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User Research Is Storytelling
Ever since I was a boy, I’ve been fascinated with movies. I loved the characters and the excitement—but most of all the stories. I wanted to be an actor. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting adventures. I even dreamed up ideas for movies that my friends and I could make and star in. But they never went any further. I did, however, end up working in user experience (UX). Now, I realize that there’s an element of theater to UX—I hadn’t really considered it before, but user research is storytelling. And to get the most out of user research, you need to tell a good story where you bring stakeholders—the product team and decision makers—along and get them interested in learning more.
Think of your favorite movie. More than likely it follows a three-act structure that’s commonly seen in storytelling: the setup, the conflict, and the resolution. The first act shows what exists today, and it helps you get to know the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two introduces the conflict, where the action is. Here, problems grow or get worse. And the third and final act is the resolution. This is where the issues are resolved and the characters learn and change. I believe that this structure is also a great way to think about user research, and I think that it can be especially helpful in explaining user research to others.
Use storytelling as a structure to do research
It’s sad to say, but many have come to see research as being expendable. If budgets or timelines are tight, research tends to be one of the first things to go. Instead of investing in research, some product managers rely on designers or—worse—their own opinion to make the “right” choices for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get teams some of the way, but that approach can so easily miss out on solving users’ real problems. To remain user-centered, this is something we should avoid. User research elevates design. It keeps it on track, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay ahead of your competitors.
In the three-act structure, each act corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is critical to telling the whole story. Let’s look at the different acts and how they align with user research.
Act one: setup
The setup is all about understanding the background, and that’s where foundational research comes in. Foundational research (also called generative, discovery, or initial research) helps you understand users and identify their problems. You’re learning about what exists today, the challenges users have, and how the challenges affect them—just like in the movies. To do foundational research, you can conduct contextual inquiries or diary studies (or both!), which can help you start to identify problems as well as opportunities. It doesn’t need to be a huge investment in time or money.
Erika Hall writes about minimum viable ethnography, which can be as simple as spending 15 minutes with a user and asking them one thing: “‘Walk me through your day yesterday.’ That’s it. Present that one request. Shut up and listen to them for 15 minutes. Do your damndest to keep yourself and your interests out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography.” According to Hall, “[This] will probably prove quite illuminating. In the highly unlikely case that you didn’t learn anything new or useful, carry on with enhanced confidence in your direction.”
This makes total sense to me. And I love that this makes user research so accessible. You don’t need to prepare a lot of documentation; you can just recruit participants and do it! This can yield a wealth of information about your users, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their lives. That’s really what act one is all about: understanding where users are coming from.
Jared Spool talks about the importance of foundational research and how it should form the bulk of your research. If you can draw from any additional user data that you can get your hands on, such as surveys or analytics, that can supplement what you’ve heard in the foundational studies or even point to areas that need further investigation. Together, all this data paints a clearer picture of the state of things and all its shortcomings. And that’s the beginning of a compelling story. It’s the point in the plot where you realize that the main characters—or the users in this case—are facing challenges that they need to overcome. Like in the movies, this is where you start to build empathy for the characters and root for them to succeed. And hopefully stakeholders are now doing the same. Their sympathy may be with their business, which could be losing money because users can’t complete certain tasks. Or maybe they do empathize with users’ struggles. Either way, act one is your initial hook to get the stakeholders interested and invested.
Once stakeholders begin to understand the value of foundational research, that can open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making process. And that can guide product teams toward being more user-centered. This benefits everyone—users, the product, and stakeholders. It’s like winning an Oscar in movie terms—it often leads to your product being well received and successful. And this can be an incentive for stakeholders to repeat this process with other products. Storytelling is the key to this process, and knowing how to tell a good story is the only way to get stakeholders to really care about doing more research.
This brings us to act two, where you iteratively evaluate a design or concept to see whether it addresses the issues.
Act two: conflict
Act two is all about digging deeper into the problems that you identified in act one. This usually involves directional research, such as usability tests, where you assess a potential solution (such as a design) to see whether it addresses the issues that you found. The issues could include unmet needs or problems with a flow or process that’s tripping users up. Like act two in a movie, more issues will crop up along the way. It’s here that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this act.
Usability tests should typically include around five participants according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can usually identify most of the problems: “As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.”
There are parallels with storytelling here too; if you try to tell a story with too many characters, the plot may get lost. Having fewer participants means that each user’s struggles will be more memorable and easier to relay to other stakeholders when talking about the research. This can help convey the issues that need to be addressed while also highlighting the value of doing the research in the first place.
Researchers have run usability tests in person for decades, but you can also conduct usability tests remotely using tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You can think of in-person usability tests like going to a play and remote sessions as more like watching a movie. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. In-person usability research is a much richer experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. You also get real-time reactions—including surprise, agreement, disagreement, and discussions about what they’re seeing. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors’ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.
If in-person usability testing is like watching a play—staged and controlled—then conducting usability testing in the field is like immersive theater where any two sessions might be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can go out to meet users at their location to do your research. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that wouldn’t have in a lab environment—and conversion can shift in entirely different directions. As researchers, you have less control over how these sessions go, but this can sometimes help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests provide another level of detail that’s often missing from remote usability tests.
That’s not to say that the “movies”—remote sessions—aren’t a good option. Remote sessions can reach a wider audience. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see what’s going on. And they open the doors to a much wider geographical pool of users. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working.
The benefit of usability testing, whether remote or in person, is that you get to see real users interact with the designs in real time, and you can ask them questions to understand their thought processes and grasp of the solution. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. Furthermore, you can test hypotheses and gauge whether your thinking is correct. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. Act two is the heart of the story—where the excitement is—but there can be surprises too. This is equally true of usability tests. Often, participants will say unexpected things, which change the way that you look at things—and these twists in the story can move things in new directions.
Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. And too often usability testing is the only research process that some stakeholders think that they ever need. In fact, if the designs that you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a solid understanding of your users (foundational research), there’s not much to be gained by doing usability testing in the first place. That’s because you’re narrowing the focus of what you’re getting feedback on, without understanding the users’ needs. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. It’s only feedback on a particular design in the context of a usability test.
On the other hand, if you only do foundational research, while you might have set out to solve the right problem, you won’t know whether the thing that you’re building will actually solve that. This illustrates the importance of doing both foundational and directional research.
In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can help motivate stakeholders to address the issues that come up.
Act three: resolution
While the first two acts are about understanding the background and the tensions that can propel stakeholders into action, the third part is about resolving the problems from the first two acts. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That means the whole product team, including developers, UX practitioners, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other stakeholders that have a say in the next steps. It allows the whole team to hear users’ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. And it lets the UX research and design teams clarify, suggest alternatives, or give more context behind their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.
This act is mostly told in voiceover with some audience participation. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They give the stakeholders their recommendations and their guidance on creating this vision.
Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. “The most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved,” writes Duarte. “That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently.”
This type of structure aligns well with research results, and particularly results from usability tests. It provides evidence for “what is”—the problems that you’ve identified. And “what could be”—your recommendations on how to address them. And so on and so forth.
You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be visual, like quick mockups of how a new design could look that solves a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the end of the session when you’ve wrapped everything up in the conclusion by summarizing the main issues and suggesting a way forward. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. This stage gives stakeholders the next steps and hopefully the momentum to take those steps!
While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. All the elements of a good story are there in the three-act structure of user research:
- Act one: You meet the protagonists (the users) and the antagonists (the problems affecting users). This is the beginning of the plot. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. The output of these methods can include personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards.
- Act two: Next, there’s character development. There’s conflict and tension as the protagonists encounter problems and challenges, which they must overcome. In act two, researchers might use methods including usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and heuristics evaluation. The output of these can include usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices.
- Act three: The protagonists triumph and you see what a better future looks like. In act three, researchers may use methods including presentation decks, storytelling, and digital media. The output of these can be: presentation decks, video clips, audio clips, and pictures.
The researcher has multiple roles: they’re the storyteller, the director, and the producer. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters (in the research). And the stakeholders are the audience. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users’ stories through research. By the end, the stakeholders should walk away with a purpose and an eagerness to resolve the product’s ills.
So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. Ultimately, user research is a win-win for everyone, and you just need to get stakeholders interested in how the story ends.
I Swapped My Skin-Care Routine For This Vitamin C Line—Here’s How It Changed My Summer Skin
Call it a glow up.
July’s powerful astrology brings both the fireworks and the waterworks. It’s Cancer season, so the emotion is LOUD, but with communication connoisseur Mercury and sweet Venus moving into Leo (summer’s super-hot middle child) we start to feel the sizzle early in the month.
(Psst: You can get a chance to win a free astrology reading with Well+Good’s resident monthly astrologer, Stefanie Iris Weiss, by pre-ordering her new book, Sex and Your Stars: A Sexologist’s Guide to the Erotic Energy of the Zodiac.)
Conversations could be quite heated leading up to July 4 thanks to an opposition between Mercury and Pluto the day before. Avoid being snippy with lovers and others, but let yourself feel all your feels—and have a container to put them in, even if it’s just your journal for now.
When Mars in Taurus connects with Uranus on the 15th, expect cosmic eruptions in the form of wild and potentially unsettling news.
The new moon in Cancer arrives on July 5, softening and sweetening up the vibe, but potentially making us feel clingy and vulnerable. Set intentions for the Cancer-ruled house of your chart, and think forward through the next six months. What do you want to create and build in this part of your life?
The most volatile moment of the month comes on July 15, when mighty Mars in Taurus comes together with anything-goes Uranus, creating a crescendo of cosmic eruptions. We’re deep in election season by this time—and this is the week of the Republican Convention—so we’re bound to get some wild and potentially unsettling news around mid-month.
Our second full moon in Capricorn of the summer unfurls on July 21, at 29 degrees of the sign. Since the first full moon in this sign on June 21, we’ve been on a whole journey through this part of our chart. Whatever you’ve been carrying for the last 30 days, and/or the last six months, let it go for real.
The Sun blasts into Leo the day after the full moon, setting the stage for 30 days to blaze. It’s time to open our hearts, love like there’s no tomorrow, and to write, direct, and star in our own second-half-of-summer series.
July 2024 monthly horoscope for each zodiac sign
To get a fuller understanding of what you can expect from the above cosmic transits and others this month, keep reading for your zodiac sign’s July 2024 monthly horoscope. (A pro tip: Read for both your sun sign and your rising sign, the latter of which can offer an even more accurate horoscope, as it sets the order of the astrological houses in your birth chart.)
Looking for even more astrology insights? Read your full 2024 yearly horoscope here.
Aries
You’re steeped in all things domestic as the month begins, Aries, but once planets begin moving into your fifth house of love, there is no stopping you from pursuing pleasure like it’s your actual job. Use the new moon on July 5 to reevaluate your relationship with your home, roots, and attachments to the past. The full moon lands in your status sector on July 23, revealing what you might need to release in order to really, truly shine on the professional stage. After the Sun moves into Leo on July 22, there’s a lot more sweetness to tap. Whether you’re single or attached, take note that your Tinder House is on fire for the next month.
Career and money:
Your planetary ruler Mars collides with Uranus in your financial zone at mid-month, so an unexpected yet very exciting monetary development is possible. You’ve been through an intense clearing phase in your career arena in the last month, and it culminates at the Full Moon on the 21st, a moment of deep reflection about what you came to earth to do. You may put some outdated professional plans to bed in order to achieve sustainable success in an arena that is more meaningful to you.
Love and relationships:
Big time passion begins to rush into your life the moment Venus enters your romance zone on the 11th, but watch out for jealousy to erupt the day after, as the love planet opposes Pluto in your friendship zone. This could be one of those moments when a situationship gets so tense that you’re ready to commit or quit.
Taurus
You can emote like a boss this July, sweet Taurus. Cancer season calls for compassionate communication, deep listening, and co-creation in conversation. The new moon on July 5 is a moment to experience this IRL. Write down your goals for talking, thinking, and texting so the best ideas can start to manifest during the next six months.
