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Jobs To Be Done

In this chapter, you’ll learn about these plays:

How to create a jobs-driven roadmap
Using job stories to solve specific design problems
How to architect the structure of a solution
Testing assumptions directed by JTBD

A software company I once worked for held what were called “hackweeks” once a quarter. This was a time for developers to work on “whatever they wanted,” as it was framed. Give engineers time to play around with technology, and they’re bound to find the next innovation, or so the theory went.

Hackweek was a big deal for us. Dozens of people organized it, and every developer in the company stopped work to contribute to the effort. It was costly, but we were committed to hackweek. After all, new software offerings come from new development, right?

Here’s how it went: small teams formed to cobble together starter projects representing the use of some new technology. At the end of the week, a panel judged the dozens of concepts that emerged, and the winning “solutions” were rewarded.

But in our case, hackweek was like shooting a shotgun in the wrong direction while blindfolded and hoping to hit the target. The result was inevitably a collection of concepts looking for a problem to solve. It was innovation theater at its best.

To be fair, not all hackathons are bad. Some organizations coordinate hackathons with strategic imperatives or with customer needs. And sure, it’s also good to flex creative muscles and practice collaboration across teams. But given their cost and imprecision, hackathons are often largely ineffective in producing usable concepts.

The problem is not a lack of ideas—companies are usually swimming in them. Like ours, many organizations have a Darwinistic outlook on innovation: generate more and more ideas, and the best will surely rise to the top. Said another way, when looking for a needle in a haystack, the best approach is rarely to add more hay.

The problem is knowing which ideas to pursue. The goal of innovation activities shouldn’t be to collect as many ideas as possible, but instead to get to the right ideas—the ones that matter most to the people you serve.

But more than that, the real challenge is in overcoming the natural forces in organizations that keep good ideas down. Chief among these is uncertainty, a leading deterrent to innovation. New ideas are a gamble for risk-averse managers, even if well-expressed in a high-fidelity prototype.

JTBD provides a way to increase your chances of success by first identifying the right problem to solve. Then JTBD gives you decision-making criteria for moving forward: bet on solutions that address unmet needs to create profitable differentiation.

Focus first on getting the main job done for the individual and fulfilling their needs in relation to the job. From this perspective, hackathons and other idea-generating efforts can be framed by JTBD as both inputs and outputs in terms of how concepts are evaluated.

After understanding the job landscape and defining the value you’re going after, you can continue using JTBD thinking to align teams around the design of your solution. Create a roadmap based on your JTBD landscape to set a common direction. Then use job stories to get everyone on the same page and tie local design efforts to the big picture and to architect the solution structure. JTBD can also guide the experiments you conduct to test your team’s assumptions.

Create a Development Roadmap

At its highest level, a roadmap is a sequence of development events—the relative chronological order in which features and capabilities will be built. Roadmaps serve as a central point of reference for teams to align their efforts. They show the path forward without defining individual tasks.

In the age of Agile and Lean efforts, roadmaps have gotten a bad reputation. People are quick to point out—and rightfully so—that long-term plans inevitably fail: priorities change, unforeseen challenges arise, and timelines slip. The solution, they might argue, is to have no long-term plans and to work on short initiatives with the flexibility to change as needed.

But while providing decision-making power to local development teams makes sense, overall alignment is still needed. An alternative way of viewing roadmaps is to see them not as a definitive project plan, but as a vision of how you’ll create an offering that customers will value. Roadmaps are not unchanging predictions of future activity, but a way to provide transparency for the sequence of steps your team will take to design solutions.

The information in a roadmap helps the entire organization get aligned, not just developers. It’s a strategic communication tool reflecting intention and direction. More importantly, road mapping isn’t just about the artifact: it’s about getting a common understanding of where you’re headed. In this sense, the roadmap occupies the space between the vision and detailed project planning.

JTBD can help create roadmaps that focus on the value that the organization intends to create and deliver for customers. The trick is to get the right problem to solve. Use the insights from your JTBD investigation to formulate roadmaps that are grounded in real customer need.

Mapping the Road Ahead

For a concrete approach to road mapping, I recommend the book Product Roadmaps Relaunched by C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, and Michael Conners.^[1] In it, the authors clearly articulate the steps to creating meaningful product roadmaps.

JTBD plays a key role in aligning to customer needs, as the authors write: “We recommend starting with the chunks of value you intend to deliver that will build up over time to accomplish your visions. Often this is a set of high-level customer needs, problems, or jobs to be done.”

Their approach breaks down the four key elements of a good product roadmap:

Product vision: The vision outlines how your customers will benefit from your offering. How will the job performer benefit from the solution? What will getting the job done look like after the solution is in place?
Business objectives: A roadmap must be aligned with the organization’s strategy and objectives. The goals of the business are important for measuring progress.
Timefames: Rather than committing to specific dates, good roadmaps sequence work and set broad timelines for completion.
Themes: These are the key problems that customers face when completing a job, or clusters of needs that align to the overall solution to be created. JTBD helps frame the themes of your roadmap in particular.

Figure 5.1 shows an example from their book of a basic roadmap overview for a fictional company, The Wombatter Hose, illustrating these main components. Note the disclaimer, as well, indicating that the roadmap is subject to change.

Figure 5.1: An example of the main components of a roadmap from the book Product Roadmaps Relaunched.²

Putting it all together, the process for creating a JTBD-driven roadmap can be broken down into four phases.

Step 1: Define the solution direction.

Define the various elements of your overall product strategy to get agreement on how you’ll be using them. In addition to your solution vision, also define the following together with the team:

Mission: What are your business intentions? The mission is about what your organization wants to ultimately achieve.
Values: What are your beliefs and ideals? What is the philosophy of your organization and solution? Values define the philosophy of the team and what it believes.
Business objectives: What are the specific goals your offerings will accomplish for the organization? Frame these in terms of outcomes, not outputs.

Step 2: Determine customer needs to pursue.

Next, decide on the customer needs to pursue. Here, the authors of Product Roadmaps Relaunched stress the importance of grounding the roadmap in actual customer need. JTBD is central to this step. They write:

“Identifying customer needs is the most important aspect of your roadmapping process. Roadmaps should be about expressing those customer needs. Therefore, most items on your roadmap will derive from a job the customer needs to accomplish or a problem the customer must solve.”

