbone. 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 trace the entire course of a card’s “hand” from leadership focus down to a strategic 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: when, 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.

Picture this. You’ve joined a squad at your company that’s designing new product features with an emphasis on automation or AI. Or your company has just implemented a personalization engine. Either way, you’re designing with data. Now what? When it comes to designing for personalization, there are many cautionary tales, no overnight successes, and few guides for the perplexed. 

Between the fantasy of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong—like when we encounter “persofails” in the vein of a company repeatedly imploring everyday consumers to buy additional toilet seats—the personalization gap is real. It’s an especially confounding place to be a digital professional without a map, a compass, or a plan.

For those of you venturing into personalization, there’s no Lonely Planet and few tour guides because effective personalization is so specific to each organization’s talent, technology, and market position. 

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

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

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set your kitchen timer

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

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

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

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

Kickstart: Whet your appetite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hit that test kitchen

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

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

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

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

Verify your ingredients

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

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

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

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

Compose your recipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better kitchens require better architecture

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

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

You can definitely stand the heat…

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

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

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

I offer a single bit of advice to friends and family when they become new parents: When you start to think that you’ve got everything figured out, everything will change. Just as you start to get the hang of feedings, diapers, and regular naps, it’s time for solid food, potty training, and overnight sleeping. When you figure those out, it’s time for preschool and rare naps. The cycle goes on and on.

The same applies for those of us working in design and development these days. Having worked on the web for almost three decades at this point, I’ve seen the regular wax and wane of ideas, techniques, and technologies. Each time that we as developers and designers get into a regular rhythm, some new idea or technology comes along to shake things up and remake our world.

How we got here

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 birth of web 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 languages like PHP, Java, and .NET overtook Perl as the predominant back-end processors, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the trash bin. With these better server-side tools came the first era of web applications, starting with content-management systems (particularly in the blogging space with tools like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress). In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened doors for asynchronous interaction between the front end and back end. Suddenly, pages could update their content without needing to reload. A crop of JavaScript frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and jQuery arose to help developers build more reliable client-side interaction across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like image replacement let crafty designers and developers display fonts of their choosing. And technologies like Flash made it possible to add animations, games, and even more interactivity.

These new technologies, standards, and techniques reinvigorated the industry in many ways. Web design flourished as designers and developers explored more diverse styles and layouts. But we still relied on tons of hacks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes (such as rounded or angled corners) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks). Complicated layouts required all manner of nested floats or absolute positioning (or both). Flash and image replacement for custom fonts was a great start toward varying the typefaces from the big five, but both hacks introduced accessibility and performance problems. And JavaScript libraries made it easy for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, although at the cost of doubling or even quadrupling the download size of simple websites.

The web as software platform

The symbiosis between the front end and back end continued to improve, and that led to the current era of modern web applications. Between expanded server-side programming languages (which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Alongside these tools came others, including collaborative version control, build automation, and shared package libraries. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.

At the same time, mobile devices became more capable, and they gave us internet access in our pockets. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.

This combination of capable mobile devices and powerful development tools contributed to the waxing of social media and other centralized tools for people to connect and consume. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media offered connections on a global scale, with both the good and bad that that entails.

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

Where we are now

In the last couple of years, it’s felt like we’ve begun to reach another major inflection point. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. There are many different ways to make a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all flavors. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other tools of the IndieWeb can help with this, but they’re still relatively underimplemented and hard to use for the less nerdy. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.

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

Today, with a few commands and a couple of lines of code, we can prototype almost any idea. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. But the upfront cost that these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes due as upgrading and maintaining them becomes a part of our technical debt.

If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks—which used to let us adopt new techniques sooner—have now become hindrances instead. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And when scripts fail (whether 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’re unwilling to admit that they’re hacks or we hesitate to replace them. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?

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

Start from standards. Standards continue to evolve over time, but browsers have done a remarkably good job of continuing to support older standards. The same isn’t always true of third-party frameworks. Sites built with even the hackiest of HTML from the ’90s still work just fine today. The same can’t always be said of sites built with frameworks even after just a couple years.

Design with care. Whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes, consider the impacts of each decision. The convenience of many a modern tool comes at the cost of not always understanding the underlying decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the impact that those decisions can have. Rather than rushing headlong to “move fast and break things,” use the time saved by modern tools to consider more carefully and design with deliberation.

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. You might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year, even if you were to focus solely on learning standards. (Remember XHTML?) But constant learning opens up new connections in your brain, and the hacks that you learn one day may help to inform different experiments another day.