Your planetary ruler Venus moves into your domestic zone on July 11, bringing love and romance home to you. On July 15, Mars in your stars has an explosive encounter with Uranus. It might be a good day to avoid confrontation—or even better, meditate, take CBD, and add in an Epsom salt bath for good measure. It’s tense as hell. After July 22, when the Sun moves into your home zone, you just might want to take a relaxing staycation.
Career and money:
You’ve got serious clarity about career matters this month, especially near the new moon —you can use this to pitch clients, edit your resume, apply for a new position, start a podcast, or begin a long-delayed writing project. However, with communication planet Mercury in your home zone for most of the month, you may prefer WFH over being in the office.
Love and relationships:
Partnership is sweet this month, particularly if you’ve got a live-in lover or have been thinking about moving in with your boo. Just be careful about misunderstandings and lovers’ quarrels around the Mars-Uranus conjunction in your sign at mid-month—you’re more likely to let small things get to you.
Gemini
July’s stars show you what you’re worth, Gemini. The Sun’s journey through Cancer brings a strong emphasis to money and earning and their relationship to your values during the first three weeks of the month. Your ruler Mercury slips into your communication zone on July 2, powering up your star-given skillset. Talking, thinking, and texting come even more naturally to you than usual, so have that important conversation or send that long-delayed text.
If you’re in the need of passion and drive, Mars has plenty on offer after he charges into your stars on July 20. The full moon on July 21 is all about resonating with deep, powerful transformation and emotional intimacy—the kind that can make you feel like an entirely new person.
Career and money:
With a powerful new moon in your house of money and values on July 5, it’s time to set some specific goals about what you want to earn during the next six months. Whether this means looking for a new job or asking for a raise at your current one, use this lunation to get super specific about what kind of budget will afford you what you need and deserve.
Love and relationships:
The Mars-Uranus conjunction brings your psychic shadows to the fore at mid-month, and this process could make you feel relationally cranky and angsty. Thankfully, as you build up to the full moon on July 21, boundlessly deep erotic intimacy is possible between you and a lover. But you may have to let go of old expectations first.
Cancer
Happy birthday darling Cancer! Your annual astro season is super sweet. The Sun and Venus deliver some serious pleasure to your door during the first few weeks of the month. The very powerful New Moon in your own sign on July 5 is an opportunity to set intentions for the next six months. Think of this like an extra allowance of New Year’s resolutions to manifest during the second half of 2024.
The full moon in your relationship zone arrives on July 21, helping you to unburden yourself of a heavy issue with a one-to-one partner. After the Sun follows Mercury and Venus into your money zone on the 22nd, your goals shift to spending and saving, not necessarily in that order.
Career and money:
July is both your birthday season and your cash cow. Mercury moves into your financial zone on the 2nd, followed by Venus on the 11th. You can talk about money matters more easily with anyone you share resources with, while simultaneously attracting new sources of income from mid-month on.
Love and relationships:
July’s stars sweeten up your love life considerably, and not just because it’s Cancer season and everyone is checking you out. Romance planet Venus is in your sign early in the month, and she trines magical Neptune in Pisces on July 11, making it a day of pure magic for your love life. The full moon in your relationship zone can help you get closure on a relationship from your past or heal an issue with a current lover. Don’t cling to old wounds, Cancer—the present is a gift.
Leo
It’s getting hot in (wherever you are as you read this), Leo. Your ruling luminary remains in the shadow of your 12th house through July 22, when Leo season officially begins. There’s a dreamy sensation to your waking life, but as planets begin to enter your fiery realm (starting with Mercury on July 2 and Venus on July 11) you’ll start to feel like you’re onstage, right in the center of the spotlight. Use the new moon on July 5 to tune into your dreams and fantasies—and set intentions to manifest them IRL.
The Full Moon arrives in your work and wellness zone on July 21–the second lunation here since June. If you’ve been stressed or even sick during the past month, this is your moment to let it go and emerge renewed in chrysalis form, ready for your Leo season glow-up.
Career and money:
Next month could be a bit messy money-wise thanks to Mercury retrograde in your financial zone, so now’s the time to get your ducks in a row in terms of your budget. If you were thinking of asking for a raise or applying for a new job this summer, hit up your boss or new client before mid-month if possible. The Mars-Uranus conjunction is in your career zone on July 15, which may bring a surprise!
Love and relationships:
When Mercury in your sign opposes Pluto in your partnership zone on July 3, relationship conversations could get pretty heated. It’s important not to let your ego dominate the dialogue. Instead, practice active listening and speak from your heart-space. Whatever the outcome, when you stay true to your desires, love will win.
Virgo
You’re torn between socializing and hermit-mode this month, Virgo. With the Sun in your community zone, you want to see and be seen, but after your ruler Mercury enters your dream zone, part of you may want to rest and reset. Guess what? You can do both at the same time.
Use the New Moon on July 5 to set intentions for a thriving social life, focusing on the ways that networking can enhance your personal and professional life. Then at the full moon on July 21, consider what you may need to let go of from the last six months. If a romance didn’t quite work out or a creative project fizzled, it’s time to forgive yourself and move on. Virgo season will be here before you know it, and you want to be as burden-free as possible by the time it does—so you can live it up, step into the spotlight, and own your joy.
Career and money:
The Mercury-Pluto opposition could be a bit contentious for your everyday work life at the start of the month, so be wary of the way small stressors can become big problems when you overfocus on them. Instead of criticizing yourself or your co-workers, try to talk or think it through, emphasizing what’s working. Cue your career breakthrough!
Love and relationships:
As you approach the second full moon in your romance zone on July 21, you can finally release any fear you’ve felt about not being in the “perfect” relationship. During the second half of the month, remember that whether you’re solo or partnered, your life is full of love. Stop measuring it out in teaspoons, and start experiencing it in every cell of your body.
Libra
Your status soars this month, Libra, and your community is behind you the whole way. With the Sun in your professional zone through July 22, your career gets a big boost. Set intentions to accomplish your most worldly goals during the new moon on July 5. Note that VIPs are probably looking at your work right now, but there is definitely a major “I get by with a little help from my friends” vibe as well, because both Mercury and your ruling planet Venus are hyping you up from your friendship zone.
The full moon on July 21 speaks to an intense discharge of pressure in your home zone. Something that’s been weighing on you during the last six months should finally be released. You may have to let yourself let it go, however—notice if you’re holding onto your burdens too tightly, because you’ve gotten too comfortable with them.
Black Moon Lilith—the dark void of the moon associated with shadow work and unearthing repressed energy—entered your sign at the end of June. She’s going to help you to integrate your inner rebel over the next nine months. Get ready for a Libran revolution.
Career and money:
Networking opportunities abound after Mercury moves into your social zone on July 2 and then Venus follows on July 11. Yet there could be some confusion and complexity early in the month, after Neptune stations retrograde in your work and wellness zone. Make sure to clarify anything you don’t quite understand, whether in the company Slack or face-to-face. Don’t worry about offending your coworkers—this is not a time to be too nice.
Love and relationships:
After Chiron stations retrograde in your partnership zone on July 26, you can start to go deeper with old relational wounds. Profound shadow work that will positively impact your love life can happen during the next few months. When your ruler Venus trines Chiron on July 30, you should be able to see this path clearly.
Scorpio
Cancer season is an adventure for you, Scorpio. With the Sun in your sister water sign, you feel safe and secure enough to fly free and explore the world around you. Keep your passport ready and your carry-on packed. If you don’t have any trips planned, use the new moon on July 5 to set intentions for some major jet-setting during the next six months.
As Mercury (on July 2) and Venus (on July 11) move into your professional sector, you may feel extremely motivated to strive until you hit the professional stratosphere. This intensifies after the Sun enters Leo on July 22. The day before, the full moon lands in your communication zone, helping you to let go of something that’s perplexed you for the last six months through an important conversation. If that doesn’t feel comfortable or possible, writing about it in a journal will help you let it go.
Career and money:
Your professional life is where it’s at this month, thanks to the presence of Mercury in your career zone starting on July 2. But the opposition between the communication planet and Pluto on July 3 could be a bit tense, so don’t broach any important career conversations until after the Independence Day break. Come back to the office refreshed, and then hit those pitches with gusto.
Love and relationships:
Your passionate planetary ruler Mars spends his final few weeks in your relationship zone, culminating in an explosive conjunction with Uranus on July 15. This is an expect-the-unexpected, anything-goes moment for your love life. Mars moves into your eighth house on July 20, spicing up your sex life considerably for the next six weeks. Intimacy can be INTENSE but amazing.
Sagittarius
Deep transformation is at hand, Sagittarius, as the Sun moves through your intimacy zone. There’s no wise way to gloss over the most important personal issues right now. You can use the energy of the new moon on July 5 to explore the parts of you that you often keep under wraps. Even if you have to dig deep and explore new levels of emotional vulnerability, it should be well-worth it for your growth as a person.
Planets are moving into Leo, your sister fire sign, heating up your travel zone. After Mercury enters here on July 2, followed by Venus on July 11 and the Sun on July 22, your soul’s mission to see the world will reignite. The Mars-Uranus conjunction in your work and wellness zone could bring a total surprise to your schedule. Try to gently manage any stress that comes from this change near July 15. The full moon on July 21 speaks to your self-esteem, helping you shed shame and reclaim a more authentic version of yourself.
Career and money:
The double impact of two full moons in your money zone over the last month culminates on July 21—a powerful moment to own your financial ambitions. The Sun and new moon are in your house of shared resources, so you may find yourself thinking about investments, taxes, and any cash that isn’t exactly classified as “earning.” More of this could be coming your way!
Love and relationships:
After Mars charges into your relationship zone on July 20, your passions surge to a level that could feel somewhat uncontrollable (especially with Venus and the Sun in a fellow fire sign). In short, you’re feeling hella sexy and more than likely in the mood for love. If you’re in a relationship, your partner is likely to be pretty psyched about this sudden flood of libido. But even if you’re solo, why waste this erotic energy?
Capricorn
July is all about relationships, love, and sex, Capricorn. With the Sun in your partnership zone through July 22, passion planet Mars in your house of pleasure through July 20, and Mercury and Venus moving into your sexuality sector, it may be hard to think about anything other than romance. Tearing you away from your ambitions isn’t always the easiest thing, but right now, you have an excellent excuse to loosen your grip on worldly achievements to focus on emotional/erotic connections.
Use the new moon on July 5 to set intentions for relationships during the next six months. The Mars-Uranus conjunction in your Tinder zone on July 15 could bring a total surprise for your love life, whether you’re currently single or attached. The second full moon in Capricorn lights up your own sign on July 21, offering you the chance to let go of the heaviest burdens you’ve carried since your last birthday. Release them, and step into a liberating kind of sovereignty for your whole body and soul.
Career and money:
The Mercury-Pluto opposition on July 3 could be a tricky moment for communication about your assets. It’s not the best moment for making investments until Venus moves into your shared resources zone on July 11. Mars moves into your work zone on July 20, restoring your passion about your daily duties.
Love and relationships:
Love is where it’s at almost all month long, but there is a clear emphasis on the relational realm while the Sun is in your opposite sign for the first three weeks of July. With Mercury in your intimacy zone, deep and meaningful conversations with a lover are possible—you can talk about the future with an equal measure of love and practicality. The new moon is an ideal time to think about the parameters of this discussion, no matter when you choose to broach it.
Aquarius
July brings a mixture of hard work and soft play, Aquarius. The Sun remains in your work and wellness zone through July 22, keeping you focused on meeting deadlines. But as Mercury, and then Venus make their way into your partnership zone (on July 2 and 11, respectively), you’ll start to tune into the “other halves” in your life, whether they’re personal or professional partners.
The new moon arrives on July 5 to help you forge plans for health and success during the next six months. Set intentions to make your schedule work for you instead of the other way around. The full moon in your subconscious sector provides space to dream on July 21, making way for deep introspection and self-awareness. You can let go of something that’s secretly consumed you for the last six months, clearing the way for profound healing of your psyche.
Career and money:
If you’ve got a WFH sitch, the Mars-Uranus conjunction in your domestic zone could bring a sudden change to the arrangement. Your boss may want you to come in more often, or you may suddenly decide to launch a side hustle that you can literally do from your sofa. The new moon can help you create any kind of new work scenario you might envision, so write all those dreams down early in the month.