As outlined in Chapter 2, “Core Concepts of JTBD,” needs are hierarchical—from high-level aspirations to main jobs and sub-jobs to micro-jobs. Figure out the top-level jobs to explore and then drill down into the specific themes to target.

The “value themes,” as they are called, might come right from the job map. Locate the areas of highest underserved needs and use those stages as the categories of your roadmap themes. Or you can cluster needs to form themes that don’t necessarily follow the chronology of the job map. The important point is to ground the division of the roadmap in real-world observations of the customer’s job to be done and align the timeline to it.

Step 3: Set a timeline.

Next, create a sequence of value themes that your team will work toward. Timelines can be absolute, relative, or a mix of both. Absolute timelines with specific dates carry the risk of changing, which, in turn, can cause confusion or missed expectations.

Relative timelines give more flexibility but still provide insight into what’s coming and why. There are various terms to use, but the timeline is often broken into three phases for near-term, mid-term, and long-term. Examples include “now, later, future” or “going, next, later” or something similar. Find what works best for you.

Step 4: Align development effort to the roadmap.

Finally, conceptualize specific solutions to design and create. Use job stories to tie the overall project intent to customer needs, outlined in the next section. Then conceptualize solutions around getting the entire job done or the parts of it determined to be most strategically relevant to your business.

After a roadmap is created, you may then need detailed project plans to track progress. A simple Kanban board can serve that purpose in many cases. Or, for more complex software development efforts, tracking software may be needed. In Agile efforts, epic planning and then sprint planning come after you have an overall roadmap.

Tying the overall plan to customer needs gives the design and development teams the feeling that they are building something that matters to customers. Staying focused on customer needs helps avoid building things your customers don’t want. The nature of a job stays the same, even as features may shift. Grounding the roadmap in JTBD ensures that both its longevity and ability to absorb will change.

Learn More About This Play

Lombardo, C. Todd, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, and Michael Conners.^[3] Product Roadmaps Relaunched. Sebastopol, CA:O’Reilly, 2018.

This book distills a wealth of practical information into a compact guide on roadmapping. The authors go to great lengths to provide numerous examples and stories from real-world cases. They use a realistic, modern approach for creating a roadmap that is driven, in part, by JTBD.

Align Teams to Job Stories

Agile development enables teams and organizations to work in a flexible way. The approach started in software development, but has spread to other domains, including government and the military. The principles of Agile development can apply to just about any field.

A key part of Agile is to break down efforts into individual units of work. User stories are short descriptions of features and functionality written from the perspective of the end user. Teams can focus on only a small part of the whole and make progress in a controlled way.

User stories are commonly written in a three-part format. The first element indicates a user’s role in the system. The second points to a capability that enables the person to get a task done. The last part often describes a benefit or reason for using the capability.

Although specific styles can vary, a typical user story resembles something like the following:

As a <role> I can <capability>, so that <benefit>

Examples of use stories in this format include:

As a system admin, I can specify files or folders to back up based on file size, date created, and date modified.
As a user, I can indicate folders not to back up so that my drive isn't filled up with things I don't need to be saved.
As a user, I want to update the name of a document so that I can categorize it.

For any given system, there may be hundreds of user stories. Some can be quite granular, such as describing a single button and why a user would click it. Stories are then organized into a backlog or repository of functionality to be built. Teams break off logical groups of user stories in sprints or two- to four-week cycles of work.

Job Stories

Although user stories are good for breaking down work, they typically fail to connect the solution being built with user needs. They lack an indication of why someone would behave in a certain way and what they need to get a job done. In fact, often user stories are derived from the capability being built, not from observing actual behavior.

Job stories are an alternative to user stories. They follow the tradition of breaking down efforts into smaller pieces, but through the JTBD lens. The technique was first pioneered by the product development team at Intercom, a leading marketing communications solution. They wanted to avoid leading designers with a preconceived solution, as well as tying development to the company vision and strategy.

Paul Adams, an Intercom product manager, wrote about job stories for the first time, saying: “We frame every design problem in a Job, focusing on the triggering event or situation, the motivation and goal, and the intended outcome.”^[4]

As a result, their job story format also has three parts. But instead of focusing on a generic role, like a “user” or an “admin,” job stories begin with a highlight on the situation and context, not the individual:

When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome].

Examples of job stories include:

When an important new customer signs up, I want to be notified so that I can start a conversation with that person.
When I visit someone’s profile page, I want to see how many posts they have in each topic so that I have an understanding of where they have the most knowledge.
When I have used the application multiple times, I get nudged to contribute so that I am encouraged to participate.

JTBD author and leader Alan Klement has done the most work refining the job story format.^[5] He believes that adding more information about the circumstances shows causality better. Focusing on the context shifts attention from a persona to the situation. Klement advises that you avoid writing vague situations, but instead be as specific as possible.

For instance, consider these three possible situations for the first element of job stories:

When I’m hungry…
When I’m lost…
When I want to check my email…

Instead, Klement recommends describing the circumstances in rich detail:

When I’m hungry, running late to get somewhere, not sure when I’m going to eat again, and worried that I’ll soon be tired and irritable from hunger…
When I’m lost in a city that I’ve never been to, don’t know the local language, and am worried that I’ll be wasting my time in places I don’t want to be in…
When I want to check my email, but don’t want anyone around me to know I’m checking my email because they’ll think I’m being rude…

Each of these example situations provides more context for designing an appropriate solution.

Working with Job Stories

Job stories are modular, giving designers and developers the flexibility to solve problems in alternative ways. Job stories are grounded in real-world insight, and they are more powerful than user stories in guiding solutions. But creating job stories is more free-form than other JTBD techniques. Still, there are patterns that you can follow. Using the elements from Chapter 2, I suggest the following structure for job stories:

When I [circumstance + job stage/step], I want to [micro-job], so I can [need].

Examples:

When I am one of the top posters while updating my social media feeds daily, I want it to show on my profile so that I can increase recognition as an expert on the subject.
When I run out of materials needed while completing an art project, I want to find alternative materials so that I can maximize the number of uses of my current supplies.
When preparing for my commute and running late, I want to know the current weather along my journey so that I can minimize the chance of arriving wet.

Consider the last example. The first element combines information about the circumstances (running late) of getting the main job done (commute to work) within a stage of the process (prepare for commute).

