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

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

For our information to be understood by many systems, the unit needed conceptual types, which are names given based on their meaning rather than their presentation. This is crucial for an multichannel content strategy. Our aim was to allow artists to create original content and use it where necessary. But as the job proceeded, I realized that supporting material utilize at the range that my client needed required the whole group to identify a new pattern.

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

Two fundamental tenets govern a successful content model

We needed to explain to our designers, developers, and stakeholders that we were doing something completely different from their previous web projects, where everyone assumed that content would fit into layouts as visual building blocks. The previous approach was not only more familiar but also more intuitive—at least at first—because it made the designs feel more tangible. The team was able to understand how a content model differs from the design systems we were familiar with by discovering two principles:

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

Semantic content models

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

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

A semantic content model has a number of advantages:

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

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

Content models that connect

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

Write an essay or article about it. The meaning and usefulness of an article depend on how well its components are kept together. Would one of the headings or paragraphs be meaningful on their own without the context of the full article? Our well-versed in designing systems frequently led us to want to develop content models that would break content into smaller pieces to fit the web-centric layout. This had a similar effect to an article that had had its headline removed. Because we were slicing content into standalone pieces based on layout, content that belonged together became difficult to manage and nearly impossible for multiple delivery channels to understand.

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

The method for equitable safety

Your objectives when designing for protection are as follows:

• discover ways your solution can be used for abuse,
• style ways to prevent the maltreatment, and
• offer assistance for customers who are prone to regain control and power.

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

• conducting exploration
• Creating tropes
• Pondering issues
• Designing answers
• Testing for security

It is intended to be flexible, so teams might not want to utilize every action in all circumstances. Use the parts that are related to your special function and environment, this is meant to be something you can put into your existing style process.

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

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

Step 1: Conduct research

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

broad analysis

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

Specific research: Survivors

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

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

Abusers specifically: research

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

Step 2: Create archetypes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 3: Remind yourself of your issues

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

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

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

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

It’s impossible to say 100 % assurance that you’ve done everything right, but instead of aiming for 100 % assurance, acknowledge that you’ve taken this step and have done everything you can, and pledge to keep putting safety first in the future. Once your product is released, your users may identify new issues that you missed, aim to receive that feedback graciously and course-correct quickly.

Step 4: Design solutions

You should now be aware of the ways your product can be used for harm as well as survivor and abuser archetypes describing opposing user objectives. The next step is to identify ways to design against the identified abuser’s goals and to support the survivor’s goals. This is a good addition to existing design processes where you’re making recommendations for solutions to the various issues your research has identified.

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

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

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

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

Step 5: Test for safety

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

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

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

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

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

Abuse testing

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

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

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

testing for a Survivor

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

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

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

Stress testing

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

In the 1950s, many in the elite running community had begun to believe it wasn’t possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Runners had been attempting it since the late 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body simply wasn’t built for the task. 

But on May 6, 1956, Roger Bannister took everyone by surprise. It was a cold, wet day in Oxford, England—conditions no one expected to lend themselves to record-setting—and yet Bannister did just that, running a mile in 3:59.4 and becoming the first person in the record books to run a mile in under four minutes. 

This shift in the benchmark had profound effects; the world now knew that the four-minute mile was possible. Bannister’s record lasted only forty-six days, when it was snatched away by Australian runner John Landy. Then a year later, three runners all beat the four-minute barrier together in the same race. Since then, over 1,400 runners have officially run a mile in under four minutes; the current record is 3:43.13, held by Moroccan athlete Hicham El Guerrouj.

We achieve far more when we believe that something is possible, and we will believe it’s possible only when we see someone else has already done it—and as with human running speed, so it is with what we believe are the hard limits for how a website needs to perform.

Establishing standards for a sustainable web

In most major industries, the key metrics of environmental performance are fairly well established, such as miles per gallon for cars or energy per square meter for homes. The tools and methods for calculating those metrics are standardized as well, which keeps everyone on the same page when doing environmental assessments. In the world of websites and apps, however, we aren’t held to any particular environmental standards, and only recently have gained the tools and methods we need to even make an environmental assessment.

The primary goal in sustainable web design is to reduce carbon emissions. However, it’s almost impossible to actually measure the amount of CO₂ produced by a web product. We can’t measure the fumes coming out of the exhaust pipes on our laptops. The emissions of our websites are far away, out of sight and out of mind, coming out of power stations burning coal and gas. We have no way to trace the electrons from a website or app back to the power station where the electricity is being generated and actually know the exact amount of greenhouse gas produced. So what do we do? 

