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The Shocking Sturgeon Full Moon in Aquarius Will Rock Your Emotional Foundation
Brace yourself for some uncomfortable truths.
I’ll be honest: I am as good as married to my Dyson Supersonic blowdryer and swear by it whether my hair is curly or straight. So I was incredibly intrigued when I learned that Dyson would be releasing its first-ever line of hair products called Dyson Chitosan—a two-part product line that includes the Pre-Styling cream ($60) and the Post-Styling serum ($60), both of which work together to add shine, hold, protection, and moisture, depending on your hair type and how you use the products.
If you’re feeling skeptical, I get it—I was too. It’s one thing to innovate in the hair-tools space, but it’s another to formulate in the already oversaturated haircare market. Thankfully, I got to try out the Dyson Chitosan line ahead of its launch (and took some tested-and-reviewed photos to prove it). Ahead, find everything you need to know about the brand’s new styling formulation, plus my honest review of it.
About Dyson Chitosan
First things first: “Chitosan” is the name for both products in the Chitosan product line. Though you can buy both products separately, they’re technically part of a two-part system. Here’s what’s included:
Pre-Styling cream
The Chitosan Pre-Styling cream is meant to be used on damp hair to give your hair a bit of flexible hold and moisture. The cream comes in four different formulations to target different hair textures and porosities:
- Straight to wavy (choose between “light conditioning” for finer hair, or “rich conditioning” for dryer, thicker hair)
- Curly to coily (choose between “light conditioning” for finer curls, or “rich conditioning” for dry or damaged curls)
Post-Styling serum
The Chitosan Post-Styling serum is used, as you’d guess, after styling. It’s a lightweight serum that helps add shine and smoothness to dry, styled hair.
The ingredients
The name “Chitosan” comes from a natural compound called chitosan, a macromolecule found in the cell walls of chestnut, white button, and oyster mushrooms (Dyson’s is formulated from oyster mushrooms). According to research, chitosan can also be found in a variety of other sources, like the crustacean shell. In cosmetics, the ingredient is used as a film-forming agent and can create a protective layer on the skin or hair.
Dyson innovators tapped the ingredient mainly for its ability to help create flexible hold and shine in its new formulas. “Clients have complained about style retention, and we wanted to provide a solution,” Justina Mejia-Montane, Dyson’s global product innovation and packaging development lead, tells Well+Good at the salon preview.
The problem is a lot of products that promise hold can also leave your hair dry and crunchy. To avoid this, Dyson formulators paired chitosan with grapeseed, castor seed, coconut, and argan oils to help soften your hair and add shine. The light conditioning formulas utilizes a lower concentration of oils versus the rich conditioning options, which are more potent. So, the straight to wavy light formula has an even blend of all four oils, while the curly to coily rich formula has more coconut and castor oils to better condition thicker hair.
You should definitely pick a pre-styling formula based on your hair type for best results (I have type 3 curly hair with heat damage, so I used the coily rich conditioning option). The post-styling serum is available in one formulation and is a finishing product that also has hyaluronic acid and amino acids to smooth hair cuticles and add shine.
My honest review of Dyson Chitosan
Celebrity hairstylist and Dyson ambassador Matthew Collins styled my hair with the new products, so I was able to experience their performance firsthand. The scent has notes of bergamot, basil, green tea, and cedarwood, and it gives that lingering clean whiff you want from freshly washed hair. Collins smoothed one pump of Chitosan Pre-Styler on my damp hair and detangled with a paddle brush in large sections to distribute. Then he dried my hair with the Dyson Supersonic before flat-ironing with the Dyson Corrale flat iron.
I was admittedly a bit skeptical about how the products would perform. I’ve mastered my at-home silk press and typically use a variety of products (leave-in conditioner, heat protectant, flexible hold spray, edge control) to achieve a super-straight finish that lasts at least one week. So when Collins and the Dyson team promised me those same results with only two products, I wasn’t totally convinced.
I can usually tell at the blow-dry step of a salon service whether or not I’ll like my hair, and at this point, I was impressed with how smooth my hair was with just the Pre-Styling Cream and a round brush. I typically would never use a round brush if DIY’ing my hair at home to avoid too much volume at the roots, but I was committed to trusting the process.
Once my hair was completely dried, it was time to flat-iron my roots, which Collins did with one pass of the Dyson Corrale in small sections, adding alternating curls as he made his way down the lengths of my hair. He massaged a pump of the Post-Styling serum through my hair, breaking up my curls with his fingers, and I was done (as you can see, my curls were smooth and defined). I loved the immediate results, but the real test happened when I walked outside to brave the NYC humidity.
I ended up sweating a lot the following day, and my roots swelled (which is inevitable with curly hair—just the name of the game), but the rest of my hair maintained a nice wave for days following my salon visit, and all I had to do was smooth out my roots. While sweaty roots is pretty normal, I will say that my lengths staying curled and bouncy for the days following my service was better than normal. Most times when I get my hair done in salon, the curls usually drop within hours.
Final takeaway
Overall, I think the Chitosan range is a great addition to your hair routine if you’re a one-and-done type of person. If you want to cut back on leave-in mists, styling creams, and hairsprays, this does all that in fewer steps. I’m actually eager to see how this would perform at home with my usual steps, this time adding some edge control and tying down my roots after styling. So, once I get my hands on a personal bottle, I’m looking forward to giving this another spin at home.
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It might be time to check in with your pelvic floor.
I’ll be honest: I am as good as married to my Dyson Supersonic blowdryer and swear by it whether my hair is curly or straight. So I was incredibly intrigued when I learned that Dyson would be releasing its first-ever line of hair products called Dyson Chitosan—a two-part product line that includes the Pre-Styling cream ($60) and the Post-Styling serum ($60), both of which work together to add shine, hold, protection, and moisture, depending on your hair type and how you use the products.
If you’re feeling skeptical, I get it—I was too. It’s one thing to innovate in the hair-tools space, but it’s another to formulate in the already oversaturated haircare market. Thankfully, I got to try out the Dyson Chitosan line ahead of its launch (and took some tested-and-reviewed photos to prove it). Ahead, find everything you need to know about the brand’s new styling formulation, plus my honest review of it.
About Dyson Chitosan
First things first: “Chitosan” is the name for both products in the Chitosan product line. Though you can buy both products separately, they’re technically part of a two-part system. Here’s what’s included:
Pre-Styling cream
The Chitosan Pre-Styling cream is meant to be used on damp hair to give your hair a bit of flexible hold and moisture. The cream comes in four different formulations to target different hair textures and porosities:
- Straight to wavy (choose between “light conditioning” for finer hair, or “rich conditioning” for dryer, thicker hair)
- Curly to coily (choose between “light conditioning” for finer curls, or “rich conditioning” for dry or damaged curls)
Post-Styling serum
The Chitosan Post-Styling serum is used, as you’d guess, after styling. It’s a lightweight serum that helps add shine and smoothness to dry, styled hair.
The ingredients
The name “Chitosan” comes from a natural compound called chitosan, a macromolecule found in the cell walls of chestnut, white button, and oyster mushrooms (Dyson’s is formulated from oyster mushrooms). According to research, chitosan can also be found in a variety of other sources, like the crustacean shell. In cosmetics, the ingredient is used as a film-forming agent and can create a protective layer on the skin or hair.
Dyson innovators tapped the ingredient mainly for its ability to help create flexible hold and shine in its new formulas. “Clients have complained about style retention, and we wanted to provide a solution,” Justina Mejia-Montane, Dyson’s global product innovation and packaging development lead, tells Well+Good at the salon preview.
The problem is a lot of products that promise hold can also leave your hair dry and crunchy. To avoid this, Dyson formulators paired chitosan with grapeseed, castor seed, coconut, and argan oils to help soften your hair and add shine. The light conditioning formulas utilizes a lower concentration of oils versus the rich conditioning options, which are more potent. So, the straight to wavy light formula has an even blend of all four oils, while the curly to coily rich formula has more coconut and castor oils to better condition thicker hair.
You should definitely pick a pre-styling formula based on your hair type for best results (I have type 3 curly hair with heat damage, so I used the coily rich conditioning option). The post-styling serum is available in one formulation and is a finishing product that also has hyaluronic acid and amino acids to smooth hair cuticles and add shine.
My honest review of Dyson Chitosan
Celebrity hairstylist and Dyson ambassador Matthew Collins styled my hair with the new products, so I was able to experience their performance firsthand. The scent has notes of bergamot, basil, green tea, and cedarwood, and it gives that lingering clean whiff you want from freshly washed hair. Collins smoothed one pump of Chitosan Pre-Styler on my damp hair and detangled with a paddle brush in large sections to distribute. Then he dried my hair with the Dyson Supersonic before flat-ironing with the Dyson Corrale flat iron.
I was admittedly a bit skeptical about how the products would perform. I’ve mastered my at-home silk press and typically use a variety of products (leave-in conditioner, heat protectant, flexible hold spray, edge control) to achieve a super-straight finish that lasts at least one week. So when Collins and the Dyson team promised me those same results with only two products, I wasn’t totally convinced.
I can usually tell at the blow-dry step of a salon service whether or not I’ll like my hair, and at this point, I was impressed with how smooth my hair was with just the Pre-Styling Cream and a round brush. I typically would never use a round brush if DIY’ing my hair at home to avoid too much volume at the roots, but I was committed to trusting the process.
Once my hair was completely dried, it was time to flat-iron my roots, which Collins did with one pass of the Dyson Corrale in small sections, adding alternating curls as he made his way down the lengths of my hair. He massaged a pump of the Post-Styling serum through my hair, breaking up my curls with his fingers, and I was done (as you can see, my curls were smooth and defined). I loved the immediate results, but the real test happened when I walked outside to brave the NYC humidity.
I ended up sweating a lot the following day, and my roots swelled (which is inevitable with curly hair—just the name of the game), but the rest of my hair maintained a nice wave for days following my salon visit, and all I had to do was smooth out my roots. While sweaty roots is pretty normal, I will say that my lengths staying curled and bouncy for the days following my service was better than normal. Most times when I get my hair done in salon, the curls usually drop within hours.
Final takeaway
Overall, I think the Chitosan range is a great addition to your hair routine if you’re a one-and-done type of person. If you want to cut back on leave-in mists, styling creams, and hairsprays, this does all that in fewer steps. I’m actually eager to see how this would perform at home with my usual steps, this time adding some edge control and tying down my roots after styling. So, once I get my hands on a personal bottle, I’m looking forward to giving this another spin at home.
Dyson Just Launched Its First Hair-Product Line Called Chitosan—Here’s My Honest Review
I’ll be honest: I am as good as married to my Dyson Supersonic blowdryer and swear by it whether my hair is curly or straight. So I was incredibly intrigued when I learned that Dyson would be releasing its first-ever line of hair products called Dyson Chitosan—a two-part product line that includes the Pre-Styling cream ($60) […]
I’ll be honest: I am as good as married to my Dyson Supersonic blowdryer and swear by it whether my hair is curly or straight. So I was incredibly intrigued when I learned that Dyson would be releasing its first-ever line of hair products called Dyson Chitosan—a two-part product line that includes the Pre-Styling cream ($60) and the Post-Styling serum ($60), both of which work together to add shine, hold, protection, and moisture, depending on your hair type and how you use the products.
If you’re feeling skeptical, I get it—I was too. It’s one thing to innovate in the hair-tools space, but it’s another to formulate in the already oversaturated haircare market. Thankfully, I got to try out the Dyson Chitosan line ahead of its launch (and took some tested-and-reviewed photos to prove it). Ahead, find everything you need to know about the brand’s new styling formulation, plus my honest review of it.
About Dyson Chitosan
First things first: “Chitosan” is the name for both products in the Chitosan product line. Though you can buy both products separately, they’re technically part of a two-part system. Here’s what’s included:
Pre-Styling cream
The Chitosan Pre-Styling cream is meant to be used on damp hair to give your hair a bit of flexible hold and moisture. The cream comes in four different formulations to target different hair textures and porosities:
- Straight to wavy (choose between “light conditioning” for finer hair, or “rich conditioning” for dryer, thicker hair)
- Curly to coily (choose between “light conditioning” for finer curls, or “rich conditioning” for dry or damaged curls)
Post-Styling serum
The Chitosan Post-Styling serum is used, as you’d guess, after styling. It’s a lightweight serum that helps add shine and smoothness to dry, styled hair.
