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

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

How we got here

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

The birth of web standards

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

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

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

The web as software platform

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

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

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

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

Where we are now

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

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

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

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

Where do we go from here?

Today’s hacks help to shape tomorrow’s standards. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks—for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we’re unwilling to admit that they’re hacks or we hesitate to replace them. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?

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

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

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

Always be learning. If you’re always learning, you’re also growing. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. You might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year, even if you were to focus solely on learning standards. (Remember XHTML?) But constant learning opens up new connections in your brain, and the hacks that you learn one day may help to inform different experiments another day.

Play, experiment, and be weird! This web that we’ve built is the ultimate experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be courageous and try new things. Build a playground for ideas. Make goofy experiments in your own mad science lab. Start your own small business. There has never been a more empowering place to be creative, take risks, and explore what we’re capable of.

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

Go forth and make

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

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

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

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

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

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

We call it prepersonalization.

Behind the music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set your kitchen timer

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

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

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

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

Kickstart: Whet your appetite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hit that test kitchen

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

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

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

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

Verify your ingredients

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

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

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

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

Compose your recipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better kitchens require better architecture

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

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

You can definitely stand the heat…

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

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

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

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

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

Use storytelling as a structure to do research

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

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

Act one: setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act two: conflict

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act three: resolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marketing in the Era of Uber Trends written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode: Overview In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Michael Tchong, innovation expert, futurist, and founder of Uber Trends. Named “America’s most influential trend spotter” by Daily Telegraph, Michael has helped brands like Apple, Amex, and Mercedes-Benz anticipate seismic shifts in technology and consumer behavior. Michael […]

Marketing in the Era of Uber Trends written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

When James Gunn unveiled the “Gods and Monsters” slate for the new DC Universe in early 2023, it signaled more than a relaunch. It was a commitment to cinematic storytelling that could be mythic, grounded, tragic, uplifting, and courageous. Within that bold vision, however, one name was still absent. Virgil Hawkins.  Virgil is the young […]

The post Static Shock Deserves a Live-Action Future in the DC Universe appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New World season 3 episode 6.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 episode 6 “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” concluded with one the great classic science fiction twists. The feared and near-mythical scavenger ship the Enterprise encounters, the one that had been flying through the galaxy wiping out planets and spaceships with abandon, was not a mysterious new alien threat, but in fact a long-lost space mission originally launched from Earth.

It’s not exactly a new twist (even before Planet of the Apes did a variant on it, numerous versions of it had appeared in The Twilight Zone and beyond), and in this installment it even bordered on being a little problematic. The episode did leave you wondering if Kirk would have been quite so upset about those 7,000 deaths if the space helmet had opened to reveal a new kind of bumpy forehead.

But it also gave us a glimpse into a fascinating period in Star Trek’s future history. The 21st century of the Star Trek universe is littered with lost and doomed space missions. In Kirk’s very first adventure on screen, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” he encountered the flight recorder of the SS Valiant, and later the space probe Nomad. The Next Generation’s crew came across the wreckage of the doomed NASA spacecraft Charybdis (as well as the corpse of its sole surviving crewmember trapped in a reconstruction of an old pulp novel). Even Voyager ran into the long-lost Mars mission Ares IV (presumably making The Martian movie’s Ares III mission Trek canon), and the experiment warp probe Friendship One.

But even among these jaunts into the galaxy, this scavenger ship stands out thanks to what we see when the viewscreen zooms in on the remaining Earth-originating features of the ship.

We see a familiar emblem now known as the “Starfleet Delta” (there’s a whole other article to be written about the history of that) and the letters and numbers “XCV-100.” Those numbers give that ship a lineage that leads to none other than the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself.

“All these ships were called Enterprise”

The first time those numbers appear together on screen (although too small for you to actually read) are in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An alien entity has possessed a member of the ship’s crew (later it would turn out this entity was yet another Earth probe that had gone astray, this time the Voyager VI probe). In search of peace and understanding, the entity is given a tour of the Enterprise, including the ship’s recreation room (not to be confused with the holodeck, which was also called the recreation room in Star Trek: The Animated Series and the recent “A Space Adventure Hour.” Here the entity is shown a wall of pictures, including a sailing ship, the real-world aircraft carrier the crew would eventually break into in Star Trek IV, the prototype NASA space shuttle (which in real life was named after the fictional starship), and the Enterprise we know and love. Between those spaceships was another, never-seen-before spaceship, some previously unseen part of the Enterprise lineage.

A small, cylindrical capsule on the end of a long rod, surrounded by a pair of large ring shapes. If viewers had been able to look closely enough, they would have seen the name Enterprise XCV 330. It was a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail, so naturally Trekkies have been obsessing over it for decades.

Put a Ring on It

That picture has its origins right at the very beginning of Star Trek’s story, when Matt Jefferies (the man who the famous “Jefferies Tubes” are named after) was sketching out potential outlines for what would eventually become the Enterprise. You could go through those sketches and find cool outlines for a dozen new sci-fi shows, but one shape that kept recurring was the idea of a ship with a large set of rings at the back – sometimes with a saucer at the front, sometimes with other shapes. But one of those discarded sketches, sketch “22L” would go on to have a far longer continuing mission.

Mark Rademaker is a digital artist who has worked on a wide range of Star Trek projects, including several based around that very sketch.

“About 10 years later sketch 22L got picked up again when Gene was developing a new series called ‘Starship’,” Rademaker tells us. “That series never came to fruition. But for that series Matt Jefferies did make some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork of the ‘22L’ version.”

This new show was not going to be Star Trek, which meant its interior would have some extensive differences, even if ultimately those differences might turn out to be more cosmetic.

Instead of a bridge based around one man in a chair, it was based around people sitting in a circle around a computer console – a design with ideas that would still find their way into Star Trek: The Next Generation’s early set designs.

“People would not transport to a planet, but step into the ‘metafier’ (The dome on the right side of the command module) and ‘project’ themselves onto a planet,” Rademaker says. “I assume this was another cost saving mechanic, just like a transporter.”

When Starship failed to materialize, another attempt to relaunch Star Trek with the spinoff Phase II turned into a movie production and that design finally found its way into Star Trek canon.

“When they were building the ship wall in the rec room, Gene [Roddenberry] asked Rick Sternbach to do a high contrast ink version of a Matt Jefferies’ painting, to add onto this wall,” says Rademaker.