If we can’t measure the actual carbon emissions, then we need to find what we can measure. The primary factors that could be used as indicators of carbon emissions are:

1. Data transfer 
2. Carbon intensity of electricity

Let’s take a look at how we can use these metrics to quantify the energy consumption, and in turn the carbon footprint, of the websites and web apps we create.

Data transfer

Most researchers use kilowatt-hours per gigabyte (kWh/GB) as a metric of energy efficiency when measuring the amount of data transferred over the internet when a website or application is used. This provides a great reference point for energy consumption and carbon emissions. As a rule of thumb, the more data transferred, the more energy used in the data center, telecoms networks, and end user devices.

For web pages, data transfer for a single visit can be most easily estimated by measuring the page weight, meaning the transfer size of the page in kilobytes the first time someone visits the page. It’s fairly easy to measure using the developer tools in any modern web browser. Often your web hosting account will include statistics for the total data transfer of any web application (Fig 2.1).

The nice thing about page weight as a metric is that it allows us to compare the efficiency of web pages on a level playing field without confusing the issue with constantly changing traffic volumes. 

Reducing page weight requires a large scope. By early 2020, the median page weight was 1.97 MB for setups the HTTP Archive classifies as “desktop” and 1.77 MB for “mobile,” with desktop increasing 36 percent since January 2016 and mobile page weights nearly doubling in the same period (Fig 2.2). Roughly half of this data transfer is image files, making images the single biggest source of carbon emissions on the average website. 

History clearly shows us that our web pages can be smaller, if only we set our minds to it. While most technologies become ever more energy efficient, including the underlying technology of the web such as data centers and transmission networks, websites themselves are a technology that becomes less efficient as time goes on.

You might be familiar with the concept of performance budgeting as a way of focusing a project team on creating faster user experiences. For example, we might specify that the website must load in a maximum of one second on a broadband connection and three seconds on a 3G connection. Much like speed limits while driving, performance budgets are upper limits rather than vague suggestions, so the goal should always be to come in under budget.

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

We can set a page weight budget in reference to a benchmark of industry averages, using data from sources like HTTP Archive. We can also benchmark page weight against competitors or the old version of the website we’re replacing. For example, we might set a maximum page weight budget as equal to our most efficient competitor, or we could set the benchmark lower to guarantee we are best in class. 

If we want to take it to the next level, then we could also start looking at the transfer size of our web pages for repeat visitors. Although page weight for the first time someone visits is the easiest thing to measure, and easy to compare on a like-for-like basis, we can learn even more if we start looking at transfer size in other scenarios too. For example, visitors who load the same page multiple times will likely have a high percentage of the files cached in their browser, meaning they don’t need to transfer all of the files on subsequent visits. Likewise, a visitor who navigates to new pages on the same website will likely not need to load the full page each time, as some global assets from areas like the header and footer may already be cached in their browser. Measuring transfer size at this next level of detail can help us learn even more about how we can optimize efficiency for users who regularly visit our pages, and enable us to set page weight budgets for additional scenarios beyond the first visit.

Page weight budgets are easy to track throughout a design and development process. Although they don’t actually tell us carbon emission and energy consumption analytics directly, they give us a clear indication of efficiency relative to other websites. And as transfer size is an effective analog for energy consumption, we can actually use it to estimate energy consumption too.

In summary, reduced data transfer translates to energy efficiency, a key factor to reducing carbon emissions of web products. The more efficient our products, the less electricity they use, and the less fossil fuels need to be burned to produce the electricity to power them. But as we’ll see next, since all web products demand some power, it’s important to consider the source of that electricity, too.

Carbon intensity of electricity

Regardless of energy efficiency, the level of pollution caused by digital products depends on the carbon intensity of the energy being used to power them. Carbon intensity is a term used to define the grams of CO₂ produced for every kilowatt-hour of electricity (gCO₂/kWh). This varies widely, with renewable energy sources and nuclear having an extremely low carbon intensity of less than 10 gCO₂/kWh (even when factoring in their construction); whereas fossil fuels have very high carbon intensity of approximately 200–400 gCO₂/kWh. 

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

We don’t have control over the full energy supply of web services, but we do have some control over where we host our projects. With a data center using a significant proportion of the energy of any website, locating the data center in an area with low carbon energy will tangibly reduce its carbon emissions. Danish startup Tomorrow reports and maps this user-contributed data, and a glance at their map shows how, for example, choosing a data center in France will have significantly lower carbon emissions than a data center in the Netherlands (Fig 2.3).

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

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

For example, if a website is hosted in London but the primary user base is on the West Coast of the USA, then we could look up the distance from London to San Francisco, which is 5,300 miles. That’s a long way! We can see that hosting it somewhere in North America, ideally on the West Coast, would significantly reduce the distance and thus the energy used to transmit the data. In addition, locating our servers closer to our visitors helps reduce latency and delivers better user experience, so it’s a win-win.