Play, experiment, and be weird! This web that we’ve built is the ultimate experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be courageous and try new things. Build a playground for ideas. Make goofy experiments in your own mad science lab. 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 that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. 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.

In reading Joe Dolson’s recent piece on the intersection of AI and accessibility, I absolutely appreciated the skepticism that he has for AI in general as well as for the ways that many have been using it. In fact, I’m very skeptical of AI myself, despite my role at Microsoft as an accessibility innovation strategist who helps run the AI for Accessibility grant program. As with any tool, AI can be used in very constructive, inclusive, and accessible ways; and it can also be used in destructive, exclusive, and harmful ones. And there are a ton of uses somewhere in the mediocre middle as well.

I’d like you to consider this a “yes… and” piece to complement Joe’s post. I’m not trying to refute any of what he’s saying but rather provide some visibility to projects and opportunities where AI can make meaningful differences for people with disabilities. To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t real risks or pressing issues with AI that need to be addressed—there are, and we’ve needed to address them, like, yesterday—but I want to take a little time to talk about what’s possible in hopes that we’ll get there one day.

Alternative text

Joe’s piece spends a lot of time talking about computer-vision models generating alternative text. He highlights a ton of valid issues with the current state of things. And while computer-vision models continue to improve in the quality and richness of detail in their descriptions, their results aren’t great. As he rightly points out, the current state of image analysis is pretty poor—especially for certain image types—in large part because current AI systems examine images in isolation rather than within the contexts that they’re in (which is a consequence of having separate “foundation” models for text analysis and image analysis). Today’s models aren’t trained to distinguish between images that are contextually relevant (that should probably have descriptions) and those that are purely decorative (which might not need a description) either. Still, I still think there’s potential in this space.

As Joe mentions, human-in-the-loop authoring of alt text should absolutely be a thing. And if AI can pop in to offer a starting point for alt text—even if that starting point might be a prompt saying What is this BS? That’s not right at all… Let me try to offer a starting point—I think that’s a win.

Taking things a step further, if we can specifically train a model to analyze image usage in context, it could help us more quickly identify which images are likely to be decorative and which ones likely require a description. That will help reinforce which contexts call for image descriptions and it’ll improve authors’ efficiency toward making their pages more accessible.

While complex images—like graphs and charts—are challenging to describe in any sort of succinct way (even for humans), the image example shared in the GPT4 announcement points to an interesting opportunity as well. Let’s suppose that you came across a chart whose description was simply the title of the chart and the kind of visualization it was, such as: Pie chart comparing smartphone usage to feature phone usage among US households making under $30,000 a year. (That would be a pretty awful alt text for a chart since that would tend to leave many questions about the data unanswered, but then again, let’s suppose that that was the description that was in place.) If your browser knew that that image was a pie chart (because an onboard model concluded this), imagine a world where users could ask questions like these about the graphic:

• Do more people use smartphones or feature phones?
• How many more?
• Is there a group of people that don’t fall into either of these buckets?
• How many is that?

Setting aside the realities of large language model (LLM) hallucinations—where a model just makes up plausible-sounding “facts”—for a moment, the opportunity to learn more about images and data in this way could be revolutionary for blind and low-vision folks as well as for people with various forms of color blindness, cognitive disabilities, and so on. It could also be useful in educational contexts to help people who can see these charts, as is, to understand the data in the charts.

Taking things a step further: What if you could ask your browser to simplify a complex chart? What if you could ask it to isolate a single line on a line graph? What if you could ask your browser to transpose the colors of the different lines to work better for form of color blindness you have? What if you could ask it to swap colors for patterns? Given these tools’ chat-based interfaces and our existing ability to manipulate images in today’s AI tools, that seems like a possibility.

Now imagine a purpose-built model that could extract the information from that chart and convert it to another format. For example, perhaps it could turn that pie chart (or better yet, a series of pie charts) into more accessible (and useful) formats, like spreadsheets. That would be amazing!

Matching algorithms

Safiya Umoja Noble absolutely hit the nail on the head when she titled her book Algorithms of Oppression. While her book was focused on the ways that search engines reinforce racism, I think that it’s equally true that all computer models have the potential to amplify conflict, bias, and intolerance. Whether it’s Twitter always showing you the latest tweet from a bored billionaire, YouTube sending us into a Q-hole, or Instagram warping our ideas of what natural bodies look like, we know that poorly authored and maintained algorithms are incredibly harmful. A lot of this stems from a lack of diversity among the people who shape and build them. When these platforms are built with inclusively baked in, however, there’s real potential for algorithm development to help people with disabilities.

