I offer a single bit of advice to friends and family when they become new parents: When you start to think that you’ve got everything figured out, everything will change. Just as you start to get the hang of feedings, diapers, and regular naps, it’s time for solid food, potty training, and overnight sleeping. When you figure those out, it’s time for preschool and rare naps. The cycle goes on and on.
The same applies for those of us working in design and development these days. Having worked on the web for almost three decades at this point, I’ve seen the regular wax and wane of ideas, techniques, and technologies. Each time that we as developers and designers get into a regular rhythm, some new idea or technology comes along to shake things up and remake our world.
I built my first website in the mid-’90s. Design and development on the web back then was a free-for-all, with few established norms. For any layout aside from a single column, we used table elements, often with empty cells containing a single pixel spacer GIF to add empty space. We styled text with numerous font tags, nesting the tags every time we wanted to vary the font style. And we had only three or four typefaces to choose from: Arial, Courier, or Times New Roman. When Verdana and Georgia came out in 1996, we rejoiced because our options had nearly doubled. The only safe colors to choose from were the 216 “web safe” colors known to work across platforms. The few interactive elements (like contact forms, guest books, and counters) were mostly powered by CGI scripts (predominantly written in Perl at the time). Achieving any kind of unique look involved a pile of hacks all the way down. Interaction was often limited to specific pages in a site.
At the turn of the century, a new cycle started. Crufty code littered with table layouts and font tags waned, and a push for web standards waxed. Newer technologies like CSS got more widespread adoption by browsers makers, developers, and designers. This shift toward standards didn’t happen accidentally or overnight. It took active engagement between the W3C and browser vendors and heavy evangelism from folks like the Web Standards Project to build standards. A List Apart and books like Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman played key roles in teaching developers and designers why standards are important, how to implement them, and how to sell them to their organizations. And approaches like progressive enhancement introduced the idea that content should be available for all browsers—with additional enhancements available for more advanced browsers. Meanwhile, sites like the CSS Zen Garden showcased just how powerful and versatile CSS can be when combined with a solid semantic HTML structure.
Server-side languages like PHP, Java, and .NET overtook Perl as the predominant back-end processors, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the trash bin. With these better server-side tools came the first era of web applications, starting with content-management systems (particularly in the blogging space with tools like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress). In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened doors for asynchronous interaction between the front end and back end. Suddenly, pages could update their content without needing to reload. A crop of JavaScript frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and jQuery arose to help developers build more reliable client-side interaction across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like image replacement let crafty designers and developers display fonts of their choosing. And technologies like Flash made it possible to add animations, games, and even more interactivity.
These new technologies, standards, and techniques reinvigorated the industry in many ways. Web design flourished as designers and developers explored more diverse styles and layouts. But we still relied on tons of hacks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes (such as rounded or angled corners) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks). Complicated layouts required all manner of nested floats or absolute positioning (or both). Flash and image replacement for custom fonts was a great start toward varying the typefaces from the big five, but both hacks introduced accessibility and performance problems. And JavaScript libraries made it easy for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, although at the cost of doubling or even quadrupling the download size of simple websites.
The symbiosis between the front end and back end continued to improve, and that led to the current era of modern web applications. Between expanded server-side programming languages (which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Alongside these tools came others, including collaborative version control, build automation, and shared package libraries. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.
At the same time, mobile devices became more capable, and they gave us internet access in our pockets. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.
This combination of capable mobile devices and powerful development tools contributed to the waxing of social media and other centralized tools for people to connect and consume. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media offered connections on a global scale, with both the good and bad that that entails.
Want a much more extensive history of how we got here, with some other takes on ways that we can improve? Jeremy Keith wrote “Of Time and the Web.” Or check out the “Web Design History Timeline” at the Web Design Museum. Neal Agarwal also has a fun tour through “Internet Artifacts.”
In the last couple of years, it’s felt like we’ve begun to reach another major inflection point. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. There are many different ways to make a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all flavors. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other tools of the IndieWeb can help with this, but they’re still relatively underimplemented and hard to use for the less nerdy. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.
Browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other standards like web components has accelerated, especially through efforts like Interop. New technologies gain support across the board in a fraction of the time that they used to. I often learn about a new feature and check its browser support only to find that its coverage is already above 80 percent. Nowadays, the barrier to using newer techniques often isn’t browser support but simply the limits of how quickly designers and developers can learn what’s available and how to adopt it.
Today, with a few commands and a couple of lines of code, we can prototype almost any idea. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. But the upfront cost that these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes due as upgrading and maintaining them becomes a part of our technical debt.
If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks—which used to let us adopt new techniques sooner—have now become hindrances instead. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And when scripts fail (whether through poor code, network issues, or other environmental factors), there’s often no alternative, leaving users with blank or broken pages.
Today’s hacks help to shape tomorrow’s standards. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks—for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we’re unwilling to admit that they’re hacks or we hesitate to replace them. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?
Build for the long haul. Optimize for performance, for accessibility, and for the user. Weigh the costs of those developer-friendly tools. They may make your job a little easier today, but how do they affect everything else? What’s the cost to users? To future developers? To standards adoption? Sometimes the convenience may be worth it. Sometimes it’s just a hack that you’ve grown accustomed to. And sometimes it’s holding you back from even better options.
Start from standards. Standards continue to evolve over time, but browsers have done a remarkably good job of continuing to support older standards. The same isn’t always true of third-party frameworks. Sites built with even the hackiest of HTML from the ’90s still work just fine today. The same can’t always be said of sites built with frameworks even after just a couple years.
Design with care. Whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes, consider the impacts of each decision. The convenience of many a modern tool comes at the cost of not always understanding the underlying decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the impact that those decisions can have. Rather than rushing headlong to “move fast and break things,” use the time saved by modern tools to consider more carefully and design with deliberation.
Always be learning. If you’re always learning, you’re also growing. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. You might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year, even if you were to focus solely on learning standards. (Remember XHTML?) But constant learning opens up new connections in your brain, and the hacks that you learn one day may help to inform different experiments another day.
Play, experiment, and be weird! This web that we’ve built is the ultimate experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be courageous and try new things. Build a playground for ideas. Make goofy experiments in your own mad science lab. Start your own small business. There has never been a more empowering place to be creative, take risks, and explore what we’re capable of.
Share and amplify. As you experiment, play, and learn, share what’s worked for you. Write on your own website, post on whichever social media site you prefer, or shout it from a TikTok. Write something for A List Apart! But take the time to amplify others too: find new voices, learn from them, and share what they’ve taught you.
As designers and developers for the web (and beyond), we’re responsible for building the future every day, whether that may take the shape of personal websites, social media tools used by billions, or anything in between. Let’s imbue our values into the things that we create, and let’s make the web a better place for everyone. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then share it, make it better, make it again, or make something new. Learn. Make. Share. Grow. Rinse and repeat. Every time you think that you’ve mastered the web, everything will change.
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.
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.
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 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.
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:
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.
Achy hips while you’re trying to catch sweet zzzs? We’ve got you covered.
Any group fitness class that starts with a One Direction song and ends with Ed Sheeran is sure to be fun, and the cardio drumming class at Duke Health & Fitness Center in Durham, North Carolina, was no different.
But first, let me give you some background: I’m always interested in learning about new fitness trends and fun ways to work out. While volleyball and dance are my staples, I’ve also tried trampoline fitness, hot girl walks, and cozy cardio—and they’ve all been winners in my book.