Converting it back to carbon emissions

If we combine carbon intensity with a calculation for energy consumption, we can calculate the carbon emissions of our websites and apps. A tool my team created does this by measuring the data transfer over the wire when loading a web page, calculating the amount of electricity associated, and then converting that into a figure for CO₂ (Fig 2.4). It also factors in whether or not the web hosting is powered by renewable energy.

If you want to take it to the next level and tailor the data more accurately to the unique aspects of your project, the Energy and Emissions Worksheet accompanying this book shows you how.

With the ability to calculate carbon emissions for our projects, we could actually take a page weight budget one step further and set carbon budgets as well. CO₂ is not a metric commonly used in web projects; we’re more familiar with kilobytes and megabytes, and can fairly easily look at design options and files to assess how big they are. Translating that into carbon adds a layer of abstraction that isn’t as intuitive—but carbon budgets do focus our minds on the primary thing we’re trying to reduce, and support the core objective of sustainable web design: reducing carbon emissions.

Browser Energy

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

One part of the system we can look at in more detail is the energy used by end users’ devices. As front-end web technologies become more advanced, the computational load is increasingly moving from the data center to users’ devices, whether they be phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or even smart TVs. Modern web browsers allow us to implement more complex styling and animation on the fly using CSS and JavaScript. Furthermore, JavaScript libraries such as Angular and React allow us to create applications where the “thinking” work is done partly or entirely in the browser. 

All of these advances are exciting and open up new possibilities for what the web can do to serve society and create positive experiences. However, more computation in the user’s web browser means more energy used by their devices. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a heavy processing load on the user’s device can inadvertently exclude users with older, slower devices and cause batteries on phones and laptops to drain faster. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. This isn’t just bad for the environment, but it puts a disproportionate financial burden on the poorest in society.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cross between panel design and analysis

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

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

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

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

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

Getting back in the same curiosity-boat

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

Mark Twain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

” So are caregivers in scope for this redesign”?

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

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

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

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

The two questions

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

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

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

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

Work in preparation: Noun for foraging

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

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

Just a few excellent noun foraging sources can be found:

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

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

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

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

1. Structure
2. Instances
3. Purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

( Before moving on, feel free to explore this hypothetical product’s potential and then scroll down to see how closely our lists correspond. Just don’t get lost in your own emails! Rejoice to me again!

Drumroll, please…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facilitate an Object Definition Workshop

Noun foraging can be used as a starting point for your workshop; it can be done in concert. If you have five people in the room, pick five sources, assign one to every person, and give everyone ten minutes to find the objects within their source. When the time’s up, come together and find the overlap. Here, affinity mapping is your friend!

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

HOT TIP: before jumping into the workshop, frame the conversation as a requirements-gathering session to help you better understand the scope and details of the system. We’ll keep that a secret; you just need to let them know that you‘re looking for gaps in the team’s understanding so that you can demonstrate the need for more user research. Instead, go into the session optimistically, as if your knowledgeable stakeholders and PMs and biz folks already have all the answers.

Let the whack-a-mole question then start.

1. What is this thing?

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

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

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

2. Do our users know what these things are? What do users refer to this as?

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

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

Ask the group if they can agree to use only that term as they go along if a more user-friendly term comes up. This way, the team can better align to the users ‘ language and mindset.

Okay, let’s get started.

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

3. Do they share the same name? Or are these different? What distinguishes them from one another if they are different?

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

Stakeholder 1: Yes! Without a doubt.

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

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

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

4. What’s the relationship between these objects?

You: Are saved responses and templates in any way connected to each other?

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

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

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

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

5. Is this object in scope?

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Create a visual representation of the objects ‘ relationships

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

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

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

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

Light the fuse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final words: Hold the screen design!

Seriously, if you’re ever going to design screens again, make sure you first address these fundamental inquiries: what are the objects and how do they relate?

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

Before you begin building screens, I sincerely hope this will free up your time and money to spend on user education and clarifying what you are designing. If you find success using noun foraging and the Object Definition Workshop, there’s more where that came from in the rest of the ORCA process, which will help prevent even more late-in-the-game scope tugs-of-war and strategy pivots.

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

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

Square features, for instance, make it fun to play with round picture areas. Mobile display holes and electronic keyboards offer issues to best manage content that stays clear of them. Additionally, dual-screen or portable devices force us to consider how to make the most of the available space in various device configurations.

The design of products has become more challenging and interesting as a result of new changes to the online platform. They’re wonderful opportunities for us to break out of our triangular boxes.

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

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

As a style area, PWAs are really exciting because they challenge us to think about what mixing online and device-native user interface can get. We have more than 40 years of experience telling us what software may look like, especially on desktop computers, and it’s challenging to get out of this psychological design.