Take Mentra, for example. They are an employment network for neurodivergent people. They use an algorithm to match job seekers with potential employers based on over 75 data points. On the job-seeker side of things, it considers each candidate’s strengths, their necessary and preferred workplace accommodations, environmental sensitivities, and so on. On the employer side, it considers each work environment, communication factors related to each job, and the like. As a company run by neurodivergent folks, Mentra made the decision to flip the script when it came to typical employment sites. They use their algorithm to propose available candidates to companies, who can then connect with job seekers that they are interested in; reducing the emotional and physical labor on the job-seeker side of things.

When more people with disabilities are involved in the creation of algorithms, that can reduce the chances that these algorithms will inflict harm on their communities. That’s why diverse teams are so important.

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

Other ways that AI can helps people with disabilities

If I weren’t trying to put this together between other tasks, I’m sure that I could go on and on, providing all kinds of examples of how AI could be used to help people with disabilities, but I’m going to make this last section into a bit of a lightning round. In no particular order:

• Voice preservation. You may have seen the VALL-E paper or Apple’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day announcement or you may be familiar with the voice-preservation offerings from Microsoft, Acapela, or others. It’s possible to train an AI model to replicate your voice, which can be a tremendous boon for people who have ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) or motor-neuron disease or other medical conditions that can lead to an inability to talk. This is, of course, the same tech that can also be used to create audio deepfakes, so it’s something that we need to approach responsibly, but the tech has truly transformative potential.
• Voice recognition. Researchers like those in the Speech Accessibility Project are paying people with disabilities for their help in collecting recordings of people with atypical speech. As I type, they are actively recruiting people with Parkinson’s and related conditions, and they have plans to expand this to other conditions as the project progresses. This research will result in more inclusive data sets that will let more people with disabilities use voice assistants, dictation software, and voice-response services as well as control their computers and other devices more easily, using only their voice.
• Text transformation. The current generation of LLMs is quite capable of adjusting existing text content without injecting hallucinations. This is hugely empowering for people with cognitive disabilities who may benefit from text summaries or simplified versions of text or even text that’s prepped for Bionic Reading.

The importance of diverse teams and data

We need to recognize that our differences matter. Our lived experiences are influenced by the intersections of the identities that we exist in. These lived experiences—with all their complexities (and joys and pain)—are valuable inputs to the software, services, and societies that we shape. Our differences need to be represented in the data that we use to train new models, and the folks who contribute that valuable information need to be compensated for sharing it with us. Inclusive data sets yield more robust models that foster more equitable outcomes.

Want a model that doesn’t demean or patronize or objectify people with disabilities? Make sure that you have content about disabilities that’s authored by people with a range of disabilities, and make sure that that’s well represented in the training data.

Want a model that doesn’t use ableist language? You may be able to use existing data sets to build a filter that can intercept and remediate ableist language before it reaches readers. That being said, when it comes to sensitivity reading, AI models won’t be replacing human copy editors anytime soon. 

Want a coding copilot that gives you accessible recommendations from the jump? Train it on code that you know to be accessible.

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

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

I am a artistic. What I do is alchemy. It is a puzzle. I don’t perform it as much as I let it be done by me.

I am a artistic. Certainly all creative people approve of this brand. No everyone sees themselves in this way. Some innovative persons incorporate technology into their work. That is their reality, and I respect it. Sometimes I even envy them, a minor. But my operation is different—my becoming is unique.

Apologizing and qualifying in advance is a diversion. That’s what my mind does to destroy me. I’ll leave it alone for today. I may come back later to make amends and count. After I’ve said what I originally said. Which is challenging enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can nail aside, surround myself with information or photos, and maybe that works. I can go for a walk, and occasionally that works. There is no connection between sizzling fuel and flowing pots, and I may be making dinner. I frequently have a sense of direction when I awaken. The idea that may have saved me disappears almost as frequently as I become aware and a part of the world once more as a thoughtless wind of oblivion. For imagination, I believe, comes from that other planet. The one we enter in aspirations, and possibly, before conception and after death. But that’s for authors to know, and I am not a writer. I am a artistic. Theologians should circulate large armies throughout their artistic globe, which they claim to be true. But that is another diversion. And one that is miserable. Whether or not I am innovative or not, this may be on a much larger issue. But that’s also a step backwards from what I’m trying to say.