My latest trial run? Cardio drumming. It’s a type of workout I first heard about on TikTok. When I saw I could take a class in the next town over, I quickly registered online. And when I walked in and was instantly welcomed by lots of friendly ladies, my excitement (and comfort level) grew.
Cardio drumming is an exercise where participants hit different parts of an exercise ball (or the area around it) with drumsticks to the rhythm of songs. This fitness activity combines music, movement, and community.
Also called “Drums Alive,” it’s “the original and only research-based, comprehensive, all-inclusive program in the world that applies drumming fitness protocols in a multi-disciplinary way through physical education, fitness, dance, music education, mindfulness, relaxation, and inclusion strategies for the improvement of brain and body health and wellness.”
Carrie Elkins created and founded the program in 2001. She had recently gotten a hip injury that limited her movement greatly, and this especially upset her as an athlete. Wanting to fast-track the healing process, she started drumming on cardboard boxes to get some movement in. While drumming, she experienced a mood lift and increased heart rate—like she had from teaching fitness classes. Thus, cardio drumming was born.
One of the most obvious benefits of cardio drumming is that it’s a more accessible and flexible form of exercise. If you can’t (or don’t want to) move much, cardio drumming is an in-between option. Further, you can kick it up a notch by adding squats, stepping in place, or walking around the ball as you hit it, or make it easier by drumming the ball only on the top, without walking or squatting or “getting fancy.”
While cardio drumming might sound or look easy, make no mistake: It’s a workout, and it has benefits. “It is low-impact, but still gives you a cardio workout,” says Tanya Judd, the class’s instructor who’s taught group fitness for over 25 years and cardio drumming for seven years. “We do a little bit of full-body movement, but primarily it’s cardio from the upper body.”
I can confirm: I felt light sweat dripping down my back about halfway through the class. Both my arms and legs were thoroughly engaged in the movements.
Research affirms that “easy” exercise is still good for your brain and body. An October 2015 systematic review in Sports Medicine Open notes that low-intensity exercise is effective at improving physical and cognitive health for older adults, has a lower risk of injury, and promotes long-term sustainability.
What really surprised me, though, was how cardio drumming is a workout for the mind. When the instructor says “two…four…two…two…four” (for the amount of times to hit the ball in that spot) or “front, side, back, side, back, front, top, side” quickly and in seemingly random order, you really have to concentrate and pay attention.
This type of exercise was beneficial for my emotional health, as well; I felt like I could get any anger or frustration I had out on the ball. Plus, let’s be honest, it’s fun to drum and swing your arms, and having fun is an important part of well-being, too.
While physical movement in itself is beneficial for mental health—it can treat and prevent depression and anxiety disorders, improve focus, and more—the music or drumming aspect is, too. According to an October 2021 review in Brain, Behavior, & Immunity — Health, music and music therapy can improve physical and mental well-being components, such as heart rate, motor skills, brain stimulation, and immune system enhancement. And playing the drums—while a few instruments short of an entire band—is music. Especially hitting the ball at different speeds to match the song, and the louder or softer noises that come from hitting different parts of the ball.
The biggest reason why participants seem to go to these classes, though, is simply because they’re enjoyable. “It’s fun, and you get out of it what you put into it,” says Debbie Crownover, who’s been cardio drumming for two and a half years. “I like to dance; I don’t get to dance otherwise.”
Another participant in the class felt similarly. “I always wanted to be a drummer,” says Betty Berghaus, who’s been attending cardio drumming classes for almost three years. “It’s not like being a drummer, but it’s still fun. And you know, I get exercise, too. And the company.”
Am I Ringo Starr? No. Am I dripping in sweat? No. But maybe that’s a good thing. Sometimes, exercise just needs to be gentle movement, and movement-centered hobbies just need to be fun.
Cardio drumming is more than just hitting a ball. Sure, we mostly drummed at different tempos during the warm-up song, but that quickly changed by the time the second song rolled around. We hit different sides of the ball, for instance, and even did light squats to hit the lower parts of the ball and the risers it sat on. We walked around the ball as we hit it. We alternated between hitting our ball and our neighbor’s ball. We drummed one side and then the other, switching back and forth often. As a dancer, I even added a little hip action.
One of the great things about this form of movement is that it can be done from the comfort of your home (and without bothering your neighbors downstairs too much). DrumFIT has online classes, as does YouTube.
While it’s easy to just jump in and start drumming in these classes, there are some considerations to keep in mind to protect your body and feel your best. First, be mindful of how you hold the drumsticks. “You want to hold the sticks lightly; it’s not like drumming,” Judd says. “You hold the sticks lightly so that the vibrations from the hitting are going into the ball and not into your arms so that your arms aren’t getting overly sore.”
Good posture practices are important here, too. Judd says to make sure you’re not leaning over the ball, as that puts a lot of strain on your back, and to stand close to the ball.
Cardio drumming is a workout you can do with a group fitness class locally. A quick Google search can lead you to a few in-person options, like at local community centers or YMCAs.
The videos above are also great options if you’d prefer to do the workout at home. Cardio drumming equipment kits can easily be bought online—on Amazon, for example—for a little over $20.
As I’m reflecting on my experience with the class, here’s my take: Am I Ringo Starr? No. Am I dripping in sweat? No. But maybe that’s a good thing. Sometimes, exercise just needs to be gentle movement, and movement-centered hobbies just need to be fun.
Better safe than sorry, especially when it comes to food poisoning.
Any group fitness class that starts with a One Direction song and ends with Ed Sheeran is sure to be fun, and the cardio drumming class at Duke Health & Fitness Center in Durham, North Carolina, was no different.
But first, let me give you some background: I’m always interested in learning about new fitness trends and fun ways to work out. While volleyball and dance are my staples, I’ve also tried trampoline fitness, hot girl walks, and cozy cardio—and they’ve all been winners in my book.
My latest trial run? Cardio drumming. It’s a type of workout I first heard about on TikTok. When I saw I could take a class in the next town over, I quickly registered online. And when I walked in and was instantly welcomed by lots of friendly ladies, my excitement (and comfort level) grew.
Cardio drumming is an exercise where participants hit different parts of an exercise ball (or the area around it) with drumsticks to the rhythm of songs. This fitness activity combines music, movement, and community.
Also called “Drums Alive,” it’s “the original and only research-based, comprehensive, all-inclusive program in the world that applies drumming fitness protocols in a multi-disciplinary way through physical education, fitness, dance, music education, mindfulness, relaxation, and inclusion strategies for the improvement of brain and body health and wellness.”
Carrie Elkins created and founded the program in 2001. She had recently gotten a hip injury that limited her movement greatly, and this especially upset her as an athlete. Wanting to fast-track the healing process, she started drumming on cardboard boxes to get some movement in. While drumming, she experienced a mood lift and increased heart rate—like she had from teaching fitness classes. Thus, cardio drumming was born.
One of the most obvious benefits of cardio drumming is that it’s a more accessible and flexible form of exercise. If you can’t (or don’t want to) move much, cardio drumming is an in-between option. Further, you can kick it up a notch by adding squats, stepping in place, or walking around the ball as you hit it, or make it easier by drumming the ball only on the top, without walking or squatting or “getting fancy.”
While cardio drumming might sound or look easy, make no mistake: It’s a workout, and it has benefits. “It is low-impact, but still gives you a cardio workout,” says Tanya Judd, the class’s instructor who’s taught group fitness for over 25 years and cardio drumming for seven years. “We do a little bit of full-body movement, but primarily it’s cardio from the upper body.”