The Space Cruise Liner

For a long time that detail would remain a tantalizing tidbit of canon. For decades the only further information fans would have on the ship was the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology. Published in 1980, written and edited by Stan Goldstein and Fred Goldstein, and illustrated by Rick Sternbach, this book was for years the “official” history of the Star Trek universe.

This chronology, which ran from the earliest days of spaceflight to the Enterprise as depicted in the Star Trek movies, described the ring-ship Enterprise as “Declaration Class,” operating from 2123 to 2165 as an interstellar cruise liner, with three theaters, three nightclubs, and a zero-gravity gymnasium, among other things. The book also claimed it was the first kind of ship to be equipped with a subspace radio.

That was where the ship remained in canon for decades, until 2001, with the launch of a new show chronicling the adventures of the Enterprise that came before the one in the Original Series.

Probably correctly deciding that the show’s hero ship would need to be more recognizably “Star Trek” than the historic ring ship, the show opted for a different design, one that for some reason never made it to the rec room wall of the 1701.

Back into the Canon

But while the Enterprise that would appear in Star Trek: Enterprise was reassuringly saucer-and-warp-nacelle based, the show would also need other ship designs. For the first time, Vulcan starships would play a major role in the show, and such iconic aliens needed an iconic starship design.

Like many designers before and since, their first idea was to dive into Matt Jefferies’ wastepaper basket.

As designer Doug Drexler said later, “My main impetus was to get another classic [Matt] Jeffries concept on Star Trek as a signature ship. So the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic came from Matt Jeffries ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s Starship!”

Enterprise would go a step further in cementing the ring ship’s place in the canon with the episode “First Flight.” This episode provided a flashback to the early days of the warp program, where 80 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved Warp 1, Earth was still trying to get to Warp 2. We saw young Jonathan Archer competing to be the first person to command an actual starship, and are introduced to Club 602, the San Francisco bar where all the Starfleet flyboys hang out. The bar is decorated with various photos and insignias celebrating the history of flight and spaceflight, and in another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance, the Enterprise XCV-330 mission patch, with a picture of the enigmatic ring ship, is right up there on the board.

Which raises the question, once again, of how the XCV-330 fits into Star Trek’s chronology.

“My personal theory: Somewhere between 2055 and 2110, XCV ships were developed,” suggests Rademaker. “I assume the XCV-330 was a human design based on some sub-light XCV platform but engineered to combine it with a Vulcan low warp ring template. It might be a later and perhaps even the final version of this line of ships. This would explain the rings, a rather dated cylindrical and thin internal layout, and a long neck so the crew is far away from the danger bits.”

Relaunching the XCV-330

Rademaker has had plenty of time to think about this. He first came into contact with the ship in a professional capacity when he met Andrew Probert, who among other things designed the Enterprise for The Motion Picture and The Next Generation, as well as the XCV-330 for Star Trek’s “Ships of the Line” calendar.

“Andrew and I mailed back and forth about the general shapes and a lot about the details, with Andrew sketching over my renders to illustrate what direction to take,” Rademaker remembers. “This collab with Andrew really opened my eyes, I improved a lot because of it.”

The work caught a few eyes, including that of modeling company QMx. They asked Rademaker for a file of the 3D model so that they could use it to create an “Artisan model”.

“Later, when I sat in the cinema, I found out that QMx used the model to do a prop for Into Darkness!” Rademaker says.

The miniature appears on Admiral Marcus’s desk, between the real-life Ares V rocket and Zefram Cochrane’s experimental warp ship “The Phoenix.” This places it before humans achieve lightspeed. According to the QMx website (which is sadly no longer online), this Enterprise was “Earth’s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle.”

Rakemaker’s model would continue its voyages, with Eaglemoss using it as the basis for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature. Most recently, in 2023, 100 years before the launch of this Enterprise according to the Spaceflight Chronology, Rademaker was recruited to work on the ring ship once again.

“I was just about to do a refit on this ship to make it compatible with my current render software when Mike Okuda reached out and asked me if I could model the bridge for the Roddenberry Archive. Great gig!” Rademaker says.

You can visit Rademaker’s reconstruction of this Enterprise, inside and out, at the Rodenberry Archive, including an explorable 3D reconstruction of its bridge and “metafier” room, based on Jefferies’ blueprints from the defunct Starship show.

The model even gave the ship its first actual appearance, depicting its eventual demise in the short film “Memory Wall.” Rademaker has also continued working with the ring ship shape for NASA. You see, the workings of Star Trek’s warp drive are very close to the ideas of physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His theoretical “Alcubierre drive” would be driven by an engine that is most likely, you guessed it, ring shaped.

“In 2011 Dr. Harold ‘Sonny’ White (Then working at NASA) asked me to modify the XCV-330 to create a ship for STEM outreach,” Rademaker shares. “We eventually decided to do a whole new ringship that would conform better to his theory. (The IXS-110 aka IXS Enterprise.)  The idea was never to present that ship as an actual new NASA Starship, more like a good motivator for students to get into STEM/STEAM, but the media decided otherwise. It was good fun.”

The Continuing Voyages

The ring ship design is finding its way into Star Trek shows for the first time as well. As Star Trek: Lower Decks drew to a close last year, with what is now a Hugo award-winning finale. The story featured an alternate 21st century, parallel universe traversing ship called the USS Beagle. Its design was clearly a variation of the Enterprise XCV-330, with some extra solar panels and added details, and a nifty new landing mechanism.

And finally, we come to the XCV-100 in last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds. It gives us a lot of clues about how the ring ship Enterprise fits into Star Trek history. If this ship has a ring like the Enterprise, that is obscured, and the ship appears much bigger than the ship in Rademaker’s models.

“The XCV-100 was not a warp capable ship, and the larger size was a requirement for their mission. The XCV-330 compared to the 100 seems to be a scaled down version but with very similar parameters of the nose/front end, like that was an optimized shape for some reason,” Rademaker hypothesizes. “Or maybe they just made this shape in a couple of sizes. Not unheard of in shipbuilding, some hulls in terms of hydrodynamics can be scaled up from for example 60 to 120 meters, without significant changes in characteristics.”

In the brief glimpse we get of the ship, we notice the ID number, the American flag, and the iconic Starfleet delta (many decades before Starfleet could have actually been established).

“The 100 probably was constructed somewhere between 2055 and 2063. Hence it still shows a US like flag alongside an UESPA logo that we also see on the Friendship One probe that was launched in 2067,” Rademaker suggests. “However, that probe does not carry any nation flags on the outside. That makes me assume that 2067 is when UESPA is well established and Earth’s unification in terms of space related things has been formalized.”