At the end of the day though, PWAs on desktops are constrained to the glass they appear in: a square with a name bar at the top.

What a standard desktops PWA app looks like:

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

What if we could consider other ways and reclaim the whole screen in the app? Doing so would give us a chance to create our applications more wonderful and feel more included in the operating system.

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

About the subject bar and glass controls

Let’s get started with an explanation of the subject bar and window settings.

The title bar is the place displayed at the top of an game glass, which frequently contains the phone’s name. The controls are displayed at the top of an app’s window, along with the buttons that enable it to minimize, maximize, near, and close it.

Window Controls Overlay removes the natural barrier of the name bar and windows controls areas. It frees up the entire game window’s height, allowing the overlay of the title club and window control buttons on top of the application’s web content.

If you are reading this article on a desktop computer, get a quick glance at another software. Odds are they’re currently doing something similar to this. In fact, the internet browser you are using uses the major area to show tabs.

Spotify’s application window’s top edge is where the album artwork appears.

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

The whole point of this feature is to allow you to make use of this space with your own content while providing a way to account for the window control buttons. And it makes it possible to offer this modified experience across a variety of platforms without having a negative impact on browsers or other devices that don’t support Window Controls Overlay. After all, PWAs are all about progressive enhancement, so this feature is a chance to enhance your app to use this extra space when it’s available.

Let’s use the feature.

For the rest of this article, we’ll be working on a demo app to learn more about using the feature.

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

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

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

We can install the app as a PWA on the desktop because I added a straightforward web manifest and service worker. Here is what it looks like on macOS:

And on Windows:

Our app is looking good, but the white title bar in the first page is wasted space. It would be really nice if the design area extended to the top of the app window on the second page.

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

Enabling Window Controls Overlay

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

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

Using the overlay of Window Controls

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

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

On the surface, the feature is really simple to use. The only thing required is for this manifest change to transform the window controls into an overlay and make the title bar disappear.

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

Here is how the app currently looks:

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

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

Using CSS to keep clear of the window controls

New CSS environment variables have also been added to the feature:

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

You use these variables with the CSS env ( ) function to position your content where the title bar would have been while ensuring it won’t overlap with the window controls. We’ll position our header, which includes the logo, search bar, and NEW button, using two of the variables in our case.

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

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

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

Now our header adapts to its surroundings, and it doesn’t feel like the window control buttons have been added as an afterthought. The app appears much more like a native app.

Changing the window controls background color so it blends in

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

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

We can fix this by changing the app’s theme color. There are several definitions for it:

PWAs can define a theme color in the web app manifest file using the theme_color manifest member. The OS then uses this color in a variety of ways. On desktop platforms, it is used to provide a background color to the title bar and window controls.
• Websites can use the theme-color meta tag as well. It’s used by browsers to customize the color of the UI around the web page. For PWAs, this color can override the manifest theme_color.

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

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

Here is the method we’ll employ:

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

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

Dragging the window

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

Users can use the Window Controls Overlay feature to move the window, but this area becomes limited to where the control buttons are, and they must carefully aim between these buttons to move the window. However, the title bar offers a sizable area for users to click and drag.

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

We can use the following to animate any aspect of the app so that the window can drag it toward any point:

-webkit-app-region: drag;

It is also possible to explicitly make an element non-draggable:

-webkit-app-region: no-drag; 

These choices might be beneficial to us. We can make the entire header a dragging target, but make the search field and NEW button within it non-draggable so they can still be used as normal.

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

...

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

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

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

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

Users can click and drag where the title bar used to be with the above code. It is an area that users expect to be able to use to move windows on desktop, and we’re not breaking this expectation, which is good.

Adapting to window resize

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

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

Three intriguing things are provided by the API:

• navigator.windowControlsOverlay.visiblelets us know whether the overlay is visible.
• navigator.windowControlsOverlay.getBoundingClientRect()lets us know the position and size of the title bar area.
• navigator.windowControlsOverlay.ongeometrychangelets us know when the visibility or size change.

Let’s use this to be aware of the size of the title bar area and move the header down if it’s too narrow.

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

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

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

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

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

Thirty pixels of exciting design opportunities

We were able to convert our simple demo app to something that felt much more connected to desktop devices by using the Window Controls Overlay feature. Something that reaches out of the usual window constraints and provides a custom experience for its users.

In reality, this feature only gives us about 30 more pixels of room and presents challenges when using the window controls. And yet, this extra room and those challenges can be turned into exciting design opportunities.

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

So let’s embrace this. Let’s use the standard technologies already at our disposal, and experiment with new ideas to provide tailored experiences for all devices, all from a single codebase!