The second element points to an even smaller step or micro-job (check forecast). It should be formulated without reference to specific technology, but should be specific enough for designers and developers to create a specific capability.

Finally, the last element can be taken right from your list of needs. In this case, the job performer (commuter) wants to avoid showing up to the office wet (minimize the chance of arriving at work wet). You can leverage the elements your JTBD landscape already uncovered in research directly in the formulation of the job story statements.

In researching this book, I’ve come across various alternative approaches to formulating job stories. Andrea Hill, a prominent advocate of JTBD on social media, suggests a slightly different approach. She sees the middle element pointing directly to a feature or solution of some kind, thus explicitly crossing from the problem space into the solution space. Her basic format is as follows:

When I [circumstance], I want to [solution capability], so I can [need].

A job story for the previous example of commuting to work might then look like this:

When I’m preparing to commute to work, I want to have weather forecast notifications pushed to my phone, so I can minimize the chance of arriving wet.

Steph Troeph, research and JTBD instructor in the UK, approaches job stories in yet another way. She thinks of them with this formula:

When I [circumstance], I want to [job], so that [benefit a solution offers].

Regardless of your interpretation, the key is to find a consistent structure and stick with it. The form you end up with needs to be appropriate to your team and your situation.

Jobs Stories in Action

Ultimately, job stories tie a local design and development effort to a broader JTBD framework. Because the format of job stories includes contextual details, they are portable. In other words, a job story should make sense without having to know the larger JTBD landscape or job map. As a result, job stories have a more “plug-and-play” versatility that is often required for Agile designs and development teams.

For instance, Agile planners can manage a backlog of job stories much in the same way that they would manage user stories. If a given sprint gets slowed down or changes direction, stories not addressed can be carried over to the next sprint. Having a smaller, self-contained description of the smaller job to be done has advantages during the design and development phases.

But to be clear: I have found that job stories typically do not replace user stories for development completely. Instead, job stories guide and frame the conceptualization of a solution rather than track implementation. They serve best as a design tool to create or determine concept direction and design. Developers and engineers will likely still need user stories to measure the burndown rate and overall progress.

Your job map provides an overall orientation to your JTBD landscape and allows you to zero in on a specific area for design and development. A roadmap gives you a high-level sequence of development with the rationale for planning activities. Job stories are more specific and guide the local design and development of features and capabilities.

Follow these steps to create job stories based on your JTBD research:

Step 1: Understand job stages and circumstances.

Base the relevant jobs and circumstances on previous interviews and observations. For each area of development in your solution, consider the steps in the main job. Then drill down and list the smaller and smaller steps as micro-jobs, using the rules of formulating JTBD. Also identify the circumstances that apply to that part of the main job in particular.

Depending on the depth of your prior research and how well you and your team understand the job, you may not need to do more research to create and validate job stories. It’s never a bad idea to speak with people again and drill down on specific problems and objectives they have. During additional interviews, ask “how?” until you get more granular in understanding of subgoals and objectives.

Step 2: Formulate job stories.

As a team, write job stories that are specific to your design and development effort. Decide on a consistent format for the job stories and stick to it.

Strive to come up with unique, mutually exclusive stories that target specific jobs and circumstances. Avoid redundancy. For instance, in the previous example, you probably don’t need separate stories for commuting by train versus commuting by car. Develop the job stories that matter the most and focus on a limited set. You may end up with anywhere from three to eight job stories per project or sprint.

Step 3: Solve for the job stories.

Make job stories visible and transparent to the entire team to solve for the job stories. For instance, post a relevant list of job stories in a brainstorming session for everyone to see. Or list job stories at the beginning of a design critique so that the team has context for making comments. Use JTBD to guide design and development decisions.

It’s also possible to then use the job stories to review the appropriateness of your solutions. First, the design team can use the job stories relevant to a project as heuristics. They should constantly ask if their designs are meeting the user’s goals set out in the job stories.

Then you can test solutions with users against the job stories. Show users your solutions (e.g., as a mock-up or prototype) and ask them how well each addresses the job stories. This can be done in an interview-style fashion or with a survey. The job stories ultimately become a measure for success of the designs before anything is built.

Job stories let you take a step back and look at the context of the job while designing a product or service. In this respect, job stories fill an important gap between the observations of customers and solution development, connecting insights into customer needs to individual features and development efforts.

Related Approaches: Needs Statements

Design thinking is a broad framework for creative problem solving. It is rooted in human-centered methods that seek to develop deep empathy for people and then to devise solutions that meet their needs. In design thinking, it is important to define the problem to solve before generating options for solutions.

One technique to encapsulate insights from research is to generate need statements, greatly resembling job stories in form. But these statements differ from “needs,” as defined in Chapter 2, in that need statements in design thinking are not specifically limited to the outcomes of a getting a main job done, and they can be aspirational in nature.

Need statements in design thinking also tend to be much more focused on a persona or an individual rather than the circumstances. For instance, writing for the Norman Nielsen Group, Sarah Gibbons refers to need statements representing a point-of-view for the user of a system:^[6] “A user need statement is an actionable problem statement used to summarize who a particular user is, the user’s need, and why the need is important to that user.”

Like job stories, need statements have three components: a user, a need, and a goal. The user corresponds to a goal-based persona based on research (as outlined in Chapter 4, “Defining Value”). A need is expressed independent of a feature or technology. The goal is the result of meeting the need. Gibbons provides an example:

Alieda, a multitasking, tech-savvy mother of two, needs to quickly and confidently compare options without leaving her comfort zone in order to spend more time doing the things that really matter.

Note that the insight at the end of this statement, “doing the things that really matter,” is very broad and hard to measure. Job stories, on the other hand, favor a more specific context and outcome. For instance, rewriting the above example through the lens of job stories might yield something like the following:

When I’m multitasking and in a rush, I need a familiar way to quickly and confidently compare options so that I can minimize the time spent on finding a solution.

Like need statements in design thinking, job stories also avoid the mention of features or technology. Yet, they are much more specific to a given job and its context. While both a need statement from design thinking and a job story can feed into the creative generation of solutions, job stories will provide more direct guidance without prescribing a solution.