Love and relationships:
When Mercury in your partnership zone opposes Pluto in your sign on July 3, relationships could be fraught, tense, and complex. Avoid pushing any buttons and deflect if a lover tries to bait you into an argument. Use the time in between to work things through, so by the time the Sun opposes Pluto on July 23, you’re ready to engage with compassion.
Pisces
Love, romance, and sex, oh my! With the Sun in your fifth House through July 22, you’ve got access to all of this and more right now, Pisces. The new moon activates this part of your chart on July 5, helping you set sweet intentions for your next six months of creativity, pleasure, and play. After Mercury and Venus leave this part of your chart and move into your work zone, you won’t exactly forget the fun parts, but you’re likely to be more focused on getting stuff done than crafting your very own Romanstasy novel IRL.
Try not to say anything too outrageous when the Mars-Uranus conjunction explodes in your communication zone on July 15 (and avoid confrontation that week, if possible). The full moon in Capricorn on July 21 can bring closure to an issue that’s been lingering with friends for the last six months. You might collectively let it go so that the group chat can be a place of joy again.
Career and money:
Mercury moves into your work zone on July 2 and immediately clashes with Pluto in your subconscious sector. You might project (or have projected onto you) an issue that is separate from the actual matter at hand, so try to work through this before bringing it up with a colleague. After Venus moves into your daily activities zone on July 11, your working conditions can improve, along with your income.
Love and relationships:
During a spectacular month for your love life, there are few extra spectacular days. The Sun in your pleasure zone trines Saturn in your sign on July 11, bringing stability to your relationships. On the same day, Venus in your romance zone trines your modern ruler Neptune, bringing your fantasies to life.
Your July 2024 Horoscope Is Here, Along With Some Explosive (And Sexy!) Cosmic Energy
Things are going to get hot and heavy this month.
July’s powerful astrology brings both the fireworks and the waterworks. It’s Cancer season, so the emotion is LOUD, but with communication connoisseur Mercury and sweet Venus moving into Leo (summer’s super-hot middle child) we start to feel the sizzle early in the month.
(Psst: You can get a chance to win a free astrology reading with Well+Good’s resident monthly astrologer, Stefanie Iris Weiss, by pre-ordering her new book, Sex and Your Stars: A Sexologist’s Guide to the Erotic Energy of the Zodiac.)
Conversations could be quite heated leading up to July 4 thanks to an opposition between Mercury and Pluto the day before. Avoid being snippy with lovers and others, but let yourself feel all your feels—and have a container to put them in, even if it’s just your journal for now.
When Mars in Taurus connects with Uranus on the 15th, expect cosmic eruptions in the form of wild and potentially unsettling news.
The new moon in Cancer arrives on July 5, softening and sweetening up the vibe, but potentially making us feel clingy and vulnerable. Set intentions for the Cancer-ruled house of your chart, and think forward through the next six months. What do you want to create and build in this part of your life?
The most volatile moment of the month comes on July 15, when mighty Mars in Taurus comes together with anything-goes Uranus, creating a crescendo of cosmic eruptions. We’re deep in election season by this time—and this is the week of the Republican Convention—so we’re bound to get some wild and potentially unsettling news around mid-month.
Our second full moon in Capricorn of the summer unfurls on July 21, at 29 degrees of the sign. Since the first full moon in this sign on June 21, we’ve been on a whole journey through this part of our chart. Whatever you’ve been carrying for the last 30 days, and/or the last six months, let it go for real.
The Sun blasts into Leo the day after the full moon, setting the stage for 30 days to blaze. It’s time to open our hearts, love like there’s no tomorrow, and to write, direct, and star in our own second-half-of-summer series.
July 2024 monthly horoscope for each zodiac sign
To get a fuller understanding of what you can expect from the above cosmic transits and others this month, keep reading for your zodiac sign’s July 2024 monthly horoscope. (A pro tip: Read for both your sun sign and your rising sign, the latter of which can offer an even more accurate horoscope, as it sets the order of the astrological houses in your birth chart.)
Looking for even more astrology insights? Read your full 2024 yearly horoscope here.
Aries
You’re steeped in all things domestic as the month begins, Aries, but once planets begin moving into your fifth house of love, there is no stopping you from pursuing pleasure like it’s your actual job. Use the new moon on July 5 to reevaluate your relationship with your home, roots, and attachments to the past. The full moon lands in your status sector on July 23, revealing what you might need to release in order to really, truly shine on the professional stage. After the Sun moves into Leo on July 22, there’s a lot more sweetness to tap. Whether you’re single or attached, take note that your Tinder House is on fire for the next month.
Career and money:
Your planetary ruler Mars collides with Uranus in your financial zone at mid-month, so an unexpected yet very exciting monetary development is possible. You’ve been through an intense clearing phase in your career arena in the last month, and it culminates at the Full Moon on the 21st, a moment of deep reflection about what you came to earth to do. You may put some outdated professional plans to bed in order to achieve sustainable success in an arena that is more meaningful to you.
Love and relationships:
Big time passion begins to rush into your life the moment Venus enters your romance zone on the 11th, but watch out for jealousy to erupt the day after, as the love planet opposes Pluto in your friendship zone. This could be one of those moments when a situationship gets so tense that you’re ready to commit or quit.
Taurus
You can emote like a boss this July, sweet Taurus. Cancer season calls for compassionate communication, deep listening, and co-creation in conversation. The new moon on July 5 is a moment to experience this IRL. Write down your goals for talking, thinking, and texting so the best ideas can start to manifest during the next six months.
Your planetary ruler Venus moves into your domestic zone on July 11, bringing love and romance home to you. On July 15, Mars in your stars has an explosive encounter with Uranus. It might be a good day to avoid confrontation—or even better, meditate, take CBD, and add in an Epsom salt bath for good measure. It’s tense as hell. After July 22, when the Sun moves into your home zone, you just might want to take a relaxing staycation.
Career and money:
You’ve got serious clarity about career matters this month, especially near the new moon —you can use this to pitch clients, edit your resume, apply for a new position, start a podcast, or begin a long-delayed writing project. However, with communication planet Mercury in your home zone for most of the month, you may prefer WFH over being in the office.
Love and relationships:
Partnership is sweet this month, particularly if you’ve got a live-in lover or have been thinking about moving in with your boo. Just be careful about misunderstandings and lovers’ quarrels around the Mars-Uranus conjunction in your sign at mid-month—you’re more likely to let small things get to you.
Gemini
July’s stars show you what you’re worth, Gemini. The Sun’s journey through Cancer brings a strong emphasis to money and earning and their relationship to your values during the first three weeks of the month. Your ruler Mercury slips into your communication zone on July 2, powering up your star-given skillset. Talking, thinking, and texting come even more naturally to you than usual, so have that important conversation or send that long-delayed text.
If you’re in the need of passion and drive, Mars has plenty on offer after he charges into your stars on July 20. The full moon on July 21 is all about resonating with deep, powerful transformation and emotional intimacy—the kind that can make you feel like an entirely new person.
Career and money:
With a powerful new moon in your house of money and values on July 5, it’s time to set some specific goals about what you want to earn during the next six months. Whether this means looking for a new job or asking for a raise at your current one, use this lunation to get super specific about what kind of budget will afford you what you need and deserve.
Love and relationships:
The Mars-Uranus conjunction brings your psychic shadows to the fore at mid-month, and this process could make you feel relationally cranky and angsty. Thankfully, as you build up to the full moon on July 21, boundlessly deep erotic intimacy is possible between you and a lover. But you may have to let go of old expectations first.
Cancer
Happy birthday darling Cancer! Your annual astro season is super sweet. The Sun and Venus deliver some serious pleasure to your door during the first few weeks of the month. The very powerful New Moon in your own sign on July 5 is an opportunity to set intentions for the next six months. Think of this like an extra allowance of New Year’s resolutions to manifest during the second half of 2024.
The full moon in your relationship zone arrives on July 21, helping you to unburden yourself of a heavy issue with a one-to-one partner. After the Sun follows Mercury and Venus into your money zone on the 22nd, your goals shift to spending and saving, not necessarily in that order.
Career and money:
July is both your birthday season and your cash cow. Mercury moves into your financial zone on the 2nd, followed by Venus on the 11th. You can talk about money matters more easily with anyone you share resources with, while simultaneously attracting new sources of income from mid-month on.
Love and relationships:
July’s stars sweeten up your love life considerably, and not just because it’s Cancer season and everyone is checking you out. Romance planet Venus is in your sign early in the month, and she trines magical Neptune in Pisces on July 11, making it a day of pure magic for your love life. The full moon in your relationship zone can help you get closure on a relationship from your past or heal an issue with a current lover. Don’t cling to old wounds, Cancer—the present is a gift.
Leo
It’s getting hot in (wherever you are as you read this), Leo. Your ruling luminary remains in the shadow of your 12th house through July 22, when Leo season officially begins. There’s a dreamy sensation to your waking life, but as planets begin to enter your fiery realm (starting with Mercury on July 2 and Venus on July 11) you’ll start to feel like you’re onstage, right in the center of the spotlight. Use the new moon on July 5 to tune into your dreams and fantasies—and set intentions to manifest them IRL.
The Full Moon arrives in your work and wellness zone on July 21–the second lunation here since June. If you’ve been stressed or even sick during the past month, this is your moment to let it go and emerge renewed in chrysalis form, ready for your Leo season glow-up.
Career and money:
Next month could be a bit messy money-wise thanks to Mercury retrograde in your financial zone, so now’s the time to get your ducks in a row in terms of your budget. If you were thinking of asking for a raise or applying for a new job this summer, hit up your boss or new client before mid-month if possible. The Mars-Uranus conjunction is in your career zone on July 15, which may bring a surprise!
Love and relationships:
When Mercury in your sign opposes Pluto in your partnership zone on July 3, relationship conversations could get pretty heated. It’s important not to let your ego dominate the dialogue. Instead, practice active listening and speak from your heart-space. Whatever the outcome, when you stay true to your desires, love will win.
Virgo
You’re torn between socializing and hermit-mode this month, Virgo. With the Sun in your community zone, you want to see and be seen, but after your ruler Mercury enters your dream zone, part of you may want to rest and reset. Guess what? You can do both at the same time.
Use the New Moon on July 5 to set intentions for a thriving social life, focusing on the ways that networking can enhance your personal and professional life. Then at the full moon on July 21, consider what you may need to let go of from the last six months. If a romance didn’t quite work out or a creative project fizzled, it’s time to forgive yourself and move on. Virgo season will be here before you know it, and you want to be as burden-free as possible by the time it does—so you can live it up, step into the spotlight, and own your joy.
Career and money:
The Mercury-Pluto opposition could be a bit contentious for your everyday work life at the start of the month, so be wary of the way small stressors can become big problems when you overfocus on them. Instead of criticizing yourself or your co-workers, try to talk or think it through, emphasizing what’s working. Cue your career breakthrough!
Love and relationships:
As you approach the second full moon in your romance zone on July 21, you can finally release any fear you’ve felt about not being in the “perfect” relationship. During the second half of the month, remember that whether you’re solo or partnered, your life is full of love. Stop measuring it out in teaspoons, and start experiencing it in every cell of your body.
Libra
Your status soars this month, Libra, and your community is behind you the whole way. With the Sun in your professional zone through July 22, your career gets a big boost. Set intentions to accomplish your most worldly goals during the new moon on July 5. Note that VIPs are probably looking at your work right now, but there is definitely a major “I get by with a little help from my friends” vibe as well, because both Mercury and your ruling planet Venus are hyping you up from your friendship zone.
The full moon on July 21 speaks to an intense discharge of pressure in your home zone. Something that’s been weighing on you during the last six months should finally be released. You may have to let yourself let it go, however—notice if you’re holding onto your burdens too tightly, because you’ve gotten too comfortable with them.
Black Moon Lilith—the dark void of the moon associated with shadow work and unearthing repressed energy—entered your sign at the end of June. She’s going to help you to integrate your inner rebel over the next nine months. Get ready for a Libran revolution.