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

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

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

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

merits of mobile-first technology

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

Development order. A good development hierarchy is one thing you definitely get from mobile-first; you just concentrate on the cellular view and start developing.

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

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

Inhibits desktop-centric growth. It can be tempting to first focus on the desktop perspective because enhancement is done using pc servers. No one wants to spend their time retrofitting a desktop-centric website to function on mobile devices, but thinking about smart from the beginning prevents us from getting stuck in the future!

Drawbacks of mobile-first

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

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

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

Requires more analysis tests. All higher thresholds must be regression tested if CSS changes at lower views ( such as adding a new fashion ).

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

Property price issue overrules its own.

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

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

As you can view each target as a blank slate, this strategy opens up some opportunities. If a product’s layout appears to be based on Flexbox at all baselines, that is acceptable and can be coded in the definition style sheet. But if it looks like Grid would be much better for large windows and Flexbox for portable, these can both be done entirely freely when the CSS is put into finished media keyword ranges. Additionally, having a thorough understanding of any given part in all breakpoints upfront is necessary for developing together. This can help identify design flaws earlier in the growth process. We don’t want to get stuck down a rabbit hole building a sophisticated component for wireless, and then get the designs for desktop and find they are extremely difficult and inconsistent with the HTML we created for the mobile view!

Although this strategy won’t work for everyone, I urge you to try it. Responsively App, Blisk, and many others are among the many tools available to assist with concurrent development.

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

Closed media query ranges are used in real life

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

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

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

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

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

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

The goal is to: 

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

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

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

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

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

Bundling versus separating the CSS

Due to the browser's concurrent request limit (typically around six ), it was crucial back then to keep the number of requests to a minimum. In consequence, using image sprites and CSS bundling was the norm, with all the CSS being downloaded as a single stylesheet with the highest priority.

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

What version of HTTP do you use?

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

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

If your website still uses HTTP/1, please check it out. WHILE!! What are you waiting for? Excellent user support exists for HTTP/2.

CSS should be split.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving on

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

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

In general, simplifying CSS rule creation whenever we can is ultimately a cleaner approach than going around in circles of overrides. However, whatever method you use, it must be appropriate for the project. Mobile-first may turn out to be the best option for the situation at hand or not, but first you need to fully comprehend the trade-offs you're entering.

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

At the time, I didn’t realize yet how to functionally incorporate morality. Yes, I did discover some tools in other projects that had worked well for me, such as using checklists, notion monitoring, and “dark truth” sessions. I was still struggling for time and support, and at best I had only partially achieved a higher ( moral ) quality of design—which is far from my definition of structurally integrated.

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

Control the program

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

What can we do to alter this?

We may start by acting on the appropriate level of the system. System scholar Donna H. Meadows after outlined ways to increase the effectiveness of a system. When you apply these to architecture, you get:

You can change things like usability results or the number of layout criticism at the lowest level of effectiveness. But none of that may change the direction of a business.
• Similarly, affecting buffers ( such as team budgets ), stocks ( such as the number of designers ), flows ( such as the number of new hires ), and delays ( such as the time that it takes to hear about the effect of design ) won’t significantly affect a company.
• Instead of focusing on feedback loops like control power, employee reputation, or design-system investments, a company can improve its ability to achieve its goals. But that doesn’t alter the goals themselves, which means that the business will also work against your ethical-design ideals.
• The change of moral methods, toolkits, articles, conferences, workshops, and so on is what most ethical-design initiatives are currently focused on at the next stage, information flows. This is also where social style has remained largely theoretical. We’ve been focusing on the wrong level of the system all this day.
• Consider rules, for instance; they consistently defeat information. There can be commonly accepted guidelines, such as how fund works, or a sprint group’s concept of done. However, illegal laws intended to maintain profits is also smother social design, which are frequently revealed through statements like” the customer didn’t ask for it” or “don’t make it very big.”
• Changing the rules without holding formal power is extremely difficult. That’s why the next stage is thus important: self-organization. Bottom-up initiatives, interest projects, self-steering teams, and research all contribute to a company’s resilience and creativity. It’s precisely this diversity of viewpoints that’s needed to functionally address major structural issues like materialism, wealth inequality, and climate change.
• But objectives and metrics are even more powerful than self-organization. Our companies want to make more money, which means that everything and everyone in the company does their best to… make the company more money. And once I realized that profit is nothing more than a measurement, I understood how crucial a very specific, defined metric can be toward pushing a company in a certain direction.