I can confirm: I felt light sweat dripping down my back about halfway through the class. Both my arms and legs were thoroughly engaged in the movements.
Research affirms that “easy” exercise is still good for your brain and body. An October 2015 systematic review in Sports Medicine Open notes that low-intensity exercise is effective at improving physical and cognitive health for older adults, has a lower risk of injury, and promotes long-term sustainability.
What really surprised me, though, was how cardio drumming is a workout for the mind. When the instructor says “two…four…two…two…four” (for the amount of times to hit the ball in that spot) or “front, side, back, side, back, front, top, side” quickly and in seemingly random order, you really have to concentrate and pay attention.
This type of exercise was beneficial for my emotional health, as well; I felt like I could get any anger or frustration I had out on the ball. Plus, let’s be honest, it’s fun to drum and swing your arms, and having fun is an important part of well-being, too.
While physical movement in itself is beneficial for mental health—it can treat and prevent depression and anxiety disorders, improve focus, and more—the music or drumming aspect is, too. According to an October 2021 review in Brain, Behavior, & Immunity — Health, music and music therapy can improve physical and mental well-being components, such as heart rate, motor skills, brain stimulation, and immune system enhancement. And playing the drums—while a few instruments short of an entire band—is music. Especially hitting the ball at different speeds to match the song, and the louder or softer noises that come from hitting different parts of the ball.
The biggest reason why participants seem to go to these classes, though, is simply because they’re enjoyable. “It’s fun, and you get out of it what you put into it,” says Debbie Crownover, who’s been cardio drumming for two and a half years. “I like to dance; I don’t get to dance otherwise.”
Another participant in the class felt similarly. “I always wanted to be a drummer,” says Betty Berghaus, who’s been attending cardio drumming classes for almost three years. “It’s not like being a drummer, but it’s still fun. And you know, I get exercise, too. And the company.”
Am I Ringo Starr? No. Am I dripping in sweat? No. But maybe that’s a good thing. Sometimes, exercise just needs to be gentle movement, and movement-centered hobbies just need to be fun.
Cardio drumming is more than just hitting a ball. Sure, we mostly drummed at different tempos during the warm-up song, but that quickly changed by the time the second song rolled around. We hit different sides of the ball, for instance, and even did light squats to hit the lower parts of the ball and the risers it sat on. We walked around the ball as we hit it. We alternated between hitting our ball and our neighbor’s ball. We drummed one side and then the other, switching back and forth often. As a dancer, I even added a little hip action.
One of the great things about this form of movement is that it can be done from the comfort of your home (and without bothering your neighbors downstairs too much). DrumFIT has online classes, as does YouTube.
While it’s easy to just jump in and start drumming in these classes, there are some considerations to keep in mind to protect your body and feel your best. First, be mindful of how you hold the drumsticks. “You want to hold the sticks lightly; it’s not like drumming,” Judd says. “You hold the sticks lightly so that the vibrations from the hitting are going into the ball and not into your arms so that your arms aren’t getting overly sore.”
Good posture practices are important here, too. Judd says to make sure you’re not leaning over the ball, as that puts a lot of strain on your back, and to stand close to the ball.
Cardio drumming is a workout you can do with a group fitness class locally. A quick Google search can lead you to a few in-person options, like at local community centers or YMCAs.
The videos above are also great options if you’d prefer to do the workout at home. Cardio drumming equipment kits can easily be bought online—on Amazon, for example—for a little over $20.
As I’m reflecting on my experience with the class, here’s my take: Am I Ringo Starr? No. Am I dripping in sweat? No. But maybe that’s a good thing. Sometimes, exercise just needs to be gentle movement, and movement-centered hobbies just need to be fun.
You might want to try a different position next time.
Any group fitness class that starts with a One Direction song and ends with Ed Sheeran is sure to be fun, and the cardio drumming class at Duke Health & Fitness Center in Durham, North Carolina, was no different.
But first, let me give you some background: I’m always interested in learning about new fitness trends and fun ways to work out. While volleyball and dance are my staples, I’ve also tried trampoline fitness, hot girl walks, and cozy cardio—and they’ve all been winners in my book.
My latest trial run? Cardio drumming. It’s a type of workout I first heard about on TikTok. When I saw I could take a class in the next town over, I quickly registered online. And when I walked in and was instantly welcomed by lots of friendly ladies, my excitement (and comfort level) grew.
Cardio drumming is an exercise where participants hit different parts of an exercise ball (or the area around it) with drumsticks to the rhythm of songs. This fitness activity combines music, movement, and community.
Also called “Drums Alive,” it’s “the original and only research-based, comprehensive, all-inclusive program in the world that applies drumming fitness protocols in a multi-disciplinary way through physical education, fitness, dance, music education, mindfulness, relaxation, and inclusion strategies for the improvement of brain and body health and wellness.”
Carrie Elkins created and founded the program in 2001. She had recently gotten a hip injury that limited her movement greatly, and this especially upset her as an athlete. Wanting to fast-track the healing process, she started drumming on cardboard boxes to get some movement in. While drumming, she experienced a mood lift and increased heart rate—like she had from teaching fitness classes. Thus, cardio drumming was born.
One of the most obvious benefits of cardio drumming is that it’s a more accessible and flexible form of exercise. If you can’t (or don’t want to) move much, cardio drumming is an in-between option. Further, you can kick it up a notch by adding squats, stepping in place, or walking around the ball as you hit it, or make it easier by drumming the ball only on the top, without walking or squatting or “getting fancy.”
While cardio drumming might sound or look easy, make no mistake: It’s a workout, and it has benefits. “It is low-impact, but still gives you a cardio workout,” says Tanya Judd, the class’s instructor who’s taught group fitness for over 25 years and cardio drumming for seven years. “We do a little bit of full-body movement, but primarily it’s cardio from the upper body.”
I can confirm: I felt light sweat dripping down my back about halfway through the class. Both my arms and legs were thoroughly engaged in the movements.
Research affirms that “easy” exercise is still good for your brain and body. An October 2015 systematic review in Sports Medicine Open notes that low-intensity exercise is effective at improving physical and cognitive health for older adults, has a lower risk of injury, and promotes long-term sustainability.
What really surprised me, though, was how cardio drumming is a workout for the mind. When the instructor says “two…four…two…two…four” (for the amount of times to hit the ball in that spot) or “front, side, back, side, back, front, top, side” quickly and in seemingly random order, you really have to concentrate and pay attention.
This type of exercise was beneficial for my emotional health, as well; I felt like I could get any anger or frustration I had out on the ball. Plus, let’s be honest, it’s fun to drum and swing your arms, and having fun is an important part of well-being, too.
While physical movement in itself is beneficial for mental health—it can treat and prevent depression and anxiety disorders, improve focus, and more—the music or drumming aspect is, too. According to an October 2021 review in Brain, Behavior, & Immunity — Health, music and music therapy can improve physical and mental well-being components, such as heart rate, motor skills, brain stimulation, and immune system enhancement. And playing the drums—while a few instruments short of an entire band—is music. Especially hitting the ball at different speeds to match the song, and the louder or softer noises that come from hitting different parts of the ball.
The biggest reason why participants seem to go to these classes, though, is simply because they’re enjoyable. “It’s fun, and you get out of it what you put into it,” says Debbie Crownover, who’s been cardio drumming for two and a half years. “I like to dance; I don’t get to dance otherwise.”
Another participant in the class felt similarly. “I always wanted to be a drummer,” says Betty Berghaus, who’s been attending cardio drumming classes for almost three years. “It’s not like being a drummer, but it’s still fun. And you know, I get exercise, too. And the company.”