We even see the crew’s spacesuits, which are clearly based on the prototype of NASA’s “Z2” spacesuit being developed for a potential Mars mission. In that way, the XCV-100 is a missing link, a very concrete connection between Pike’s starship Enterprise, and our own time’s NASA space program (however much longer that might last).

Look closer though, and there’s a bit more to it than that. Through “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” we are told the legends and rumors about this scavenger ship. Even the Gorn call it a monster.

As Scott describes it, “Its needs are bottomless. All it does is consume and make itself bigger. The bigger it gets, the more it requires. Then it moves on to devour the next resource, like it will never stop.”

When he says it, we think he’s describing an alien monster. Something consumes, destroys and assimilates everything it encounters, like the Doomsday Machine from TOS, or the Borg.

But of course, it turns out he’s describing us – humans as they exist in the 21st century, viewed by the inhabitants of Star Trek’s perfect future.

To a paraphrase another old Enterprise, it’s a long road getting from here to there…

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with a finale on Sept. 11.

The post Strange New Worlds’ XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History appeared first on Den of Geek.

“I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” When most people refer to that line, spoken by Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, they quote it to set up Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey’s thoughtful, resonate […]

The post Hunt for Gollum Movie Poised to Ask ‘What Does Frodo Do When He’s Happy?’ appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New World season 3 episode 6.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 episode 6 “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” concluded with one the great classic science fiction twists. The feared and near-mythical scavenger ship the Enterprise encounters, the one that had been flying through the galaxy wiping out planets and spaceships with abandon, was not a mysterious new alien threat, but in fact a long-lost space mission originally launched from Earth.

It’s not exactly a new twist (even before Planet of the Apes did a variant on it, numerous versions of it had appeared in The Twilight Zone and beyond), and in this installment it even bordered on being a little problematic. The episode did leave you wondering if Kirk would have been quite so upset about those 7,000 deaths if the space helmet had opened to reveal a new kind of bumpy forehead.

But it also gave us a glimpse into a fascinating period in Star Trek’s future history. The 21st century of the Star Trek universe is littered with lost and doomed space missions. In Kirk’s very first adventure on screen, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” he encountered the flight recorder of the SS Valiant, and later the space probe Nomad. The Next Generation’s crew came across the wreckage of the doomed NASA spacecraft Charybdis (as well as the corpse of its sole surviving crewmember trapped in a reconstruction of an old pulp novel). Even Voyager ran into the long-lost Mars mission Ares IV (presumably making The Martian movie’s Ares III mission Trek canon), and the experiment warp probe Friendship One.

But even among these jaunts into the galaxy, this scavenger ship stands out thanks to what we see when the viewscreen zooms in on the remaining Earth-originating features of the ship.

We see a familiar emblem now known as the “Starfleet Delta” (there’s a whole other article to be written about the history of that) and the letters and numbers “XCV-100.” Those numbers give that ship a lineage that leads to none other than the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself.

“All these ships were called Enterprise”

The first time those numbers appear together on screen (although too small for you to actually read) are in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An alien entity has possessed a member of the ship’s crew (later it would turn out this entity was yet another Earth probe that had gone astray, this time the Voyager VI probe). In search of peace and understanding, the entity is given a tour of the Enterprise, including the ship’s recreation room (not to be confused with the holodeck, which was also called the recreation room in Star Trek: The Animated Series and the recent “A Space Adventure Hour.” Here the entity is shown a wall of pictures, including a sailing ship, the real-world aircraft carrier the crew would eventually break into in Star Trek IV, the prototype NASA space shuttle (which in real life was named after the fictional starship), and the Enterprise we know and love. Between those spaceships was another, never-seen-before spaceship, some previously unseen part of the Enterprise lineage.

A small, cylindrical capsule on the end of a long rod, surrounded by a pair of large ring shapes. If viewers had been able to look closely enough, they would have seen the name Enterprise XCV 330. It was a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail, so naturally Trekkies have been obsessing over it for decades.

Put a Ring on It

That picture has its origins right at the very beginning of Star Trek’s story, when Matt Jefferies (the man who the famous “Jefferies Tubes” are named after) was sketching out potential outlines for what would eventually become the Enterprise. You could go through those sketches and find cool outlines for a dozen new sci-fi shows, but one shape that kept recurring was the idea of a ship with a large set of rings at the back – sometimes with a saucer at the front, sometimes with other shapes. But one of those discarded sketches, sketch “22L” would go on to have a far longer continuing mission.

Mark Rademaker is a digital artist who has worked on a wide range of Star Trek projects, including several based around that very sketch.

“About 10 years later sketch 22L got picked up again when Gene was developing a new series called ‘Starship’,” Rademaker tells us. “That series never came to fruition. But for that series Matt Jefferies did make some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork of the ‘22L’ version.”

This new show was not going to be Star Trek, which meant its interior would have some extensive differences, even if ultimately those differences might turn out to be more cosmetic.

Instead of a bridge based around one man in a chair, it was based around people sitting in a circle around a computer console – a design with ideas that would still find their way into Star Trek: The Next Generation’s early set designs.

“People would not transport to a planet, but step into the ‘metafier’ (The dome on the right side of the command module) and ‘project’ themselves onto a planet,” Rademaker says. “I assume this was another cost saving mechanic, just like a transporter.”

When Starship failed to materialize, another attempt to relaunch Star Trek with the spinoff Phase II turned into a movie production and that design finally found its way into Star Trek canon.

“When they were building the ship wall in the rec room, Gene [Roddenberry] asked Rick Sternbach to do a high contrast ink version of a Matt Jefferies’ painting, to add onto this wall,” says Rademaker.

The Space Cruise Liner

For a long time that detail would remain a tantalizing tidbit of canon. For decades the only further information fans would have on the ship was the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology. Published in 1980, written and edited by Stan Goldstein and Fred Goldstein, and illustrated by Rick Sternbach, this book was for years the “official” history of the Star Trek universe.

This chronology, which ran from the earliest days of spaceflight to the Enterprise as depicted in the Star Trek movies, described the ring-ship Enterprise as “Declaration Class,” operating from 2123 to 2165 as an interstellar cruise liner, with three theaters, three nightclubs, and a zero-gravity gymnasium, among other things. The book also claimed it was the first kind of ship to be equipped with a subspace radio.

That was where the ship remained in canon for decades, until 2001, with the launch of a new show chronicling the adventures of the Enterprise that came before the one in the Original Series.

Probably correctly deciding that the show’s hero ship would need to be more recognizably “Star Trek” than the historic ring ship, the show opted for a different design, one that for some reason never made it to the rec room wall of the 1701.