But the definition of a need in design thinking can vary greatly. For instance, IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking approach also includes guidelines for generating statements.^[7] Not surprisingly, there are three parts: a user, a need, and a benefit. Here’s an example from the IBM site:

A developer needs a way to make sense of minimal design so that they can prototype faster.

This example is much more specific than Gibbon’s approach, yet still avoids mentioning a specific solution. There are no aspirational elements, such as “pursuing lifelong dreams,” sometimes found elsewhere in design thinking. IBM’s approach to need statements is closer to the job story approach, but is also light on describing the circumstances of use.

In some sense, the differences between job stories—even with the variations in format—and need statements points to a key distinction between JTBD and design thinking. The former focuses much more on the circumstances than the person’s state of mind or psychology. Where design thinking seeks to gain empathy for the individual as a starting point, JTBD seeks to understand the circumstances of accomplishing an objective before factoring in emotional and personal aspects.

Learn More About This Play

Klement, Alan. “Replacing the User Story with the Job Story.” JTBD.info (2013); “5 Tips for Writing a Job Story,” JTBD.info (2013); “Designing Features Using Job Stories,” Inside Intercom (2015).

Klement has done the most extensive work to develop the job story technique. These three articles outline the basis for creating them. The technique has evolved slightly, but Klement points clearly to how he’s updated his approach. Klement and others have posted widely about their use for development efforts, but start with these resources.

van de Keuken, Maxim. “Using Job Stories and Jobs-to-be-Done in Software Requirements Engineering.” Thesis, Utrecht University, 2017.

This thesis project offers a detailed investigation of how job stories are applied to date. After illustrating the history of job stories, Van de Keuken presents the results of his original research variations in application of job stories as seen in practice. This work contributes greatly to making job stories a more formal part of software requirements engineering.

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Usability Testing for Voice Content

It’s an important time to be in voice design. Many of us are turning to voice assistants in these times, whether for comfort, recreation, or staying informed. As the interest in interfaces driven by voice continues to reach new heights around the world, so too will users’ expectations and the best practices that guide their design.

Voice interfaces (also known as voice user interfaces or VUIs) have been reinventing how we approach, evaluate, and interact with user interfaces. The impact of conscious efforts to reduce close contact between people will continue to increase users’ expectations for the availability of a voice component on all devices, whether that entails a microphone icon indicating voice-enabled search or a full-fledged voice assistant waiting patiently in the wings for an invocation.

But voice interfaces present inherent challenges and surprises. In this relatively new realm of design, the intrinsic twists and turns in spoken language can make things difficult for even the most carefully considered voice interfaces. After all, spoken language is littered with fillers (in the linguistic sense of utterances like hmm and um), hesitations and pauses, and other interruptions and speech disfluencies that present puzzling problems for designers and implementers alike.

Once you’ve built a voice interface that introduces information or permits transactions in a rich way for spoken language users, the easy part is done. Nonetheless, voice interfaces also surface unique challenges when it comes to usability testing and robust evaluation of your end result. But there are advantages, too, especially when it comes to accessibility and cross-channel content strategy. The fact that voice-driven content lies on the opposite extreme of the spectrum from the traditional website confers it an additional benefit: it’s an effective way to analyze and stress-test just how channel-agnostic your content truly is.

The quandary of voice usability

Several years ago, I led a talented team at Acquia Labs to design and build a voice interface for Digital Services Georgia called Ask GeorgiaGov, which allowed citizens of the state of Georgia to access content about key civic tasks, like registering to vote, renewing a driver’s license, and filing complaints against businesses. Based on copy drawn directly from the frequently asked questions section of the Georgia.gov website, it was the first Amazon Alexa interface integrated with the Drupal content management system ever built for public consumption. Built by my former colleague Chris Hamper, it also offered a host of impressive features, like allowing users to request the phone number of individual government agencies for each query on a topic.

Designing and building web experiences for the public sector is a uniquely challenging endeavor due to requirements surrounding accessibility and frequent budgetary challenges. Out of necessity, governments need to be exacting and methodical not only in how they engage their citizens and spend money on projects but also how they incorporate new technologies into the mix. For most government entities, voice is a completely different world, with many potential pitfalls.

At the outset of the project, the Digital Services Georgia team, led by Nikhil Deshpande, expressed their most important need: a single content model across all their content irrespective of delivery channel, as they only had resources to maintain a single rendition of each content item. Despite this editorial challenge, Georgia saw Alexa as an exciting opportunity to open new doors to accessible solutions for citizens with disabilities. And finally, because there were relatively few examples of voice usability testing at the time, we knew we would have to learn on the fly and experiment to find the right solution.

Eventually, we discovered that all the traditional approaches to usability testing that we’d executed for other projects were ill-suited to the unique problems of voice usability. And this was only the beginning of our problems.

How voice interfaces improve accessibility outcomes

Any discussion of voice usability must consider some of the most experienced voice interface users: people who use assistive devices. After all, accessibility has long been a bastion of web experiences, but it has only recently become a focus of those implementing voice interfaces. In a world where refreshable Braille displays and screen readers prize the rendering of web-based content into synthesized speech above all, the voice interface seems like an anomaly. But in fact, the exciting potential of Amazon Alexa for disabled citizens represented one of the primary motivations for Georgia’s interest in making their content available through a voice assistant.

Questions surrounding accessibility with voice have surfaced in recent years due to the perceived user experience benefits that voice interfaces can offer over more established assistive devices. Because screen readers make no exceptions when they recite the contents of a page, they can occasionally present superfluous information and force the user to wait longer than they’re willing. In addition, with an effective content schema, it can often be the case that voice interfaces facilitate pointed interactions with content at a more granular level than the page itself.

Though it can be difficult to convince even the most forward-looking clients of accessibility’s value, Georgia has been not only a trailblazer but also a committed proponent of content accessibility beyond the web. The state was among the first jurisdictions to offer a text-to-speech (TTS) phone hotline that read web pages aloud. After all, state governments must serve all citizens equally—no ifs, ands, or buts. And while these are still early days, I can see voice assistants becoming new conduits, and perhaps more efficient channels, by which disabled users can access the content they need.