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

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

Creatives understand creatives.

Disadvantages are aware of cons, just like queers are aware of queers, just like real rappers are aware of actual rappers are aware of cons. Creatives feel enormous regard for creatives. We love, respect, emulate, and nearly deify the excellent ones. To idolize any man is, of course, a dreadful mistake. We have been warned. We know much. We know people are simply people. They dispute, they are depressed, they regret their most critical decisions, they are weak and thirsty, they can be cruel, they can be just as terrible as we can, if, like us, they are clay. But. But. However, they produce this incredible issue. They give birth to something that may never occur without them and did not exist before them. They are the inspirations ‘ mother. And I suppose, since it’s only lying it, I have to put that they are the mother of technology. Ba ho backside! Okay, that’s done. Continue.

Creatives disparage our personal small successes, because we compare them to those of the wonderful people. Wonderful video! Also, I‘m no Miyazaki. Now THAT is brilliance. That is glory straight out of the Bible. This half-starved small item that I made? It essentially fell off the pumpkin vehicle. And the carrots weren’t actually new.

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

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

I am a artistic. Every project I create has a goal that makes Indiana Jones appear older and snoring in a balcony head. The more I pursue my creative endeavors, the faster I progress in my work, and the more I slog through lines and gaze blankly before beginning that task.

I can move ten times more quickly than those who aren’t artistic, those who have only had a short-cut of creativity, and those who have just had a short-cut of creativity for work. Only that I spend twice as long as they do putting the job off before I work ten times as quickly as they do. When I put my mind to it, I am so confident in my ability to do a great career. I am that attached to the excitement scramble of delay. I’m also so scared of jumping.

I am not an actor.

I am a artistic. No an actor. Though I dreamed, as a child, of eventually being that. Some of us like and criticize our talents because we are not Michelangelos and Warhols. That is narcissism—but at least we aren’t in elections.

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

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

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

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

Working frees me from worrying about my job.

I am a artistic. I worry that my little present will disappear unexpectedly.

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

I am a innovative. I think method is the most amazing secret. I think I have to think it so strongly that I actually made the foolish decision to publish an essay I wrote without having to go through or edit. I didn’t do this generally, I promise. But I did it right away because I was even more frightened of forgetting what I was saying because I was afraid of you seeing through my sad movements toward the wonderful.

There. I think I’ve said it.

Ever since I was a boy, I’ve been fascinated with movies. I loved the characters and the excitement—but most of all the stories. I wanted to be an actor. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting adventures. I even dreamed up ideas for movies that my friends and I could make and star in. But they never went any further. I did, however, end up working in user experience (UX). Now, I realize that there’s an element of theater to UX—I hadn’t really considered it before, but user research is storytelling. And to get the most out of user research, you need to tell a good story where you bring stakeholders—the product team and decision makers—along and get them interested in learning more.

Think of your favorite movie. More than likely it follows a three-act structure that’s commonly seen in storytelling: the setup, the conflict, and the resolution. The first act shows what exists today, and it helps you get to know the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two introduces the conflict, where the action is. Here, problems grow or get worse. And the third and final act is the resolution. This is where the issues are resolved and the characters learn and change. I believe that this structure is also a great way to think about user research, and I think that it can be especially helpful in explaining user research to others.

Use storytelling as a structure to do research

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see research as being expendable. If budgets or timelines are tight, research tends to be one of the first things to go. Instead of investing in research, some product managers rely on designers or—worse—their own opinion to make the “right” choices for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get teams some of the way, but that approach can so easily miss out on solving users’ real problems. To remain user-centered, this is something we should avoid. User research elevates design. It keeps it on track, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay ahead of your competitors.

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

Act one: setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act two: conflict

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act three: resolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The nominations are in, the predictions have been made, and a lot of people are probably just looking for a place to watch the 10 Best Picture nominees ( we got you covered on that as well ). Nevertheless, all the prediction, horse race monitoring, and second-guessing over the disappointments and upsets has a bad ]…]

The best times from the 2025 Oscar films second appeared on Den of Geek.

In the new truck for Sinners, Ryan Coogler‘s first venture into the scary type, a worldly words warns,” There are traditions of individuals where the product of making music]is ] so true, it can create spirits from the past and the future. Although this product may win people over to fame and fortune, it can also help to “pierce the veil between life and death.”