Back into the Canon

But while the Enterprise that would appear in Star Trek: Enterprise was reassuringly saucer-and-warp-nacelle based, the show would also need other ship designs. For the first time, Vulcan starships would play a major role in the show, and such iconic aliens needed an iconic starship design.

Like many designers before and since, their first idea was to dive into Matt Jefferies’ wastepaper basket.

As designer Doug Drexler said later, “My main impetus was to get another classic [Matt] Jeffries concept on Star Trek as a signature ship. So the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic came from Matt Jeffries ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s Starship!”

Enterprise would go a step further in cementing the ring ship’s place in the canon with the episode “First Flight.” This episode provided a flashback to the early days of the warp program, where 80 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved Warp 1, Earth was still trying to get to Warp 2. We saw young Jonathan Archer competing to be the first person to command an actual starship, and are introduced to Club 602, the San Francisco bar where all the Starfleet flyboys hang out. The bar is decorated with various photos and insignias celebrating the history of flight and spaceflight, and in another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance, the Enterprise XCV-330 mission patch, with a picture of the enigmatic ring ship, is right up there on the board.

Which raises the question, once again, of how the XCV-330 fits into Star Trek’s chronology.

“My personal theory: Somewhere between 2055 and 2110, XCV ships were developed,” suggests Rademaker. “I assume the XCV-330 was a human design based on some sub-light XCV platform but engineered to combine it with a Vulcan low warp ring template. It might be a later and perhaps even the final version of this line of ships. This would explain the rings, a rather dated cylindrical and thin internal layout, and a long neck so the crew is far away from the danger bits.”

Relaunching the XCV-330

Rademaker has had plenty of time to think about this. He first came into contact with the ship in a professional capacity when he met Andrew Probert, who among other things designed the Enterprise for The Motion Picture and The Next Generation, as well as the XCV-330 for Star Trek’s “Ships of the Line” calendar.

“Andrew and I mailed back and forth about the general shapes and a lot about the details, with Andrew sketching over my renders to illustrate what direction to take,” Rademaker remembers. “This collab with Andrew really opened my eyes, I improved a lot because of it.”

The work caught a few eyes, including that of modeling company QMx. They asked Rademaker for a file of the 3D model so that they could use it to create an “Artisan model”.

“Later, when I sat in the cinema, I found out that QMx used the model to do a prop for Into Darkness!” Rademaker says.

The miniature appears on Admiral Marcus’s desk, between the real-life Ares V rocket and Zefram Cochrane’s experimental warp ship “The Phoenix.” This places it before humans achieve lightspeed. According to the QMx website (which is sadly no longer online), this Enterprise was “Earth’s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle.”

Rakemaker’s model would continue its voyages, with Eaglemoss using it as the basis for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature. Most recently, in 2023, 100 years before the launch of this Enterprise according to the Spaceflight Chronology, Rademaker was recruited to work on the ring ship once again.

“I was just about to do a refit on this ship to make it compatible with my current render software when Mike Okuda reached out and asked me if I could model the bridge for the Roddenberry Archive. Great gig!” Rademaker says.

You can visit Rademaker’s reconstruction of this Enterprise, inside and out, at the Rodenberry Archive, including an explorable 3D reconstruction of its bridge and “metafier” room, based on Jefferies’ blueprints from the defunct Starship show.

The model even gave the ship its first actual appearance, depicting its eventual demise in the short film “Memory Wall.” Rademaker has also continued working with the ring ship shape for NASA. You see, the workings of Star Trek’s warp drive are very close to the ideas of physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His theoretical “Alcubierre drive” would be driven by an engine that is most likely, you guessed it, ring shaped.

“In 2011 Dr. Harold ‘Sonny’ White (Then working at NASA) asked me to modify the XCV-330 to create a ship for STEM outreach,” Rademaker shares. “We eventually decided to do a whole new ringship that would conform better to his theory. (The IXS-110 aka IXS Enterprise.)  The idea was never to present that ship as an actual new NASA Starship, more like a good motivator for students to get into STEM/STEAM, but the media decided otherwise. It was good fun.”

The Continuing Voyages

The ring ship design is finding its way into Star Trek shows for the first time as well. As Star Trek: Lower Decks drew to a close last year, with what is now a Hugo award-winning finale. The story featured an alternate 21st century, parallel universe traversing ship called the USS Beagle. Its design was clearly a variation of the Enterprise XCV-330, with some extra solar panels and added details, and a nifty new landing mechanism.

And finally, we come to the XCV-100 in last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds. It gives us a lot of clues about how the ring ship Enterprise fits into Star Trek history. If this ship has a ring like the Enterprise, that is obscured, and the ship appears much bigger than the ship in Rademaker’s models.

“The XCV-100 was not a warp capable ship, and the larger size was a requirement for their mission. The XCV-330 compared to the 100 seems to be a scaled down version but with very similar parameters of the nose/front end, like that was an optimized shape for some reason,” Rademaker hypothesizes. “Or maybe they just made this shape in a couple of sizes. Not unheard of in shipbuilding, some hulls in terms of hydrodynamics can be scaled up from for example 60 to 120 meters, without significant changes in characteristics.”

In the brief glimpse we get of the ship, we notice the ID number, the American flag, and the iconic Starfleet delta (many decades before Starfleet could have actually been established).

“The 100 probably was constructed somewhere between 2055 and 2063. Hence it still shows a US like flag alongside an UESPA logo that we also see on the Friendship One probe that was launched in 2067,” Rademaker suggests. “However, that probe does not carry any nation flags on the outside. That makes me assume that 2067 is when UESPA is well established and Earth’s unification in terms of space related things has been formalized.”

We even see the crew’s spacesuits, which are clearly based on the prototype of NASA’s “Z2” spacesuit being developed for a potential Mars mission. In that way, the XCV-100 is a missing link, a very concrete connection between Pike’s starship Enterprise, and our own time’s NASA space program (however much longer that might last).

Look closer though, and there’s a bit more to it than that. Through “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” we are told the legends and rumors about this scavenger ship. Even the Gorn call it a monster.

As Scott describes it, “Its needs are bottomless. All it does is consume and make itself bigger. The bigger it gets, the more it requires. Then it moves on to devour the next resource, like it will never stop.”

When he says it, we think he’s describing an alien monster. Something consumes, destroys and assimilates everything it encounters, like the Doomsday Machine from TOS, or the Borg.