Managing content destined for discrete channels

Whereas voice can improve accessibility of content, it’s seldom the case that web and voice are the only channels through which we must expose information. For this reason, one piece of advice I often give to content strategists and architects at organizations interested in pursuing voice-driven content is to never think of voice content in isolation. Siloing it is the same misguided approach that has led to mobile applications and other discrete experiences delivering orphaned or outdated content to a user expecting that all content on the website should be up-to-date and accessible through other channels as well.

After all, we’ve trained ourselves for many years to think of content in the web-only context rather than across channels. Our closely held assumptions about links, file downloads, images, and other web-based marginalia and miscellany are all aspects of web content that translate poorly to the conversational context—and particularly the voice context. Increasingly, we all need to concern ourselves with an omnichannel content strategy that straddles all those channels in existence today and others that will doubtlessly surface over the horizon.

With the advantages of structured content in Drupal 7, Georgia.gov already had a content model amenable to interlocution in the form of frequently asked questions (FAQs). While question-and-answer formats are convenient for voice assistants because queries for content tend to come in the form of questions, the returned responses likewise need to be as voice-optimized as possible.

For Georgia.gov, the need to preserve a single rendition of all content across all channels led us to perform a conversational content audit, in which we read aloud all of the FAQ pages, putting ourselves in the shoes of a voice user, and identified key differences between how a user would interpret the written form and how they would parse the spoken form of that same content. After some discussion with the editorial team at Georgia, we opted to limit calls to action (e.g., “Read more”), links lacking clear context in surrounding text, and other situations confusing to voice users who cannot visualize the content they are listening to.

Here’s a table containing examples of how we converted certain text on FAQ pages to counterparts more appropriate for voice. Reading each sentence aloud, one by one, helped us identify cases where users might scratch their heads and say “Huh?” in a voice context.

Before	After
Learn how to change your name on your Social Security card.	The Social Security Administration can help you change your name on your Social Security card.
You can receive payments through either a debit card or direct deposit. Learn more about payments.	You can receive payments through either a debit card or direct deposit.
Read more about this.	In Georgia, the Family Support Registry typically pulls payments directly from your paycheck. However, you can send your own payments online through your bank account, your credit card, or Western Union. You may also send your payments by mail to the address provided in your court order.

In areas like content strategy and content governance, content audits have long been key to understanding the full picture of your content, but it doesn’t end there. Successful content audits can run the gamut from automated checks for orphaned content or overly wordy articles to more qualitative analyses of how content adheres to a specific brand voice or certain design standards. For a content strategy truly prepared for channels both here and still to come, a holistic understanding of how users will interact with your content in a variety of situations is a baseline requirement today.

Other conversational interfaces have it easier

Spoken language is inherently hard. Even the most gifted orators can have trouble with it. It’s littered with mistakes, starts and stops, interruptions, hesitations, and a vertiginous range of other uniquely human transgressions. The written word, because it’s committed instantly to a mostly permanent record, is tame, staid, and carefully considered in comparison.

When we talk about conversational interfaces, we need to draw a clear distinction between the range of user experiences that traffic in written language rather than spoken language. As we know from the relative solidity of written language and literature versus the comparative transience of spoken language and oral traditions, in many ways the two couldn’t be more different from one another. The implications for designers are significant because spoken language, from the user’s perspective, lacks a graphical equivalent to which those scratching their head can readily refer. We’re dealing with the spoken word and aural affordances, not pixels, written help text, or visual affordances.

Why written conversational interfaces are easier to evaluate

One of the privileges that chatbots and textbots enjoy over voice interfaces is the fact that by design, they can’t hide the previous steps users have taken. Any conversational interface user working in the written medium has access to their previous history of interactions, which can stretch back days, weeks, or months: the so-called backscroll. A flight passenger communicating with an airline through Facebook Messenger, for example, knows that they can merely scroll up in the chat history to confirm that they’ve already provided the company with their e-ticket number or frequent flyer account information.

This has outsize implications for information architecture and conversational wayfinding. Since chatbot users can consult their own written record, it’s much harder for things to go completely awry when they make a move they didn’t intend. Recollection is much more difficult when you have to remember what you said a few minutes ago off the top of your head rather than scrolling up to the information you provided a few hours or weeks ago. An effective chatbot interface may, for example, enable a user to jump back to a much earlier, specific place in a conversation’s history.An effective chatbot interface may, for example, enable a user to jump back to a much earlier, specific place in a conversation’s history. Voice interfaces that live perpetually in the moment have no such luxury.

Eye tracking only works for visual components

In many cases, those who work with chatbots and messaging bots (especially those leveraging text messages or other messaging services like Facebook Messenger, Slack, or WhatsApp) have the unique privilege of benefiting from a visual component. Some conversational interfaces now insert other elements into the conversational flow between a machine and a person, such as embedded conversational forms (like SPACE10’s Conversational Form) that allow users to enter rich input or select from a range of possible responses.

The success of eye tracking in more traditional usability testing scenarios highlights its appropriateness for visual interfaces such as websites, mobile applications, and others. However, from the standpoint of evaluating voice interfaces that are entirely aural, eye tracking serves only the limited (but still interesting from a research perspective) purpose of assessing where the test subject is looking while speaking with an invisible interlocutor—not whether they are able to use the interface successfully. Indeed, eye tracking is only a viable option for voice interfaces that have some visual component, like the Amazon Echo Show.

Think-aloud and concurrent probing interrupt the conversational flow

A well-worn approach for usability testing is think-aloud, which allows for users working with interfaces to present their frequently qualitative impressions of interfaces verbally while interacting with the user experience in question. Paired with eye tracking, think-aloud adds considerable dimension to a usability test for visual interfaces such as websites and web applications, as well as other visually or physically oriented devices.

Another is concurrent probing (CP). Probing involves the use of questions to gather insights about the interface from users, and Usability.gov describes two types: concurrent, in which the researcher asks questions during interactions, and retrospective, in which questions only come once the interaction is complete.

Conversational interfaces that utilize written language rather than spoken language can still be well-suited to think-aloud and concurrent probing approaches, especially for the components in the interface that require manual input, like conversational forms and other traditional UI elements interspersed throughout the conversation itself.

But for voice interfaces, think-aloud and concurrent probing are highly questionable approaches and can catalyze a variety of unintended consequences, including accidental invocations of trigger words (such as Alexa mishearing “selected” as “Alexa”) and introduction of bad data (such as speech transcription registering both the voice interface and test subject). After all, in a hypothetical think-aloud or CP test of a voice interface, the user would be responsible for conversing with the chatbot while simultaneously offering up their impressions to the evaluator overseeing the test.