The ingredients
The name “Chitosan” comes from a natural compound called chitosan, a macromolecule found in the cell walls of chestnut, white button, and oyster mushrooms (Dyson’s is formulated from oyster mushrooms). According to research, chitosan can also be found in a variety of other sources, like the crustacean shell. In cosmetics, the ingredient is used as a film-forming agent and can create a protective layer on the skin or hair.
Dyson innovators tapped the ingredient mainly for its ability to help create flexible hold and shine in its new formulas. “Clients have complained about style retention, and we wanted to provide a solution,” Justina Mejia-Montane, Dyson’s global product innovation and packaging development lead, tells Well+Good at the salon preview.
The problem is a lot of products that promise hold can also leave your hair dry and crunchy. To avoid this, Dyson formulators paired chitosan with grapeseed, castor seed, coconut, and argan oils to help soften your hair and add shine. The light conditioning formulas utilizes a lower concentration of oils versus the rich conditioning options, which are more potent. So, the straight to wavy light formula has an even blend of all four oils, while the curly to coily rich formula has more coconut and castor oils to better condition thicker hair.
You should definitely pick a pre-styling formula based on your hair type for best results (I have type 3 curly hair with heat damage, so I used the coily rich conditioning option). The post-styling serum is available in one formulation and is a finishing product that also has hyaluronic acid and amino acids to smooth hair cuticles and add shine.
My honest review of Dyson Chitosan
Celebrity hairstylist and Dyson ambassador Matthew Collins styled my hair with the new products, so I was able to experience their performance firsthand. The scent has notes of bergamot, basil, green tea, and cedarwood, and it gives that lingering clean whiff you want from freshly washed hair. Collins smoothed one pump of Chitosan Pre-Styler on my damp hair and detangled with a paddle brush in large sections to distribute. Then he dried my hair with the Dyson Supersonic before flat-ironing with the Dyson Corrale flat iron.
I was admittedly a bit skeptical about how the products would perform. I’ve mastered my at-home silk press and typically use a variety of products (leave-in conditioner, heat protectant, flexible hold spray, edge control) to achieve a super-straight finish that lasts at least one week. So when Collins and the Dyson team promised me those same results with only two products, I wasn’t totally convinced.
I can usually tell at the blow-dry step of a salon service whether or not I’ll like my hair, and at this point, I was impressed with how smooth my hair was with just the Pre-Styling Cream and a round brush. I typically would never use a round brush if DIY’ing my hair at home to avoid too much volume at the roots, but I was committed to trusting the process.
Once my hair was completely dried, it was time to flat-iron my roots, which Collins did with one pass of the Dyson Corrale in small sections, adding alternating curls as he made his way down the lengths of my hair. He massaged a pump of the Post-Styling serum through my hair, breaking up my curls with his fingers, and I was done (as you can see, my curls were smooth and defined). I loved the immediate results, but the real test happened when I walked outside to brave the NYC humidity.
I ended up sweating a lot the following day, and my roots swelled (which is inevitable with curly hair—just the name of the game), but the rest of my hair maintained a nice wave for days following my salon visit, and all I had to do was smooth out my roots. While sweaty roots is pretty normal, I will say that my lengths staying curled and bouncy for the days following my service was better than normal. Most times when I get my hair done in salon, the curls usually drop within hours.
Final takeaway
Overall, I think the Chitosan range is a great addition to your hair routine if you’re a one-and-done type of person. If you want to cut back on leave-in mists, styling creams, and hairsprays, this does all that in fewer steps. I’m actually eager to see how this would perform at home with my usual steps, this time adding some edge control and tying down my roots after styling. So, once I get my hands on a personal bottle, I’m looking forward to giving this another spin at home.
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When stand-up paddle boarding first grew popular in the ‘90s, it required a hard, fiberglass board that took up 12 feet or so of storage space and was a major hassle to actually get to the water. The only inflatable options on the market “felt soggy, like standing on a pickle,” says Kris Les, a merchandiser for L.L. Bean. That’s not the case anymore. “We’re at a point now where inflatable paddle boards are pretty good, they’re pretty darn rigid,” he says.
Construction updates over the past few years mean that you can get an inflatable stand-up paddle board (aka SUPs) that’s easy to store in your garage or stick in the trunk of your car without sacrificing much performance—especially if you’re a beginner who’s just looking to get out on the water and have a little fun. The hardest part? Picking a board.
To help you get on the water easily and often, we chatted with Les about what to look for in the best inflatable paddle boards and tested several ourselves to find the top 10 that you’ll want to take the plunge on.
Best inflatable paddle boards, at a glance:
- Best overall: iRocker Cruiser 10’6” 7.0, $599
- Best package: Isle Pioneer 3, $495
- Most compact: Red Paddle Co 10’0″ Ride, $1,299
- Most versatile: NRS Jukdo, $925
- Most portable: Pau Hana 10’ 10” Solo SUP Backcountry, $869
- Best hybrid: Bote LowRider Aero 10’6” Full Trax Navy Inflatable Paddle Board, $799
- Best for lounging: Pelican Inflatable Loungeboard, $499
- Most stylish: Thurso Waterwalker 126 10’6” All-Around SUP, $799
What to look for in an inflatable paddle board
When you’re on the hunt for the best inflatable paddle boards, Les says there are five key things to keep in mind.
Size
Although boards can range from just six feet long (for kids) to 16 or more (for group paddling), Les says most range between 10.5-12 feet, with 11-footers being the most popular. “That is the sweet spot,” he says. But smaller people might prefer a shorter board so it’s lighter and easier to transport, while bigger riders might prefer something longer to better support their weight. Width matters, too: A wider board (around 32 inches or more) will be more stable than a narrower one.
Shape
Paddle boarding evolved out of surfing, so most SUPs are shaped like surfboards, Les explains. “But as the sport evolved in the mid-2000s, everybody realized that, actually, a surfboard-shaped board doesn’t really plow through the water as efficiently as a board that has more of the hull in the water and is more pointy-shaped,” he says. These longer, narrower, pointy boards are called displacement paddle boards and are best for people who want to paddle fast and far in a straight line. A wide hull with a slight upward curve at the front, on the other hand, is called a planing board, and is more beginner-friendly—it won’t travel as quickly or easily but it’s more stable for leisurely floating around or doing some yoga.
Accessories
Remember: You need more than just a board to paddle board. Most inflatable boards today are sold as packages with pumps, carrying bags, a collapsible paddle, a leash (to strap the board to your ankle), and a small repair kit. Higher-quality accessories like an electric pump or carbon fiber paddle will mean a higher price point. Not all boards come as complete packages, however, so be sure to look up exactly what’s included to consider the full cost of what you’ll need to get on the water.
Storage space
Most paddle boards come with a variety of clips, velcro straps, and bungee cords on top so you can stash your flip flops, drinks, or fishing gear, or keep your paddle secure if you want to put it down for a while. Many also let you attach a seat so you can sit down and kayak. Think through how you plan to use your board to make sure it has what you’ll need.
Inflatable paddle board design
A paddle board you love the look of is a paddle board you’ll want to get on over and over again. “Color is really important,” Les admits. “This is your limited amount of recreational time that you get. When you’re standing on this thing, are you like, ‘Yeah, I really like looking at this’?” Hopefully, you are.
Shop 8 of the best inflatable paddle boards
Weight: 25 pounds
Length: 10’6”
Width: 34”
With a wide 34-inch base, this board offers a great mix of stability and maneuverability for beginners. It’s easy to get up from sitting or kneeling to standing (or even into downward dog—SUP yoga, anyone?) without worrying too much about your balance. And with a 435-pound weight capacity, it can accommodate multiple riders or pets, if yours are adventurous. The relatively short length does mean it’s meant for riders just 5’8” and under, although one of our 5’10” testers felt super comfortable on it out on the Charles River in Boston. Just know that this board is sold as a basic package with only the board, fins, repair kit, and leash, so you’ll need to bundle it with your preferred paddle, pump, and carrier for a complete setup.
Max capacity: 435 pounds
Pump: Not included
Carrier: Not included
Pros:
- Four color options
- Wide base for extra stability
- Easy to maneuver on the water
- Leash includes a spot to stash your keys
Cons:
- Pump, carrying case, and paddles are sold separately
- Recommended for riders 5’8” or under
Weight: 19 pounds
Length: 10’6”
Width: 34”
For a sturdy, beginner-friendly board that comes with all the accessories you need, look no further than Isle’s best-selling Pioneer 3. The board itself is extra sturdy and features a full-length traction pad so you can get a great grip on the deck. The Pioneer 3 comes with an adjustable carbon paddle, hand pump, touring fin, and six-foot leash, all packed in a wheeled backpack. Our testers were particularly impressed by how easy it is to fit multiple people (or dogs!) on board at one time. There’s also ample storage plus velcro loops for your paddle to store it when it’s not in use. All in all, the Isle Pioneer 3 is an excellent bang-for-your-buck deal worth a spot in your gear closet.
Max capacity: 285 pounds
Pump: Manual
Carrier: Roller backpack
Also available at Amazon.
Pros:
- Sturdy, grippy deck
- Ample storage and attachment space
- Lightweight and compact
- Includes tons of accessories
- Often on sale
Cons:
- Fin can be cumbersome to attach
Weight: 20 pounds
Length: 10’0”
Width: 29”
Smaller riders sometimes struggle to maneuver a long SUP into and out of the water. At just 10 feet long and only 20 pounds, this compact board makes things more manageable. Permanently-attached fins even make the setup one step shorter. Just know that the max rider weight is 165 pounds, so this is definitely designed for smaller, solo paddlers. And we definitely got a workout for all our little stabilizer and core muscles in order to stay upright on it—although it’s super stiff for a smooth ride, it’s just 29 inches wide, so it will challenge your balance.
Max capacity: 165 pounds
Pump: Manual
Carrier: Roller backpack
Pros:
- Lightweight and short for easy carrying
- Slices through the water quickly
- Comes with a great roller backpack with spots for everything you need
- Permanent fins are attached
Cons:
- Paddle sticks a bit when you try to take it apart
- 165-pound weight capacity
Weight: 21
Length: 10’0”
Width: 31″
If you’re looking for a do-it-all board, the NRS Jukdo has got you covered. Slightly wider than other boards on this list and incredibly hardy, the Jukdo is designed with tons of thoughtful touches (slightly raised deck rails, a die-cut EVA foam deck, and a grippy stomp pad for your back foot) to maximize rider balance on the water. Whether you’re looking to mindlessly float on for a few hours or want to endeavor on a sweaty, speedy paddle, it’s all you need for a day out in the sun.
“I’m super impressed with its versatility,” says our tester, W+G Commerce Editor, Francesca Krempa. “I’ve had first-timing SUP friends get on this thing and feel totally secure, while I’ve been able to take it out for longer, more intense tours and it kept up just fine. It’s a splurge, but it’s worth it if you’re getting into SUP and want a premium product that will be able to grow as you do.”
The Jukdo is currently available in three lengths: 10′, 10’8″, and 11′. We tested the 10-foot board and found it to be balanced and maneuverable, even for taller paddlers. But if you prefer a little more board under your feet, you may want to size up.
Max capacity: 190 pounds
Pump: Manual
Carrier: Backpack
Pros:
- Extra sturdy
- Designed for maximum balance
- Extra grippy deck with rear stomp pad
- Versatile
- Includes pump, fins, and repair kit
Cons:
- Pricey
- Paddle sold separately
Weight: 14.9 pounds
Length: 10’10”
Width: 30”
If you ever dreamed of hiking out to your favorite paddle-boarding destination, this super compact inflatable lets you pull it off. “The whole shtick is it’s an extra lightweight, extra small one that you can backpack remotely,” Les says. Once deflated, the Solo rolls up to about half the size of a typical inflatable SUP, and fits into a backpack about as big as your average sleeping bag. Even the paddle features a unique breakdown design that lets you roll it up for easy packing—however, some users report that makes it less efficient in the water.