Career and money:
Networking opportunities abound after Mercury moves into your social zone on July 2 and then Venus follows on July 11. Yet there could be some confusion and complexity early in the month, after Neptune stations retrograde in your work and wellness zone. Make sure to clarify anything you don’t quite understand, whether in the company Slack or face-to-face. Don’t worry about offending your coworkers—this is not a time to be too nice.
Love and relationships:
After Chiron stations retrograde in your partnership zone on July 26, you can start to go deeper with old relational wounds. Profound shadow work that will positively impact your love life can happen during the next few months. When your ruler Venus trines Chiron on July 30, you should be able to see this path clearly.
Scorpio
Cancer season is an adventure for you, Scorpio. With the Sun in your sister water sign, you feel safe and secure enough to fly free and explore the world around you. Keep your passport ready and your carry-on packed. If you don’t have any trips planned, use the new moon on July 5 to set intentions for some major jet-setting during the next six months.
As Mercury (on July 2) and Venus (on July 11) move into your professional sector, you may feel extremely motivated to strive until you hit the professional stratosphere. This intensifies after the Sun enters Leo on July 22. The day before, the full moon lands in your communication zone, helping you to let go of something that’s perplexed you for the last six months through an important conversation. If that doesn’t feel comfortable or possible, writing about it in a journal will help you let it go.
Career and money:
Your professional life is where it’s at this month, thanks to the presence of Mercury in your career zone starting on July 2. But the opposition between the communication planet and Pluto on July 3 could be a bit tense, so don’t broach any important career conversations until after the Independence Day break. Come back to the office refreshed, and then hit those pitches with gusto.
Love and relationships:
Your passionate planetary ruler Mars spends his final few weeks in your relationship zone, culminating in an explosive conjunction with Uranus on July 15. This is an expect-the-unexpected, anything-goes moment for your love life. Mars moves into your eighth house on July 20, spicing up your sex life considerably for the next six weeks. Intimacy can be INTENSE but amazing.
Sagittarius
Deep transformation is at hand, Sagittarius, as the Sun moves through your intimacy zone. There’s no wise way to gloss over the most important personal issues right now. You can use the energy of the new moon on July 5 to explore the parts of you that you often keep under wraps. Even if you have to dig deep and explore new levels of emotional vulnerability, it should be well-worth it for your growth as a person.
Planets are moving into Leo, your sister fire sign, heating up your travel zone. After Mercury enters here on July 2, followed by Venus on July 11 and the Sun on July 22, your soul’s mission to see the world will reignite. The Mars-Uranus conjunction in your work and wellness zone could bring a total surprise to your schedule. Try to gently manage any stress that comes from this change near July 15. The full moon on July 21 speaks to your self-esteem, helping you shed shame and reclaim a more authentic version of yourself.
Career and money:
The double impact of two full moons in your money zone over the last month culminates on July 21—a powerful moment to own your financial ambitions. The Sun and new moon are in your house of shared resources, so you may find yourself thinking about investments, taxes, and any cash that isn’t exactly classified as “earning.” More of this could be coming your way!
Love and relationships:
After Mars charges into your relationship zone on July 20, your passions surge to a level that could feel somewhat uncontrollable (especially with Venus and the Sun in a fellow fire sign). In short, you’re feeling hella sexy and more than likely in the mood for love. If you’re in a relationship, your partner is likely to be pretty psyched about this sudden flood of libido. But even if you’re solo, why waste this erotic energy?
Capricorn
July is all about relationships, love, and sex, Capricorn. With the Sun in your partnership zone through July 22, passion planet Mars in your house of pleasure through July 20, and Mercury and Venus moving into your sexuality sector, it may be hard to think about anything other than romance. Tearing you away from your ambitions isn’t always the easiest thing, but right now, you have an excellent excuse to loosen your grip on worldly achievements to focus on emotional/erotic connections.
Use the new moon on July 5 to set intentions for relationships during the next six months. The Mars-Uranus conjunction in your Tinder zone on July 15 could bring a total surprise for your love life, whether you’re currently single or attached. The second full moon in Capricorn lights up your own sign on July 21, offering you the chance to let go of the heaviest burdens you’ve carried since your last birthday. Release them, and step into a liberating kind of sovereignty for your whole body and soul.
Career and money:
The Mercury-Pluto opposition on July 3 could be a tricky moment for communication about your assets. It’s not the best moment for making investments until Venus moves into your shared resources zone on July 11. Mars moves into your work zone on July 20, restoring your passion about your daily duties.
Love and relationships:
Love is where it’s at almost all month long, but there is a clear emphasis on the relational realm while the Sun is in your opposite sign for the first three weeks of July. With Mercury in your intimacy zone, deep and meaningful conversations with a lover are possible—you can talk about the future with an equal measure of love and practicality. The new moon is an ideal time to think about the parameters of this discussion, no matter when you choose to broach it.
Aquarius
July brings a mixture of hard work and soft play, Aquarius. The Sun remains in your work and wellness zone through July 22, keeping you focused on meeting deadlines. But as Mercury, and then Venus make their way into your partnership zone (on July 2 and 11, respectively), you’ll start to tune into the “other halves” in your life, whether they’re personal or professional partners.
The new moon arrives on July 5 to help you forge plans for health and success during the next six months. Set intentions to make your schedule work for you instead of the other way around. The full moon in your subconscious sector provides space to dream on July 21, making way for deep introspection and self-awareness. You can let go of something that’s secretly consumed you for the last six months, clearing the way for profound healing of your psyche.
Career and money:
If you’ve got a WFH sitch, the Mars-Uranus conjunction in your domestic zone could bring a sudden change to the arrangement. Your boss may want you to come in more often, or you may suddenly decide to launch a side hustle that you can literally do from your sofa. The new moon can help you create any kind of new work scenario you might envision, so write all those dreams down early in the month.
Love and relationships:
When Mercury in your partnership zone opposes Pluto in your sign on July 3, relationships could be fraught, tense, and complex. Avoid pushing any buttons and deflect if a lover tries to bait you into an argument. Use the time in between to work things through, so by the time the Sun opposes Pluto on July 23, you’re ready to engage with compassion.
Pisces
Love, romance, and sex, oh my! With the Sun in your fifth House through July 22, you’ve got access to all of this and more right now, Pisces. The new moon activates this part of your chart on July 5, helping you set sweet intentions for your next six months of creativity, pleasure, and play. After Mercury and Venus leave this part of your chart and move into your work zone, you won’t exactly forget the fun parts, but you’re likely to be more focused on getting stuff done than crafting your very own Romanstasy novel IRL.
Try not to say anything too outrageous when the Mars-Uranus conjunction explodes in your communication zone on July 15 (and avoid confrontation that week, if possible). The full moon in Capricorn on July 21 can bring closure to an issue that’s been lingering with friends for the last six months. You might collectively let it go so that the group chat can be a place of joy again.
Career and money:
Mercury moves into your work zone on July 2 and immediately clashes with Pluto in your subconscious sector. You might project (or have projected onto you) an issue that is separate from the actual matter at hand, so try to work through this before bringing it up with a colleague. After Venus moves into your daily activities zone on July 11, your working conditions can improve, along with your income.
Love and relationships:
During a spectacular month for your love life, there are few extra spectacular days. The Sun in your pleasure zone trines Saturn in your sign on July 11, bringing stability to your relationships. On the same day, Venus in your romance zone trines your modern ruler Neptune, bringing your fantasies to life.
‘Gentle Movement’ Is on the Rise—Because Exercising Is About More Than Just Streaks, Steps, and Calories
Allowing yourself to slow down is one of the best things you can do for your health.
July’s powerful astrology brings both the fireworks and the waterworks. It’s Cancer season, so the emotion is LOUD, but with communication connoisseur Mercury and sweet Venus moving into Leo (summer’s super-hot middle child) we start to feel the sizzle early in the month.
(Psst: You can get a chance to win a free astrology reading with Well+Good’s resident monthly astrologer, Stefanie Iris Weiss, by pre-ordering her new book, Sex and Your Stars: A Sexologist’s Guide to the Erotic Energy of the Zodiac.)
Conversations could be quite heated leading up to July 4 thanks to an opposition between Mercury and Pluto the day before. Avoid being snippy with lovers and others, but let yourself feel all your feels—and have a container to put them in, even if it’s just your journal for now.
When Mars in Taurus connects with Uranus on the 15th, expect cosmic eruptions in the form of wild and potentially unsettling news.
The new moon in Cancer arrives on July 5, softening and sweetening up the vibe, but potentially making us feel clingy and vulnerable. Set intentions for the Cancer-ruled house of your chart, and think forward through the next six months. What do you want to create and build in this part of your life?
The most volatile moment of the month comes on July 15, when mighty Mars in Taurus comes together with anything-goes Uranus, creating a crescendo of cosmic eruptions. We’re deep in election season by this time—and this is the week of the Republican Convention—so we’re bound to get some wild and potentially unsettling news around mid-month.
Our second full moon in Capricorn of the summer unfurls on July 21, at 29 degrees of the sign. Since the first full moon in this sign on June 21, we’ve been on a whole journey through this part of our chart. Whatever you’ve been carrying for the last 30 days, and/or the last six months, let it go for real.
The Sun blasts into Leo the day after the full moon, setting the stage for 30 days to blaze. It’s time to open our hearts, love like there’s no tomorrow, and to write, direct, and star in our own second-half-of-summer series.
July 2024 monthly horoscope for each zodiac sign
To get a fuller understanding of what you can expect from the above cosmic transits and others this month, keep reading for your zodiac sign’s July 2024 monthly horoscope. (A pro tip: Read for both your sun sign and your rising sign, the latter of which can offer an even more accurate horoscope, as it sets the order of the astrological houses in your birth chart.)
Looking for even more astrology insights? Read your full 2024 yearly horoscope here.
Aries
You’re steeped in all things domestic as the month begins, Aries, but once planets begin moving into your fifth house of love, there is no stopping you from pursuing pleasure like it’s your actual job. Use the new moon on July 5 to reevaluate your relationship with your home, roots, and attachments to the past. The full moon lands in your status sector on July 23, revealing what you might need to release in order to really, truly shine on the professional stage. After the Sun moves into Leo on July 22, there’s a lot more sweetness to tap. Whether you’re single or attached, take note that your Tinder House is on fire for the next month.
Career and money:
Your planetary ruler Mars collides with Uranus in your financial zone at mid-month, so an unexpected yet very exciting monetary development is possible. You’ve been through an intense clearing phase in your career arena in the last month, and it culminates at the Full Moon on the 21st, a moment of deep reflection about what you came to earth to do. You may put some outdated professional plans to bed in order to achieve sustainable success in an arena that is more meaningful to you.
Love and relationships:
Big time passion begins to rush into your life the moment Venus enters your romance zone on the 11th, but watch out for jealousy to erupt the day after, as the love planet opposes Pluto in your friendship zone. This could be one of those moments when a situationship gets so tense that you’re ready to commit or quit.
Taurus
You can emote like a boss this July, sweet Taurus. Cancer season calls for compassionate communication, deep listening, and co-creation in conversation. The new moon on July 5 is a moment to experience this IRL. Write down your goals for talking, thinking, and texting so the best ideas can start to manifest during the next six months.
Your planetary ruler Venus moves into your domestic zone on July 11, bringing love and romance home to you. On July 15, Mars in your stars has an explosive encounter with Uranus. It might be a good day to avoid confrontation—or even better, meditate, take CBD, and add in an Epsom salt bath for good measure. It’s tense as hell. After July 22, when the Sun moves into your home zone, you just might want to take a relaxing staycation.
Career and money:
You’ve got serious clarity about career matters this month, especially near the new moon —you can use this to pitch clients, edit your resume, apply for a new position, start a podcast, or begin a long-delayed writing project. However, with communication planet Mercury in your home zone for most of the month, you may prefer WFH over being in the office.
Love and relationships:
Partnership is sweet this month, particularly if you’ve got a live-in lover or have been thinking about moving in with your boo. Just be careful about misunderstandings and lovers’ quarrels around the Mars-Uranus conjunction in your sign at mid-month—you’re more likely to let small things get to you.