But of course, it turns out he’s describing us – humans as they exist in the 21st century, viewed by the inhabitants of Star Trek’s perfect future.

To a paraphrase another old Enterprise, it’s a long road getting from here to there…

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with a finale on Sept. 11.

The post Strange New Worlds’ XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains very mild spoilers for the first episode of Alien: Earth. There originally were never going to be any robots in the world or mythology of Alien. As brilliant as Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s initial idea was about a crew encountering an alien organism that nestles itself inside a human host—or “impregnates […]

The post Alien: Androids and AI Are Now the Center of the Franchise appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New World season 3 episode 6.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 episode 6 “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” concluded with one the great classic science fiction twists. The feared and near-mythical scavenger ship the Enterprise encounters, the one that had been flying through the galaxy wiping out planets and spaceships with abandon, was not a mysterious new alien threat, but in fact a long-lost space mission originally launched from Earth.

It’s not exactly a new twist (even before Planet of the Apes did a variant on it, numerous versions of it had appeared in The Twilight Zone and beyond), and in this installment it even bordered on being a little problematic. The episode did leave you wondering if Kirk would have been quite so upset about those 7,000 deaths if the space helmet had opened to reveal a new kind of bumpy forehead.

But it also gave us a glimpse into a fascinating period in Star Trek’s future history. The 21st century of the Star Trek universe is littered with lost and doomed space missions. In Kirk’s very first adventure on screen, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” he encountered the flight recorder of the SS Valiant, and later the space probe Nomad. The Next Generation’s crew came across the wreckage of the doomed NASA spacecraft Charybdis (as well as the corpse of its sole surviving crewmember trapped in a reconstruction of an old pulp novel). Even Voyager ran into the long-lost Mars mission Ares IV (presumably making The Martian movie’s Ares III mission Trek canon), and the experiment warp probe Friendship One.

But even among these jaunts into the galaxy, this scavenger ship stands out thanks to what we see when the viewscreen zooms in on the remaining Earth-originating features of the ship.

We see a familiar emblem now known as the “Starfleet Delta” (there’s a whole other article to be written about the history of that) and the letters and numbers “XCV-100.” Those numbers give that ship a lineage that leads to none other than the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself.

“All these ships were called Enterprise”

The first time those numbers appear together on screen (although too small for you to actually read) are in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An alien entity has possessed a member of the ship’s crew (later it would turn out this entity was yet another Earth probe that had gone astray, this time the Voyager VI probe). In search of peace and understanding, the entity is given a tour of the Enterprise, including the ship’s recreation room (not to be confused with the holodeck, which was also called the recreation room in Star Trek: The Animated Series and the recent “A Space Adventure Hour.” Here the entity is shown a wall of pictures, including a sailing ship, the real-world aircraft carrier the crew would eventually break into in Star Trek IV, the prototype NASA space shuttle (which in real life was named after the fictional starship), and the Enterprise we know and love. Between those spaceships was another, never-seen-before spaceship, some previously unseen part of the Enterprise lineage.

A small, cylindrical capsule on the end of a long rod, surrounded by a pair of large ring shapes. If viewers had been able to look closely enough, they would have seen the name Enterprise XCV 330. It was a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail, so naturally Trekkies have been obsessing over it for decades.

Put a Ring on It

That picture has its origins right at the very beginning of Star Trek’s story, when Matt Jefferies (the man who the famous “Jefferies Tubes” are named after) was sketching out potential outlines for what would eventually become the Enterprise. You could go through those sketches and find cool outlines for a dozen new sci-fi shows, but one shape that kept recurring was the idea of a ship with a large set of rings at the back – sometimes with a saucer at the front, sometimes with other shapes. But one of those discarded sketches, sketch “22L” would go on to have a far longer continuing mission.

Mark Rademaker is a digital artist who has worked on a wide range of Star Trek projects, including several based around that very sketch.

“About 10 years later sketch 22L got picked up again when Gene was developing a new series called ‘Starship’,” Rademaker tells us. “That series never came to fruition. But for that series Matt Jefferies did make some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork of the ‘22L’ version.”

This new show was not going to be Star Trek, which meant its interior would have some extensive differences, even if ultimately those differences might turn out to be more cosmetic.

Instead of a bridge based around one man in a chair, it was based around people sitting in a circle around a computer console – a design with ideas that would still find their way into Star Trek: The Next Generation’s early set designs.

“People would not transport to a planet, but step into the ‘metafier’ (The dome on the right side of the command module) and ‘project’ themselves onto a planet,” Rademaker says. “I assume this was another cost saving mechanic, just like a transporter.”

When Starship failed to materialize, another attempt to relaunch Star Trek with the spinoff Phase II turned into a movie production and that design finally found its way into Star Trek canon.

“When they were building the ship wall in the rec room, Gene [Roddenberry] asked Rick Sternbach to do a high contrast ink version of a Matt Jefferies’ painting, to add onto this wall,” says Rademaker.

The Space Cruise Liner

For a long time that detail would remain a tantalizing tidbit of canon. For decades the only further information fans would have on the ship was the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology. Published in 1980, written and edited by Stan Goldstein and Fred Goldstein, and illustrated by Rick Sternbach, this book was for years the “official” history of the Star Trek universe.

This chronology, which ran from the earliest days of spaceflight to the Enterprise as depicted in the Star Trek movies, described the ring-ship Enterprise as “Declaration Class,” operating from 2123 to 2165 as an interstellar cruise liner, with three theaters, three nightclubs, and a zero-gravity gymnasium, among other things. The book also claimed it was the first kind of ship to be equipped with a subspace radio.

That was where the ship remained in canon for decades, until 2001, with the launch of a new show chronicling the adventures of the Enterprise that came before the one in the Original Series.

Probably correctly deciding that the show’s hero ship would need to be more recognizably “Star Trek” than the historic ring ship, the show opted for a different design, one that for some reason never made it to the rec room wall of the 1701.

Back into the Canon

But while the Enterprise that would appear in Star Trek: Enterprise was reassuringly saucer-and-warp-nacelle based, the show would also need other ship designs. For the first time, Vulcan starships would play a major role in the show, and such iconic aliens needed an iconic starship design.

Like many designers before and since, their first idea was to dive into Matt Jefferies’ wastepaper basket.

As designer Doug Drexler said later, “My main impetus was to get another classic [Matt] Jeffries concept on Star Trek as a signature ship. So the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic came from Matt Jeffries ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s Starship!”