Am I Ringo Starr? No. Am I dripping in sweat? No. But maybe that’s a good thing. Sometimes, exercise just needs to be gentle movement, and movement-centered hobbies just need to be fun.
Cardio drumming is more than just hitting a ball. Sure, we mostly drummed at different tempos during the warm-up song, but that quickly changed by the time the second song rolled around. We hit different sides of the ball, for instance, and even did light squats to hit the lower parts of the ball and the risers it sat on. We walked around the ball as we hit it. We alternated between hitting our ball and our neighbor’s ball. We drummed one side and then the other, switching back and forth often. As a dancer, I even added a little hip action.
One of the great things about this form of movement is that it can be done from the comfort of your home (and without bothering your neighbors downstairs too much). DrumFIT has online classes, as does YouTube.
While it’s easy to just jump in and start drumming in these classes, there are some considerations to keep in mind to protect your body and feel your best. First, be mindful of how you hold the drumsticks. “You want to hold the sticks lightly; it’s not like drumming,” Judd says. “You hold the sticks lightly so that the vibrations from the hitting are going into the ball and not into your arms so that your arms aren’t getting overly sore.”
Good posture practices are important here, too. Judd says to make sure you’re not leaning over the ball, as that puts a lot of strain on your back, and to stand close to the ball.
Cardio drumming is a workout you can do with a group fitness class locally. A quick Google search can lead you to a few in-person options, like at local community centers or YMCAs.
The videos above are also great options if you’d prefer to do the workout at home. Cardio drumming equipment kits can easily be bought online—on Amazon, for example—for a little over $20.
As I’m reflecting on my experience with the class, here’s my take: Am I Ringo Starr? No. Am I dripping in sweat? No. But maybe that’s a good thing. Sometimes, exercise just needs to be gentle movement, and movement-centered hobbies just need to be fun.
Living out my rocker dreams while reaping the benefits of movement? Yes, please.
Any group fitness class that starts with a One Direction song and ends with Ed Sheeran is sure to be fun, and the cardio drumming class at Duke Health & Fitness Center in Durham, North Carolina, was no different.
But first, let me give you some background: I’m always interested in learning about new fitness trends and fun ways to work out. While volleyball and dance are my staples, I’ve also tried trampoline fitness, hot girl walks, and cozy cardio—and they’ve all been winners in my book.
My latest trial run? Cardio drumming. It’s a type of workout I first heard about on TikTok. When I saw I could take a class in the next town over, I quickly registered online. And when I walked in and was instantly welcomed by lots of friendly ladies, my excitement (and comfort level) grew.
Cardio drumming is an exercise where participants hit different parts of an exercise ball (or the area around it) with drumsticks to the rhythm of songs. This fitness activity combines music, movement, and community.
Also called “Drums Alive,” it’s “the original and only research-based, comprehensive, all-inclusive program in the world that applies drumming fitness protocols in a multi-disciplinary way through physical education, fitness, dance, music education, mindfulness, relaxation, and inclusion strategies for the improvement of brain and body health and wellness.”
Carrie Elkins created and founded the program in 2001. She had recently gotten a hip injury that limited her movement greatly, and this especially upset her as an athlete. Wanting to fast-track the healing process, she started drumming on cardboard boxes to get some movement in. While drumming, she experienced a mood lift and increased heart rate—like she had from teaching fitness classes. Thus, cardio drumming was born.
One of the most obvious benefits of cardio drumming is that it’s a more accessible and flexible form of exercise. If you can’t (or don’t want to) move much, cardio drumming is an in-between option. Further, you can kick it up a notch by adding squats, stepping in place, or walking around the ball as you hit it, or make it easier by drumming the ball only on the top, without walking or squatting or “getting fancy.”
While cardio drumming might sound or look easy, make no mistake: It’s a workout, and it has benefits. “It is low-impact, but still gives you a cardio workout,” says Tanya Judd, the class’s instructor who’s taught group fitness for over 25 years and cardio drumming for seven years. “We do a little bit of full-body movement, but primarily it’s cardio from the upper body.”
I can confirm: I felt light sweat dripping down my back about halfway through the class. Both my arms and legs were thoroughly engaged in the movements.
Research affirms that “easy” exercise is still good for your brain and body. An October 2015 systematic review in Sports Medicine Open notes that low-intensity exercise is effective at improving physical and cognitive health for older adults, has a lower risk of injury, and promotes long-term sustainability.
What really surprised me, though, was how cardio drumming is a workout for the mind. When the instructor says “two…four…two…two…four” (for the amount of times to hit the ball in that spot) or “front, side, back, side, back, front, top, side” quickly and in seemingly random order, you really have to concentrate and pay attention.
This type of exercise was beneficial for my emotional health, as well; I felt like I could get any anger or frustration I had out on the ball. Plus, let’s be honest, it’s fun to drum and swing your arms, and having fun is an important part of well-being, too.
While physical movement in itself is beneficial for mental health—it can treat and prevent depression and anxiety disorders, improve focus, and more—the music or drumming aspect is, too. According to an October 2021 review in Brain, Behavior, & Immunity — Health, music and music therapy can improve physical and mental well-being components, such as heart rate, motor skills, brain stimulation, and immune system enhancement. And playing the drums—while a few instruments short of an entire band—is music. Especially hitting the ball at different speeds to match the song, and the louder or softer noises that come from hitting different parts of the ball.
The biggest reason why participants seem to go to these classes, though, is simply because they’re enjoyable. “It’s fun, and you get out of it what you put into it,” says Debbie Crownover, who’s been cardio drumming for two and a half years. “I like to dance; I don’t get to dance otherwise.”
Another participant in the class felt similarly. “I always wanted to be a drummer,” says Betty Berghaus, who’s been attending cardio drumming classes for almost three years. “It’s not like being a drummer, but it’s still fun. And you know, I get exercise, too. And the company.”
Am I Ringo Starr? No. Am I dripping in sweat? No. But maybe that’s a good thing. Sometimes, exercise just needs to be gentle movement, and movement-centered hobbies just need to be fun.
Cardio drumming is more than just hitting a ball. Sure, we mostly drummed at different tempos during the warm-up song, but that quickly changed by the time the second song rolled around. We hit different sides of the ball, for instance, and even did light squats to hit the lower parts of the ball and the risers it sat on. We walked around the ball as we hit it. We alternated between hitting our ball and our neighbor’s ball. We drummed one side and then the other, switching back and forth often. As a dancer, I even added a little hip action.
One of the great things about this form of movement is that it can be done from the comfort of your home (and without bothering your neighbors downstairs too much). DrumFIT has online classes, as does YouTube.
While it’s easy to just jump in and start drumming in these classes, there are some considerations to keep in mind to protect your body and feel your best. First, be mindful of how you hold the drumsticks. “You want to hold the sticks lightly; it’s not like drumming,” Judd says. “You hold the sticks lightly so that the vibrations from the hitting are going into the ball and not into your arms so that your arms aren’t getting overly sore.”
Good posture practices are important here, too. Judd says to make sure you’re not leaning over the ball, as that puts a lot of strain on your back, and to stand close to the ball.
Cardio drumming is a workout you can do with a group fitness class locally. A quick Google search can lead you to a few in-person options, like at local community centers or YMCAs.
The videos above are also great options if you’d prefer to do the workout at home. Cardio drumming equipment kits can easily be bought online—on Amazon, for example—for a little over $20.