Gemini
July’s stars show you what you’re worth, Gemini. The Sun’s journey through Cancer brings a strong emphasis to money and earning and their relationship to your values during the first three weeks of the month. Your ruler Mercury slips into your communication zone on July 2, powering up your star-given skillset. Talking, thinking, and texting come even more naturally to you than usual, so have that important conversation or send that long-delayed text.
If you’re in the need of passion and drive, Mars has plenty on offer after he charges into your stars on July 20. The full moon on July 21 is all about resonating with deep, powerful transformation and emotional intimacy—the kind that can make you feel like an entirely new person.
Career and money:
With a powerful new moon in your house of money and values on July 5, it’s time to set some specific goals about what you want to earn during the next six months. Whether this means looking for a new job or asking for a raise at your current one, use this lunation to get super specific about what kind of budget will afford you what you need and deserve.
Love and relationships:
The Mars-Uranus conjunction brings your psychic shadows to the fore at mid-month, and this process could make you feel relationally cranky and angsty. Thankfully, as you build up to the full moon on July 21, boundlessly deep erotic intimacy is possible between you and a lover. But you may have to let go of old expectations first.
Cancer
Happy birthday darling Cancer! Your annual astro season is super sweet. The Sun and Venus deliver some serious pleasure to your door during the first few weeks of the month. The very powerful New Moon in your own sign on July 5 is an opportunity to set intentions for the next six months. Think of this like an extra allowance of New Year’s resolutions to manifest during the second half of 2024.
The full moon in your relationship zone arrives on July 21, helping you to unburden yourself of a heavy issue with a one-to-one partner. After the Sun follows Mercury and Venus into your money zone on the 22nd, your goals shift to spending and saving, not necessarily in that order.
Career and money:
July is both your birthday season and your cash cow. Mercury moves into your financial zone on the 2nd, followed by Venus on the 11th. You can talk about money matters more easily with anyone you share resources with, while simultaneously attracting new sources of income from mid-month on.
Love and relationships:
July’s stars sweeten up your love life considerably, and not just because it’s Cancer season and everyone is checking you out. Romance planet Venus is in your sign early in the month, and she trines magical Neptune in Pisces on July 11, making it a day of pure magic for your love life. The full moon in your relationship zone can help you get closure on a relationship from your past or heal an issue with a current lover. Don’t cling to old wounds, Cancer—the present is a gift.
Leo
It’s getting hot in (wherever you are as you read this), Leo. Your ruling luminary remains in the shadow of your 12th house through July 22, when Leo season officially begins. There’s a dreamy sensation to your waking life, but as planets begin to enter your fiery realm (starting with Mercury on July 2 and Venus on July 11) you’ll start to feel like you’re onstage, right in the center of the spotlight. Use the new moon on July 5 to tune into your dreams and fantasies—and set intentions to manifest them IRL.
The Full Moon arrives in your work and wellness zone on July 21–the second lunation here since June. If you’ve been stressed or even sick during the past month, this is your moment to let it go and emerge renewed in chrysalis form, ready for your Leo season glow-up.
Career and money:
Next month could be a bit messy money-wise thanks to Mercury retrograde in your financial zone, so now’s the time to get your ducks in a row in terms of your budget. If you were thinking of asking for a raise or applying for a new job this summer, hit up your boss or new client before mid-month if possible. The Mars-Uranus conjunction is in your career zone on July 15, which may bring a surprise!
Love and relationships:
When Mercury in your sign opposes Pluto in your partnership zone on July 3, relationship conversations could get pretty heated. It’s important not to let your ego dominate the dialogue. Instead, practice active listening and speak from your heart-space. Whatever the outcome, when you stay true to your desires, love will win.
Virgo
You’re torn between socializing and hermit-mode this month, Virgo. With the Sun in your community zone, you want to see and be seen, but after your ruler Mercury enters your dream zone, part of you may want to rest and reset. Guess what? You can do both at the same time.
Use the New Moon on July 5 to set intentions for a thriving social life, focusing on the ways that networking can enhance your personal and professional life. Then at the full moon on July 21, consider what you may need to let go of from the last six months. If a romance didn’t quite work out or a creative project fizzled, it’s time to forgive yourself and move on. Virgo season will be here before you know it, and you want to be as burden-free as possible by the time it does—so you can live it up, step into the spotlight, and own your joy.
Career and money:
The Mercury-Pluto opposition could be a bit contentious for your everyday work life at the start of the month, so be wary of the way small stressors can become big problems when you overfocus on them. Instead of criticizing yourself or your co-workers, try to talk or think it through, emphasizing what’s working. Cue your career breakthrough!
Love and relationships:
As you approach the second full moon in your romance zone on July 21, you can finally release any fear you’ve felt about not being in the “perfect” relationship. During the second half of the month, remember that whether you’re solo or partnered, your life is full of love. Stop measuring it out in teaspoons, and start experiencing it in every cell of your body.
Libra
Your status soars this month, Libra, and your community is behind you the whole way. With the Sun in your professional zone through July 22, your career gets a big boost. Set intentions to accomplish your most worldly goals during the new moon on July 5. Note that VIPs are probably looking at your work right now, but there is definitely a major “I get by with a little help from my friends” vibe as well, because both Mercury and your ruling planet Venus are hyping you up from your friendship zone.
The full moon on July 21 speaks to an intense discharge of pressure in your home zone. Something that’s been weighing on you during the last six months should finally be released. You may have to let yourself let it go, however—notice if you’re holding onto your burdens too tightly, because you’ve gotten too comfortable with them.
Black Moon Lilith—the dark void of the moon associated with shadow work and unearthing repressed energy—entered your sign at the end of June. She’s going to help you to integrate your inner rebel over the next nine months. Get ready for a Libran revolution.
Career and money:
Networking opportunities abound after Mercury moves into your social zone on July 2 and then Venus follows on July 11. Yet there could be some confusion and complexity early in the month, after Neptune stations retrograde in your work and wellness zone. Make sure to clarify anything you don’t quite understand, whether in the company Slack or face-to-face. Don’t worry about offending your coworkers—this is not a time to be too nice.
Love and relationships:
After Chiron stations retrograde in your partnership zone on July 26, you can start to go deeper with old relational wounds. Profound shadow work that will positively impact your love life can happen during the next few months. When your ruler Venus trines Chiron on July 30, you should be able to see this path clearly.
Scorpio
Cancer season is an adventure for you, Scorpio. With the Sun in your sister water sign, you feel safe and secure enough to fly free and explore the world around you. Keep your passport ready and your carry-on packed. If you don’t have any trips planned, use the new moon on July 5 to set intentions for some major jet-setting during the next six months.
As Mercury (on July 2) and Venus (on July 11) move into your professional sector, you may feel extremely motivated to strive until you hit the professional stratosphere. This intensifies after the Sun enters Leo on July 22. The day before, the full moon lands in your communication zone, helping you to let go of something that’s perplexed you for the last six months through an important conversation. If that doesn’t feel comfortable or possible, writing about it in a journal will help you let it go.
Career and money:
Your professional life is where it’s at this month, thanks to the presence of Mercury in your career zone starting on July 2. But the opposition between the communication planet and Pluto on July 3 could be a bit tense, so don’t broach any important career conversations until after the Independence Day break. Come back to the office refreshed, and then hit those pitches with gusto.
Love and relationships:
Your passionate planetary ruler Mars spends his final few weeks in your relationship zone, culminating in an explosive conjunction with Uranus on July 15. This is an expect-the-unexpected, anything-goes moment for your love life. Mars moves into your eighth house on July 20, spicing up your sex life considerably for the next six weeks. Intimacy can be INTENSE but amazing.
Sagittarius
Deep transformation is at hand, Sagittarius, as the Sun moves through your intimacy zone. There’s no wise way to gloss over the most important personal issues right now. You can use the energy of the new moon on July 5 to explore the parts of you that you often keep under wraps. Even if you have to dig deep and explore new levels of emotional vulnerability, it should be well-worth it for your growth as a person.
Planets are moving into Leo, your sister fire sign, heating up your travel zone. After Mercury enters here on July 2, followed by Venus on July 11 and the Sun on July 22, your soul’s mission to see the world will reignite. The Mars-Uranus conjunction in your work and wellness zone could bring a total surprise to your schedule. Try to gently manage any stress that comes from this change near July 15. The full moon on July 21 speaks to your self-esteem, helping you shed shame and reclaim a more authentic version of yourself.
Career and money:
The double impact of two full moons in your money zone over the last month culminates on July 21—a powerful moment to own your financial ambitions. The Sun and new moon are in your house of shared resources, so you may find yourself thinking about investments, taxes, and any cash that isn’t exactly classified as “earning.” More of this could be coming your way!
Love and relationships:
After Mars charges into your relationship zone on July 20, your passions surge to a level that could feel somewhat uncontrollable (especially with Venus and the Sun in a fellow fire sign). In short, you’re feeling hella sexy and more than likely in the mood for love. If you’re in a relationship, your partner is likely to be pretty psyched about this sudden flood of libido. But even if you’re solo, why waste this erotic energy?
Capricorn
July is all about relationships, love, and sex, Capricorn. With the Sun in your partnership zone through July 22, passion planet Mars in your house of pleasure through July 20, and Mercury and Venus moving into your sexuality sector, it may be hard to think about anything other than romance. Tearing you away from your ambitions isn’t always the easiest thing, but right now, you have an excellent excuse to loosen your grip on worldly achievements to focus on emotional/erotic connections.
Use the new moon on July 5 to set intentions for relationships during the next six months. The Mars-Uranus conjunction in your Tinder zone on July 15 could bring a total surprise for your love life, whether you’re currently single or attached. The second full moon in Capricorn lights up your own sign on July 21, offering you the chance to let go of the heaviest burdens you’ve carried since your last birthday. Release them, and step into a liberating kind of sovereignty for your whole body and soul.
Career and money:
The Mercury-Pluto opposition on July 3 could be a tricky moment for communication about your assets. It’s not the best moment for making investments until Venus moves into your shared resources zone on July 11. Mars moves into your work zone on July 20, restoring your passion about your daily duties.
Love and relationships:
Love is where it’s at almost all month long, but there is a clear emphasis on the relational realm while the Sun is in your opposite sign for the first three weeks of July. With Mercury in your intimacy zone, deep and meaningful conversations with a lover are possible—you can talk about the future with an equal measure of love and practicality. The new moon is an ideal time to think about the parameters of this discussion, no matter when you choose to broach it.
Aquarius
July brings a mixture of hard work and soft play, Aquarius. The Sun remains in your work and wellness zone through July 22, keeping you focused on meeting deadlines. But as Mercury, and then Venus make their way into your partnership zone (on July 2 and 11, respectively), you’ll start to tune into the “other halves” in your life, whether they’re personal or professional partners.
The new moon arrives on July 5 to help you forge plans for health and success during the next six months. Set intentions to make your schedule work for you instead of the other way around. The full moon in your subconscious sector provides space to dream on July 21, making way for deep introspection and self-awareness. You can let go of something that’s secretly consumed you for the last six months, clearing the way for profound healing of your psyche.
Career and money:
If you’ve got a WFH sitch, the Mars-Uranus conjunction in your domestic zone could bring a sudden change to the arrangement. Your boss may want you to come in more often, or you may suddenly decide to launch a side hustle that you can literally do from your sofa. The new moon can help you create any kind of new work scenario you might envision, so write all those dreams down early in the month.
Love and relationships:
When Mercury in your partnership zone opposes Pluto in your sign on July 3, relationships could be fraught, tense, and complex. Avoid pushing any buttons and deflect if a lover tries to bait you into an argument. Use the time in between to work things through, so by the time the Sun opposes Pluto on July 23, you’re ready to engage with compassion.
Pisces
Love, romance, and sex, oh my! With the Sun in your fifth House through July 22, you’ve got access to all of this and more right now, Pisces. The new moon activates this part of your chart on July 5, helping you set sweet intentions for your next six months of creativity, pleasure, and play. After Mercury and Venus leave this part of your chart and move into your work zone, you won’t exactly forget the fun parts, but you’re likely to be more focused on getting stuff done than crafting your very own Romanstasy novel IRL.