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

Redefine success

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

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

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

A genuinely purpose-driven company would try to reverse this dynamic: it would recognize finance for what it was intended for: a means. Therefore, both feasibility and viability are important factors in the company’s efforts to accomplish what they stated. It makes intuitive sense: to achieve most anything, you need resources, people, and money. Fun fact: Italian speakers are completely unaware of the distinction between feasibility and viability; both terms are merely fattibilità.

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

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

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

Ensure social justice, equity, and sustainability.

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

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

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

We must consider our impact beyond the user, expanding our focus to the economy, communities, and other indirect stakeholders, as a result of having an objective on the societal level. We called this objective equity:

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

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

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

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

Measure impact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practice daily ethical design

Once you’ve defined your objectives and you have a reasonable idea of the potential metrics for your design project, only then do you have a chance to structurally practice ethical design. It” simply” turns into a matter of using your imagination and sprinkling from the knowledge and tools that are already at your disposal.

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

What doing good design means will be completely altered by the new definition of success.

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

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

The kickoff is the most important meeting that can be so easy to forget to include. There are two main stages in it: 1 ) coordinating expectations; 2 ) defining success as a goal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the project’s history and purpose: What is the purpose of this project?
• the problem definition: what do we want to solve?
• the concrete goals and metrics for each success dimension: what do we want to achieve?
• how will we go about defining the scope, procedure, and role descriptions?

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In today’s data-driven environment, it’s becoming more and more possible for you to be asked to create a personal digital expertise, whether it’s a common website, consumer portal, or local application. But while there continues to be no lack of marketing buzz around personalization systems, we also have very few defined approaches for implementing personalized UX.

That’s where we come in. After completing tens of personalisation projects over the past few years, we gave ourselves a purpose: could you make a systematic personalization platform especially for UX practitioners? The Personalization Pyramid is a designer-centric framework for establishing human-centered personalization initiatives that cover data, classification, content delivery, and overall objectives. 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

We’ll assume that you are already comfortable with the fundamentals of modern personalization for the purposes of this article. A nice guide can be found these: Website Personalization Planning. Although Graphic projects in this field can take a variety of forms, they frequently begin with similar starting points.

Common scenarios for starting a customisation 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 unclear or disjointed.
• You are running some secluded targeting strategies or A/B tests
• On personalization method, partners disagree.
• Mandate of customer privacy rules ( e. g. GDPR ) requires revisiting existing user targeting practices

Regardless of where you begin, a powerful personalization system will require the same key building stones. These are the “levels” on the tower, as we’ve made them. 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 you get personal service?
3. Contexts and Campaigns: What personalization information does the person view?
4. What makes up a distinct, useable viewers according to consumer segments?
5. Actionable Data: What dependable and credible information is captured by our professional platform to generate personalization?
6. What wider set of data is conceivable ( now in our environment ) to allow you to optimize?

We’ll go through each of these amounts in change. An associated deck of cards serves as an example of each level’s specific examples to make this more practical. We’ve found them helpful in customisation pondering periods, and will include cases for you here.

Starting at the Top

The elements of the pyramids are as follows:

North Star

What overall goal do you have with your personalization software ( big or small ) is a northern star. The North Star defines the (one ) overall mission of the personalization program. What are your goals, exactly? North Stars cast a ghost. The darkness is bigger the sun, the star, and so on. Example of North Starts may contain:

Function: Use simple user inputs to optimize. Examples:” Raw” messages, basic search effects, system user settings and settings options, general flexibility, basic improvements
1. Feature: Self-contained personalisation component. Examples:” Cooked” notifications, advanced optimizations ( geolocation ), basic dynamic messaging, customized modules, automations, recommenders
2. Experience: Individualized customer experiences across a variety of 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 distinctive, personalized solution experiences. Example: Standalone, branded encounters with personalization at their base, like the “algotorial” songs by Spotify quite as Discover Weekly.

Goals

Personalization can aid in accelerating designing with user intentions, as in any great UX design. Goals are the military and tangible metrics that may prove the entire program is effective. Start with your existing analytics and measurement system, as well as metrics that you can benchmark against. In some cases, fresh 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 spent on work
• Net promoter score ( NPS)
• Satisfaction of the customers

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are where the personalisation happens. One of your main responsibilities as a UX artist will be in this area. The connections available to you will depend on how your personalization and associated technology features are instrumented, and should be rooted in improving a person’s experience at a certain point in the trip. Touchpoints can be multi-device ( mobile, in-store, website ), but they can also be more specific ( web banner, web pop-up, etc. ). Here are a few illustrations:

Channel-level touchpoints

• Email: Role
• Email opens at what time?
• In-store display ( JSON endpoint )
• Native app
• Search

Wireframe-level Touchpoints

• Web overlay
• Web alert bar
• Web banner
• Web content block
• Menu on the web

If you’re designing for web interfaces, for example, you will likely need to include personalized “zones” in your wireframes. Based on our next step, context, and campaigns, the content for these can be presented programmatically in touchpoints.