As I’m reflecting on my experience with the class, here’s my take: Am I Ringo Starr? No. Am I dripping in sweat? No. But maybe that’s a good thing. Sometimes, exercise just needs to be gentle movement, and movement-centered hobbies just need to be fun.
Humility, a designer’s essential value—that has a nice ring to it. What about humility, an office manager’s essential value? Or a dentist’s? Or a librarian’s? They all sound great. When humility is our guiding light, the path is always open for fulfillment, evolution, connection, and engagement. In this chapter, we’re going to talk about why.
That said, this is a book for designers, and to that end, I’d like to start with a story—well, a journey, really. It’s a personal one, and I’m going to make myself a bit vulnerable along the way. I call it:
When I was coming out of art school, a long-haired, goateed neophyte, print was a known quantity to me; design on the web, however, was rife with complexities to navigate and discover, a problem to be solved. Though I had been formally trained in graphic design, typography, and layout, what fascinated me was how these traditional skills might be applied to a fledgling digital landscape. This theme would ultimately shape the rest of my career.
So rather than graduate and go into print like many of my friends, I devoured HTML and JavaScript books into the wee hours of the morning and taught myself how to code during my senior year. I wanted—nay, needed—to better understand the underlying implications of what my design decisions would mean once rendered in a browser.
The late ’90s and early 2000s were the so-called “Wild West” of web design. Designers at the time were all figuring out how to apply design and visual communication to the digital landscape. What were the rules? How could we break them and still engage, entertain, and convey information? At a more macro level, how could my values, inclusive of humility, respect, and connection, align in tandem with that? I was hungry to find out.
Though I’m talking about a different era, those are timeless considerations between non-career interactions and the world of design. What are your core passions, or values, that transcend medium? It’s essentially the same concept we discussed earlier on the direct parallels between what fulfills you, agnostic of the tangible or digital realms; the core themes are all the same.
First within tables, animated GIFs, Flash, then with Web Standards, divs, and CSS, there was personality, raw unbridled creativity, and unique means of presentment that often defied any semblance of a visible grid. Splash screens and “browser requirement” pages aplenty. Usability and accessibility were typically victims of such a creation, but such paramount facets of any digital design were largely (and, in hindsight, unfairly) disregarded at the expense of experimentation.
For example, this iteration of my personal portfolio site (“the pseudoroom”) from that era was experimental, if not a bit heavy- handed, in the visual communication of the concept of a living sketchbook. Very skeuomorphic. I collaborated with fellow designer and dear friend Marc Clancy (now a co-founder of the creative project organizing app Milanote) on this one, where we’d first sketch and then pass a Photoshop file back and forth to trick things out and play with varied user interactions. Then, I’d break it down and code it into a digital layout.
Along with design folio pieces, the site also offered free downloads for Mac OS customizations: desktop wallpapers that were effectively design experimentation, custom-designed typefaces, and desktop icons.
From around the same time, GUI Galaxy was a design, pixel art, and Mac-centric news portal some graphic designer friends and I conceived, designed, developed, and deployed.
Design news portals were incredibly popular during this period, featuring (what would now be considered) Tweet-size, small-format snippets of pertinent news from the categories I previously mentioned. If you took Twitter, curated it to a few categories, and wrapped it in a custom-branded experience, you’d have a design news portal from the late 90s / early 2000s.
We as designers had evolved and created a bandwidth-sensitive, web standards award-winning, much more accessibility-conscious website. Still ripe with experimentation, yet more mindful of equitable engagement. You can see a couple of content panes here, noting general news (tech, design) and Mac-centric news below. We also offered many of the custom downloads I cited before as present on my folio site but branded and themed to GUI Galaxy.
The site’s backbone was a homegrown CMS, with the presentation layer consisting of global design + illustration + news author collaboration. And the collaboration effort here, in addition to experimentation on a ‘brand’ and content delivery, was hitting my core. We were designing something bigger than any single one of us and connecting with a global audience.
Collaboration and connection transcend medium in their impact, immensely fulfilling me as a designer.
Now, why am I taking you down this trip of design memory lane? Two reasons.
First, there’s a reason for the nostalgia for that design era (the “Wild West” era, as I called it earlier): the inherent exploration, personality, and creativity that saturated many design portals and personal portfolio sites. Ultra-finely detailed pixel art UI, custom illustration, bespoke vector graphics, all underpinned by a strong design community.
Today’s web design has been in a period of stagnation. I suspect there’s a strong chance you’ve seen a site whose structure looks something like this: a hero image / banner with text overlaid, perhaps with a lovely rotating carousel of images (laying the snark on heavy there), a call to action, and three columns of sub-content directly beneath. Maybe an icon library is employed with selections that vaguely relate to their respective content.
Design, as it’s applied to the digital landscape, is in dire need of thoughtful layout, typography, and visual engagement that goes hand-in-hand with all the modern considerations we now know are paramount: usability. Accessibility. Load times and bandwidth- sensitive content delivery. A responsive presentation that meets human beings wherever they’re engaging from. We must be mindful of, and respectful toward, those concerns—but not at the expense of creativity of visual communication or via replicating cookie-cutter layouts.
Websites during this period were often designed and built on Macs whose OS and desktops looked something like this. This is Mac OS 7.5, but 8 and 9 weren’t that different.
Desktop icons fascinated me: how could any single one, at any given point, stand out to get my attention? In this example, the user’s desktop is tidy, but think of a more realistic example with icon pandemonium. Or, say an icon was part of a larger system grouping (fonts, extensions, control panels)—how did it also maintain cohesion amongst a group?
These were 32 x 32 pixel creations, utilizing a 256-color palette, designed pixel-by-pixel as mini mosaics. To me, this was the embodiment of digital visual communication under such ridiculous constraints. And often, ridiculous restrictions can yield the purification of concept and theme.
So I began to research and do my homework. I was a student of this new medium, hungry to dissect, process, discover, and make it my own.
Expanding upon the notion of exploration, I wanted to see how I could push the limits of a 32×32 pixel grid with that 256-color palette. Those ridiculous constraints forced a clarity of concept and presentation that I found incredibly appealing. The digital gauntlet had been tossed, and that challenge fueled me. And so, in my dorm room into the wee hours of the morning, I toiled away, bringing conceptual sketches into mini mosaic fruition.
These are some of my creations, utilizing the only tool available at the time to create icons called ResEdit. ResEdit was a clunky, built-in Mac OS utility not really made for exactly what we were using it for. At the core of all of this work: Research. Challenge. Problem- solving. Again, these core connection-based values are agnostic of medium.
There’s one more design portal I want to talk about, which also serves as the second reason for my story to bring this all together.
This is K10k, short for Kaliber 1000. K10k was founded in 1998 by Michael Schmidt and Toke Nygaard, and was the design news portal on the web during this period. With its pixel art-fueled presentation, ultra-focused care given to every facet and detail, and with many of the more influential designers of the time who were invited to be news authors on the site, well… it was the place to be, my friend. With respect where respect is due, GUI Galaxy’s concept was inspired by what these folks were doing.
For my part, the combination of my web design work and pixel art exploration began to get me some notoriety in the design scene. Eventually, K10k noticed and added me as one of their very select group of news authors to contribute content to the site.
Amongst my personal work and side projects—and now with this inclusion—in the design community, this put me on the map. My design work also began to be published in various printed collections, in magazines domestically and overseas, and featured on other design news portals. With that degree of success while in my early twenties, something else happened:
I evolved—devolved, really—into a colossal asshole (and in just about a year out of art school, no less). The press and the praise became what fulfilled me, and they went straight to my head. They inflated my ego. I actually felt somewhat superior to my fellow designers.