Try not to say anything too outrageous when the Mars-Uranus conjunction explodes in your communication zone on July 15 (and avoid confrontation that week, if possible). The full moon in Capricorn on July 21 can bring closure to an issue that’s been lingering with friends for the last six months. You might collectively let it go so that the group chat can be a place of joy again.
Career and money:
Mercury moves into your work zone on July 2 and immediately clashes with Pluto in your subconscious sector. You might project (or have projected onto you) an issue that is separate from the actual matter at hand, so try to work through this before bringing it up with a colleague. After Venus moves into your daily activities zone on July 11, your working conditions can improve, along with your income.
Love and relationships:
During a spectacular month for your love life, there are few extra spectacular days. The Sun in your pleasure zone trines Saturn in your sign on July 11, bringing stability to your relationships. On the same day, Venus in your romance zone trines your modern ruler Neptune, bringing your fantasies to life.
Anxiety Can Cause Shortness of Breath, but So Can *a Lot* of Other Health Issues—Here’s How to Tell the Difference
Deep breath in, deep breath out.
July’s powerful astrology brings both the fireworks and the waterworks. It’s Cancer season, so the emotion is LOUD, but with communication connoisseur Mercury and sweet Venus moving into Leo (summer’s super-hot middle child) we start to feel the sizzle early in the month.
(Psst: You can get a chance to win a free astrology reading with Well+Good’s resident monthly astrologer, Stefanie Iris Weiss, by pre-ordering her new book, Sex and Your Stars: A Sexologist’s Guide to the Erotic Energy of the Zodiac.)
Conversations could be quite heated leading up to July 4 thanks to an opposition between Mercury and Pluto the day before. Avoid being snippy with lovers and others, but let yourself feel all your feels—and have a container to put them in, even if it’s just your journal for now.
When Mars in Taurus connects with Uranus on the 15th, expect cosmic eruptions in the form of wild and potentially unsettling news.
The new moon in Cancer arrives on July 5, softening and sweetening up the vibe, but potentially making us feel clingy and vulnerable. Set intentions for the Cancer-ruled house of your chart, and think forward through the next six months. What do you want to create and build in this part of your life?
The most volatile moment of the month comes on July 15, when mighty Mars in Taurus comes together with anything-goes Uranus, creating a crescendo of cosmic eruptions. We’re deep in election season by this time—and this is the week of the Republican Convention—so we’re bound to get some wild and potentially unsettling news around mid-month.
Our second full moon in Capricorn of the summer unfurls on July 21, at 29 degrees of the sign. Since the first full moon in this sign on June 21, we’ve been on a whole journey through this part of our chart. Whatever you’ve been carrying for the last 30 days, and/or the last six months, let it go for real.
The Sun blasts into Leo the day after the full moon, setting the stage for 30 days to blaze. It’s time to open our hearts, love like there’s no tomorrow, and to write, direct, and star in our own second-half-of-summer series.
July 2024 monthly horoscope for each zodiac sign
To get a fuller understanding of what you can expect from the above cosmic transits and others this month, keep reading for your zodiac sign’s July 2024 monthly horoscope. (A pro tip: Read for both your sun sign and your rising sign, the latter of which can offer an even more accurate horoscope, as it sets the order of the astrological houses in your birth chart.)
Looking for even more astrology insights? Read your full 2024 yearly horoscope here.
Aries
You’re steeped in all things domestic as the month begins, Aries, but once planets begin moving into your fifth house of love, there is no stopping you from pursuing pleasure like it’s your actual job. Use the new moon on July 5 to reevaluate your relationship with your home, roots, and attachments to the past. The full moon lands in your status sector on July 23, revealing what you might need to release in order to really, truly shine on the professional stage. After the Sun moves into Leo on July 22, there’s a lot more sweetness to tap. Whether you’re single or attached, take note that your Tinder House is on fire for the next month.
Career and money:
Your planetary ruler Mars collides with Uranus in your financial zone at mid-month, so an unexpected yet very exciting monetary development is possible. You’ve been through an intense clearing phase in your career arena in the last month, and it culminates at the Full Moon on the 21st, a moment of deep reflection about what you came to earth to do. You may put some outdated professional plans to bed in order to achieve sustainable success in an arena that is more meaningful to you.
Love and relationships:
Big time passion begins to rush into your life the moment Venus enters your romance zone on the 11th, but watch out for jealousy to erupt the day after, as the love planet opposes Pluto in your friendship zone. This could be one of those moments when a situationship gets so tense that you’re ready to commit or quit.
Taurus
You can emote like a boss this July, sweet Taurus. Cancer season calls for compassionate communication, deep listening, and co-creation in conversation. The new moon on July 5 is a moment to experience this IRL. Write down your goals for talking, thinking, and texting so the best ideas can start to manifest during the next six months.
Your planetary ruler Venus moves into your domestic zone on July 11, bringing love and romance home to you. On July 15, Mars in your stars has an explosive encounter with Uranus. It might be a good day to avoid confrontation—or even better, meditate, take CBD, and add in an Epsom salt bath for good measure. It’s tense as hell. After July 22, when the Sun moves into your home zone, you just might want to take a relaxing staycation.
Career and money:
You’ve got serious clarity about career matters this month, especially near the new moon —you can use this to pitch clients, edit your resume, apply for a new position, start a podcast, or begin a long-delayed writing project. However, with communication planet Mercury in your home zone for most of the month, you may prefer WFH over being in the office.
Love and relationships:
Partnership is sweet this month, particularly if you’ve got a live-in lover or have been thinking about moving in with your boo. Just be careful about misunderstandings and lovers’ quarrels around the Mars-Uranus conjunction in your sign at mid-month—you’re more likely to let small things get to you.
Gemini
July’s stars show you what you’re worth, Gemini. The Sun’s journey through Cancer brings a strong emphasis to money and earning and their relationship to your values during the first three weeks of the month. Your ruler Mercury slips into your communication zone on July 2, powering up your star-given skillset. Talking, thinking, and texting come even more naturally to you than usual, so have that important conversation or send that long-delayed text.
If you’re in the need of passion and drive, Mars has plenty on offer after he charges into your stars on July 20. The full moon on July 21 is all about resonating with deep, powerful transformation and emotional intimacy—the kind that can make you feel like an entirely new person.
Career and money:
With a powerful new moon in your house of money and values on July 5, it’s time to set some specific goals about what you want to earn during the next six months. Whether this means looking for a new job or asking for a raise at your current one, use this lunation to get super specific about what kind of budget will afford you what you need and deserve.
Love and relationships:
The Mars-Uranus conjunction brings your psychic shadows to the fore at mid-month, and this process could make you feel relationally cranky and angsty. Thankfully, as you build up to the full moon on July 21, boundlessly deep erotic intimacy is possible between you and a lover. But you may have to let go of old expectations first.
Cancer
Happy birthday darling Cancer! Your annual astro season is super sweet. The Sun and Venus deliver some serious pleasure to your door during the first few weeks of the month. The very powerful New Moon in your own sign on July 5 is an opportunity to set intentions for the next six months. Think of this like an extra allowance of New Year’s resolutions to manifest during the second half of 2024.
The full moon in your relationship zone arrives on July 21, helping you to unburden yourself of a heavy issue with a one-to-one partner. After the Sun follows Mercury and Venus into your money zone on the 22nd, your goals shift to spending and saving, not necessarily in that order.
Career and money:
July is both your birthday season and your cash cow. Mercury moves into your financial zone on the 2nd, followed by Venus on the 11th. You can talk about money matters more easily with anyone you share resources with, while simultaneously attracting new sources of income from mid-month on.
Love and relationships:
July’s stars sweeten up your love life considerably, and not just because it’s Cancer season and everyone is checking you out. Romance planet Venus is in your sign early in the month, and she trines magical Neptune in Pisces on July 11, making it a day of pure magic for your love life. The full moon in your relationship zone can help you get closure on a relationship from your past or heal an issue with a current lover. Don’t cling to old wounds, Cancer—the present is a gift.
Leo
It’s getting hot in (wherever you are as you read this), Leo. Your ruling luminary remains in the shadow of your 12th house through July 22, when Leo season officially begins. There’s a dreamy sensation to your waking life, but as planets begin to enter your fiery realm (starting with Mercury on July 2 and Venus on July 11) you’ll start to feel like you’re onstage, right in the center of the spotlight. Use the new moon on July 5 to tune into your dreams and fantasies—and set intentions to manifest them IRL.
The Full Moon arrives in your work and wellness zone on July 21–the second lunation here since June. If you’ve been stressed or even sick during the past month, this is your moment to let it go and emerge renewed in chrysalis form, ready for your Leo season glow-up.
Career and money:
Next month could be a bit messy money-wise thanks to Mercury retrograde in your financial zone, so now’s the time to get your ducks in a row in terms of your budget. If you were thinking of asking for a raise or applying for a new job this summer, hit up your boss or new client before mid-month if possible. The Mars-Uranus conjunction is in your career zone on July 15, which may bring a surprise!
Love and relationships:
When Mercury in your sign opposes Pluto in your partnership zone on July 3, relationship conversations could get pretty heated. It’s important not to let your ego dominate the dialogue. Instead, practice active listening and speak from your heart-space. Whatever the outcome, when you stay true to your desires, love will win.
Virgo
You’re torn between socializing and hermit-mode this month, Virgo. With the Sun in your community zone, you want to see and be seen, but after your ruler Mercury enters your dream zone, part of you may want to rest and reset. Guess what? You can do both at the same time.
Use the New Moon on July 5 to set intentions for a thriving social life, focusing on the ways that networking can enhance your personal and professional life. Then at the full moon on July 21, consider what you may need to let go of from the last six months. If a romance didn’t quite work out or a creative project fizzled, it’s time to forgive yourself and move on. Virgo season will be here before you know it, and you want to be as burden-free as possible by the time it does—so you can live it up, step into the spotlight, and own your joy.
Career and money:
The Mercury-Pluto opposition could be a bit contentious for your everyday work life at the start of the month, so be wary of the way small stressors can become big problems when you overfocus on them. Instead of criticizing yourself or your co-workers, try to talk or think it through, emphasizing what’s working. Cue your career breakthrough!
Love and relationships:
As you approach the second full moon in your romance zone on July 21, you can finally release any fear you’ve felt about not being in the “perfect” relationship. During the second half of the month, remember that whether you’re solo or partnered, your life is full of love. Stop measuring it out in teaspoons, and start experiencing it in every cell of your body.
Libra
Your status soars this month, Libra, and your community is behind you the whole way. With the Sun in your professional zone through July 22, your career gets a big boost. Set intentions to accomplish your most worldly goals during the new moon on July 5. Note that VIPs are probably looking at your work right now, but there is definitely a major “I get by with a little help from my friends” vibe as well, because both Mercury and your ruling planet Venus are hyping you up from your friendship zone.
The full moon on July 21 speaks to an intense discharge of pressure in your home zone. Something that’s been weighing on you during the last six months should finally be released. You may have to let yourself let it go, however—notice if you’re holding onto your burdens too tightly, because you’ve gotten too comfortable with them.
Black Moon Lilith—the dark void of the moon associated with shadow work and unearthing repressed energy—entered your sign at the end of June. She’s going to help you to integrate your inner rebel over the next nine months. Get ready for a Libran revolution.
Career and money:
Networking opportunities abound after Mercury moves into your social zone on July 2 and then Venus follows on July 11. Yet there could be some confusion and complexity early in the month, after Neptune stations retrograde in your work and wellness zone. Make sure to clarify anything you don’t quite understand, whether in the company Slack or face-to-face. Don’t worry about offending your coworkers—this is not a time to be too nice.
Love and relationships:
After Chiron stations retrograde in your partnership zone on July 26, you can start to go deeper with old relational wounds. Profound shadow work that will positively impact your love life can happen during the next few months. When your ruler Venus trines Chiron on July 30, you should be able to see this path clearly.
Scorpio
Cancer season is an adventure for you, Scorpio. With the Sun in your sister water sign, you feel safe and secure enough to fly free and explore the world around you. Keep your passport ready and your carry-on packed. If you don’t have any trips planned, use the new moon on July 5 to set intentions for some major jet-setting during the next six months.