For metaphysics and menace are essential to a story set in the South, according to anyone with a background in British music. However, the demons are a new technology on the part of writer-director Coogler’s drama, which follows Michael B. Jordan in the dual functions of twin brothers trying to make ends meet in 1930s period Mississippi. Even so, as Coogler sees it, a monster fabric naturally lends itself to the rhythm and blues, as well as how those noises were demonized hundreds of years ago when Jim Crow was the law of the land.

During a press conference that Den of Geek attended prior to the release of Sinners ‘ trailer, Coogler claims,” The film deals with American music, blues music.” The director continues to draw inspiration from the mythology surrounding the well-known blues musicians Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson, who were rumored to had sold their lives to the Devil in Mississippi for the product of artistic skills despite having no connection to either of them. ( In actuality, Robert might have been so accused because he was one of the biggest names who dared to turn his back from playing church” spirituals” in favor of the profits of” secular”, godless music. )

Says Coogler,” When you think about the monster as it exists, it’s got an organization or a equivalent in almost every culture. But it is the divine thing most associated with romance, that’s most associated with decision. And that element is especially manifest when blues song was also known as the Devil’s music. There’s a distinction between a liberal life and]Christian morality]. The video is in conversation with all of those items, but the paradox is always at the center of it.

The romance is clearly visible in the scenes we have seen of the movie. A teaser over the weekend showed smiling white faces ( including a devil-looking JackO’Connell ) as they begged to be entered a blues juke joint operated by the brothers Elijah and Elias ( Jordan, both ). This naturally suggests the old monster adage,” Be wary of who you request in.” A similarly disturbing scene that was only broadcast to the push shows the negatives of precisely that: one of Elijah’s associates asks for an offer after going off with those bright devils.

The video marks a chance for Coogler, who is on his second collaboration in as many movies with Jordan, to tumble into his forces and ideas. The director claims that” the genre is for the popular consumers of film, but it’s also a genre that comes up when people ask about great pieces of art.” Horror itself has long been an interest for him. And I believe it because it feels very antiquated; in fact, the first tale told amid a fire was probably a horror tale.

And the horror campfire tales of, say, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn seem self-evident on Sinners. Even so, the director points out he is inspired just as much by Rodriguez’s The Faculty, as well as plenty of Coen Brothers with Inside Llewyn Davis and O Brother, Where Art Thou? specifically mentioned ( fitting given that the latter also features a crossroads devil and a hell of a guitar player ).

The biggest influences, however, are intriguingly less cinematic than they are spiritually linked: one is among the more darkly amusing episodes of The Twilight Zone,” The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank”, a yarn about a Southern man in 1920s Missouri returning from the dead after his own funeral, the other is a 1975 Stephen King novel also about vampires, Salem’s Lot.

” Salem’s Lot is about the town”, Coogler says,” and this movie is about this community”.

Still, Coogler emphasizes the mixture of blues, vampirism, and Mississippi is hitting on a lot more than fictional reference points. In fact, it might very well be the most personal work in Coogler’s oeuvre.

My maternal grandfather was from Mississippi, according to Coogler, and my uncle James, who passed away while I was finishing up Creed, was also from Mississippi. And I had the honor of having a very close relationship with my uncle James. And that relationship with my uncle gave birth to the relationship. He would constantly listen to blues music. When he was listening to that music, he would only talk about Mississippi. And he significantly altered my life.

It’s intended to transport viewers to a bygone era and place by using a well-known form of entertainment like horror, with the vampires and the blood, and using glorious IMAX photography, a genre first for the kind of movies with 65mm IMAX cameras.

” The film for me personally was a reclamation of a time period and a place that my family does n&#8217, t talk about much”, Coogler acknowledges, “because it &#8217, s a lot of feelings associated with our history. We go there, showing these people in their full … humanity.’” full of music and life.

On April 18, Sinners will debut.

The post Sinners: Ryan Coogler Is Tying Vampires to the Blues and ‘ Devil’s Music’ appeared first on Den of Geek.

Pointless, a brand-new series of breakfast survey shows, is about to debut in the UK. Since the existing line merely ends the day before, Series 33 did begin airing on Wednesday February 5 at 17 :15 on BBC One. Never that you’ll need to know about it. ( Pointless is as eternal and ever-flowing as the]… ]

The article Pointless: Who Are the New Guest Visitors for 2025? second appeared on Den of Geek.

In the new truck for Sinners, Ryan Coogler‘s first venture into the scary type, a worldly words warns,” There are traditions of individuals where the product of making music]is ] so true, it can create spirits from the past and the future. This product can lead to fame and fortune, but it also has the power to “pierce the mask between life and death.”