Contexts and Campaigns

Once you’ve identified some touchpoints, you can decide what kind of personalized content a user will receive. Many personalization tools will refer to these as” campaigns” ( so, for example, a campaign on a web banner for new visitors to the website ). These will be displayed to specific user segments programmatically, as defined by user data. At this stage, we find it helpful to consider two separate models: a context model and a content model. The context helps you consider the level of user engagement at the personalization moment, for instance, if they are just casually browsing information rather than engaging in a deep dive. Think of it in terms of information retrieval behaviors. 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. Make Easier
3. Cross-Sell
4. Enrich

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

User Groups

User segments can be created prescriptively or adaptively, based on user research ( e. g. via rules and logic tied to set user behaviors or via 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. Here are some examples from the personalization pyramid:

• Unknown
• Guest
• Authenticated
• Default
• Referred
• Role
• Cohort
• Unique Identification Number

Actionable Data

Every organization with any digital presence has data. 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 data: a recent study by Twilio estimates some 80 % of businesses are using at least some type of first-party data to personalize the customer experience.

First-party data has a number of benefits for the user experience, including being relatively simple to collect, more likely to be accurate, and less susceptible to the” creep factor” of third-party data. So a key part of your UX strategy should be to determine what the best form of data collection is on your audiences. Here are a few illustrations:

There is a progression of profiling when it comes to recognizing and making decisioning about different audiences and their signals. As time and confidence and data volume increase, it varies to more granular constructs about smaller and smaller cohorts of users.

While some combination of implicit / explicit data is generally a prerequisite for any implementation ( more commonly referred to as first party and third-party data ) ML efforts are typically not cost-effective directly out of the box. This is because optimization requires a strong content repository and data backbone. But these approaches should be considered as part of the larger roadmap and may indeed help accelerate the organization’s overall progress. At this point, you will typically work with key stakeholders and product owners to create a profiling model. The profiling model includes defining approach to configuring profiles, profile keys, profile cards and pattern cards. a scalable, multi-faceted approach to profiling.

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.

In assembling a card “hand”, one can begin to trace the entire trajectory from leadership focus down through a strategic and tactical execution. It serves as the foundation for the workshops that both co-authors have conducted to build a program backlog, which would make a good article topic.

In the meantime, what is important to note is that each colored class of card is helpful to survey in understanding the range of choices potentially at your disposal, it is threading through and making concrete decisions about for whom this decisioning will be made: where, when, and how.

Lay Down Your Cards

Any effective personalization strategy must take into account near, middle, and long-term objectives. Even with the leading CMS platforms like Sitecore and Adobe or the most exciting composable CMS DXP out there, there is simply no “easy button” wherein a personalization program can be stood up and immediately view meaningful results. Having said that, every personalization activity has a common grammar, just like every sentence has nouns and verbs. These cards attempt to map that territory.

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

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

But you can ensure that your group has packed its carriers reasonably.

There’s a DIY method to increase your chances for victory. You’ll at least at least disarm your boss ‘ irrational exuberance. Before the group you’ll need to properly plan.

It’s known as prepersonalization.

Behind the audio

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

We’re used to seeing the polished final outcome of a personalization have. A personal have had to be conceived, budgeted, and prioritized before the year-end prize, the making-of-backstory, or the behind-the-scenes success chest. Before any customisation have goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a delay of valuable ideas for expressing consumer experiences more automatically.

How do you decide where to position customisation wagers? How do you design regular interactions that didn’t journey up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve discovered that several budgeted programs second required one or more workshops to join key stakeholders and domestic customers of the technology in order to justify their continuing investments. Make it matter.

We’ve closely monitored the same evolution with our consumers, from major software to young companies. In our experience with working on small and large personalization work, a program’s best monitor record—and its capacity to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and manage its design and engineering efforts—turns on how successfully these prepersonalization activities play out.

Successful seminars consistently save time, money, and overall well-being by separating successful potential endeavors from unsuccessful ones.

A personalization training involves a protracted work of testing and function development. It’s never a switch-flip in your software load. It’s ideal managed as a queue that usually evolves through three methods:

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

This is why we created our democratic personalization platform and why we’re field-testing an following deck of cards: we believe that there’s a foundation grammar, a set of “nouns and verbs” that your organization can use to style experiences that are customized, personalized, or automated. These cards are not necessary for you. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.

Set the timer for your kitchen.