As Mercury (on July 2) and Venus (on July 11) move into your professional sector, you may feel extremely motivated to strive until you hit the professional stratosphere. This intensifies after the Sun enters Leo on July 22. The day before, the full moon lands in your communication zone, helping you to let go of something that’s perplexed you for the last six months through an important conversation. If that doesn’t feel comfortable or possible, writing about it in a journal will help you let it go.
Career and money:
Your professional life is where it’s at this month, thanks to the presence of Mercury in your career zone starting on July 2. But the opposition between the communication planet and Pluto on July 3 could be a bit tense, so don’t broach any important career conversations until after the Independence Day break. Come back to the office refreshed, and then hit those pitches with gusto.
Love and relationships:
Your passionate planetary ruler Mars spends his final few weeks in your relationship zone, culminating in an explosive conjunction with Uranus on July 15. This is an expect-the-unexpected, anything-goes moment for your love life. Mars moves into your eighth house on July 20, spicing up your sex life considerably for the next six weeks. Intimacy can be INTENSE but amazing.
Sagittarius
Deep transformation is at hand, Sagittarius, as the Sun moves through your intimacy zone. There’s no wise way to gloss over the most important personal issues right now. You can use the energy of the new moon on July 5 to explore the parts of you that you often keep under wraps. Even if you have to dig deep and explore new levels of emotional vulnerability, it should be well-worth it for your growth as a person.
Planets are moving into Leo, your sister fire sign, heating up your travel zone. After Mercury enters here on July 2, followed by Venus on July 11 and the Sun on July 22, your soul’s mission to see the world will reignite. The Mars-Uranus conjunction in your work and wellness zone could bring a total surprise to your schedule. Try to gently manage any stress that comes from this change near July 15. The full moon on July 21 speaks to your self-esteem, helping you shed shame and reclaim a more authentic version of yourself.
Career and money:
The double impact of two full moons in your money zone over the last month culminates on July 21—a powerful moment to own your financial ambitions. The Sun and new moon are in your house of shared resources, so you may find yourself thinking about investments, taxes, and any cash that isn’t exactly classified as “earning.” More of this could be coming your way!
Love and relationships:
After Mars charges into your relationship zone on July 20, your passions surge to a level that could feel somewhat uncontrollable (especially with Venus and the Sun in a fellow fire sign). In short, you’re feeling hella sexy and more than likely in the mood for love. If you’re in a relationship, your partner is likely to be pretty psyched about this sudden flood of libido. But even if you’re solo, why waste this erotic energy?
Capricorn
July is all about relationships, love, and sex, Capricorn. With the Sun in your partnership zone through July 22, passion planet Mars in your house of pleasure through July 20, and Mercury and Venus moving into your sexuality sector, it may be hard to think about anything other than romance. Tearing you away from your ambitions isn’t always the easiest thing, but right now, you have an excellent excuse to loosen your grip on worldly achievements to focus on emotional/erotic connections.
Use the new moon on July 5 to set intentions for relationships during the next six months. The Mars-Uranus conjunction in your Tinder zone on July 15 could bring a total surprise for your love life, whether you’re currently single or attached. The second full moon in Capricorn lights up your own sign on July 21, offering you the chance to let go of the heaviest burdens you’ve carried since your last birthday. Release them, and step into a liberating kind of sovereignty for your whole body and soul.
Career and money:
The Mercury-Pluto opposition on July 3 could be a tricky moment for communication about your assets. It’s not the best moment for making investments until Venus moves into your shared resources zone on July 11. Mars moves into your work zone on July 20, restoring your passion about your daily duties.
Love and relationships:
Love is where it’s at almost all month long, but there is a clear emphasis on the relational realm while the Sun is in your opposite sign for the first three weeks of July. With Mercury in your intimacy zone, deep and meaningful conversations with a lover are possible—you can talk about the future with an equal measure of love and practicality. The new moon is an ideal time to think about the parameters of this discussion, no matter when you choose to broach it.
Aquarius
July brings a mixture of hard work and soft play, Aquarius. The Sun remains in your work and wellness zone through July 22, keeping you focused on meeting deadlines. But as Mercury, and then Venus make their way into your partnership zone (on July 2 and 11, respectively), you’ll start to tune into the “other halves” in your life, whether they’re personal or professional partners.
The new moon arrives on July 5 to help you forge plans for health and success during the next six months. Set intentions to make your schedule work for you instead of the other way around. The full moon in your subconscious sector provides space to dream on July 21, making way for deep introspection and self-awareness. You can let go of something that’s secretly consumed you for the last six months, clearing the way for profound healing of your psyche.
Career and money:
If you’ve got a WFH sitch, the Mars-Uranus conjunction in your domestic zone could bring a sudden change to the arrangement. Your boss may want you to come in more often, or you may suddenly decide to launch a side hustle that you can literally do from your sofa. The new moon can help you create any kind of new work scenario you might envision, so write all those dreams down early in the month.
Love and relationships:
When Mercury in your partnership zone opposes Pluto in your sign on July 3, relationships could be fraught, tense, and complex. Avoid pushing any buttons and deflect if a lover tries to bait you into an argument. Use the time in between to work things through, so by the time the Sun opposes Pluto on July 23, you’re ready to engage with compassion.
Pisces
Love, romance, and sex, oh my! With the Sun in your fifth House through July 22, you’ve got access to all of this and more right now, Pisces. The new moon activates this part of your chart on July 5, helping you set sweet intentions for your next six months of creativity, pleasure, and play. After Mercury and Venus leave this part of your chart and move into your work zone, you won’t exactly forget the fun parts, but you’re likely to be more focused on getting stuff done than crafting your very own Romanstasy novel IRL.
Try not to say anything too outrageous when the Mars-Uranus conjunction explodes in your communication zone on July 15 (and avoid confrontation that week, if possible). The full moon in Capricorn on July 21 can bring closure to an issue that’s been lingering with friends for the last six months. You might collectively let it go so that the group chat can be a place of joy again.
Career and money:
Mercury moves into your work zone on July 2 and immediately clashes with Pluto in your subconscious sector. You might project (or have projected onto you) an issue that is separate from the actual matter at hand, so try to work through this before bringing it up with a colleague. After Venus moves into your daily activities zone on July 11, your working conditions can improve, along with your income.
Love and relationships:
During a spectacular month for your love life, there are few extra spectacular days. The Sun in your pleasure zone trines Saturn in your sign on July 11, bringing stability to your relationships. On the same day, Venus in your romance zone trines your modern ruler Neptune, bringing your fantasies to life.
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Now all you need is a killer playlist, and you’re ready to hit the road.
July’s powerful astrology brings both the fireworks and the waterworks. It’s Cancer season, so the emotion is LOUD, but with communication connoisseur Mercury and sweet Venus moving into Leo (summer’s super-hot middle child) we start to feel the sizzle early in the month.
(Psst: You can get a chance to win a free astrology reading with Well+Good’s resident monthly astrologer, Stefanie Iris Weiss, by pre-ordering her new book, Sex and Your Stars: A Sexologist’s Guide to the Erotic Energy of the Zodiac.)
Conversations could be quite heated leading up to July 4 thanks to an opposition between Mercury and Pluto the day before. Avoid being snippy with lovers and others, but let yourself feel all your feels—and have a container to put them in, even if it’s just your journal for now.
When Mars in Taurus connects with Uranus on the 15th, expect cosmic eruptions in the form of wild and potentially unsettling news.
The new moon in Cancer arrives on July 5, softening and sweetening up the vibe, but potentially making us feel clingy and vulnerable. Set intentions for the Cancer-ruled house of your chart, and think forward through the next six months. What do you want to create and build in this part of your life?
The most volatile moment of the month comes on July 15, when mighty Mars in Taurus comes together with anything-goes Uranus, creating a crescendo of cosmic eruptions. We’re deep in election season by this time—and this is the week of the Republican Convention—so we’re bound to get some wild and potentially unsettling news around mid-month.
Our second full moon in Capricorn of the summer unfurls on July 21, at 29 degrees of the sign. Since the first full moon in this sign on June 21, we’ve been on a whole journey through this part of our chart. Whatever you’ve been carrying for the last 30 days, and/or the last six months, let it go for real.
The Sun blasts into Leo the day after the full moon, setting the stage for 30 days to blaze. It’s time to open our hearts, love like there’s no tomorrow, and to write, direct, and star in our own second-half-of-summer series.
July 2024 monthly horoscope for each zodiac sign
To get a fuller understanding of what you can expect from the above cosmic transits and others this month, keep reading for your zodiac sign’s July 2024 monthly horoscope. (A pro tip: Read for both your sun sign and your rising sign, the latter of which can offer an even more accurate horoscope, as it sets the order of the astrological houses in your birth chart.)
Looking for even more astrology insights? Read your full 2024 yearly horoscope here.
Aries
You’re steeped in all things domestic as the month begins, Aries, but once planets begin moving into your fifth house of love, there is no stopping you from pursuing pleasure like it’s your actual job. Use the new moon on July 5 to reevaluate your relationship with your home, roots, and attachments to the past. The full moon lands in your status sector on July 23, revealing what you might need to release in order to really, truly shine on the professional stage. After the Sun moves into Leo on July 22, there’s a lot more sweetness to tap. Whether you’re single or attached, take note that your Tinder House is on fire for the next month.
Career and money:
Your planetary ruler Mars collides with Uranus in your financial zone at mid-month, so an unexpected yet very exciting monetary development is possible. You’ve been through an intense clearing phase in your career arena in the last month, and it culminates at the Full Moon on the 21st, a moment of deep reflection about what you came to earth to do. You may put some outdated professional plans to bed in order to achieve sustainable success in an arena that is more meaningful to you.
Love and relationships:
Big time passion begins to rush into your life the moment Venus enters your romance zone on the 11th, but watch out for jealousy to erupt the day after, as the love planet opposes Pluto in your friendship zone. This could be one of those moments when a situationship gets so tense that you’re ready to commit or quit.
Taurus
You can emote like a boss this July, sweet Taurus. Cancer season calls for compassionate communication, deep listening, and co-creation in conversation. The new moon on July 5 is a moment to experience this IRL. Write down your goals for talking, thinking, and texting so the best ideas can start to manifest during the next six months.
Your planetary ruler Venus moves into your domestic zone on July 11, bringing love and romance home to you. On July 15, Mars in your stars has an explosive encounter with Uranus. It might be a good day to avoid confrontation—or even better, meditate, take CBD, and add in an Epsom salt bath for good measure. It’s tense as hell. After July 22, when the Sun moves into your home zone, you just might want to take a relaxing staycation.
Career and money:
You’ve got serious clarity about career matters this month, especially near the new moon —you can use this to pitch clients, edit your resume, apply for a new position, start a podcast, or begin a long-delayed writing project. However, with communication planet Mercury in your home zone for most of the month, you may prefer WFH over being in the office.
Love and relationships:
Partnership is sweet this month, particularly if you’ve got a live-in lover or have been thinking about moving in with your boo. Just be careful about misunderstandings and lovers’ quarrels around the Mars-Uranus conjunction in your sign at mid-month—you’re more likely to let small things get to you.
Gemini
July’s stars show you what you’re worth, Gemini. The Sun’s journey through Cancer brings a strong emphasis to money and earning and their relationship to your values during the first three weeks of the month. Your ruler Mercury slips into your communication zone on July 2, powering up your star-given skillset. Talking, thinking, and texting come even more naturally to you than usual, so have that important conversation or send that long-delayed text.
If you’re in the need of passion and drive, Mars has plenty on offer after he charges into your stars on July 20. The full moon on July 21 is all about resonating with deep, powerful transformation and emotional intimacy—the kind that can make you feel like an entirely new person.
Career and money:
With a powerful new moon in your house of money and values on July 5, it’s time to set some specific goals about what you want to earn during the next six months. Whether this means looking for a new job or asking for a raise at your current one, use this lunation to get super specific about what kind of budget will afford you what you need and deserve.