Max capacity: 350 pounds
Pump: Manual
Carrier: Backpack
Pros:
- Lightweight and packs small enough to hike with
- Paddle rolls up for compact storage
- Backpack performs double duty as a dry bag
- Glides easily and quickly on water
Cons:
- Narrower 30-inch width means less stability
- Paddle has mixed reviews
- The short manual pump creates its own workout
Weight: 30 pounds
Length: 10′ 6″
Width: 36″
Some days, you’re in the mood to SUP. Others, you want to kick back and kayak. With the Bote LowRider Aero, you can do both. This sporty inflatable paddle board includes an inflatable kayak seat you can attach to your board and hybrid paddle for days you want to kayak.
It’s also loaded with features that make it a great paddling companion. The extra wide, 36-inch base is covered in a full-length deck pad for easy, comfortable grip, while the bungee cords at the front and back allows for maximum storage. It’s also compatible with the full line of Bote accessories (sold separately), including the brand’s Magnepod line of magnetized tumblers, coolers, and speakers that attach to the board and stay put while you paddle.
“This is the second Bote board I’ve tested and it’s my new favorite toy,” says Krempa. “I love that I can kick back and relax with the kayak seat on days when I don’t feel like standing. But most of all, I love how customizable Bote boards are—you can basically build out your board exactly how you want, which is key for anyone who spends a lot of time on the water.”
Max capacity: 300 pounds
Pump: Manual
Carrier: Rolling backpack
Pros:
- Hybrid model allows you to SUP or kayak
- Versatile
- Wide, sturdy base
- Can be customized with accessories
- Ample storage in the bow and stern for securing down dry bags and personal belongings
Cons:
- Heavy and slightly cumbersome when deflated inside the backpack
- Removable fins are tricky to get in and out
Weight: 19.5 pounds
Length: 9’
Width: 39”
Not everyone gets a paddle board to work out. Sometimes, you just wanna glide and chill, y’know? The Pelican Loungeboard is designed for just that. With a 400-pound capacity, this board lets a friend join you on top, or you can take advantage of the velcro connectors that attach multiple boards together to create your own floating island. At 39 inches wide, this big boy is ultra-stable. And the entire deck is covered in padded grip so you can really use the whole space if you’re riding tandem or want to do some yoga. Just know that it’s a tank to move: You don’t want to be trying to get anywhere fast on the water on this. We found it’s not the most efficient to paddle on and is particularly difficult to move in a straight line.
Max capacity: 400 pounds
Pump: Manual
Carrier: Over-the-shoulder duffle
Also available at REI.
Pros:
- Super stable
- High weight capacity
- Easily attaches to other Loungeboards
- Exceptionally quick to deflate
- Lightweight
- Perfect for low-key float days
Cons:
- Moves slowly
- Doesn’t track well in a straight line—not designed for touring
Weight: 23.7 pounds
Length: 10’6”
Width: 31”
Our testers found Thurso’s flagship all-around board tracked well in a straight line, and was easy to manage even when the water got a little choppy. But it did take a little work to balance when the conditions weren’t 100 percent calm. With an electric pump and multiple handles, setup and getting it into the water was a breeze overall, though it took some elbow grease to get the center fin on and off. We also enjoyed loading it up with everything we needed for longer adventures—there are multiple bungees on the nose and tail to stash your stuff, and holders on the side keep your paddle secure if you want to hop off for a dip.
Max capacity: 300 pounds (but 130-180 is recommended)
Pump: Electric
Carrier: Roller backpack
Pros:
- Fun design gives classic surf vibes
- Includes rechargeable electric pump that inflates and deflates the board quickly
- Comes with a wheeled duffle bag for easy transport
- Features bungees on nose and tail to tie down cargo, plus paddle holders on the side
Cons:
- Requires some work to balance
- A little tricky to get fins on and off
What It’s Like Rebuilding a Movement Practice in Eating Disorder Recovery
It’s never too late to start.
When stand-up paddle boarding first grew popular in the ‘90s, it required a hard, fiberglass board that took up 12 feet or so of storage space and was a major hassle to actually get to the water. The only inflatable options on the market “felt soggy, like standing on a pickle,” says Kris Les, a merchandiser for L.L. Bean. That’s not the case anymore. “We’re at a point now where inflatable paddle boards are pretty good, they’re pretty darn rigid,” he says.
Construction updates over the past few years mean that you can get an inflatable stand-up paddle board (aka SUPs) that’s easy to store in your garage or stick in the trunk of your car without sacrificing much performance—especially if you’re a beginner who’s just looking to get out on the water and have a little fun. The hardest part? Picking a board.
To help you get on the water easily and often, we chatted with Les about what to look for in the best inflatable paddle boards and tested several ourselves to find the top 10 that you’ll want to take the plunge on.
Best inflatable paddle boards, at a glance:
- Best overall: iRocker Cruiser 10’6” 7.0, $599
- Best package: Isle Pioneer 3, $495
- Most compact: Red Paddle Co 10’0″ Ride, $1,299
- Most versatile: NRS Jukdo, $925
- Most portable: Pau Hana 10’ 10” Solo SUP Backcountry, $869
- Best hybrid: Bote LowRider Aero 10’6” Full Trax Navy Inflatable Paddle Board, $799
- Best for lounging: Pelican Inflatable Loungeboard, $499
- Most stylish: Thurso Waterwalker 126 10’6” All-Around SUP, $799
What to look for in an inflatable paddle board
When you’re on the hunt for the best inflatable paddle boards, Les says there are five key things to keep in mind.
Size
Although boards can range from just six feet long (for kids) to 16 or more (for group paddling), Les says most range between 10.5-12 feet, with 11-footers being the most popular. “That is the sweet spot,” he says. But smaller people might prefer a shorter board so it’s lighter and easier to transport, while bigger riders might prefer something longer to better support their weight. Width matters, too: A wider board (around 32 inches or more) will be more stable than a narrower one.
Shape
Paddle boarding evolved out of surfing, so most SUPs are shaped like surfboards, Les explains. “But as the sport evolved in the mid-2000s, everybody realized that, actually, a surfboard-shaped board doesn’t really plow through the water as efficiently as a board that has more of the hull in the water and is more pointy-shaped,” he says. These longer, narrower, pointy boards are called displacement paddle boards and are best for people who want to paddle fast and far in a straight line. A wide hull with a slight upward curve at the front, on the other hand, is called a planing board, and is more beginner-friendly—it won’t travel as quickly or easily but it’s more stable for leisurely floating around or doing some yoga.
Accessories
Remember: You need more than just a board to paddle board. Most inflatable boards today are sold as packages with pumps, carrying bags, a collapsible paddle, a leash (to strap the board to your ankle), and a small repair kit. Higher-quality accessories like an electric pump or carbon fiber paddle will mean a higher price point. Not all boards come as complete packages, however, so be sure to look up exactly what’s included to consider the full cost of what you’ll need to get on the water.
Storage space
Most paddle boards come with a variety of clips, velcro straps, and bungee cords on top so you can stash your flip flops, drinks, or fishing gear, or keep your paddle secure if you want to put it down for a while. Many also let you attach a seat so you can sit down and kayak. Think through how you plan to use your board to make sure it has what you’ll need.
Inflatable paddle board design
A paddle board you love the look of is a paddle board you’ll want to get on over and over again. “Color is really important,” Les admits. “This is your limited amount of recreational time that you get. When you’re standing on this thing, are you like, ‘Yeah, I really like looking at this’?” Hopefully, you are.
Shop 8 of the best inflatable paddle boards
Weight: 25 pounds
Length: 10’6”
Width: 34”
With a wide 34-inch base, this board offers a great mix of stability and maneuverability for beginners. It’s easy to get up from sitting or kneeling to standing (or even into downward dog—SUP yoga, anyone?) without worrying too much about your balance. And with a 435-pound weight capacity, it can accommodate multiple riders or pets, if yours are adventurous. The relatively short length does mean it’s meant for riders just 5’8” and under, although one of our 5’10” testers felt super comfortable on it out on the Charles River in Boston. Just know that this board is sold as a basic package with only the board, fins, repair kit, and leash, so you’ll need to bundle it with your preferred paddle, pump, and carrier for a complete setup.
Max capacity: 435 pounds
Pump: Not included
Carrier: Not included
Pros:
- Four color options
- Wide base for extra stability
- Easy to maneuver on the water
- Leash includes a spot to stash your keys
Cons:
- Pump, carrying case, and paddles are sold separately
- Recommended for riders 5’8” or under
Weight: 19 pounds
Length: 10’6”
Width: 34”
For a sturdy, beginner-friendly board that comes with all the accessories you need, look no further than Isle’s best-selling Pioneer 3. The board itself is extra sturdy and features a full-length traction pad so you can get a great grip on the deck. The Pioneer 3 comes with an adjustable carbon paddle, hand pump, touring fin, and six-foot leash, all packed in a wheeled backpack. Our testers were particularly impressed by how easy it is to fit multiple people (or dogs!) on board at one time. There’s also ample storage plus velcro loops for your paddle to store it when it’s not in use. All in all, the Isle Pioneer 3 is an excellent bang-for-your-buck deal worth a spot in your gear closet.
Max capacity: 285 pounds
Pump: Manual
Carrier: Roller backpack
Also available at Amazon.
Pros:
- Sturdy, grippy deck
- Ample storage and attachment space
- Lightweight and compact
- Includes tons of accessories
- Often on sale
Cons:
- Fin can be cumbersome to attach
Weight: 20 pounds
Length: 10’0”
Width: 29”
Smaller riders sometimes struggle to maneuver a long SUP into and out of the water. At just 10 feet long and only 20 pounds, this compact board makes things more manageable. Permanently-attached fins even make the setup one step shorter. Just know that the max rider weight is 165 pounds, so this is definitely designed for smaller, solo paddlers. And we definitely got a workout for all our little stabilizer and core muscles in order to stay upright on it—although it’s super stiff for a smooth ride, it’s just 29 inches wide, so it will challenge your balance.
Max capacity: 165 pounds
Pump: Manual
Carrier: Roller backpack
Pros:
- Lightweight and short for easy carrying
- Slices through the water quickly
- Comes with a great roller backpack with spots for everything you need
- Permanent fins are attached
Cons:
- Paddle sticks a bit when you try to take it apart
- 165-pound weight capacity
Weight: 21
Length: 10’0”
Width: 31″
If you’re looking for a do-it-all board, the NRS Jukdo has got you covered. Slightly wider than other boards on this list and incredibly hardy, the Jukdo is designed with tons of thoughtful touches (slightly raised deck rails, a die-cut EVA foam deck, and a grippy stomp pad for your back foot) to maximize rider balance on the water. Whether you’re looking to mindlessly float on for a few hours or want to endeavor on a sweaty, speedy paddle, it’s all you need for a day out in the sun.
“I’m super impressed with its versatility,” says our tester, W+G Commerce Editor, Francesca Krempa. “I’ve had first-timing SUP friends get on this thing and feel totally secure, while I’ve been able to take it out for longer, more intense tours and it kept up just fine. It’s a splurge, but it’s worth it if you’re getting into SUP and want a premium product that will be able to grow as you do.”
The Jukdo is currently available in three lengths: 10′, 10’8″, and 11′. We tested the 10-foot board and found it to be balanced and maneuverable, even for taller paddlers. But if you prefer a little more board under your feet, you may want to size up.
Max capacity: 190 pounds
Pump: Manual
Carrier: Backpack
Pros:
- Extra sturdy
- Designed for maximum balance
- Extra grippy deck with rear stomp pad
- Versatile
- Includes pump, fins, and repair kit
Cons:
- Pricey
- Paddle sold separately
Weight: 14.9 pounds
Length: 10’10”
Width: 30”
If you ever dreamed of hiking out to your favorite paddle-boarding destination, this super compact inflatable lets you pull it off. “The whole shtick is it’s an extra lightweight, extra small one that you can backpack remotely,” Les says. Once deflated, the Solo rolls up to about half the size of a typical inflatable SUP, and fits into a backpack about as big as your average sleeping bag. Even the paddle features a unique breakdown design that lets you roll it up for easy packing—however, some users report that makes it less efficient in the water.