Enterprise would go a step further in cementing the ring ship’s place in the canon with the episode “First Flight.” This episode provided a flashback to the early days of the warp program, where 80 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved Warp 1, Earth was still trying to get to Warp 2. We saw young Jonathan Archer competing to be the first person to command an actual starship, and are introduced to Club 602, the San Francisco bar where all the Starfleet flyboys hang out. The bar is decorated with various photos and insignias celebrating the history of flight and spaceflight, and in another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance, the Enterprise XCV-330 mission patch, with a picture of the enigmatic ring ship, is right up there on the board.

Which raises the question, once again, of how the XCV-330 fits into Star Trek’s chronology.

“My personal theory: Somewhere between 2055 and 2110, XCV ships were developed,” suggests Rademaker. “I assume the XCV-330 was a human design based on some sub-light XCV platform but engineered to combine it with a Vulcan low warp ring template. It might be a later and perhaps even the final version of this line of ships. This would explain the rings, a rather dated cylindrical and thin internal layout, and a long neck so the crew is far away from the danger bits.”

Relaunching the XCV-330

Rademaker has had plenty of time to think about this. He first came into contact with the ship in a professional capacity when he met Andrew Probert, who among other things designed the Enterprise for The Motion Picture and The Next Generation, as well as the XCV-330 for Star Trek’s “Ships of the Line” calendar.

“Andrew and I mailed back and forth about the general shapes and a lot about the details, with Andrew sketching over my renders to illustrate what direction to take,” Rademaker remembers. “This collab with Andrew really opened my eyes, I improved a lot because of it.”

The work caught a few eyes, including that of modeling company QMx. They asked Rademaker for a file of the 3D model so that they could use it to create an “Artisan model”.

“Later, when I sat in the cinema, I found out that QMx used the model to do a prop for Into Darkness!” Rademaker says.

The miniature appears on Admiral Marcus’s desk, between the real-life Ares V rocket and Zefram Cochrane’s experimental warp ship “The Phoenix.” This places it before humans achieve lightspeed. According to the QMx website (which is sadly no longer online), this Enterprise was “Earth’s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle.”

Rakemaker’s model would continue its voyages, with Eaglemoss using it as the basis for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature. Most recently, in 2023, 100 years before the launch of this Enterprise according to the Spaceflight Chronology, Rademaker was recruited to work on the ring ship once again.

“I was just about to do a refit on this ship to make it compatible with my current render software when Mike Okuda reached out and asked me if I could model the bridge for the Roddenberry Archive. Great gig!” Rademaker says.

You can visit Rademaker’s reconstruction of this Enterprise, inside and out, at the Rodenberry Archive, including an explorable 3D reconstruction of its bridge and “metafier” room, based on Jefferies’ blueprints from the defunct Starship show.

The model even gave the ship its first actual appearance, depicting its eventual demise in the short film “Memory Wall.” Rademaker has also continued working with the ring ship shape for NASA. You see, the workings of Star Trek’s warp drive are very close to the ideas of physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His theoretical “Alcubierre drive” would be driven by an engine that is most likely, you guessed it, ring shaped.

“In 2011 Dr. Harold ‘Sonny’ White (Then working at NASA) asked me to modify the XCV-330 to create a ship for STEM outreach,” Rademaker shares. “We eventually decided to do a whole new ringship that would conform better to his theory. (The IXS-110 aka IXS Enterprise.)  The idea was never to present that ship as an actual new NASA Starship, more like a good motivator for students to get into STEM/STEAM, but the media decided otherwise. It was good fun.”

The Continuing Voyages

The ring ship design is finding its way into Star Trek shows for the first time as well. As Star Trek: Lower Decks drew to a close last year, with what is now a Hugo award-winning finale. The story featured an alternate 21st century, parallel universe traversing ship called the USS Beagle. Its design was clearly a variation of the Enterprise XCV-330, with some extra solar panels and added details, and a nifty new landing mechanism.

And finally, we come to the XCV-100 in last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds. It gives us a lot of clues about how the ring ship Enterprise fits into Star Trek history. If this ship has a ring like the Enterprise, that is obscured, and the ship appears much bigger than the ship in Rademaker’s models.

“The XCV-100 was not a warp capable ship, and the larger size was a requirement for their mission. The XCV-330 compared to the 100 seems to be a scaled down version but with very similar parameters of the nose/front end, like that was an optimized shape for some reason,” Rademaker hypothesizes. “Or maybe they just made this shape in a couple of sizes. Not unheard of in shipbuilding, some hulls in terms of hydrodynamics can be scaled up from for example 60 to 120 meters, without significant changes in characteristics.”

In the brief glimpse we get of the ship, we notice the ID number, the American flag, and the iconic Starfleet delta (many decades before Starfleet could have actually been established).

“The 100 probably was constructed somewhere between 2055 and 2063. Hence it still shows a US like flag alongside an UESPA logo that we also see on the Friendship One probe that was launched in 2067,” Rademaker suggests. “However, that probe does not carry any nation flags on the outside. That makes me assume that 2067 is when UESPA is well established and Earth’s unification in terms of space related things has been formalized.”

We even see the crew’s spacesuits, which are clearly based on the prototype of NASA’s “Z2” spacesuit being developed for a potential Mars mission. In that way, the XCV-100 is a missing link, a very concrete connection between Pike’s starship Enterprise, and our own time’s NASA space program (however much longer that might last).

Look closer though, and there’s a bit more to it than that. Through “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” we are told the legends and rumors about this scavenger ship. Even the Gorn call it a monster.

As Scott describes it, “Its needs are bottomless. All it does is consume and make itself bigger. The bigger it gets, the more it requires. Then it moves on to devour the next resource, like it will never stop.”

When he says it, we think he’s describing an alien monster. Something consumes, destroys and assimilates everything it encounters, like the Doomsday Machine from TOS, or the Borg.

But of course, it turns out he’s describing us – humans as they exist in the 21st century, viewed by the inhabitants of Star Trek’s perfect future.

To a paraphrase another old Enterprise, it’s a long road getting from here to there…

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with a finale on Sept. 11.

The post Strange New Worlds’ XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History appeared first on Den of Geek.

Feedback, in whichever form it takes, and whatever it may be called, is one of the most effective soft skills that we have at our disposal to collaboratively get our designs to a better place while growing our own skills and perspectives.

Feedback is also one of the most underestimated tools, and often by assuming that we’re already good at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a skill that can be trained, grown, and improved. Poor feedback can create confusion in projects, bring down morale, and affect trust and team collaboration over the long term. Quality feedback can be a transformative force. 