Love and relationships:
The Mars-Uranus conjunction brings your psychic shadows to the fore at mid-month, and this process could make you feel relationally cranky and angsty. Thankfully, as you build up to the full moon on July 21, boundlessly deep erotic intimacy is possible between you and a lover. But you may have to let go of old expectations first.
Cancer
Happy birthday darling Cancer! Your annual astro season is super sweet. The Sun and Venus deliver some serious pleasure to your door during the first few weeks of the month. The very powerful New Moon in your own sign on July 5 is an opportunity to set intentions for the next six months. Think of this like an extra allowance of New Year’s resolutions to manifest during the second half of 2024.
The full moon in your relationship zone arrives on July 21, helping you to unburden yourself of a heavy issue with a one-to-one partner. After the Sun follows Mercury and Venus into your money zone on the 22nd, your goals shift to spending and saving, not necessarily in that order.
Career and money:
July is both your birthday season and your cash cow. Mercury moves into your financial zone on the 2nd, followed by Venus on the 11th. You can talk about money matters more easily with anyone you share resources with, while simultaneously attracting new sources of income from mid-month on.
Love and relationships:
July’s stars sweeten up your love life considerably, and not just because it’s Cancer season and everyone is checking you out. Romance planet Venus is in your sign early in the month, and she trines magical Neptune in Pisces on July 11, making it a day of pure magic for your love life. The full moon in your relationship zone can help you get closure on a relationship from your past or heal an issue with a current lover. Don’t cling to old wounds, Cancer—the present is a gift.
Leo
It’s getting hot in (wherever you are as you read this), Leo. Your ruling luminary remains in the shadow of your 12th house through July 22, when Leo season officially begins. There’s a dreamy sensation to your waking life, but as planets begin to enter your fiery realm (starting with Mercury on July 2 and Venus on July 11) you’ll start to feel like you’re onstage, right in the center of the spotlight. Use the new moon on July 5 to tune into your dreams and fantasies—and set intentions to manifest them IRL.
The Full Moon arrives in your work and wellness zone on July 21–the second lunation here since June. If you’ve been stressed or even sick during the past month, this is your moment to let it go and emerge renewed in chrysalis form, ready for your Leo season glow-up.
Career and money:
Next month could be a bit messy money-wise thanks to Mercury retrograde in your financial zone, so now’s the time to get your ducks in a row in terms of your budget. If you were thinking of asking for a raise or applying for a new job this summer, hit up your boss or new client before mid-month if possible. The Mars-Uranus conjunction is in your career zone on July 15, which may bring a surprise!
Love and relationships:
When Mercury in your sign opposes Pluto in your partnership zone on July 3, relationship conversations could get pretty heated. It’s important not to let your ego dominate the dialogue. Instead, practice active listening and speak from your heart-space. Whatever the outcome, when you stay true to your desires, love will win.
Virgo
You’re torn between socializing and hermit-mode this month, Virgo. With the Sun in your community zone, you want to see and be seen, but after your ruler Mercury enters your dream zone, part of you may want to rest and reset. Guess what? You can do both at the same time.
Use the New Moon on July 5 to set intentions for a thriving social life, focusing on the ways that networking can enhance your personal and professional life. Then at the full moon on July 21, consider what you may need to let go of from the last six months. If a romance didn’t quite work out or a creative project fizzled, it’s time to forgive yourself and move on. Virgo season will be here before you know it, and you want to be as burden-free as possible by the time it does—so you can live it up, step into the spotlight, and own your joy.
Career and money:
The Mercury-Pluto opposition could be a bit contentious for your everyday work life at the start of the month, so be wary of the way small stressors can become big problems when you overfocus on them. Instead of criticizing yourself or your co-workers, try to talk or think it through, emphasizing what’s working. Cue your career breakthrough!
Love and relationships:
As you approach the second full moon in your romance zone on July 21, you can finally release any fear you’ve felt about not being in the “perfect” relationship. During the second half of the month, remember that whether you’re solo or partnered, your life is full of love. Stop measuring it out in teaspoons, and start experiencing it in every cell of your body.
Libra
Your status soars this month, Libra, and your community is behind you the whole way. With the Sun in your professional zone through July 22, your career gets a big boost. Set intentions to accomplish your most worldly goals during the new moon on July 5. Note that VIPs are probably looking at your work right now, but there is definitely a major “I get by with a little help from my friends” vibe as well, because both Mercury and your ruling planet Venus are hyping you up from your friendship zone.
The full moon on July 21 speaks to an intense discharge of pressure in your home zone. Something that’s been weighing on you during the last six months should finally be released. You may have to let yourself let it go, however—notice if you’re holding onto your burdens too tightly, because you’ve gotten too comfortable with them.
Black Moon Lilith—the dark void of the moon associated with shadow work and unearthing repressed energy—entered your sign at the end of June. She’s going to help you to integrate your inner rebel over the next nine months. Get ready for a Libran revolution.
Career and money:
Networking opportunities abound after Mercury moves into your social zone on July 2 and then Venus follows on July 11. Yet there could be some confusion and complexity early in the month, after Neptune stations retrograde in your work and wellness zone. Make sure to clarify anything you don’t quite understand, whether in the company Slack or face-to-face. Don’t worry about offending your coworkers—this is not a time to be too nice.
Love and relationships:
After Chiron stations retrograde in your partnership zone on July 26, you can start to go deeper with old relational wounds. Profound shadow work that will positively impact your love life can happen during the next few months. When your ruler Venus trines Chiron on July 30, you should be able to see this path clearly.
Scorpio
Cancer season is an adventure for you, Scorpio. With the Sun in your sister water sign, you feel safe and secure enough to fly free and explore the world around you. Keep your passport ready and your carry-on packed. If you don’t have any trips planned, use the new moon on July 5 to set intentions for some major jet-setting during the next six months.
As Mercury (on July 2) and Venus (on July 11) move into your professional sector, you may feel extremely motivated to strive until you hit the professional stratosphere. This intensifies after the Sun enters Leo on July 22. The day before, the full moon lands in your communication zone, helping you to let go of something that’s perplexed you for the last six months through an important conversation. If that doesn’t feel comfortable or possible, writing about it in a journal will help you let it go.
Career and money:
Your professional life is where it’s at this month, thanks to the presence of Mercury in your career zone starting on July 2. But the opposition between the communication planet and Pluto on July 3 could be a bit tense, so don’t broach any important career conversations until after the Independence Day break. Come back to the office refreshed, and then hit those pitches with gusto.
Love and relationships:
Your passionate planetary ruler Mars spends his final few weeks in your relationship zone, culminating in an explosive conjunction with Uranus on July 15. This is an expect-the-unexpected, anything-goes moment for your love life. Mars moves into your eighth house on July 20, spicing up your sex life considerably for the next six weeks. Intimacy can be INTENSE but amazing.
Sagittarius
Deep transformation is at hand, Sagittarius, as the Sun moves through your intimacy zone. There’s no wise way to gloss over the most important personal issues right now. You can use the energy of the new moon on July 5 to explore the parts of you that you often keep under wraps. Even if you have to dig deep and explore new levels of emotional vulnerability, it should be well-worth it for your growth as a person.
Planets are moving into Leo, your sister fire sign, heating up your travel zone. After Mercury enters here on July 2, followed by Venus on July 11 and the Sun on July 22, your soul’s mission to see the world will reignite. The Mars-Uranus conjunction in your work and wellness zone could bring a total surprise to your schedule. Try to gently manage any stress that comes from this change near July 15. The full moon on July 21 speaks to your self-esteem, helping you shed shame and reclaim a more authentic version of yourself.
Career and money:
The double impact of two full moons in your money zone over the last month culminates on July 21—a powerful moment to own your financial ambitions. The Sun and new moon are in your house of shared resources, so you may find yourself thinking about investments, taxes, and any cash that isn’t exactly classified as “earning.” More of this could be coming your way!
Love and relationships:
After Mars charges into your relationship zone on July 20, your passions surge to a level that could feel somewhat uncontrollable (especially with Venus and the Sun in a fellow fire sign). In short, you’re feeling hella sexy and more than likely in the mood for love. If you’re in a relationship, your partner is likely to be pretty psyched about this sudden flood of libido. But even if you’re solo, why waste this erotic energy?
Capricorn
July is all about relationships, love, and sex, Capricorn. With the Sun in your partnership zone through July 22, passion planet Mars in your house of pleasure through July 20, and Mercury and Venus moving into your sexuality sector, it may be hard to think about anything other than romance. Tearing you away from your ambitions isn’t always the easiest thing, but right now, you have an excellent excuse to loosen your grip on worldly achievements to focus on emotional/erotic connections.
Use the new moon on July 5 to set intentions for relationships during the next six months. The Mars-Uranus conjunction in your Tinder zone on July 15 could bring a total surprise for your love life, whether you’re currently single or attached. The second full moon in Capricorn lights up your own sign on July 21, offering you the chance to let go of the heaviest burdens you’ve carried since your last birthday. Release them, and step into a liberating kind of sovereignty for your whole body and soul.
Career and money:
The Mercury-Pluto opposition on July 3 could be a tricky moment for communication about your assets. It’s not the best moment for making investments until Venus moves into your shared resources zone on July 11. Mars moves into your work zone on July 20, restoring your passion about your daily duties.
Love and relationships:
Love is where it’s at almost all month long, but there is a clear emphasis on the relational realm while the Sun is in your opposite sign for the first three weeks of July. With Mercury in your intimacy zone, deep and meaningful conversations with a lover are possible—you can talk about the future with an equal measure of love and practicality. The new moon is an ideal time to think about the parameters of this discussion, no matter when you choose to broach it.
Aquarius
July brings a mixture of hard work and soft play, Aquarius. The Sun remains in your work and wellness zone through July 22, keeping you focused on meeting deadlines. But as Mercury, and then Venus make their way into your partnership zone (on July 2 and 11, respectively), you’ll start to tune into the “other halves” in your life, whether they’re personal or professional partners.
The new moon arrives on July 5 to help you forge plans for health and success during the next six months. Set intentions to make your schedule work for you instead of the other way around. The full moon in your subconscious sector provides space to dream on July 21, making way for deep introspection and self-awareness. You can let go of something that’s secretly consumed you for the last six months, clearing the way for profound healing of your psyche.
Career and money:
If you’ve got a WFH sitch, the Mars-Uranus conjunction in your domestic zone could bring a sudden change to the arrangement. Your boss may want you to come in more often, or you may suddenly decide to launch a side hustle that you can literally do from your sofa. The new moon can help you create any kind of new work scenario you might envision, so write all those dreams down early in the month.
Love and relationships:
When Mercury in your partnership zone opposes Pluto in your sign on July 3, relationships could be fraught, tense, and complex. Avoid pushing any buttons and deflect if a lover tries to bait you into an argument. Use the time in between to work things through, so by the time the Sun opposes Pluto on July 23, you’re ready to engage with compassion.
Pisces
Love, romance, and sex, oh my! With the Sun in your fifth House through July 22, you’ve got access to all of this and more right now, Pisces. The new moon activates this part of your chart on July 5, helping you set sweet intentions for your next six months of creativity, pleasure, and play. After Mercury and Venus leave this part of your chart and move into your work zone, you won’t exactly forget the fun parts, but you’re likely to be more focused on getting stuff done than crafting your very own Romanstasy novel IRL.
Try not to say anything too outrageous when the Mars-Uranus conjunction explodes in your communication zone on July 15 (and avoid confrontation that week, if possible). The full moon in Capricorn on July 21 can bring closure to an issue that’s been lingering with friends for the last six months. You might collectively let it go so that the group chat can be a place of joy again.
Career and money:
Mercury moves into your work zone on July 2 and immediately clashes with Pluto in your subconscious sector. You might project (or have projected onto you) an issue that is separate from the actual matter at hand, so try to work through this before bringing it up with a colleague. After Venus moves into your daily activities zone on July 11, your working conditions can improve, along with your income.
Love and relationships:
During a spectacular month for your love life, there are few extra spectacular days. The Sun in your pleasure zone trines Saturn in your sign on July 11, bringing stability to your relationships. On the same day, Venus in your romance zone trines your modern ruler Neptune, bringing your fantasies to life.
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.
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.
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.