The casualties? My design stagnated. Its evolution—my evolution— stagnated.
I felt so supremely confident in my abilities that I effectively stopped researching and discovering. When previously sketching concepts or iterating ideas in lead was my automatic step one, I instead leaped right into Photoshop. I drew my inspiration from the smallest of sources (and with blinders on). Any critique of my work from my peers was often vehemently dismissed. The most tragic loss: I had lost touch with my values.
My ego almost cost me some of my friendships and burgeoning professional relationships. I was toxic in talking about design and in collaboration. But thankfully, those same friends gave me a priceless gift: candor. They called me out on my unhealthy behavior.
Admittedly, it was a gift I initially did not accept but ultimately was able to deeply reflect upon. I was soon able to accept, and process, and course correct. The realization laid me low, but the re-awakening was essential. I let go of the “reward” of adulation and re-centered upon what stoked the fire for me in art school. Most importantly: I got back to my core values.
Following that short-term regression, I was able to push forward in my personal design and career. And I could self-reflect as I got older to facilitate further growth and course correction as needed.
As an example, let’s talk about the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC was designed “to help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, which concern the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the interrelation between quantum mechanics and general relativity.” Thanks, Wikipedia.
Around fifteen years ago, in one of my earlier professional roles, I designed the interface for the application that generated the LHC’s particle collision diagrams. These diagrams are the rendering of what’s actually happening inside the Collider during any given particle collision event and are often considered works of art unto themselves.
Designing the interface for this application was a fascinating process for me, in that I worked with Fermilab physicists to understand what the application was trying to achieve, but also how the physicists themselves would be using it. To that end, in this role,
I cut my teeth on usability testing, working with the Fermilab team to iterate and improve the interface. How they spoke and what they spoke about was like an alien language to me. And by making myself humble and working under the mindset that I was but a student, I made myself available to be a part of their world to generate that vital connection.
I also had my first ethnographic observation experience: going to the Fermilab location and observing how the physicists used the tool in their actual environment, on their actual terminals. For example, one takeaway was that due to the level of ambient light-driven contrast within the facility, the data columns ended up using white text on a dark gray background instead of black text-on-white. This enabled them to pore over reams of data during the day and ease their eye strain. And Fermilab and CERN are government entities with rigorous accessibility standards, so my knowledge in that realm also grew. The barrier-free design was another essential form of connection.
So to those core drivers of my visual problem-solving soul and ultimate fulfillment: discovery, exposure to new media, observation, human connection, and evolution. What opened the door for those values was me checking my ego before I walked through it.
An evergreen willingness to listen, learn, understand, grow, evolve, and connect yields our best work. In particular, I want to focus on the words ‘grow’ and ‘evolve’ in that statement. If we are always students of our craft, we are also continually making ourselves available to evolve. Yes, we have years of applicable design study under our belt. Or the focused lab sessions from a UX bootcamp. Or the monogrammed portfolio of our work. Or, ultimately, decades of a career behind us.
But all that said: experience does not equal “expert.”
As soon as we close our minds via an inner monologue of ‘knowing it all’ or branding ourselves a “#thoughtleader” on social media, the designer we are is our final form. The designer we can be will never exist.
As a UX professional in today’s data-driven landscape, it’s increasingly likely that you’ve been asked to design a personalized digital experience, whether it’s a public website, user portal, or native application. Yet while there continues to be no shortage of marketing hype around personalization platforms, we still have very few standardized approaches for implementing personalized UX.
That’s where we come in. After completing dozens of personalization projects over the past few years, we gave ourselves a goal: could you create a holistic personalization framework specifically for UX practitioners? The Personalization Pyramid is a designer-centric model for standing up human-centered personalization programs, spanning data, segmentation, content delivery, and overall goals. By using this approach, you will be able to understand the core components of a contemporary, UX-driven personalization program (or at the very least know enough to get started).
For the sake of this article, we’ll assume you’re already familiar with the basics of digital personalization. A good overview can be found here: Website Personalization Planning. While UX projects in this area can take on many different forms, they often stem from similar starting points.
Common scenarios for starting a personalization project:
Regardless of where you begin, a successful personalization program will require the same core building blocks. We’ve captured these as the “levels” on the pyramid. Whether you are a UX designer, researcher, or strategist, understanding the core components can help make your contribution successful.
From top to bottom, the levels include:
We’ll go through each of these levels in turn. To help make this actionable, we created an accompanying deck of cards to illustrate specific examples from each level. We’ve found them helpful in personalization brainstorming sessions, and will include examples for you here.
The components of the pyramid are as follows:
A north star is what you are aiming for overall with your personalization program (big or small). The North Star defines the (one) overall mission of the personalization program. What do you wish to accomplish? North Stars cast a shadow. The bigger the star, the bigger the shadow. Example of North Starts might include:
As in any good UX design, personalization can help accelerate designing with customer intentions. Goals are the tactical and measurable metrics that will prove the overall program is successful. A good place to start is with your current analytics and measurement program and metrics you can benchmark against. In some cases, new goals may be appropriate. The key thing to remember is that personalization itself is not a goal, rather it is a means to an end. Common goals include:
Touchpoints are where the personalization happens. As a UX designer, this will be one of your largest areas of responsibility. The touchpoints available to you will depend on how your personalization and associated technology capabilities are instrumented, and should be rooted in improving a user’s experience at a particular point in the journey. Touchpoints can be multi-device (mobile, in-store, website) but also more granular (web banner, web pop-up etc.). Here are some examples:
Channel-level Touchpoints
Wireframe-level Touchpoints
If you’re designing for web interfaces, for example, you will likely need to include personalized “zones” in your wireframes. The content for these can be presented programmatically in touchpoints based on our next step, contexts and campaigns.
Once you’ve outlined some touchpoints, you can consider the actual personalized content a user will receive. Many personalization tools will refer to these as “campaigns” (so, for example, a campaign on a web banner for new visitors to the website). These will programmatically be shown at certain touchpoints to certain user segments, as defined by user data. At this stage, we find it helpful to consider two separate models: a context model and a content model. The context helps you consider the level of engagement of the user at the personalization moment, for example a user casually browsing information vs. doing a deep-dive. Think of it in terms of information retrieval behaviors. The content model can then help you determine what type of personalization to serve based on the context (for example, an “Enrich” campaign that shows related articles may be a suitable supplement to extant content).
Personalization Context Model:
Personalization Content Model:
We’ve written extensively about each of these models elsewhere, so if you’d like to read more you can check out Colin’s Personalization Content Model and Jeff’s Personalization Context Model.
User segments can be created prescriptively or adaptively, based on user research (e.g. via rules and logic tied to set user behaviors or via A/B testing). At a minimum you will likely need to consider how to treat the unknown or first-time visitor, the guest or returning visitor for whom you may have a stateful cookie (or equivalent post-cookie identifier), or the authenticated visitor who is logged in. Here are some examples from the personalization pyramid:
Every organization with any digital presence has data. It’s a matter of asking what data you can ethically collect on users, its inherent reliability and value, as to how can you use it (sometimes known as “data activation.”) Fortunately, the tide is turning to first-party data: a recent study by Twilio estimates some 80% of businesses are using at least some type of first-party data to personalize the customer experience.