Max capacity: 350 pounds
Pump: Manual
Carrier: Backpack
Pros:
- Lightweight and packs small enough to hike with
- Paddle rolls up for compact storage
- Backpack performs double duty as a dry bag
- Glides easily and quickly on water
Cons:
- Narrower 30-inch width means less stability
- Paddle has mixed reviews
- The short manual pump creates its own workout
Weight: 30 pounds
Length: 10′ 6″
Width: 36″
Some days, you’re in the mood to SUP. Others, you want to kick back and kayak. With the Bote LowRider Aero, you can do both. This sporty inflatable paddle board includes an inflatable kayak seat you can attach to your board and hybrid paddle for days you want to kayak.
It’s also loaded with features that make it a great paddling companion. The extra wide, 36-inch base is covered in a full-length deck pad for easy, comfortable grip, while the bungee cords at the front and back allows for maximum storage. It’s also compatible with the full line of Bote accessories (sold separately), including the brand’s Magnepod line of magnetized tumblers, coolers, and speakers that attach to the board and stay put while you paddle.
“This is the second Bote board I’ve tested and it’s my new favorite toy,” says Krempa. “I love that I can kick back and relax with the kayak seat on days when I don’t feel like standing. But most of all, I love how customizable Bote boards are—you can basically build out your board exactly how you want, which is key for anyone who spends a lot of time on the water.”
Max capacity: 300 pounds
Pump: Manual
Carrier: Rolling backpack
Pros:
- Hybrid model allows you to SUP or kayak
- Versatile
- Wide, sturdy base
- Can be customized with accessories
- Ample storage in the bow and stern for securing down dry bags and personal belongings
Cons:
- Heavy and slightly cumbersome when deflated inside the backpack
- Removable fins are tricky to get in and out
Weight: 19.5 pounds
Length: 9’
Width: 39”
Not everyone gets a paddle board to work out. Sometimes, you just wanna glide and chill, y’know? The Pelican Loungeboard is designed for just that. With a 400-pound capacity, this board lets a friend join you on top, or you can take advantage of the velcro connectors that attach multiple boards together to create your own floating island. At 39 inches wide, this big boy is ultra-stable. And the entire deck is covered in padded grip so you can really use the whole space if you’re riding tandem or want to do some yoga. Just know that it’s a tank to move: You don’t want to be trying to get anywhere fast on the water on this. We found it’s not the most efficient to paddle on and is particularly difficult to move in a straight line.
Max capacity: 400 pounds
Pump: Manual
Carrier: Over-the-shoulder duffle
Also available at REI.
Pros:
- Super stable
- High weight capacity
- Easily attaches to other Loungeboards
- Exceptionally quick to deflate
- Lightweight
- Perfect for low-key float days
Cons:
- Moves slowly
- Doesn’t track well in a straight line—not designed for touring
Weight: 23.7 pounds
Length: 10’6”
Width: 31”
Our testers found Thurso’s flagship all-around board tracked well in a straight line, and was easy to manage even when the water got a little choppy. But it did take a little work to balance when the conditions weren’t 100 percent calm. With an electric pump and multiple handles, setup and getting it into the water was a breeze overall, though it took some elbow grease to get the center fin on and off. We also enjoyed loading it up with everything we needed for longer adventures—there are multiple bungees on the nose and tail to stash your stuff, and holders on the side keep your paddle secure if you want to hop off for a dip.
Max capacity: 300 pounds (but 130-180 is recommended)
Pump: Electric
Carrier: Roller backpack
Pros:
- Fun design gives classic surf vibes
- Includes rechargeable electric pump that inflates and deflates the board quickly
- Comes with a wheeled duffle bag for easy transport
- Features bungees on nose and tail to tie down cargo, plus paddle holders on the side
Cons:
- Requires some work to balance
- A little tricky to get fins on and off
How to Sell UX Research with Two Simple Questions
Do you find yourself designing screens with only a vague idea of how the things on the screen relate to the things elsewhere in the system? Do you leave stakeholder meetings with unclear directives that often seem to contradict previous conversations? You know a better understanding of user needs would help the team get clear on what you are actually trying to accomplish, but time and budget for research is tight. When it comes to asking for more direct contact with your users, you might feel like poor Oliver Twist, timidly asking, “Please, sir, I want some more.”
Here’s the trick. You need to get stakeholders themselves to identify high-risk assumptions and hidden complexity, so that they become just as motivated as you to get answers from users. Basically, you need to make them think it’s their idea.
In this article, I’ll show you how to collaboratively expose misalignment and gaps in the team’s shared understanding by bringing the team together around two simple questions:
- What are the objects?
- What are the relationships between those objects?
A gauntlet between research and screen design
These two questions align to the first two steps of the ORCA process, which might become your new best friend when it comes to reducing guesswork. Wait, what’s ORCA?! Glad you asked.
ORCA stands for Objects, Relationships, CTAs, and Attributes, and it outlines a process for creating solid object-oriented user experiences. Object-oriented UX is my design philosophy. ORCA is an iterative methodology for synthesizing user research into an elegant structural foundation to support screen and interaction design. OOUX and ORCA have made my work as a UX designer more collaborative, effective, efficient, fun, strategic, and meaningful.
The ORCA process has four iterative rounds and a whopping fifteen steps. In each round we get more clarity on our Os, Rs, Cs, and As.
I sometimes say that ORCA is a “garbage in, garbage out” process. To ensure that the testable prototype produced in the final round actually tests well, the process needs to be fed by good research. But if you don’t have a ton of research, the beginning of the ORCA process serves another purpose: it helps you sell the need for research.
In other words, the ORCA process serves as a gauntlet between research and design. With good research, you can gracefully ride the killer whale from research into design. But without good research, the process effectively spits you back into research and with a cache of specific open questions.
Getting in the same curiosity-boat
What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.
Mark Twain
The first two steps of the ORCA process—Object Discovery and Relationship Discovery—shine a spotlight on the dark, dusty corners of your team’s misalignments and any inherent complexity that’s been swept under the rug. It begins to expose what this classic comic so beautifully illustrates:
This is one reason why so many UX designers are frustrated in their job and why many projects fail. And this is also why we often can’t sell research: every decision-maker is confident in their own mental picture.
Once we expose hidden fuzzy patches in each picture and the differences between them all, the case for user research makes itself.
But how we do this is important. However much we might want to, we can’t just tell everyone, “YOU ARE WRONG!” Instead, we need to facilitate and guide our team members to self-identify holes in their picture. When stakeholders take ownership of assumptions and gaps in understanding, BAM! Suddenly, UX research is not such a hard sell, and everyone is aboard the same curiosity-boat.
Say your users are doctors. And you have no idea how doctors use the system you are tasked with redesigning.
You might try to sell research by honestly saying: “We need to understand doctors better! What are their pain points? How do they use the current app?” But here’s the problem with that. Those questions are vague, and the answers to them don’t feel acutely actionable.
Instead, you want your stakeholders themselves to ask super-specific questions. This is more like the kind of conversation you need to facilitate. Let’s listen in:
“Wait a sec, how often do doctors share patients? Does a patient in this system have primary and secondary doctors?”
“Can a patient even have more than one primary doctor?”
“Is it a ‘primary doctor’ or just a ‘primary caregiver’… Can’t that role be a nurse practitioner?”
“No, caregivers are something else… That’s the patient’s family contacts, right?”
“So are caregivers in scope for this redesign?”
“Yeah, because if a caregiver is present at an appointment, the doctor needs to note that. Like, tag the caregiver on the note… Or on the appointment?”
Now we are getting somewhere. Do you see how powerful it can be getting stakeholders to debate these questions themselves? The diabolical goal here is to shake their confidence—gently and diplomatically.
When these kinds of questions bubble up collaboratively and come directly from the mouths of your stakeholders and decision-makers, suddenly, designing screens without knowing the answers to these questions seems incredibly risky, even silly.
If we create software without understanding the real-world information environment of our users, we will likely create software that does not align to the real-world information environment of our users. And this will, hands down, result in a more confusing, more complex, and less intuitive software product.
The two questions
But how do we get to these kinds of meaty questions diplomatically, efficiently, collaboratively, and reliably?
We can do this by starting with those two big questions that align to the first two steps of the ORCA process:
- What are the objects?
- What are the relationships between those objects?
In practice, getting to these answers is easier said than done. I’m going to show you how these two simple questions can provide the outline for an Object Definition Workshop. During this workshop, these “seed” questions will blossom into dozens of specific questions and shine a spotlight on the need for more user research.
Prep work: Noun foraging
In the next section, I’ll show you how to run an Object Definition Workshop with your stakeholders (and entire cross-functional team, hopefully). But first, you need to do some prep work.
Basically, look for nouns that are particular to the business or industry of your project, and do it across at least a few sources. I call this noun foraging.
Here are just a few great noun foraging sources:
- the product’s marketing site
- the product’s competitors’ marketing sites (competitive analysis, anyone?)
- the existing product (look at labels!)
- user interview transcripts
- notes from stakeholder interviews or vision docs from stakeholders
Put your detective hat on, my dear Watson. Get resourceful and leverage what you have. If all you have is a marketing website, some screenshots of the existing legacy system, and access to customer service chat logs, then use those.
As you peruse these sources, watch for the nouns that are used over and over again, and start listing them (preferably on blue sticky notes if you’ll be creating an object map later!).
You’ll want to focus on nouns that might represent objects in your system. If you are having trouble determining if a noun might be object-worthy, remember the acronym SIP and test for:
- Structure
- Instances
- Purpose
Think of a library app, for example. Is “book” an object?
Structure: can you think of a few attributes for this potential object? Title, author, publish date… Yep, it has structure. Check!
Instance: what are some examples of this potential “book” object? Can you name a few? The Alchemist, Ready Player One, Everybody Poops… OK, check!
Purpose: why is this object important to the users and business? Well, “book” is what our library client is providing to people and books are why people come to the library… Check, check, check!
As you are noun foraging, focus on capturing the nouns that have SIP. Avoid capturing components like dropdowns, checkboxes, and calendar pickers—your UX system is not your design system! Components are just the packaging for objects—they are a means to an end. No one is coming to your digital place to play with your dropdown! They are coming for the VALUABLE THINGS and what they can do with them. Those things, or objects, are what we are trying to identify.
Let’s say we work for a startup disrupting the email experience. This is how I’d start my noun foraging.
First I’d look at my own email client, which happens to be Gmail. I’d then look at Outlook and the new HEY email. I’d look at Yahoo, Hotmail…I’d even look at Slack and Basecamp and other so-called “email replacers.” I’d read some articles, reviews, and forum threads where people are complaining about email. While doing all this, I would look for and write down the nouns.
(Before moving on, feel free to go noun foraging for this hypothetical product, too, and then scroll down to see how much our lists match up. Just don’t get lost in your own emails! Come back to me!)
Drumroll, please…
Here are a few nouns I came up with during my noun foraging:
- email message
- thread
- contact
- client
- rule/automation
- email address that is not a contact?
- contact groups
- attachment
- Google doc file / other integrated file
- newsletter? (HEY treats this differently)
- saved responses and templates
Scan your list of nouns and pick out words that you are completely clueless about. In our email example, it might be client or automation. Do as much homework as you can before your session with stakeholders: google what’s googleable. But other terms might be so specific to the product or domain that you need to have a conversation about them.
Aside: here are some real nouns foraged during my own past project work that I needed my stakeholders to help me understand:
- Record Locator
- Incentive Home
- Augmented Line Item
- Curriculum-Based Measurement Probe
This is really all you need to prepare for the workshop session: a list of nouns that represent potential objects and a short list of nouns that need to be defined further.
Facilitate an Object Definition Workshop
You could actually start your workshop with noun foraging—this activity can be done collaboratively. If you have five people in the room, pick five sources, assign one to every person, and give everyone ten minutes to find the objects within their source. When the time’s up, come together and find the overlap. Affinity mapping is your friend here!
If your team is short on time and might be reluctant to do this kind of grunt work (which is usually the case) do your own noun foraging beforehand, but be prepared to show your work. I love presenting screenshots of documents and screens with all the nouns already highlighted. Bring the artifacts of your process, and start the workshop with a five-minute overview of your noun foraging journey.
HOT TIP: before jumping into the workshop, frame the conversation as a requirements-gathering session to help you better understand the scope and details of the system. You don’t need to let them know that you’re looking for gaps in the team’s understanding so that you can prove the need for more user research—that will be our little secret. Instead, go into the session optimistically, as if your knowledgeable stakeholders and PMs and biz folks already have all the answers.