For metaphysics and danger are essential to a story set in the South, according to anyone with a background in British music. However, the demons are a new technology on the part of writer-director Coogler’s drama, which follows Michael B. Jordan in the dual functions of twin brothers trying to make ends meet in 1930s period Mississippi. Even so, as Coogler sees it, a monster fabric obviously translates to something like the rhythm and blues, as well as how those noises were demonized hundreds of years ago when Jim Crow was the country’s supreme rules.

” The movie deals with American music, blues music,” Coogler asserts at a press conference that Den of Geek attended prior to Sinners ‘ trailer release. The director continues to draw inspiration from the mythology surrounding the well-known blues musicians Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson, who were rumored to had sold their lives to the Devil in Mississippi for the product of artistic skills despite having no connection to either of them. ( In actuality, Robert might have been so accused because he was one of the biggest names who dared to turn his back from playing church” spirituals” in favor of the profits of” secular”, godless music. )

Says Coogler,” When you think about the vampire as it exists, it’s got an association or a counterpart in almost every culture. But it is the supernatural creature most associated with seduction, that’s most associated with choice. And that aspect is especially present when blues music was also known as the Devil’s music. There’s a contrast between a secular lifestyle and]Christian morality]. The film is in conversation with all of those things, but the duality is always at the center of it.

The film’s glaring glimpses reveal a lot of that seduction. As they begged to be entered a blues juke joint run by the brothers Elijah and Elias ( Jordan, both ), smiling white faces ( including a devilish-looking JackO’Connell ) were revealed in a teaser over the weekend. This obviously suggests the old vampire adage,” Be wary of who you invite in.” In addition, a disturbing scene that was exclusively shown to the press exposes the negative aspects of exactly that when one of Elijah’s friends comes back and also requests an invitation after going off with those white devils.

The film marks a chance for Coogler, who is on his fifth collaboration in as many films with Jordan, to dive into his influences and inspirations. The director claims that” I think the genre is for the popular consumers of film, but it’s also a genre that comes up when people ask about great pieces of art.” Horror itself has long interested him. And I believe it because it feels very ancient; after all, the first tale told close to a fire was probably a horror tale.

And the horror campfire tales of, say, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn seem self-evident on Sinners. Even so, the director points out he is inspired just as much by Rodriguez’s The Faculty, as well as plenty of Coen Brothers with Inside Llewyn Davis and O Brother, Where Art Thou? specifically mentioned ( fitting given that the latter also features a devil at a crossroads and a hell of a guitar player ).

The biggest influences, however, are intriguingly less cinematic than they are spiritually linked: one is among the more darkly amusing episodes of The Twilight Zone,” The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank”, a yarn about a Southern man in 1920s Missouri returning from the dead after his own funeral, the other is a 1975 Stephen King novel also about vampires, Salem’s Lot.

” Salem’s Lot is about the town”, Coogler says,” and this movie is about this community”.

Still, Coogler emphasizes the mixture of blues, vampirism, and Mississippi is hitting on a lot more than fictional reference points. In fact, it might very well be the most personal work in Coogler’s oeuvre.

My maternal grandfather, according to Coogler, was from Mississippi, and my uncle James, who passed away while I was finishing up Creed, was also from Mississippi. And I had the honor of having a very close relationship with my uncle James. And that relationship with my uncle was the start of it. He would constantly be playing blues music. When he was listening to that music, he would only talk about Mississippi. And he significantly impacted my life.

It’s all intended to transport modern viewers into a bygone era and place by using a well-known form of entertainment like horror, with the vampires and the blood, and using glorious IMAX photography ( a genre first for the type of movies using 65mm IMAX cameras ).

” The film for me personally was a reclamation of a time period and a place that my family does n&#8217, t talk about much”, Coogler acknowledges, “because it &#8217, s a lot of feelings associated with our history. We go there, showing these people in their full … humanity.’” full of music and life.

Sinners debuts on April 18th.

The post Sinners: Ryan Coogler Is Tying Vampires to the Blues and ‘ Devil’s Music’ appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Section 31. A quick scan of the internet finds that Den of Geek was hardly the only outlet to set phasers to kill on Star Trek: Section 31. Fans and critics alike have thoroughly rejected the movie, dismissing it as unfunny, unexciting, and largely derivative. It even ranks […]

The post Section 31’s Failure Shouldn’t Stop Star Trek From Trying New Things appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the new trailer for Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s first foray into the horror genre, a worldly voice warns, “There are legends of people where the gift of making music [is] so true, it can conjure spirits from the past and the future. This gift can bring fame and fortune, but it can also pierce the veil between life and death.”