First-party data represents multiple advantages on the UX front, including being relatively simple to collect, more likely to be accurate, and less susceptible to the “creep factor” of third-party data. So a key part of your UX strategy should be to determine what the best form of data collection is on your audiences. Here are some examples:
There is a progression of profiling when it comes to recognizing and making decisioning about different audiences and their signals. It tends to move towards more granular constructs about smaller and smaller cohorts of users as time and confidence and data volume grow.
While some combination of implicit / explicit data is generally a prerequisite for any implementation (more commonly referred to as first party and third-party data) ML efforts are typically not cost-effective directly out of the box. This is because a strong data backbone and content repository is a prerequisite for optimization. But these approaches should be considered as part of the larger roadmap and may indeed help accelerate the organization’s overall progress. Typically at this point you will partner with key stakeholders and product owners to design a profiling model. The profiling model includes defining approach to configuring profiles, profile keys, profile cards and pattern cards. A multi-faceted approach to profiling which makes it scalable.
While the cards comprise the starting point to an inventory of sorts (we provide blanks for you to tailor your own), a set of potential levers and motivations for the style of personalization activities you aspire to deliver, they are more valuable when thought of in a grouping.
In assembling a card “hand”, one can begin to trace the entire trajectory from leadership focus down through a strategic and tactical execution. It is also at the heart of the way both co-authors have conducted workshops in assembling a program backlog—which is a fine subject for another article.
In the meantime, what is important to note is that each colored class of card is helpful to survey in understanding the range of choices potentially at your disposal, it is threading through and making concrete decisions about for whom this decisioning will be made: where, when, and how.
Any sustainable personalization strategy must consider near, mid and long-term goals. Even with the leading CMS platforms like Sitecore and Adobe or the most exciting composable CMS DXP out there, there is simply no “easy button” wherein a personalization program can be stood up and immediately view meaningful results. That said, there is a common grammar to all personalization activities, just like every sentence has nouns and verbs. These cards attempt to map that territory.
Picture this. You’ve joined a squad at your company that’s designing new product features with an emphasis on automation or AI. Or your company has just implemented a personalization engine. Either way, you’re designing with data. Now what? When it comes to designing for personalization, there are many cautionary tales, no overnight successes, and few guides for the perplexed.
Between the fantasy of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong—like when we encounter “persofails” in the vein of a company repeatedly imploring everyday consumers to buy additional toilet seats—the personalization gap is real. It’s an especially confounding place to be a digital professional without a map, a compass, or a plan.
For those of you venturing into personalization, there’s no Lonely Planet and few tour guides because effective personalization is so specific to each organization’s talent, technology, and market position.
But you can ensure that your team has packed its bags sensibly.
There’s a DIY formula to increase your chances for success. At minimum, you’ll defuse your boss’s irrational exuberance. Before the party you’ll need to effectively prepare.
We call it prepersonalization.
Consider Spotify’s DJ feature, which debuted this past year.
We’re used to seeing the polished final result of a personalization feature. Before the year-end award, the making-of backstory, or the behind-the-scenes victory lap, a personalized feature had to be conceived, budgeted, and prioritized. Before any personalization feature goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a backlog of worthy ideas for expressing customer experiences more dynamically.
So how do you know where to place your personalization bets? How do you design consistent interactions that won’t trip up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve found that for many budgeted programs to justify their ongoing investments, they first needed one or more workshops to convene key stakeholders and internal customers of the technology. Make yours count.
From Big Tech to fledgling startups, we’ve seen the same evolution up close with our clients. In our experiences with working on small and large personalization efforts, a program’s ultimate track record—and its ability to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and organize its design and technology efforts—turns on how effectively these prepersonalization activities play out.
Time and again, we’ve seen effective workshops separate future success stories from unsuccessful efforts, saving countless time, resources, and collective well-being in the process.
A personalization practice involves a multiyear effort of testing and feature development. It’s not a switch-flip moment in your tech stack. It’s best managed as a backlog that often evolves through three steps:
This is why we created our progressive personalization framework and why we’re field-testing an accompanying deck of cards: we believe that there’s a base grammar, a set of “nouns and verbs” that your organization can use to design experiences that are customized, personalized, or automated. You won’t need these cards. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.
How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The surrounding assessment activities that we recommend including can (and often do) span weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Here’s a summary of our broader approach along with details on the essential first-day activities.
The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:
Give yourself at least a day, split into two large time blocks, to power through a concentrated version of those first two phases.
We call the first lesson the “landscape of connected experience.” It explores the personalization possibilities in your organization. A connected experience, in our parlance, is any UX requiring the orchestration of multiple systems of record on the backend. This could be a content-management system combined with a marketing-automation platform. It could be a digital-asset manager combined with a customer-data platform.
Spark conversation by naming consumer examples and business-to-business examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions (such as onboarding sequences or wizards), notifications, and recommenders. We have a catalog of these in the cards. Here’s a list of 142 different interactions to jog your thinking.
This is all about setting the table. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? If you want a broader view, here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework.
Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature (or something similar). In our cards, we divide connected experiences into five levels: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to focus the conversation on the merits of ongoing investment as well as the gap between what you deliver today and what you want to deliver in the future.
Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is critical because it emphasizes how personalization can not only help your external customers but also affect your own ways of working. It’s also a reminder (which is why we used the word argument earlier) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.
Each team member should vote on where they see your product or service putting its emphasis. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. The intention here is to flesh out how different departments may view their own upsides to the effort, which can vary from one to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.
The third and final kickstart activity is about naming your personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will data and privacy compliance be too big of a challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? (We’re pretty sure that you do: it’s just a matter of recognizing the relative size of that need and its remedy.) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. Our Detractor card, for example, lists six stakeholder behaviors that hinder progress.
Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential barriers to your future progress. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. As studies have shown, personalization efforts face many common barriers.
At this point, you’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? Good—you’re ready to continue.
Next, let’s look at what you’ll need to bring your personalization recipes to life. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. Their capabilities are sweeping and powerful, and they present broad options for how your organization can conduct its activities. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?
What’s important here is to avoid treating the installed software like it were a dream kitchen from some fantasy remodeling project (as one of our client executives memorably put it). These software engines are more like test kitchens where your team can begin devising, tasting, and refining the snacks and meals that will become a part of your personalization program’s regularly evolving menu.
The ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together over the course of the workshop. And creating “dishes” is the way that you’ll have individual team stakeholders construct personalized interactions that serve their needs or the needs of others.
The dishes will come from recipes, and those recipes have set ingredients.
Like a good product manager, you’ll make sure—andyou’ll validate with the right stakeholders present—that you have all the ingredients on hand to cook up your desired interaction (or that you can work out what needs to be added to your pantry). These ingredients include the audience that you’re targeting, content and design elements, the context for the interaction, and your measure for how it’ll come together.
This isn’t just about discovering requirements. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team:
This helps you streamline your designs and your technical efforts while you deliver a shared palette of core motifs of your personalized or automated experience.
What ingredients are important to you? Think of a who-what-when-why construct:
We first developed these cards and card categories five years ago. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And we still encounter new possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.
Here are three examples for a subscription-based reading app, which you can generally follow along with right to left in the cards in the accompanying photo below.
A useful preworkshop activity may be to think through a first draft of what these cards might be for your organization, although we’ve also found that this process sometimes flows best through cocreating the recipes themselves. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.
You can think of the later stages of the workshop as moving from recipes toward a cookbook in focus—like a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual “cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.
Simplifying a customer experience is a complicated effort for those who are inside delivering it. Beware anyone who says otherwise. With that being said, “Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes.”