Then, let the question whack-a-mole commence.
1. What is this thing?
Want to have some real fun? At the beginning of your session, ask stakeholders to privately write definitions for the handful of obscure nouns you might be uncertain about. Then, have everyone show their cards at the same time and see if you get different definitions (you will). This is gold for exposing misalignment and starting great conversations.
As your discussion unfolds, capture any agreed-upon definitions. And when uncertainty emerges, quietly (but visibly) start an “open questions” parking lot. 😉
After definitions solidify, here’s a great follow-up:
2. Do our users know what these things are? What do users call this thing?
Stakeholder 1: They probably call email clients “apps.” But I’m not sure.
Stakeholder 2: Automations are often called “workflows,” I think. Or, maybe users think workflows are something different.
If a more user-friendly term emerges, ask the group if they can agree to use only that term moving forward. This way, the team can better align to the users’ language and mindset.
OK, moving on.
If you have two or more objects that seem to overlap in purpose, ask one of these questions:
3. Are these the same thing? Or are these different? If they are not the same, how are they different?
You: Is a saved response the same as a template?
Stakeholder 1: Yes! Definitely.
Stakeholder 2: I don’t think so… A saved response is text with links and variables, but a template is more about the look and feel, like default fonts, colors, and placeholder images.
Continue to build out your growing glossary of objects. And continue to capture areas of uncertainty in your “open questions” parking lot.
If you successfully determine that two similar things are, in fact, different, here’s your next follow-up question:
4. What’s the relationship between these objects?
You: Are saved responses and templates related in any way?
Stakeholder 3: Yeah, a template can be applied to a saved response.
You, always with the follow-ups: When is the template applied to a saved response? Does that happen when the user is constructing the saved response? Or when they apply the saved response to an email? How does that actually work?
Listen. Capture uncertainty. Once the list of “open questions” grows to a critical mass, pause to start assigning questions to groups or individuals. Some questions might be for the dev team (hopefully at least one developer is in the room with you). One question might be specifically for someone who couldn’t make it to the workshop. And many questions will need to be labeled “user.”
Do you see how we are building up to our UXR sales pitch?
5. Is this object in scope?
Your next question narrows the team’s focus toward what’s most important to your users. You can simply ask, “Are saved responses in scope for our first release?,” but I’ve got a better, more devious strategy.
By now, you should have a list of clearly defined objects. Ask participants to sort these objects from most to least important, either in small breakout groups or individually. Then, like you did with the definitions, have everyone reveal their sort order at once. Surprisingly—or not so surprisingly—it’s not unusual for the VP to rank something like “saved responses” as #2 while everyone else puts it at the bottom of the list. Try not to look too smug as you inevitably expose more misalignment.
I did this for a startup a few years ago. We posted the three groups’ wildly different sort orders on the whiteboard.
The CEO stood back, looked at it, and said, “This is why we haven’t been able to move forward in two years.”
Admittedly, it’s tragic to hear that, but as a professional, it feels pretty awesome to be the one who facilitated a watershed realization.
Once you have a good idea of in-scope, clearly defined things, this is when you move on to doing more relationship mapping.
6. Create a visual representation of the objects’ relationships
We’ve already done a bit of this while trying to determine if two things are different, but this time, ask the team about every potential relationship. For each object, ask how it relates to all the other objects. In what ways are the objects connected? To visualize all the connections, pull out your trusty boxes-and-arrows technique. Here, we are connecting our objects with verbs. I like to keep my verbs to simple “has a” and “has many” statements.
This system modeling activity brings up all sorts of new questions:
- Can a saved response have attachments?
- Can a saved response use a template? If so, if an email uses a saved response with a template, can the user override that template?
- Do users want to see all the emails they sent that included a particular attachment? For example, “show me all the emails I sent with ProfessionalImage.jpg attached. I’ve changed my professional photo and I want to alert everyone to update it.”
Solid answers might emerge directly from the workshop participants. Great! Capture that new shared understanding. But when uncertainty surfaces, continue to add questions to your growing parking lot.
Light the fuse
You’ve positioned the explosives all along the floodgates. Now you simply have to light the fuse and BOOM. Watch the buy-in for user research flooooow.
Before your workshop wraps up, have the group reflect on the list of open questions. Make plans for getting answers internally, then focus on the questions that need to be brought before users.
Here’s your final step. Take those questions you’ve compiled for user research and discuss the level of risk associated with NOT answering them. Ask, “if we design without an answer to this question, if we make up our own answer and we are wrong, how bad might that turn out?”
With this methodology, we are cornering our decision-makers into advocating for user research as they themselves label questions as high-risk. Sorry, not sorry.
Now is your moment of truth. With everyone in the room, ask for a reasonable budget of time and money to conduct 6–8 user interviews focused specifically on these questions.
HOT TIP: if you are new to UX research, please note that you’ll likely need to rephrase the questions that came up during the workshop before you present them to users. Make sure your questions are open-ended and don’t lead the user into any default answers.
Final words: Hold the screen design!
Seriously, if at all possible, do not ever design screens again without first answering these fundamental questions: what are the objects and how do they relate?
I promise you this: if you can secure a shared understanding between the business, design, and development teams before you start designing screens, you will have less heartache and save more time and money, and (it almost feels like a bonus at this point!) users will be more receptive to what you put out into the world.
I sincerely hope this helps you win time and budget to go talk to your users and gain clarity on what you are designing before you start building screens. If you find success using noun foraging and the Object Definition Workshop, there’s more where that came from in the rest of the ORCA process, which will help prevent even more late-in-the-game scope tugs-of-war and strategy pivots.
All the best of luck! Now go sell research!
Breaking Out of the Box
CSS is about styling boxes. In fact, the whole web is made of boxes, from the browser viewport to elements on a page. But every once in a while a new feature comes along that makes us rethink our design approach.
Round displays, for example, make it fun to play with circular clip areas. Mobile screen notches and virtual keyboards offer challenges to best organize content that stays clear of them. And dual screen or foldable devices make us rethink how to best use available space in a number of different device postures.
These recent evolutions of the web platform made it both more challenging and more interesting to design products. They’re great opportunities for us to break out of our rectangular boxes.
I’d like to talk about a new feature similar to the above: the Window Controls Overlay for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).
Progressive Web Apps are blurring the lines between apps and websites. They combine the best of both worlds. On one hand, they’re stable, linkable, searchable, and responsive just like websites. On the other hand, they provide additional powerful capabilities, work offline, and read files just like native apps.
As a design surface, PWAs are really interesting because they challenge us to think about what mixing web and device-native user interfaces can be. On desktop devices in particular, we have more than 40 years of history telling us what applications should look like, and it can be hard to break out of this mental model.
At the end of the day though, PWAs on desktop are constrained to the window they appear in: a rectangle with a title bar at the top.
Here’s what a typical desktop PWA app looks like:
Sure, as the author of a PWA, you get to choose the color of the title bar (using the Web Application Manifest theme_color property), but that’s about it.
What if we could think outside this box, and reclaim the real estate of the app’s entire window? Doing so would give us a chance to make our apps more beautiful and feel more integrated in the operating system.
This is exactly what the Window Controls Overlay offers. This new PWA functionality makes it possible to take advantage of the full surface area of the app, including where the title bar normally appears.
About the title bar and window controls
Let’s start with an explanation of what the title bar and window controls are.
The title bar is the area displayed at the top of an app window, which usually contains the app’s name. Window controls are the affordances, or buttons, that make it possible to minimize, maximize, or close the app’s window, and are also displayed at the top.
Window Controls Overlay removes the physical constraint of the title bar and window controls areas. It frees up the full height of the app window, enabling the title bar and window control buttons to be overlaid on top of the application’s web content.
If you are reading this article on a desktop computer, take a quick look at other apps. Chances are they’re already doing something similar to this. In fact, the very web browser you are using to read this uses the top area to display tabs.
Spotify displays album artwork all the way to the top edge of the application window.
Microsoft Word uses the available title bar space to display the auto-save and search functionalities, and more.
The whole point of this feature is to allow you to make use of this space with your own content while providing a way to account for the window control buttons. And it enables you to offer this modified experience on a range of platforms while not adversely affecting the experience on browsers or devices that don’t support Window Controls Overlay. After all, PWAs are all about progressive enhancement, so this feature is a chance to enhance your app to use this extra space when it’s available.
Let’s use the feature
For the rest of this article, we’ll be working on a demo app to learn more about using the feature.
The demo app is called 1DIV. It’s a simple CSS playground where users can create designs using CSS and a single HTML element.
The app has two pages. The first lists the existing CSS designs you’ve created:
The second page enables you to create and edit CSS designs:
Since I’ve added a simple web manifest and service worker, we can install the app as a PWA on desktop. Here is what it looks like on macOS:
And on Windows:
Our app is looking good, but the white title bar in the first page is wasted space. In the second page, it would be really nice if the design area went all the way to the top of the app window.
Let’s use the Window Controls Overlay feature to improve this.
Enabling Window Controls Overlay
The feature is still experimental at the moment. To try it, you need to enable it in one of the supported browsers.
As of now, it has been implemented in Chromium, as a collaboration between Microsoft and Google. We can therefore use it in Chrome or Edge by going to the internal about://flags page, and enabling the Desktop PWA Window Controls Overlay flag.
Using Window Controls Overlay
To use the feature, we need to add the following display_override member to our web app’s manifest file:
{
"name": "1DIV",
"description": "1DIV is a mini CSS playground",
"lang": "en-US",
"start_url": "/",
"theme_color": "#ffffff",
"background_color": "#ffffff",
"display_override": [
"window-controls-overlay"
],
"icons": [
...
]
}
On the surface, the feature is really simple to use. This manifest change is the only thing we need to make the title bar disappear and turn the window controls into an overlay.
However, to provide a great experience for all users regardless of what device or browser they use, and to make the most of the title bar area in our design, we’ll need a bit of CSS and JavaScript code.
Here is what the app looks like now:
The title bar is gone, which is what we wanted, but our logo, search field, and NEW button are partially covered by the window controls because now our layout starts at the top of the window.
It’s similar on Windows, with the difference that the close, maximize, and minimize buttons appear on the right side, grouped together with the PWA control buttons:
Using CSS to keep clear of the window controls
Along with the feature, new CSS environment variables have been introduced:
titlebar-area-xtitlebar-area-ytitlebar-area-widthtitlebar-area-height
You use these variables with the CSS env() function to position your content where the title bar would have been while ensuring it won’t overlap with the window controls. In our case, we’ll use two of the variables to position our header, which contains the logo, search bar, and NEW button.
header {
position: absolute;
left: env(titlebar-area-x, 0);
width: env(titlebar-area-width, 100%);
height: var(--toolbar-height);
}
The titlebar-area-x variable gives us the distance from the left of the viewport to where the title bar would appear, and titlebar-area-width is its width. (Remember, this is not equivalent to the width of the entire viewport, just the title bar portion, which as noted earlier, doesn’t include the window controls.)
By doing this, we make sure our content remains fully visible. We’re also defining fallback values (the second parameter in the env() function) for when the variables are not defined (such as on non-supporting browsers, or when the Windows Control Overlay feature is disabled).
Now our header adapts to its surroundings, and it doesn’t feel like the window control buttons have been added as an afterthought. The app looks a lot more like a native app.
Changing the window controls background color so it blends in
Now let’s take a closer look at our second page: the CSS playground editor.
Not great. Our CSS demo area does go all the way to the top, which is what we wanted, but the way the window controls appear as white rectangles on top of it is quite jarring.
We can fix this by changing the app’s theme color. There are a couple of ways to define it:
- PWAs can define a theme color in the web app manifest file using the theme_color manifest member. This color is then used by the OS in different ways. On desktop platforms, it is used to provide a background color to the title bar and window controls.
- Websites can use the theme-color meta tag as well. It’s used by browsers to customize the color of the UI around the web page. For PWAs, this color can override the manifest
theme_color.
In our case, we can set the manifest theme_color to white to provide the right default color for our app. The OS will read this color value when the app is installed and use it to make the window controls background color white. This color works great for our main page with the list of demos.
The theme-color meta tag can be changed at runtime, using JavaScript. So we can do that to override the white with the right demo background color when one is opened.