For anyone steeped in the history of American music, such mysticism and menace is part and parcel for a story set in the South. Still, the vampires are a new innovation on the part of writer-director Coogler’s film, which follows Michael B. Jordan in the dual roles of twin brothers trying to make ends meet in 1930s era Mississippi. But even then, as Coogler sees it, a vampire yarn naturally lends itself to something like the rhythm and blues, as well as how those sounds were demonized a hundreds years ago when Jim Crow was the law of the land.

“The film deals with American music, blues music,” Coogler says during a press conference that Den of Geek attended ahead of Sinners’ trailer drop. The filmmaker goes on to note that he is directly pulling from the legends around famed blues musicians Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson, who despite having no relation both were whispered to have sold their souls to the Devil at a crossroads in Mississippi for the gift of musical talent. (In actuality, Robert might have been so accused because he was one of the biggest names who dared to turn his back from playing church “spirituals” in favor of the profits of “secular,” godless music.)

Says Coogler, “When you think about the vampire as it exists, it’s got an association or a counterpart in almost every culture. But it is the supernatural creature most associated with seduction, that’s most associated with choice. And that aspect is something that’s very present when blues music was also called the Devil’s music. There’s a contrast between a secular lifestyle and [Christian morality]. So the film is in conversation with all those things, but the duality is always at the heart of it.”

That seduction is on full display in the glimpses we have seen of the film. A teaser over the weekend revealed smiling white faces (including a devilish-looking Jack O’Connell) as they begged to be let into a blues juke joint run by the brothers Elijah and Elias (Jordan, both). This obviously hints at the classic vampire trope of being wary of who you invite in. Meanwhile a gorier scene shown exclusively to the press reveals the downsides of exactly that when one of Elijah’s friends returns and now also is asking for an invitation after going off with those white devils.

The film marks a chance for Coogler, who is on his fifth collaboration in as many films with Jordan, to dive into his influences and inspirations. Horror itself has long interested him, with the director saying, “I think the genre is for the popular consumers of film, but it’s also a genre that comes up when people ask about great pieces of art…. And I think it’s because it feels ancient, the first story told around a fire was probably a horror story.”

And the horror campfire tales of, say, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn seem self-evident on Sinners. Even so, the director points out he is inspired just as much by Rodriguez’s The Faculty, as well as plenty of Coen Brothers with Inside Llewyn Davis and O Brother, Where Art Thou? mentioned specifically (fitting since the latter also features a devil at a crossroads and a hell of a guitar player).

The biggest influences, however, are intriguingly less cinematic than they are spiritually linked: one is among the more darkly amusing episodes of The Twilight Zone, “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank,” a yarn about a Southern man in 1920s Missouri returning from the dead after his own funeral; the other is a 1975 Stephen King novel also about vampires, Salem’s Lot.

“Salem’s Lot is about the town,” Coogler says, “and this movie is about this community.”

Still, Coogler emphasizes the mixture of blues, vampirism, and Mississippi is hitting on a lot more than fictional reference points. In fact, it might very well be the most personal work in Coogler’s oeuvre.

“My maternal grandfather is from Mississippi,” Coogler says, “and my Uncle James who passed away while I was finishing up Creed is also from Mississippi… My maternal grandfather passed before I was born, but I grew up in the house that he built after he moved to California. And I was fortunate to have a really close relationship with my Uncle James. And the seed of it started with that relationship with my uncle. He would listen to blues music all the time. He would only talk about Mississippi when he was listening to that music. And he had a profound effect on my life.”

Exploring that ancestral history through a popular form of entertainment like horror, with the vampires and the blood, and via glorious IMAX photography (a genre first for the type of movies to use 65mm IMAX cameras), is all meant to immerse modern viewers into a bygone time and place.

“The film for me personally was a reclamation of a time period and a place that my family doesn’t talk about much,” Coogler acknowledges, “because it’s a lot of feelings associated with our history. We go there, showing these people in their full… humanity.’” Full of life and full of music.

Sinners opens on April 18.

The post Sinners: Ryan Coogler Is Tying Vampires to the Blues and ‘Devil’s Music’ appeared first on Den of Geek.

One of the best activities in the company is widely regarded as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. There’s a lot to love about the series ‘ second PlayStation 2 release, especially given that the upcoming GTA VI is coming back to some [ …] fans, from its music to its missions to its open-world 1980s, Miami Vice-inspired setting.