When personalization becomes a laugh line, it’s because a team is overfitting: they aren’t designing with their best data. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. Your AI’s output quality, for example, is indeed limited by your IA. Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture.
Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach will bring about the necessary focus and intention to succeed. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, hit the test kitchen to save time, preserve job satisfaction and security, and safely dispense with the fanciful ideas that originate upstairs of the doers in your organization. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.
This workshop framework gives you a fighting shot at lasting success as well as sound beginnings. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. But if you use the same cookbook and shared recipes, you’ll have solid footing for success. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.
While there are associated costs toward investing in this kind of technology and product design, your ability to size up and confront your unique situation and your digital capabilities is time well spent. Don’t squander it. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
I offer a single bit of advice to friends and family when they become new parents: When you start to think that you’ve got everything figured out, everything will change. Just as you start to get the hang of feedings, diapers, and regular naps, it’s time for solid food, potty training, and overnight sleeping. When you figure those out, it’s time for preschool and rare naps. The cycle goes on and on.
The same applies for those of us working in design and development these days. Having worked on the web for almost three decades at this point, I’ve seen the regular wax and wane of ideas, techniques, and technologies. Each time that we as developers and designers get into a regular rhythm, some new idea or technology comes along to shake things up and remake our world.
I built my first website in the mid-’90s. Design and development on the web back then was a free-for-all, with few established norms. For any layout aside from a single column, we used table elements, often with empty cells containing a single pixel spacer GIF to add empty space. We styled text with numerous font tags, nesting the tags every time we wanted to vary the font style. And we had only three or four typefaces to choose from: Arial, Courier, or Times New Roman. When Verdana and Georgia came out in 1996, we rejoiced because our options had nearly doubled. The only safe colors to choose from were the 216 “web safe” colors known to work across platforms. The few interactive elements (like contact forms, guest books, and counters) were mostly powered by CGI scripts (predominantly written in Perl at the time). Achieving any kind of unique look involved a pile of hacks all the way down. Interaction was often limited to specific pages in a site.
At the turn of the century, a new cycle started. Crufty code littered with table layouts and font tags waned, and a push for web standards waxed. Newer technologies like CSS got more widespread adoption by browsers makers, developers, and designers. This shift toward standards didn’t happen accidentally or overnight. It took active engagement between the W3C and browser vendors and heavy evangelism from folks like the Web Standards Project to build standards. A List Apart and books like Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman played key roles in teaching developers and designers why standards are important, how to implement them, and how to sell them to their organizations. And approaches like progressive enhancement introduced the idea that content should be available for all browsers—with additional enhancements available for more advanced browsers. Meanwhile, sites like the CSS Zen Garden showcased just how powerful and versatile CSS can be when combined with a solid semantic HTML structure.
Server-side languages like PHP, Java, and .NET overtook Perl as the predominant back-end processors, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the trash bin. With these better server-side tools came the first era of web applications, starting with content-management systems (particularly in the blogging space with tools like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress). In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened doors for asynchronous interaction between the front end and back end. Suddenly, pages could update their content without needing to reload. A crop of JavaScript frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and jQuery arose to help developers build more reliable client-side interaction across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like image replacement let crafty designers and developers display fonts of their choosing. And technologies like Flash made it possible to add animations, games, and even more interactivity.
These new technologies, standards, and techniques reinvigorated the industry in many ways. Web design flourished as designers and developers explored more diverse styles and layouts. But we still relied on tons of hacks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes (such as rounded or angled corners) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks). Complicated layouts required all manner of nested floats or absolute positioning (or both). Flash and image replacement for custom fonts was a great start toward varying the typefaces from the big five, but both hacks introduced accessibility and performance problems. And JavaScript libraries made it easy for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, although at the cost of doubling or even quadrupling the download size of simple websites.
The symbiosis between the front end and back end continued to improve, and that led to the current era of modern web applications. Between expanded server-side programming languages (which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Alongside these tools came others, including collaborative version control, build automation, and shared package libraries. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.
At the same time, mobile devices became more capable, and they gave us internet access in our pockets. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.
This combination of capable mobile devices and powerful development tools contributed to the waxing of social media and other centralized tools for people to connect and consume. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media offered connections on a global scale, with both the good and bad that that entails.
Want a much more extensive history of how we got here, with some other takes on ways that we can improve? Jeremy Keith wrote “Of Time and the Web.” Or check out the “Web Design History Timeline” at the Web Design Museum. Neal Agarwal also has a fun tour through “Internet Artifacts.”
In the last couple of years, it’s felt like we’ve begun to reach another major inflection point. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. There are many different ways to make a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all flavors. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other tools of the IndieWeb can help with this, but they’re still relatively underimplemented and hard to use for the less nerdy. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.
Browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other standards like web components has accelerated, especially through efforts like Interop. New technologies gain support across the board in a fraction of the time that they used to. I often learn about a new feature and check its browser support only to find that its coverage is already above 80 percent. Nowadays, the barrier to using newer techniques often isn’t browser support but simply the limits of how quickly designers and developers can learn what’s available and how to adopt it.
Today, with a few commands and a couple of lines of code, we can prototype almost any idea. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. But the upfront cost that these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes due as upgrading and maintaining them becomes a part of our technical debt.
If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks—which used to let us adopt new techniques sooner—have now become hindrances instead. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And when scripts fail (whether through poor code, network issues, or other environmental factors), there’s often no alternative, leaving users with blank or broken pages.
Today’s hacks help to shape tomorrow’s standards. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks—for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we’re unwilling to admit that they’re hacks or we hesitate to replace them. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?
Build for the long haul. Optimize for performance, for accessibility, and for the user. Weigh the costs of those developer-friendly tools. They may make your job a little easier today, but how do they affect everything else? What’s the cost to users? To future developers? To standards adoption? Sometimes the convenience may be worth it. Sometimes it’s just a hack that you’ve grown accustomed to. And sometimes it’s holding you back from even better options.
Start from standards. Standards continue to evolve over time, but browsers have done a remarkably good job of continuing to support older standards. The same isn’t always true of third-party frameworks. Sites built with even the hackiest of HTML from the ’90s still work just fine today. The same can’t always be said of sites built with frameworks even after just a couple years.
Design with care. Whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes, consider the impacts of each decision. The convenience of many a modern tool comes at the cost of not always understanding the underlying decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the impact that those decisions can have. Rather than rushing headlong to “move fast and break things,” use the time saved by modern tools to consider more carefully and design with deliberation.
Always be learning. If you’re always learning, you’re also growing. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. You might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year, even if you were to focus solely on learning standards. (Remember XHTML?) But constant learning opens up new connections in your brain, and the hacks that you learn one day may help to inform different experiments another day.
Play, experiment, and be weird! This web that we’ve built is the ultimate experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be courageous and try new things. Build a playground for ideas. Make goofy experiments in your own mad science lab. Start your own small business. There has never been a more empowering place to be creative, take risks, and explore what we’re capable of.
Share and amplify. As you experiment, play, and learn, share what’s worked for you. Write on your own website, post on whichever social media site you prefer, or shout it from a TikTok. Write something for A List Apart! But take the time to amplify others too: find new voices, learn from them, and share what they’ve taught you.
As designers and developers for the web (and beyond), we’re responsible for building the future every day, whether that may take the shape of personal websites, social media tools used by billions, or anything in between. Let’s imbue our values into the things that we create, and let’s make the web a better place for everyone. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then share it, make it better, make it again, or make something new. Learn. Make. Share. Grow. Rinse and repeat. Every time you think that you’ve mastered the web, everything will change.