Practicing our skills is surely a good way to improve, but the learning gets even faster when it’s paired with a good foundation that channels and focuses the practice. What are some foundational aspects of giving good feedback? And how can feedback be adjusted for remote and distributed work environments? 

On the web, we can identify a long tradition of asynchronous feedback: from the early days of open source, code was shared and discussed on mailing lists. Today, developers engage on pull requests, designers comment in their favorite design tools, project managers and scrum masters exchange ideas on tickets, and so on.

Design critique is often the name used for a type of feedback that’s provided to make our work better, collaboratively. So it shares a lot of the principles with feedback in general, but it also has some differences.

The content

The foundation of every good critique is the feedback’s content, so that’s where we need to start. There are many models that you can use to shape your content. The one that I personally like best—because it’s clear and actionable—is this one from Lara Hogan.

While this equation is generally used to give feedback to people, it also fits really well in a design critique because it ultimately answers some of the core questions that we work on: What? Where? Why? How? Imagine that you’re giving some feedback about some design work that spans multiple screens, like an onboarding flow: there are some pages shown, a flow blueprint, and an outline of the decisions made. You spot something that could be improved. If you keep the three elements of the equation in mind, you’ll have a mental model that can help you be more precise and effective.

Here is a comment that could be given as a part of some feedback, and it might look reasonable at a first glance: it seems to superficially fulfill the elements in the equation. But does it?

Not sure about the buttons’ styles and hierarchy—it feels off. Can you change them?

Observation for design feedback doesn’t just mean pointing out which part of the interface your feedback refers to, but it also refers to offering a perspective that’s as specific as possible. Are you providing the user’s perspective? Your expert perspective? A business perspective? The project manager’s perspective? A first-time user’s perspective?

When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back.

Impact is about the why. Just pointing out a UI element might sometimes be enough if the issue may be obvious, but more often than not, you should add an explanation of what you’re pointing out.

When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow.

The question approach is meant to provide open guidance by eliciting the critical thinking in the designer receiving the feedback. Notably, in Lara’s equation she provides a second approach: request, which instead provides guidance toward a specific solution. While that’s a viable option for feedback in general, for design critiques, in my experience, defaulting to the question approach usually reaches the best solutions because designers are generally more comfortable in being given an open space to explore.

The difference between the two can be exemplified with, for the question approach:

When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Would it make sense to unify them?

Or, for the request approach:

When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same pair of forward and back buttons.

At this point in some situations, it might be useful to integrate with an extra why: why you consider the given suggestion to be better.

When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons so that users don’t get confused.

Choosing the question approach or the request approach can also at times be a matter of personal preference. A while ago, I was putting a lot of effort into improving my feedback: I did rounds of anonymous feedback, and I reviewed feedback with other people. After a few rounds of this work and a year later, I got a positive response: my feedback came across as effective and grounded. Until I changed teams. To my shock, my next round of feedback from one specific person wasn’t that great. The reason is that I had previously tried not to be prescriptive in my advice—because the people who I was previously working with preferred the open-ended question format over the request style of suggestions. But now in this other team, there was one person who instead preferred specific guidance. So I adapted my feedback for them to include requests.

One comment that I heard come up a few times is that this kind of feedback is quite long, and it doesn’t seem very efficient. No… but also yes. Let’s explore both sides.

No, this style of feedback is actually efficient because the length here is a byproduct of clarity, and spending time giving this kind of feedback can provide exactly enough information for a good fix. Also if we zoom out, it can reduce future back-and-forth conversations and misunderstandings, improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of collaboration beyond the single comment. Imagine that in the example above the feedback were instead just, “Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons.” The designer receiving this feedback wouldn’t have much to go by, so they might just apply the change. In later iterations, the interface might change or they might introduce new features—and maybe that change might not make sense anymore. Without the why, the designer might imagine that the change is about consistency… but what if it wasn’t? So there could now be an underlying concern that changing the buttons would be perceived as a regression.

Yes, this style of feedback is not always efficient because the points in some comments don’t always need to be exhaustive, sometimes because certain changes may be obvious (“The font used doesn’t follow our guidelines”) and sometimes because the team may have a lot of internal knowledge such that some of the whys may be implied.

So the equation above isn’t meant to suggest a strict template for feedback but a mnemonic to reflect and improve the practice. Even after years of active work on my critiques, I still from time to time go back to this formula and reflect on whether what I just wrote is effective.

The tone

Well-grounded content is the foundation of feedback, but that’s not really enough. The soft skills of the person who’s providing the critique can multiply the likelihood that the feedback will be well received and understood. Tone alone can make the difference between content that’s rejected or welcomed, and it’s been demonstrated that only positive feedback creates sustained change in people.

Since our goal is to be understood and to have a positive working environment, tone is essential to work on. Over the years, I’ve tried to summarize the required soft skills in a formula that mirrors the one for content: the receptivity equation.

Respectful feedback comes across as grounded, solid, and constructive. It’s the kind of feedback that, whether it’s positive or negative, is perceived as useful and fair.

Timing refers to when the feedback happens. To-the-point feedback doesn’t have much hope of being well received if it’s given at the wrong time. Questioning the entire high-level information architecture of a new feature when it’s about to ship might still be relevant if that questioning highlights a major blocker that nobody saw, but it’s way more likely that those concerns will have to wait for a later rework. So in general, attune your feedback to the stage of the project. Early iteration? Late iteration? Polishing work in progress? These all have different needs. The right timing will make it more likely that your feedback will be well received.

Attitude is the equivalent of intent, and in the context of person-to-person feedback, it can be referred to as radical candor. That means checking before we write to see whether what we have in mind will truly help the person and make the project better overall. This might be a hard reflection at times because maybe we don’t want to admit that we don’t really appreciate that person. Hopefully that’s not the case, but that can happen, and that’s okay. Acknowledging and owning that can help you make up for that: how would I write if I really cared about them? How can I avoid being passive aggressive? How can I be more constructive?

Form is relevant especially in a diverse and cross-cultural work environments because having great content, perfect timing, and the right attitude might not come across if the way that we write creates misunderstandings. There might be many reasons for this: sometimes certain words might trigger specific reactions; sometimes nonnative speakers might not understand all the nuances of some sentences; sometimes our brains might just be different and we might perceive the world differently—neurodiversity must be taken into consideration. Whatever the reason, it’s important to review not just what we write but how.