How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The evaluation activities that we suggest include can last for a number of weeks ( and frequently do ). For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Details on the essential first-day activities are included in a summary of our broad approach.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

Kickstart: This specifies the terms of engagement as you concentrate on the potential, the readiness and drive of your team, and your leadership.
1. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
2. Work your plan: This stage consists of making it possible for team members to individually present their own pilots, which each include a proof-of-concept project, business case, and 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: Apt your appetite

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

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

The table must be set up for this. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? Here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework for a broad perspective.

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature ( or something similar ). We break down connected experiences into five categories in our cards: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to draw attention to the benefits of ongoing investment as well as the difference between what you deliver right now 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 crucial because it emphasizes how personalization can affect your own methods of working as well as your external customers. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Each team member should decide where they would like to place your company’s emphasis on your product or service. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. Here, the goal is to show how various departments may view their own benefits from the effort, which can vary from one department to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final kickstart activity is about filling in the personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will data and privacy protection be a significant challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? ( We’re pretty sure you do; it’s just a matter of acknowledging the magnitude of that need and finding a solution. ) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. For instance, our Detractor card lists six protracted behavior that is harmful to the development of our country.

Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential obstacles to your upcoming progress. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. According to research, personalization initiatives face a number of common obstacles.

At this point, you’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? Good, you’re all set to go on.

Hit that test kitchen

Next, let’s take a look at what you’ll need to create personalization recipes. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. Their capabilities are broad and potent, and they give you a variety of ways to organize your company. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

What’s crucial here is to avoid treating the installed software like a dream kitchen from some imaginary 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.

Over the course of the workshop, the ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together. 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 be made from recipes, which have predetermined ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

Like a good product manager, you’ll make sure you have everything ready to cook up your desired interaction ( or figure out what needs to be added to your pantry ) and that you validate with the right stakeholders present. 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 doesn’t just involve identifying requirements. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team:

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

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

Create a recipe.

What ingredients are important to you? Consider the construct “what-what-when-why”

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

Five years ago, we created these cards and card categories. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And there are still fresh possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

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

1. 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: An email is sent to a newly registered user to highlight the breadth of the content catalog and convert them to happy subscribers.
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.

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

The workshop’s later stages, which shift from focusing on cookbooks to focusing on customers, might seem more nuanced. Individual” cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a 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.

Architecture must be improved to produce better kitchens.

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

When a team is overfitting, it’s because they aren’t designing with their best data, which is why personalization turns into a laugh line. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. For instance, your AI’s output quality is in fact impacted 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’t stand the heat, in fact…

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach can achieve the necessary concentration and intention. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, head to the test kitchen to save time, preserve job security, and avoid imagining the creative concepts that come from your organization’s masters. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.

You have a better chance of lasting success and sound beginnings with this workshop framework. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. However, you’ll have solid ground for success if you use the same cookbook and the same recipes. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.

Your time well spent is being able to assess your unique situation and digital skills, despite the associated costs associated with investing in this kind of technology and product design. Don’t squander it. The pudding is the proof, as they say.

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

How we got below

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

the development of online requirements

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

Server-side language like PHP, Java, and.NET took Perl as the primary back-end computers, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the garbage bin. The first age of internet programs started with content-management systems (especially those used in blogs like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress ), with these better server-side equipment. In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened gates for sequential interaction between the front end and back close. Websites now no longer needed to refresh their webpages ‘ content. A grain of Script frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and ruby arose to aid developers develop more credible client-side conversation across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like image replacement enable skilled designers and developers to display fonts of their choosing. And technologies like Flash made it possible to add animations, games, and even more interactivity.

These new methods, standards, and technologies greatly reenergized the sector. Web design flourished as designers and developers explored more diverse styles and layouts. However, we still relied heavily on hacks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes ( such as rounded or angled corners ) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks ). All kinds of nested floats or absolute positioning ( or both ) were necessary for complicated layouts. 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. Additionally, JavaScript libraries made it simple for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, even at the expense of double or even quadrupling the download size of basic websites.

The web as software platform

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

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

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

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

Where we are now

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

Especially with efforts like Interop, browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other standards like web components has increased. New technologies gain support across the board in a fraction of the time that they used to. I frequently find out about a new feature and check its browser support only to discover that its coverage has already exceeded 80 %. 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.

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

If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks, which once made it easier to adopt new techniques sooner, have since evolved into obstacles. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And frequently, when scripts fail ( whether due to poor code, network problems, or other environmental factors ), users are left with blank or broken pages.

Where do we go from here?

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

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

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

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

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

Play, experiment, and be weird! This website we created is the most incredible experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be brave and make new friends. Build a playground for ideas. In your own bizarre science lab, perform bizarre experiments. Start your own small business. There has never been a place where we have more room to be creative, take risks, and discover our potential.

Share and amplify. As you play, experiment, and learn, share what has 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.

Make a move and make it happen.

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