Voice usability tests with retrospective probing

Retrospective probing (RP), a lesser-known approach for usability testing, is seldom seen in web usability testing due to its chief weakness: the fact that we have awful memories and rarely remember what occurred mere moments earlier with anything that approaches total accuracy. (This might explain why the backscroll has joined the pantheon of rigid recordkeeping currently occupied by cuneiform, the printing press, and other means of concretizing information.)

For users of voice assistants lacking scrollable chat histories, retrospective probing introduces the potential for subjects to include false recollections in their assessments or to misinterpret the conclusion of their conversations. That said, retrospective probing permits the participant to take some time to form their impressions of an interface rather than dole out incremental tidbits in a stream of consciousness, as would more likely occur in concurrent probing.

What makes voice usability tests unique

Voice usability tests have several unique characteristics that distinguish them from web usability tests or other conversational usability tests, but some of the same principles unify both visual interfaces and their aural counterparts. As always, “test early, test often” is a mantra that applies here, as the earlier you can begin testing, the more robust your results will be. Having an individual to administer a test and another to transcribe results or watch for signs of trouble is also an effective best practice in settings beyond just voice usability.

Interference from poor soundproofing or external disruptions can derail a voice usability test even before it begins. Many large organizations will have soundproof rooms or recording studios available for voice usability researchers. For the vast majority of others, a mostly silent room will suffice, though absolute silence is optimal. In addition, many subjects, even those well-versed in web usability tests, may be unaccustomed to voice usability tests in which long periods of silence are the norm to establish a baseline for data.

How we used retrospective probing to test Ask GeorgiaGov

For Ask GeorgiaGov, we used the retrospective probing approach almost exclusively to gather a range of insights about how our users were interacting with voice-driven content. We endeavored to evaluate interactions with the interface early and diachronically. In the process, we asked each of our subjects to complete two distinct tasks that would require them to traverse the entirety of the interface by asking questions (conducting a search), drilling down into further questions, and requesting the phone number for a related agency. Though this would be a significant ask of any user working with a visual interface, the unidirectional focus of voice interface flows, by contrast, reduced the likelihood of lengthy accidental detours.

Here are a couple of example scenarios:

You have a business license in Georgia, but you’re not sure if you have to register on an annual basis. Talk with Alexa to find out the information you need. At the end, ask for a phone number for more information.

You’ve just moved to Georgia and you know you need to transfer your driver’s license, but you’re not sure what to do. Talk with Alexa to find out the information you need. At the end, ask for a phone number for more information.

We also peppered users with questions after the test concluded to learn about their impressions through retrospective probing:

“On a scale of 1–5, based on the scenario, was the information you received helpful? Why or why not?”
“On a scale of 1–5, based on the scenario, was the content presented clear and easy to follow? Why or why not?”
“What’s the answer to the question that you were tasked with asking?”

Because state governments also routinely deal with citizen questions having to do with potentially traumatic issues such as divorce and sexual harassment, we also offered the choice for participants to opt out of certain categories of tasks.

While this testing procedure yielded compelling results that indicated our voice interface was performing at the level it needed to despite its experimental nature, we also ran into considerable challenges during the usability testing process. Restoring Amazon Alexa to its initial state and troubleshooting issues on the fly proved difficult during the initial stages of the implementation, when bugs were still common.

In the end, we found that many of the same lessons that apply to more storied examples of usability testing were also relevant to Ask GeorgiaGov: the importance of testing early and testing often, the need for faithful yet efficient transcription, and the surprising staying power of bugs when integrating disparate technologies. Despite Ask GeorgiaGov’s many similarities to other interface implementations in terms of technical debt and the role of usability testing, we were overjoyed to hear from real Georgians whose engagement with their state government could not be more different from before.

Conclusion

Many of us may be building interfaces for voice content to experiment with newfangled channels, or to build for disabled people and people newer to the web. Now, they are necessities for many others, especially as social distancing practices continue to take hold worldwide. Nonetheless, it’s crucial to keep in mind that voice should be only one component of a channel-agnostic strategy equipped for content ripped away from its usual contexts. Building usable voice-driven content experiences can teach us a great deal about how we should envisage our milieu of content and its future in the first place.

Gone are the days when we could write a page in HTML and call it a day; content now needs to be rendered through synthesized speech, augmented reality overlays, digital signage, and other environments where users will never even touch a personal computer. By focusing on structured content first and foremost with an eye toward moving past our web-based biases in developing our content for voice and others, we can better ensure the effectiveness of our content on any device and in any form factor.

Eight months after we finished building Ask GeorgiaGov in 2017, we conducted a retrospective to inspect the logs amassed over the past year. The results were striking. Vehicle registration, driver’s licenses, and the state sales tax comprised the most commonly searched topics. 79.2% of all interactions were successful, an achievement for one of the first content-driven Alexa skills in production, and 71.2% of all interactions led to the issuance of a phone number that users could call for further information.

But deep in the logs we implemented for the Georgia team’s convenience, we found a number of perplexing 404 Not Found errors related to a search term that kept being recorded over and over again as “Lawson’s.” After some digging and consulting the native Georgians in the room, we discovered that one of our dear users with a particularly strong drawl was repeatedly pronouncing “license” in her native dialect to no avail.

As this anecdote highlights, just as no user experience can be truly perfect for everyone, voice content is an environment where imperfections can highlight considerations we missed in developing cross-channel content. And just as we have much to learn when it comes to the new shapes content can take as it jumps off the screen and out the window, it seems our voice interfaces still have a ways to go before they take over the world too.

Special thanks to Nikhil Deshpande for his feedback during the writing process.

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Cross-Cultural Design

When I first traveled to Japan as an exchange student in 2001, I lived in northern Kyoto, a block from the Kitayama subway station.

My first time using the train to get to my university was almost a disaster, even though it was only two subway stops away. I thought I had everything I needed to successfully make the trip. I double- and triple-checked that I had the correct change in one pocket and a computer printout of where I was supposed to go in the other. I was able to make it down into the station, but then I just stood at a ticket machine, dumbfounded, looking at all the flashing lights, buttons, and maps above my head (Fig 5.1). Everything was so impenetrable. I was overwhelmed by the architecture, the sounds, the signs, and the language.