Here is the function we’ll use:
function themeWindow(bgColor) {
document.querySelector("meta[name=theme-color]").setAttribute('content', bgColor);
}With this in place, we can imagine how using color and CSS transitions can produce a smooth change from the list page to the demo page, and enable the window control buttons to blend in with the rest of the app’s interface.
Dragging the window
Now, getting rid of the title bar entirely does have an important accessibility consequence: it’s much more difficult to move the application window around.
The title bar provides a sizable area for users to click and drag, but by using the Window Controls Overlay feature, this area becomes limited to where the control buttons are, and users have to very precisely aim between these buttons to move the window.
Fortunately, this can be fixed using CSS with the app-region property. This property is, for now, only supported in Chromium-based browsers and needs the -webkit- vendor prefix.
To make any element of the app become a dragging target for the window, we can use the following:
-webkit-app-region: drag;
It is also possible to explicitly make an element non-draggable:
-webkit-app-region: no-drag;
These options can be useful for us. We can make the entire header a dragging target, but make the search field and NEW button within it non-draggable so they can still be used as normal.
However, because the editor page doesn’t display the header, users wouldn’t be able to drag the window while editing code. So let’s use a different approach. We’ll create another element before our header, also absolutely positioned, and dedicated to dragging the window.
... .drag {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
width: 100%;
height: env(titlebar-area-height, 0);
-webkit-app-region: drag;
}With the above code, we’re making the draggable area span the entire viewport width, and using the titlebar-area-height variable to make it as tall as what the title bar would have been. This way, our draggable area is aligned with the window control buttons as shown below.
And, now, to make sure our search field and button remain usable:
header .search,
header .new {
-webkit-app-region: no-drag;
}With the above code, users can click and drag where the title bar used to be. It is an area that users expect to be able to use to move windows on desktop, and we’re not breaking this expectation, which is good.
Adapting to window resize
It may be useful for an app to know both whether the window controls overlay is visible and when its size changes. In our case, if the user made the window very narrow, there wouldn’t be enough space for the search field, logo, and button to fit, so we’d want to push them down a bit.
The Window Controls Overlay feature comes with a JavaScript API we can use to do this: navigator.windowControlsOverlay.
The API provides three interesting things:
navigator.windowControlsOverlay.visiblelets us know whether the overlay is visible.navigator.windowControlsOverlay.getBoundingClientRect()lets us know the position and size of the title bar area.navigator.windowControlsOverlay.ongeometrychangelets us know when the size or visibility changes.
Let’s use this to be aware of the size of the title bar area and move the header down if it’s too narrow.
if (navigator.windowControlsOverlay) {
navigator.windowControlsOverlay.addEventListener('geometrychange', () => {
const { width } = navigator.windowControlsOverlay.getBoundingClientRect();
document.body.classList.toggle('narrow', width < 250);
});
}In the example above, we set the narrow class on the body of the app if the title bar area is narrower than 250px. We could do something similar with a media query, but using the windowControlsOverlay API has two advantages for our use case:
- It’s only fired when the feature is supported and used; we don’t want to adapt the design otherwise.
- We get the size of the title bar area across operating systems, which is great because the size of the window controls is different on Mac and Windows. Using a media query wouldn’t make it possible for us to know exactly how much space remains.
.narrow header {
top: env(titlebar-area-height, 0);
left: 0;
width: 100%;
}Using the above CSS code, we can move our header down to stay clear of the window control buttons when the window is too narrow, and move the thumbnails down accordingly.
Thirty pixels of exciting design opportunities
Using the Window Controls Overlay feature, we were able to take our simple demo app and turn it into something that feels so much more integrated on desktop devices. Something that reaches out of the usual window constraints and provides a custom experience for its users.
In reality, this feature only gives us about 30 pixels of extra room and comes with challenges on how to deal with the window controls. And yet, this extra room and those challenges can be turned into exciting design opportunities.
More devices of all shapes and forms get invented all the time, and the web keeps on evolving to adapt to them. New features get added to the web platform to allow us, web authors, to integrate more and more deeply with those devices. From watches or foldable devices to desktop computers, we need to evolve our design approach for the web. Building for the web now lets us think outside the rectangular box.
So let’s embrace this. Let’s use the standard technologies already at our disposal, and experiment with new ideas to provide tailored experiences for all devices, all from a single codebase!
If you get a chance to try the Window Controls Overlay feature and have feedback about it, you can open issues on the spec’s repository. It’s still early in the development of this feature, and you can help make it even better. Or, you can take a look at the feature’s existing documentation, or this demo app and its source code.
Designers, (Re)define Success First
About two and a half years ago, I introduced the idea of daily ethical design. It was born out of my frustration with the many obstacles to achieving design that’s usable and equitable; protects people’s privacy, agency, and focus; benefits society; and restores nature. I argued that we need to overcome the inconveniences that prevent us from acting ethically and that we need to elevate design ethics to a more practical level by structurally integrating it into our daily work, processes, and tools.
Unfortunately, we’re still very far from this ideal.
At the time, I didn’t know yet how to structurally integrate ethics. Yes, I had found some tools that had worked for me in previous projects, such as using checklists, assumption tracking, and “dark reality” sessions, but I didn’t manage to apply those in every project. I was still struggling for time and support, and at best I had only partially achieved a higher (moral) quality of design—which is far from my definition of structurally integrated.
I decided to dig deeper for the root causes in business that prevent us from practicing daily ethical design. Now, after much research and experimentation, I believe that I’ve found the key that will let us structurally integrate ethics. And it’s surprisingly simple! But first we need to zoom out to get a better understanding of what we’re up against.
Influence the system
Sadly, we’re trapped in a capitalistic system that reinforces consumerism and inequality, and it’s obsessed with the fantasy of endless growth. Sea levels, temperatures, and our demand for energy continue to rise unchallenged, while the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Shareholders expect ever-higher returns on their investments, and companies feel forced to set short-term objectives that reflect this. Over the last decades, those objectives have twisted our well-intended human-centered mindset into a powerful machine that promotes ever-higher levels of consumption. When we’re working for an organization that pursues “double-digit growth” or “aggressive sales targets” (which is 99 percent of us), that’s very hard to resist while remaining human friendly. Even with our best intentions, and even though we like to say that we create solutions for people, we’re a part of the problem.
What can we do to change this?
We can start by acting on the right level of the system. Donella H. Meadows, a system thinker, once listed ways to influence a system in order of effectiveness. When you apply these to design, you get:
- At the lowest level of effectiveness, you can affect numbers such as usability scores or the number of design critiques. But none of that will change the direction of a company.
- Similarly, affecting buffers (such as team budgets), stocks (such as the number of designers), flows (such as the number of new hires), and delays (such as the time that it takes to hear about the effect of design) won’t significantly affect a company.
- Focusing instead on feedback loops such as management control, employee recognition, or design-system investments can help a company become better at achieving its objectives. But that doesn’t change the objectives themselves, which means that the organization will still work against your ethical-design ideals.
- The next level, information flows, is what most ethical-design initiatives focus on now: the exchange of ethical methods, toolkits, articles, conferences, workshops, and so on. This is also where ethical design has remained mostly theoretical. We’ve been focusing on the wrong level of the system all this time.
- Take rules, for example—they beat knowledge every time. There can be widely accepted rules, such as how finance works, or a scrum team’s definition of done. But ethical design can also be smothered by unofficial rules meant to maintain profits, often revealed through comments such as “the client didn’t ask for it” or “don’t make it too big.”
- Changing the rules without holding official power is very hard. That’s why the next level is so influential: self-organization. Experimentation, bottom-up initiatives, passion projects, self-steering teams—all of these are examples of self-organization that improve the resilience and creativity of a company. It’s exactly this diversity of viewpoints that’s needed to structurally tackle big systemic issues like consumerism, wealth inequality, and climate change.
- Yet even stronger than self-organization are objectives and metrics. Our companies want to make more money, which means that everything and everyone in the company does their best to… make the company more money. And once I realized that profit is nothing more than a measurement, I understood how crucial a very specific, defined metric can be toward pushing a company in a certain direction.
The takeaway? If we truly want to incorporate ethics into our daily design practice, we must first change the measurable objectives of the company we work for, from the bottom up.
Redefine success
Traditionally, we consider a product or service successful if it’s desirable to humans, technologically feasible, and financially viable. You tend to see these represented as equals; if you type the three words in a search engine, you’ll find diagrams of three equally sized, evenly arranged circles.
But in our hearts, we all know that the three dimensions aren’t equally weighted: it’s viability that ultimately controls whether a product will go live. So a more realistic representation might look like this:
Desirability and feasibility are the means; viability is the goal. Companies—outside of nonprofits and charities—exist to make money.
A genuinely purpose-driven company would try to reverse this dynamic: it would recognize finance for what it was intended for: a means. So both feasibility and viability are means to achieve what the company set out to achieve. It makes intuitive sense: to achieve most anything, you need resources, people, and money. (Fun fact: the Italian language knows no difference between feasibility and viability; both are simply fattibilità.)
But simply swapping viable for desirable isn’t enough to achieve an ethical outcome. Desirability is still linked to consumerism because the associated activities aim to identify what people want—whether it’s good for them or not. Desirability objectives, such as user satisfaction or conversion, don’t consider whether a product is healthy for people. They don’t prevent us from creating products that distract or manipulate people or stop us from contributing to society’s wealth inequality. They’re unsuitable for establishing a healthy balance with nature.
There’s a fourth dimension of success that’s missing: our designs also need to be ethical in the effect that they have on the world.
This is hardly a new idea. Many similar models exist, some calling the fourth dimension accountability, integrity, or responsibility. What I’ve never seen before, however, is the necessary step that comes after: to influence the system as designers and to make ethical design more practical, we must create objectives for ethical design that are achievable and inspirational. There’s no one way to do this because it highly depends on your culture, values, and industry. But I’ll give you the version that I developed with a group of colleagues at a design agency. Consider it a template to get started.
Pursue well-being, equity, and sustainability
We created objectives that address design’s effect on three levels: individual, societal, and global.
An objective on the individual level tells us what success is beyond the typical focus of usability and satisfaction—instead considering matters such as how much time and attention is required from users. We pursued well-being:
We create products and services that allow for people’s health and happiness. Our solutions are calm, transparent, nonaddictive, and nonmisleading. We respect our users’ time, attention, and privacy, and help them make healthy and respectful choices.
An objective on the societal level forces us to consider our impact beyond just the user, widening our attention to the economy, communities, and other indirect stakeholders. We called this objective equity:
We create products and services that have a positive social impact. We consider economic equality, racial justice, and the inclusivity and diversity of people as teams, users, and customer segments. We listen to local culture, communities, and those we affect.
Finally, the objective on the global level aims to ensure that we remain in balance with the only home we have as humanity. Referring to it simply as sustainability, our definition was:
We create products and services that reward sufficiency and reusability. Our solutions support the circular economy: we create value from waste, repurpose products, and prioritize sustainable choices. We deliver functionality instead of ownership, and we limit energy use.
In short, ethical design (to us) meant achieving wellbeing for each user and an equitable value distribution within society through a design that can be sustained by our living planet. When we introduced these objectives in the company, for many colleagues, design ethics and responsible design suddenly became tangible and achievable through practical—and even familiar—actions.
Measure impact
But defining these objectives still isn’t enough. What truly caught the attention of senior management was the fact that we created a way to measure every design project’s well-being, equity, and sustainability.
This overview lists example metrics that you can use as you pursue well-being, equity, and sustainability:
There’s a lot of power in measurement. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets done. Donella Meadows once shared this example:
“If the desired system state is national security, and that is defined as the amount of money spent on the military, the system will produce military spending. It may or may not produce national security.”
This phenomenon explains why desirability is a poor indicator of success: it’s typically defined as the increase in customer satisfaction, session length, frequency of use, conversion rate, churn rate, download rate, and so on. But none of these metrics increase the health of people, communities, or ecosystems. What if instead we measured success through metrics for (digital) well-being, such as (reduced) screen time or software energy consumption?
There’s another important message here. Even if we set an objective to build a calm interface, if we were to choose the wrong metric for calmness—say, the number of interface elements—we could still end up with a screen that induces anxiety. Choosing the wrong metric can completely undo good intentions.