A few years back, I was asking for some feedback on how I give feedback. I received some good advice but also a comment that surprised me. They pointed out that when I wrote “Oh, […],” I made them feel stupid. That wasn’t my intent! I felt really bad, and I just realized that I provided feedback to them for months, and every time I might have made them feel stupid. I was horrified… but also thankful. I made a quick fix: I added “oh” in my list of replaced words (your choice between: macOS’s text replacement, aText, TextExpander, or others) so that when I typed “oh,” it was instantly deleted. 

Something to highlight because it’s quite frequent—especially in teams that have a strong group spirit—is that people tend to beat around the bush. It’s important to remember here that a positive attitude doesn’t mean going light on the feedback—it just means that even when you provide hard, difficult, or challenging feedback, you do so in a way that’s respectful and constructive. The nicest thing that you can do for someone is to help them grow.

We have a great advantage in giving feedback in written form: it can be reviewed by another person who isn’t directly involved, which can help to reduce or remove any bias that might be there. I found that the best, most insightful moments for me have happened when I’ve shared a comment and I’ve asked someone who I highly trusted, “How does this sound?,” “How can I do it better,” and even “How would you have written it?”—and I’ve learned a lot by seeing the two versions side by side.

The format

Asynchronous feedback also has a major inherent advantage: we can take more time to refine what we’ve written to make sure that it fulfills two main goals: the clarity of communication and the actionability of the suggestions.

Let’s imagine that someone shared a design iteration for a project. You are reviewing it and leaving a comment. There are many ways to do this, and of course context matters, but let’s try to think about some elements that may be useful to consider.

In terms of clarity, start by grounding the critique that you’re about to give by providing context. Specifically, this means describing where you’re coming from: do you have a deep knowledge of the project, or is this the first time that you’re seeing it? Are you coming from a high-level perspective, or are you figuring out the details? Are there regressions? Which user’s perspective are you taking when providing your feedback? Is the design iteration at a point where it would be okay to ship this, or are there major things that need to be addressed first?

Providing context is helpful even if you’re sharing feedback within a team that already has some information on the project. And context is absolutely essential when giving cross-team feedback. If I were to review a design that might be indirectly related to my work, and if I had no knowledge about how the project arrived at that point, I would say so, highlighting my take as external.

We often focus on the negatives, trying to outline all the things that could be done better. That’s of course important, but it’s just as important—if not more—to focus on the positives, especially if you saw progress from the previous iteration. This might seem superfluous, but it’s important to keep in mind that design is a discipline where there are hundreds of possible solutions for every problem. So pointing out that the design solution that was chosen is good and explaining why it’s good has two major benefits: it confirms that the approach taken was solid, and it helps to ground your negative feedback. In the longer term, sharing positive feedback can help prevent regressions on things that are going well because those things will have been highlighted as important. As a bonus, positive feedback can also help reduce impostor syndrome.

There’s one powerful approach that combines both context and a focus on the positives: frame how the design is better than the status quo (compared to a previous iteration, competitors, or benchmarks) and why, and then on that foundation, you can add what could be improved. This is powerful because there’s a big difference between a critique that’s for a design that’s already in good shape and a critique that’s for a design that isn’t quite there yet.

Another way that you can improve your feedback is to depersonalize the feedback: the comments should always be about the work, never about the person who made it. It’s “This button isn’t well aligned” versus “You haven’t aligned this button well.” This is very easy to change in your writing by reviewing it just before sending.

In terms of actionability, one of the best approaches to help the designer who’s reading through your feedback is to split it into bullet points or paragraphs, which are easier to review and analyze one by one. For longer pieces of feedback, you might also consider splitting it into sections or even across multiple comments. Of course, adding screenshots or signifying markers of the specific part of the interface you’re referring to can also be especially useful.

One approach that I’ve personally used effectively in some contexts is to enhance the bullet points with four markers using emojis. So a red square 🟥 means that it’s something that I consider blocking; a yellow diamond 🔶 is something that I can be convinced otherwise, but it seems to me that it should be changed; and a green circle 🟢 is a detailed, positive confirmation. I also use a blue spiral 🌀 for either something that I’m not sure about, an exploration, an open alternative, or just a note. But I’d use this approach only on teams where I’ve already established a good level of trust because if it happens that I have to deliver a lot of red squares, the impact could be quite demoralizing, and I’d reframe how I’d communicate that a bit.

Let’s see how this would work by reusing the example that we used earlier as the first bullet point in this list:

• 🔶 Navigation—When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons so that users don’t get confused.
• 🟢 Overall—I think the page is solid, and this is good enough to be our release candidate for a version 1.0.
• 🟢 Metrics—Good improvement in the buttons on the metrics area; the improved contrast and new focus style make them more accessible.
•  🟥  Button Style—Using the green accent in this context creates the impression that it’s a positive action because green is usually perceived as a confirmation color. Do we need to explore a different color?
• 🔶Tiles—Given the number of items on the page, and the overall page hierarchy, it seems to me that the tiles shouldn’t be using the Subtitle 1 style but the Subtitle 2 style. This will keep the visual hierarchy more consistent.
• 🌀 Background—Using a light texture works well, but I wonder whether it adds too much noise in this kind of page. What is the thinking in using that?

What about giving feedback directly in Figma or another design tool that allows in-place feedback? In general, I find these difficult to use because they hide discussions and they’re harder to track, but in the right context, they can be very effective. Just make sure that each of the comments is separate so that it’s easier to match each discussion to a single task, similar to the idea of splitting mentioned above.

One final note: say the obvious. Sometimes we might feel that something is obviously good or obviously wrong, and so we don’t say it. Or sometimes we might have a doubt that we don’t express because the question might sound stupid. Say it—that’s okay. You might have to reword it a little bit to make the reader feel more comfortable, but don’t hold it back. Good feedback is transparent, even when it may be obvious.

There’s another advantage of asynchronous feedback: written feedback automatically tracks decisions. Especially in large projects, “Why did we do this?” could be a question that pops up from time to time, and there’s nothing better than open, transparent discussions that can be reviewed at any time. For this reason, I recommend using software that saves these discussions, without hiding them once they are resolved. 

Content, tone, and format. Each one of these subjects provides a useful model, but working to improve eight areas—observation, impact, question, timing, attitude, form, clarity, and actionability—is a lot of work to put in all at once. One effective approach is to take them one by one: first identify the area that you lack the most (either from your perspective or from feedback from others) and start there. Then the second, then the third, and so on. At first you’ll have to put in extra time for every piece of feedback that you give, but after a while, it’ll become second nature, and your impact on the work will multiply.

Thanks to Brie Anne Demkiw and Mike Shelton for reviewing the first draft of this article.