Fig 5.1: Kyoto subway ticket machines—with many line maps and bilingual station names—can seem complicated, especially to newcomers.

My eyes craved something familiar—and there it was. The ticket machine had a small button that said English! I pushed it but became even more lost: the instructions were poorly translated, and anyway, they explained a system that I couldn’t use in the first place.

Guess what saved me? Two little old Japanese ladies. As they bought tickets, I casually looked over their shoulders to see how they were using the machines. First, they looked up at the map to find their desired destination. Then, they noted the fare written next to the station. Finally, they put some money into the machine, pushed the button that lit up with their correct fare, and out popped the tickets! Wow! I tried it myself after they left. And after a few tense moments, I got my ticket and headed through the gates to the train platform.

I pride myself on being a third-culture kid, meaning I was raised in a culture other than the country named on my passport. But even with a cultural upbringing in both Nigeria and the US, it was one of the first times I ever had to guess my way through a task with no previous reference points. And I did it!

Unfortunately, the same guesswork happens online a million times a day. People visit sites that offer them no cultural mental models or visual framework to fall back on, and they end up stumbling through links and pages. Effective visual systems can help eliminate that guesswork and uncertainty by creating layered sets of cues in the design and interface. Let’s look at a few core parts of these design systems and tease out how we can make them more culturally responsive and multifaceted.

Typography

If you work on the web, you deal with typography all the time. This isn’t a book about typography—others have written far more eloquently and technically on the subject. What I would like to do, however, is examine some of the ways culture and identity influence our perception of type and what typographic choices designers can make to help create rich cross-cultural experiences.

Stereotypography

I came across the word stereotypography a few years ago. Being African, I’m well aware of the way my continent is portrayed in Western media—a dirt-poor, rural monoculture with little in the way of technology, education, or urbanization. In the West, one of the most recognizable graphic markers for things African, tribal, or uncivilized (and no, they are not the same thing) is the typeface Neuland. Rob Giampietro calls it “the New Black Face,” a clever play on words. In an essay, he asks an important question:

How did [Neuland and Lithos] come to signify Africans and African-Americans, regardless of how a designer uses them, and regardless of the purpose for which their creators originally intended them? (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-01/)

From its release in 1923 and continued use through the 1940s in African-American-focused advertising, Neuland has carried heavy connotations and stereotypes of cheapness, ugliness, tribalism, and roughness. You see this even today. Neuland is used in posters for movies like Tarzan, Jurassic Park, and Jumanji—movies that are about jungles, wildness, and scary beasts lurking in the bush, all Western symbolism for the continent of Africa. Even MyFonts’ download page for Neuland (Fig 5.2) includes tags for “Africa,” “jungle fever,” and “primitive”—tags unconnected to anything else in the product besides that racist history.

Fig 5.2: On MyFonts, the Neuland typeface is tagged with “Africa”, “jungle fever”, and “primitive”, perpetuating an old and irrelevant typographic stereotype (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-02/).

Don’t make, use, or sell fonts this way. Here are some tips on how to avoid stereotypography when defining your digital experiences:

Be immediately suspicious of any typeface that “looks like” a culture or country. For example, so-called “wonton” or “chop-suey” fonts, whose visual style is thought to express “Asianness” or to suggest Chinese calligraphy, have long appeared on food cartons, signs, campaign websites, and even Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts with racist caricatures of Asians (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-03/). Monotype’s website, where you can buy a version called Mandarin Regular (US$35), cringingly describes the typeface’s story as “an interpretation of artistically drawn Asian brush calligraphy” (Fig 5.3). Whether or not you immediately know its history, run away from any typeface that purports to represent an entire culture.

Fig 5.3: Fonts.com sells a typeface called Mandarin Regular with the following description: “The stylized Asian atmosphere is not created only by the forms of the figures but also by the very name of the typeface. A mandarin was a high official of the ancient Chinese empire” (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-04/).

Support type designers who are from the culture you are designing for. This might seem like it’s a difficult task, but the internet is a big place. I have found that, for clients who are sensitive to cultural issues, the inclusion of type designers’ names and backgrounds can be a powerful differentiator, even making its way into their branding packages as a point of pride.

The world wide webfont

Another common design tool you should consider is webfonts—fonts specifically designed for use on websites and apps. One of the main selling points of webfonts is that instead of putting text in images, clients can use live text on their sites, which is better for SEO and accessibility. They are simple to implement these days, a matter of adding a line of code or checking a box on a templating engine. The easiest way to get them on your site is by using a service like Google Fonts, Fontstand, or Adobe Fonts.

Or is it? That assumes those services are actually available to your users.

Google Fonts (and every other service using Google’s Developer API) is blocked in mainland China, which means that any of those nice free fonts you chose would simply not load (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-05/). You can work around this, but it also helps to have a fallback font—that’s what they’re for.

When you’re building your design system, why not take a few extra steps to define some webfonts that are visible in places with content blocks? Justfont is one of the first services focused on offering a wide range of Chinese webfonts (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-06/). They have both free and paid tiers of service, similar to Western font services. After setting up an account, you can grab whatever CSS and font-family information you need.

Multiple script systems

When your design work requires more than one script—for instance, a Korean typeface and a Latin typeface—your choices get much more difficult. Designs that incorporate more than one are called multiple script systems (multiscript systems for short). Combining them is an interesting design challenge, one that requires extra typographic sensitivity. Luckily, your multiscript choices will rarely appear on the same page together; you will usually be choosing fonts that work across the brand, not that work well next to one another visually.

Let’s take a look at an example of effective multiscript use. SurveyMonkey, an online survey and questionnaire tool, has their site localized into a variety of different languages (Fig 5.4). Take note of the headers, the structure of the text in the menu and buttons, and how both fonts feel like part of the same brand.

Fig 5.4: Compare the typographic choices in the Korean (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-07/) and US English (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-08/) versions of SurveyMonkey’s Take a Tour page. Do the header type and spacing retain the spirit of the brand while still accounting for typographic needs?