Additionally, choosing the right metric is enormously helpful in focusing the design team. Once you go through the exercise of choosing metrics for our objectives, you’re forced to consider what success looks like concretely and how you can prove that you’ve reached your ethical objectives. It also forces you to consider what we as designers have control over: what can I include in my design or change in my process that will lead to the right type of success? The answer to this question brings a lot of clarity and focus.
And finally, it’s good to remember that traditional businesses run on measurements, and managers love to spend much time discussing charts (ideally hockey-stick shaped)—especially if they concern profit, the one-above-all of metrics. For good or ill, to improve the system, to have a serious discussion about ethical design with managers, we’ll need to speak that business language.
Practice daily ethical design
Once you’ve defined your objectives and you have a reasonable idea of the potential metrics for your design project, only then do you have a chance to structurally practice ethical design. It “simply” becomes a matter of using your creativity and choosing from all the knowledge and toolkits already available to you.
I think this is quite exciting! It opens a whole new set of challenges and considerations for the design process. Should you go with that energy-consuming video or would a simple illustration be enough? Which typeface is the most calm and inclusive? Which new tools and methods do you use? When is the website’s end of life? How can you provide the same service while requiring less attention from users? How do you make sure that those who are affected by decisions are there when those decisions are made? How can you measure our effects?
The redefinition of success will completely change what it means to do good design.
There is, however, a final piece of the puzzle that’s missing: convincing your client, product owner, or manager to be mindful of well-being, equity, and sustainability. For this, it’s essential to engage stakeholders in a dedicated kickoff session.
Kick it off or fall back to status quo
The kickoff is the most important meeting that can be so easy to forget to include. It consists of two major phases: 1) the alignment of expectations, and 2) the definition of success.
In the first phase, the entire (design) team goes over the project brief and meets with all the relevant stakeholders. Everyone gets to know one another and express their expectations on the outcome and their contributions to achieving it. Assumptions are raised and discussed. The aim is to get on the same level of understanding and to in turn avoid preventable miscommunications and surprises later in the project.
For example, for a recent freelance project that aimed to design a digital platform that facilitates US student advisors’ documentation and communication, we conducted an online kickoff with the client, a subject-matter expert, and two other designers. We used a combination of canvases on Miro: one with questions from “Manual of Me” (to get to know each other), a Team Canvas (to express expectations), and a version of the Project Canvas to align on scope, timeline, and other practical matters.
The above is the traditional purpose of a kickoff. But just as important as expressing expectations is agreeing on what success means for the project—in terms of desirability, viability, feasibility, and ethics. What are the objectives in each dimension?
Agreement on what success means at such an early stage is crucial because you can rely on it for the remainder of the project. If, for example, the design team wants to build an inclusive app for a diverse user group, they can raise diversity as a specific success criterion during the kickoff. If the client agrees, the team can refer back to that promise throughout the project. “As we agreed in our first meeting, having a diverse user group that includes A and B is necessary to build a successful product. So we do activity X and follow research process Y.” Compare those odds to a situation in which the team didn’t agree to that beforehand and had to ask for permission halfway through the project. The client might argue that that came on top of the agreed scope—and she’d be right.
In the case of this freelance project, to define success I prepared a round canvas that I call the Wheel of Success. It consists of an inner ring, meant to capture ideas for objectives, and a set of outer rings, meant to capture ideas on how to measure those objectives. The rings are divided into five dimensions of successful design: healthy, equitable, sustainable, desirable, feasible, and viable.
We went through each dimension, writing down ideas on digital sticky notes. Then we discussed our ideas and verbally agreed on the most important ones. For example, our client agreed that sustainability and progressive enhancement are important success criteria for the platform. And the subject-matter expert emphasized the importance of including students from low-income and disadvantaged groups in the design process.
After the kickoff, we summarized our ideas and shared understanding in a project brief that captured these aspects:
- the project’s origin and purpose: why are we doing this project?
- the problem definition: what do we want to solve?
- the concrete goals and metrics for each success dimension: what do we want to achieve?
- the scope, process, and role descriptions: how will we achieve it?
With such a brief in place, you can use the agreed-upon objectives and concrete metrics as a checklist of success, and your design team will be ready to pursue the right objective—using the tools, methods, and metrics at their disposal to achieve ethical outcomes.
Conclusion
Over the past year, quite a few colleagues have asked me, “Where do I start with ethical design?” My answer has always been the same: organize a session with your stakeholders to (re)define success. Even though you might not always be 100 percent successful in agreeing on goals that cover all responsibility objectives, that beats the alternative (the status quo) every time. If you want to be an ethical, responsible designer, there’s no skipping this step.
To be even more specific: if you consider yourself a strategic designer, your challenge is to define ethical objectives, set the right metrics, and conduct those kick-off sessions. If you consider yourself a system designer, your starting point is to understand how your industry contributes to consumerism and inequality, understand how finance drives business, and brainstorm which levers are available to influence the system on the highest level. Then redefine success to create the space to exercise those levers.
And for those who consider themselves service designers or UX designers or UI designers: if you truly want to have a positive, meaningful impact, stay away from the toolkits and meetups and conferences for a while. Instead, gather your colleagues and define goals for well-being, equity, and sustainability through design. Engage your stakeholders in a workshop and challenge them to think of ways to achieve and measure those ethical goals. Take their input, make it concrete and visible, ask for their agreement, and hold them to it.
Otherwise, I’m genuinely sorry to say, you’re wasting your precious time and creative energy.
Of course, engaging your stakeholders in this way can be uncomfortable. Many of my colleagues expressed doubts such as “What will the client think of this?,” “Will they take me seriously?,” and “Can’t we just do it within the design team instead?” In fact, a product manager once asked me why ethics couldn’t just be a structured part of the design process—to just do it without spending the effort to define ethical objectives. It’s a tempting idea, right? We wouldn’t have to have difficult discussions with stakeholders about what values or which key-performance indicators to pursue. It would let us focus on what we like and do best: designing.
But as systems theory tells us, that’s not enough. For those of us who aren’t from marginalized groups and have the privilege to be able to speak up and be heard, that uncomfortable space is exactly where we need to be if we truly want to make a difference. We can’t remain within the design-for-designers bubble, enjoying our privileged working-from-home situation, disconnected from the real world out there. For those of us who have the possibility to speak up and be heard: if we solely keep talking about ethical design and it remains at the level of articles and toolkits—we’re not designing ethically. It’s just theory. We need to actively engage our colleagues and clients by challenging them to redefine success in business.
With a bit of courage, determination, and focus, we can break out of this cage that finance and business-as-usual have built around us and become facilitators of a new type of business that can see beyond financial value. We just need to agree on the right objectives at the start of each design project, find the right metrics, and realize that we already have everything that we need to get started. That’s what it means to do daily ethical design.
For their inspiration and support over the years, I would like to thank Emanuela Cozzi Schettini, José Gallegos, Annegret Bönemann, Ian Dorr, Vera Rademaker, Virginia Rispoli, Cecilia Scolaro, Rouzbeh Amini, and many others.
Mobile-First CSS: Is It Time for a Rethink?
The mobile-first design methodology is great—it focuses on what really matters to the user, it’s well-practiced, and it’s been a common design pattern for years. So developing your CSS mobile-first should also be great, too…right?
Well, not necessarily. Classic mobile-first CSS development is based on the principle of overwriting style declarations: you begin your CSS with default style declarations, and overwrite and/or add new styles as you add breakpoints with min-width media queries for larger viewports (for a good overview see “What is Mobile First CSS and Why Does It Rock?”). But all those exceptions create complexity and inefficiency, which in turn can lead to an increased testing effort and a code base that’s harder to maintain. Admit it—how many of us willingly want that?
On your own projects, mobile-first CSS may yet be the best tool for the job, but first you need to evaluate just how appropriate it is in light of the visual design and user interactions you’re working on. To help you get started, here’s how I go about tackling the factors you need to watch for, and I’ll discuss some alternate solutions if mobile-first doesn’t seem to suit your project.
Advantages of mobile-first
Some of the things to like with mobile-first CSS development—and why it’s been the de facto development methodology for so long—make a lot of sense:
Development hierarchy. One thing you undoubtedly get from mobile-first is a nice development hierarchy—you just focus on the mobile view and get developing.
Tried and tested. It’s a tried and tested methodology that’s worked for years for a reason: it solves a problem really well.
Prioritizes the mobile view. The mobile view is the simplest and arguably the most important, as it encompasses all the key user journeys, and often accounts for a higher proportion of user visits (depending on the project).
Prevents desktop-centric development. As development is done using desktop computers, it can be tempting to initially focus on the desktop view. But thinking about mobile from the start prevents us from getting stuck later on; no one wants to spend their time retrofitting a desktop-centric site to work on mobile devices!
Disadvantages of mobile-first
Setting style declarations and then overwriting them at higher breakpoints can lead to undesirable ramifications:
More complexity. The farther up the breakpoint hierarchy you go, the more unnecessary code you inherit from lower breakpoints.
Higher CSS specificity. Styles that have been reverted to their browser default value in a class name declaration now have a higher specificity. This can be a headache on large projects when you want to keep the CSS selectors as simple as possible.
Requires more regression testing. Changes to the CSS at a lower view (like adding a new style) requires all higher breakpoints to be regression tested.
The browser can’t prioritize CSS downloads. At wider breakpoints, classic mobile-first min-width media queries don’t leverage the browser’s capability to download CSS files in priority order.
The problem of property value overrides
There is nothing inherently wrong with overwriting values; CSS was designed to do just that. Still, inheriting incorrect values is unhelpful and can be burdensome and inefficient. It can also lead to increased style specificity when you have to overwrite styles to reset them back to their defaults, something that may cause issues later on, especially if you are using a combination of bespoke CSS and utility classes. We won’t be able to use a utility class for a style that has been reset with a higher specificity.
With this in mind, I’m developing CSS with a focus on the default values much more these days. Since there’s no specific order, and no chains of specific values to keep track of, this frees me to develop breakpoints simultaneously. I concentrate on finding common styles and isolating the specific exceptions in closed media query ranges (that is, any range with a max-width set).
This approach opens up some opportunities, as you can look at each breakpoint as a clean slate. If a component’s layout looks like it should be based on Flexbox at all breakpoints, it’s fine and can be coded in the default style sheet. But if it looks like Grid would be much better for large screens and Flexbox for mobile, these can both be done entirely independently when the CSS is put into closed media query ranges. Also, developing simultaneously requires you to have a good understanding of any given component in all breakpoints up front. This can help surface issues in the design earlier in the development process. We don’t want to get stuck down a rabbit hole building a complex component for mobile, and then get the designs for desktop and find they are equally complex and incompatible with the HTML we created for the mobile view!
Though this approach isn’t going to suit everyone, I encourage you to give it a try. There are plenty of tools out there to help with concurrent development, such as Responsively App, Blisk, and many others.
Having said that, I don’t feel the order itself is particularly relevant. If you are comfortable with focusing on the mobile view, have a good understanding of the requirements for other breakpoints, and prefer to work on one device at a time, then by all means stick with the classic development order. The important thing is to identify common styles and exceptions so you can put them in the relevant stylesheet—a sort of manual tree-shaking process! Personally, I find this a little easier when working on a component across breakpoints, but that’s by no means a requirement.
Closed media query ranges in practice
In classic mobile-first CSS we overwrite the styles, but we can avoid this by using media query ranges. To illustrate the difference (I’m using SCSS for brevity), let’s assume there are three visual designs:
- smaller than 768
- from 768 to below 1024
- 1024 and anything larger
Take a simple example where a block-level element has a default padding of “20px,” which is overwritten at tablet to be “40px” and set back to “20px” on desktop.
Classic |
Closed media query range |
The subtle difference is that the mobile-first example sets the default padding to “20px” and then overwrites it at each breakpoint, setting it three times in total. In contrast, the second example sets the default padding to “20px” and only overrides it at the relevant breakpoint where it isn’t the default value (in this instance, tablet is the exception).
The goal is to:
- Only set styles when needed.
- Not set them with the expectation of overwriting them later on, again and again.
To this end, closed media query ranges are our best friend. If we need to make a change to any given view, we make it in the CSS media query range that applies to the specific breakpoint. We’ll be much less likely to introduce unwanted alterations, and our regression testing only needs to focus on the breakpoint we have actually edited.