One of the Best GTA Games Ever Just Got an Amazing Update ( But It Most likelyWon’t Last ) first appeared on Den of Geek.

In the new truck for Sinners, Ryan Coogler‘s first venture into the scary type, a worldly words warns,” There are traditions of individuals where the product of making music]is ] so true, it can create spirits from the past and the future. Although this product can win people over to fame and fortune, it can also help to “pierce the veil between life and death.”

For spirituality and menace are a part and parcel of a story set in the South for anyone who is well-versed in the history of American music. However, the demons are a new technology on the part of writer-director Coogler’s drama, which follows Michael B. Jordan in the dual functions of twin brothers trying to make ends meet in 1930s period Mississippi. Even so, as Coogler sees it, a monster fabric obviously translates to the rhythm and blues as well as how those noises were demonized hundreds of years ago when Jim Crow was the country’s supreme rules.

” The movie deals with American music, blues music,” Coogler asserts at a press conference that Den of Geek attended prior to Sinners ‘ trailer release. The director continues to draw inspiration from the mythology surrounding the well-known blues musicians Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson, who were rumored to had sold their lives to the Devil in Mississippi for the product of artistic skills despite having no connection to either of them. ( In actuality, Robert might have been so accused because he was one of the biggest names who dared to turn his back from playing church” spirituals” in favor of the profits of” secular”, godless music. )

Says Coogler,” When you think about the monster as it exists, it’s got an organization or a equivalent in almost every culture. But it is the divine thing most associated with romance, that’s most associated with decision. And that element is especially manifest when blues song was also known as the Devil’s music. There’s a distinction between a liberal life and]Christian morality]. The video is in conversation with all of those items, but the paradox is always at the center of it.

The courtship is clearly visible in the scenes we have seen of the movie. A smiling white faces ( including a devilish-looking JackO’Connell ) were revealed in a teaser over the weekend as they begged to be entered the brothers Elijah and Elias ( Jordan, both ). This naturally suggests the old monster adage,” Be wary of who you request in.” In addition, a disturbing scene that was entirely shown to the press exposes the negative aspects of exactly that when one of Elijah’s friends comes back and also requests an offer after going off with those bright monsters.

The video marks a chance for Coogler, who is on his second collaboration in as many movies with Jordan, to tumble into his forces and inspirations. The director claims that” I think the genre is for the popular consumers of film, but it’s also a genre that comes up when people ask about great pieces of art.” Horror itself has long interested him. And I believe it because it feels very antiquated; in fact, the first tale told amid a fire was probably a horror tale.

And the horror campfire tales of, say, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn seem self-evident on Sinners. Even so, the director points out he is inspired just as much by Rodriguez’s The Faculty, as well as plenty of Coen Brothers with Inside Llewyn Davis and O Brother, Where Art Thou? specifically mentioned ( fitting given that the latter also features a devil at a crossroads and a hell of a guitar player ).

The biggest influences, however, are intriguingly less cinematic than they are spiritually linked: one is among the more darkly amusing episodes of The Twilight Zone,” The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank”, a yarn about a Southern man in 1920s Missouri returning from the dead after his own funeral, the other is a 1975 Stephen King novel also about vampires, Salem’s Lot.

” Salem’s Lot is about the town”, Coogler says,” and this movie is about this community”.

Still, Coogler emphasizes the mixture of blues, vampirism, and Mississippi is hitting on a lot more than fictional reference points. In fact, it might very well be the most personal work in Coogler’s oeuvre.

My maternal grandfather was from Mississippi, according to Coogler, and my uncle James, who passed away while I was finishing up Creed, was also from Mississippi. And I had the honor of having a very close relationship with my uncle James. And that relationship with my uncle gave birth to the relationship. He would constantly be playing blues music. He would only discuss Mississippi while he was listening to that song. And he significantly impacted my life.

It’s all intended to transport modern viewers to a bygone era and place by using a well-known form of entertainment like horror, with the vampires and the blood, and with glorious IMAX photography ( a genre first for the type of movies using 65mm IMAX cameras ).

” The film for me personally was a reclamation of a time period and a place that my family does n&#8217, t talk about much”, Coogler acknowledges, “because it &#8217, s a lot of feelings associated with our history. We go there, showing these people in their full … humanity.’” full of music and life.

On April 18, Sinners will debut.

The post Sinners: Ryan Coogler Is Tying Vampires to the Blues and ‘ Devil’s Music’ appeared first on Den of Geek.