Taking the above example, if we find that .my-block spacing on desktop is already accounted for by the margin at that breakpoint, and since we want to remove the padding altogether, we could do this by setting the mobile padding in a closed media query range.
.my-block {
@media (max-width: 767.98px) {
padding: 20px;
}
@media (min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 1023.98px) {
padding: 40px;
}
}The browser default padding for our block is “0,” so instead of adding a desktop media query and using unset or “0” for the padding value (which we would need with mobile-first), we can wrap the mobile padding in a closed media query (since it is now also an exception) so it won’t get picked up at wider breakpoints. At the desktop breakpoint, we won’t need to set any padding style, as we want the browser default value.
Bundling versus separating the CSS
Back in the day, keeping the number of requests to a minimum was very important due to the browser’s limit of concurrent requests (typically around six). As a consequence, the use of image sprites and CSS bundling was the norm, with all the CSS being downloaded in one go, as one stylesheet with highest priority.
With HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 now on the scene, the number of requests is no longer the big deal it used to be. This allows us to separate the CSS into multiple files by media query. The clear benefit of this is the browser can now request the CSS it currently needs with a higher priority than the CSS it doesn’t. This is more performant and can reduce the overall time page rendering is blocked.
Which HTTP version are you using?
To determine which version of HTTP you’re using, go to your website and open your browser’s dev tools. Next, select the Network tab and make sure the Protocol column is visible. If “h2” is listed under Protocol, it means HTTP/2 is being used.
Note: to view the Protocol in your browser’s dev tools, go to the Network tab, reload your page, right-click any column header (e.g., Name), and check the Protocol column.
Also, if your site is still using HTTP/1...WHY?!! What are you waiting for? There is excellent user support for HTTP/2.
Splitting the CSS
Separating the CSS into individual files is a worthwhile task. Linking the separate CSS files using the relevant media attribute allows the browser to identify which files are needed immediately (because they’re render-blocking) and which can be deferred. Based on this, it allocates each file an appropriate priority.
In the following example of a website visited on a mobile breakpoint, we can see the mobile and default CSS are loaded with “Highest” priority, as they are currently needed to render the page. The remaining CSS files (print, tablet, and desktop) are still downloaded in case they’ll be needed later, but with “Lowest” priority.
With bundled CSS, the browser will have to download the CSS file and parse it before rendering can start.
While, as noted, with the CSS separated into different files linked and marked up with the relevant media attribute, the browser can prioritize the files it currently needs. Using closed media query ranges allows the browser to do this at all widths, as opposed to classic mobile-first min-width queries, where the desktop browser would have to download all the CSS with Highest priority. We can’t assume that desktop users always have a fast connection. For instance, in many rural areas, internet connection speeds are still slow.
The media queries and number of separate CSS files will vary from project to project based on project requirements, but might look similar to the example below.
|
Bundled CSS This single file contains all the CSS, including all media queries, and it will be downloaded with Highest priority. |
Separated CSS Separating the CSS and specifying a |
Depending on the project’s deployment strategy, a change to one file (mobile.css, for example) would only require the QA team to regression test on devices in that specific media query range. Compare that to the prospect of deploying the single bundled site.css file, an approach that would normally trigger a full regression test.
Moving on
The uptake of mobile-first CSS was a really important milestone in web development; it has helped front-end developers focus on mobile web applications, rather than developing sites on desktop and then attempting to retrofit them to work on other devices.
I don’t think anyone wants to return to that development model again, but it’s important we don’t lose sight of the issue it highlighted: that things can easily get convoluted and less efficient if we prioritize one particular device—any device—over others. For this reason, focusing on the CSS in its own right, always mindful of what is the default setting and what’s an exception, seems like the natural next step. I’ve started noticing small simplifications in my own CSS, as well as other developers’, and that testing and maintenance work is also a bit more simplified and productive.
In general, simplifying CSS rule creation whenever we can is ultimately a cleaner approach than going around in circles of overrides. But whichever methodology you choose, it needs to suit the project. Mobile-first may—or may not—turn out to be the best choice for what’s involved, but first you need to solidly understand the trade-offs you’re stepping into.
Personalization Pyramid: A Framework for Designing with User Data
As a UX professional in today’s data-driven landscape, it’s increasingly likely that you’ve been asked to design a personalized digital experience, whether it’s a public website, user portal, or native application. Yet while there continues to be no shortage of marketing hype around personalization platforms, we still have very few standardized approaches for implementing personalized UX.
That’s where we come in. After completing dozens of personalization projects over the past few years, we gave ourselves a goal: could you create a holistic personalization framework specifically for UX practitioners? The Personalization Pyramid is a designer-centric model for standing up human-centered personalization programs, spanning data, segmentation, content delivery, and overall goals. By using this approach, you will be able to understand the core components of a contemporary, UX-driven personalization program (or at the very least know enough to get started).
Getting Started
For the sake of this article, we’ll assume you’re already familiar with the basics of digital personalization. A good overview can be found here: Website Personalization Planning. While UX projects in this area can take on many different forms, they often stem from similar starting points.
Common scenarios for starting a personalization project:
- Your organization or client purchased a content management system (CMS) or marketing automation platform (MAP) or related technology that supports personalization
- The CMO, CDO, or CIO has identified personalization as a goal
- Customer data is disjointed or ambiguous
- You are running some isolated targeting campaigns or A/B testing
- Stakeholders disagree on personalization approach
- Mandate of customer privacy rules (e.g. GDPR) requires revisiting existing user targeting practices
Regardless of where you begin, a successful personalization program will require the same core building blocks. We’ve captured these as the “levels” on the pyramid. Whether you are a UX designer, researcher, or strategist, understanding the core components can help make your contribution successful.
From top to bottom, the levels include:
- North Star: What larger strategic objective is driving the personalization program?
- Goals: What are the specific, measurable outcomes of the program?
- Touchpoints: Where will the personalized experience be served?
- Contexts and Campaigns: What personalization content will the user see?
- User Segments: What constitutes a unique, usable audience?
- Actionable Data: What reliable and authoritative data is captured by our technical platform to drive personalization?
- Raw Data: What wider set of data is conceivably available (already in our setting) allowing you to personalize?
We’ll go through each of these levels in turn. To help make this actionable, we created an accompanying deck of cards to illustrate specific examples from each level. We’ve found them helpful in personalization brainstorming sessions, and will include examples for you here.
Starting at the Top
The components of the pyramid are as follows:
North Star
A north star is what you are aiming for overall with your personalization program (big or small). The North Star defines the (one) overall mission of the personalization program. What do you wish to accomplish? North Stars cast a shadow. The bigger the star, the bigger the shadow. Example of North Starts might include:
- Function: Personalize based on basic user inputs. Examples: “Raw” notifications, basic search results, system user settings and configuration options, general customization, basic optimizations
- Feature: Self-contained personalization componentry. Examples: “Cooked” notifications, advanced optimizations (geolocation), basic dynamic messaging, customized modules, automations, recommenders
- Experience: Personalized user experiences across multiple interactions and user flows. Examples: Email campaigns, landing pages, advanced messaging (i.e. C2C chat) or conversational interfaces, larger user flows and content-intensive optimizations (localization).
- Product: Highly differentiating personalized product experiences. Examples: Standalone, branded experiences with personalization at their core, like the “algotorial” playlists by Spotify such as Discover Weekly.
Goals
As in any good UX design, personalization can help accelerate designing with customer intentions. Goals are the tactical and measurable metrics that will prove the overall program is successful. A good place to start is with your current analytics and measurement program and metrics you can benchmark against. In some cases, new goals may be appropriate. The key thing to remember is that personalization itself is not a goal, rather it is a means to an end. Common goals include:
- Conversion
- Time on task
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- Customer satisfaction
Touchpoints
Touchpoints are where the personalization happens. As a UX designer, this will be one of your largest areas of responsibility. The touchpoints available to you will depend on how your personalization and associated technology capabilities are instrumented, and should be rooted in improving a user’s experience at a particular point in the journey. Touchpoints can be multi-device (mobile, in-store, website) but also more granular (web banner, web pop-up etc.). Here are some examples:
Channel-level Touchpoints
- Email: Role
- Email: Time of open
- In-store display (JSON endpoint)
- Native app
- Search
Wireframe-level Touchpoints
- Web overlay
- Web alert bar
- Web banner
- Web content block
- Web menu
If you’re designing for web interfaces, for example, you will likely need to include personalized “zones” in your wireframes. The content for these can be presented programmatically in touchpoints based on our next step, contexts and campaigns.
Source: “Essential Guide to End-to-End Personaliztion” by Kibo.
Contexts and Campaigns
Once you’ve outlined some touchpoints, you can consider the actual personalized content a user will receive. Many personalization tools will refer to these as “campaigns” (so, for example, a campaign on a web banner for new visitors to the website). These will programmatically be shown at certain touchpoints to certain user segments, as defined by user data. At this stage, we find it helpful to consider two separate models: a context model and a content model. The context helps you consider the level of engagement of the user at the personalization moment, for example a user casually browsing information vs. doing a deep-dive. Think of it in terms of information retrieval behaviors. The content model can then help you determine what type of personalization to serve based on the context (for example, an “Enrich” campaign that shows related articles may be a suitable supplement to extant content).
Personalization Context Model:
- Browse
- Skim
- Nudge
- Feast
Personalization Content Model:
- Alert
- Make Easier
- Cross-Sell
- Enrich
We’ve written extensively about each of these models elsewhere, so if you’d like to read more you can check out Colin’s Personalization Content Model and Jeff’s Personalization Context Model.
User Segments
User segments can be created prescriptively or adaptively, based on user research (e.g. via rules and logic tied to set user behaviors or via A/B testing). At a minimum you will likely need to consider how to treat the unknown or first-time visitor, the guest or returning visitor for whom you may have a stateful cookie (or equivalent post-cookie identifier), or the authenticated visitor who is logged in. Here are some examples from the personalization pyramid:
- Unknown
- Guest
- Authenticated
- Default
- Referred
- Role
- Cohort
- Unique ID
Actionable Data
Every organization with any digital presence has data. It’s a matter of asking what data you can ethically collect on users, its inherent reliability and value, as to how can you use it (sometimes known as “data activation.”) Fortunately, the tide is turning to first-party data: a recent study by Twilio estimates some 80% of businesses are using at least some type of first-party data to personalize the customer experience.
First-party data represents multiple advantages on the UX front, including being relatively simple to collect, more likely to be accurate, and less susceptible to the “creep factor” of third-party data. So a key part of your UX strategy should be to determine what the best form of data collection is on your audiences. Here are some examples:
There is a progression of profiling when it comes to recognizing and making decisioning about different audiences and their signals. It tends to move towards more granular constructs about smaller and smaller cohorts of users as time and confidence and data volume grow.
While some combination of implicit / explicit data is generally a prerequisite for any implementation (more commonly referred to as first party and third-party data) ML efforts are typically not cost-effective directly out of the box. This is because a strong data backbone and content repository is a prerequisite for optimization. But these approaches should be considered as part of the larger roadmap and may indeed help accelerate the organization’s overall progress. Typically at this point you will partner with key stakeholders and product owners to design a profiling model. The profiling model includes defining approach to configuring profiles, profile keys, profile cards and pattern cards. A multi-faceted approach to profiling which makes it scalable.
Pulling it Together
While the cards comprise the starting point to an inventory of sorts (we provide blanks for you to tailor your own), a set of potential levers and motivations for the style of personalization activities you aspire to deliver, they are more valuable when thought of in a grouping.
In assembling a card “hand”, one can begin to trace the entire trajectory from leadership focus down through a strategic and tactical execution. It is also at the heart of the way both co-authors have conducted workshops in assembling a program backlog—which is a fine subject for another article.
In the meantime, what is important to note is that each colored class of card is helpful to survey in understanding the range of choices potentially at your disposal, it is threading through and making concrete decisions about for whom this decisioning will be made: where, when, and how.
Lay Down Your Cards
Any sustainable personalization strategy must consider near, mid and long-term goals. Even with the leading CMS platforms like Sitecore and Adobe or the most exciting composable CMS DXP out there, there is simply no “easy button” wherein a personalization program can be stood up and immediately view meaningful results. That said, there is a common grammar to all personalization activities, just like every sentence has nouns and verbs. These cards attempt to map that territory.