Some tips as you attempt to choose multiscript fonts for your project:

Inspect the overall weight and contrast level of the scripts. Take the time to examine how weight and contrast are used in the scripts you’re using. Find weights and sizes that give you a similar feel and give the page the right balance, regardless of the script.
Keep an eye on awkward script features. Character x-heights, descenders, ascenders, and spacing can throw off the overall brand effect. For instance, Japanese characters are always positioned within a grid with all characters designed to fit in squares of equal height and width. Standard Japanese typefaces also contain Latin characters, called romaji. Those Latin characters will, by default, be kerned according to that same grid pattern, often leaving their spacing awkward and ill-formed. Take the extra time to find a typeface that doesn’t have features that are awkward to work with.
Don’t automatically choose scripts based on superficial similarity. Initial impressions don’t always mean a typeface is the right one for your project. In an interview in the book Bi-Scriptual, Jeongmin Kwon, a typeface designer based in France, offers an example (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-09/). Nanum Myeongjo, a contemporary Hangul typeface, might at first glance look really similar to a seventeenth-century Latin old-style typeface—for instance, they both have angled serifs. However, Nanum Myeongjo was designed in 2008 with refined, modern strokes, whereas old-style typefaces were originally created centuries ago and echo handwritten letterforms (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-10/). Looking at the Google Fonts page for Nanum Myeongjo, though, none of that is clear (Fig 5.5). The page automatically generates a Latin Nn glyph in the top left of the page, instead of a more representative Hangul character sample. If I based my multiscript font choices on my initial reactions to that page, my pairings wouldn’t accurately capture the history and design of each typeface.

Fig 5.5: The Google Fonts page for Nanum Myeongjo shows a Latin character sample in the top left, rather than a more representative character sample.

Visual density

CSS can help you control visual density—how much text, image, and other content there is relative to the negative space on your page. As you read on, keep cultural variables in mind: different cultures value different levels of visual density.

Let’s compare what are commonly called CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) alphabets and Latin (English, French, Italian, etc.) alphabets. CJK alphabets have more complex characters, with shapes that are generally squarer than Latin letterforms. The glyphs also tend to be more detailed than Latin ones, resulting in a higher visual density.

Your instinct might be to create custom type sizes and line heights for each of your localized pages. That is a perfectly acceptable option, and if you are a typophile, it may drive you crazy not to do it. But I’m here to tell you that when adding CJK languages to a design system, you can update it to account for their visual density without ripping out a lot of your original CSS:

Choose a font size that is slightly larger for CJK characters, because of their density.
Choose a line height that gives you ample vertical space between each line of text (referred to as line-height in CSS).
Look at your Latin text in the same sizes and see if it still works.
Tweak them together to find a size that works well with both scripts.

The 2017 site for Typojanchi, the Korean Typography Biennale, follows this methodology (Fig 5.6). Both the English and Korean texts have a font-size of 1.25em, and a line-height of 1.5. The result? The English text takes up more space vertically, and the block of Korean text is visually denser, but both are readable and sit comfortably within the overall page design. It is useful to compare translated websites like this to see how CSS styling can be standardized across Latin and CJK pages.

Fig 5.6: The 2017 site for Typojanchi, the Korean Typography Biennale, shows differing visual density in action. It is useful to compare translated websites like this to see how CSS styling can be standardized across Latin and CJK pages (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-11/).

Text expansion factors

Expansion factors calculate how long strings of text will be in different languages. They use either a decimal (1.8) or a percentage (180%) to calculate the length of a text string in English versus a different language. Of course, letter-spacing depends on the actual word or phrase, but think of them as a very rough way to anticipate space for text when it gets translated.

Using expansion factors is best when planning for microcopy, calls to action, and menus, rather than long-form content like articles or blog posts that can freely expand down the page. The Salesforce Lightning Design System offers a detailed expansion-factor table to help designers roughly calculate space requirements for other languages in a UI (Fig 5.7).

Fig 5.7: This expansion-factor table from Salesforce lets designers and developers estimate the amount of text that will exist in different languages. Though dependent on the actual words, such calculations can give you a benchmark to design with content in mind (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-12/).

But wait! Like everything in cross-cultural design, nothing is ever that simple. Japanese, for example, has three scripts: Kanji, for characters of Chinese origin, hiragana, for words and sounds that are not represented in kanji, and katakana, for words borrowed from other languages.

The follow button is a core part of the Twitter experience. It has six characters in English (“Follow”) and four in Japanese (フォロー), but the Japanese version is twenty percent longer because it is in katakana, and those characters take up more space than kanji (Fig 5.8). Expansion tables can struggle to accommodate the complex diversity of human scripts and languages, so don’t look to them as a one-stop or infallible solution.

Fig 5.8: On Twitter, expansion is clearly visible: the English “Follow” button text comes in at about 47 pixels wide, while the Japanese text comes in at 60 pixels wide.

Here are a few things you can do keep expansion factors in mind as you design:

Generate dummy text in different languages for your design comps. Of course, you should make sure your text doesn’t contain any unintentional swearwords or improper language, but tools like Foreign Ipsum are a good place to start getting your head around expansion factors (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/05-13/).
Leave extra space around buttons, menu items, and other microcopy. As well as being general good practice in responsive design, this allows you to account for how text in your target languages expands.
Make sure your components are expandable. Stay away from assigning a fixed width to your UI elements unless it’s unavoidable.
Let longer text strings wrap to a second line. Just ensure that text is aligned correctly and is easy to scan.

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Standards for Writing Accessibly

Writing to meet WCAG2 standards can be a challenge, but it’s worthwhile. Albert Einstein, the archetypical genius and physicist, once said, “Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”

Hopefully, this entire book will help you better write for accessibility. So far, you’ve learned:

Why clarity is important
How to structure messages for error states and stress cases
How to test the effectiveness of the words you write

All that should help your writing be better for screen readers, give additional context to users who may need it, and be easier to parse.

But there are a few specific points that you may not otherwise think about, even after reading these pages.

Writing for Screen Readers

People with little or no sight interact with apps and websites in a much different way than sighted people do. Screen readers parse the elements on the screen (to the best of their abilities) and read it back to the user. And along the way, there are many ways this could go wrong. As the interface writer, your role is perhaps most important in giving screen reader users the best context.

Here are a few things to keep in mind about screen readers:

The average reading time for sighted readers is two to five words per second. Screen-reader users can comprehend text being read at an average of 35 syllables per second, which is significantly faster. Don’t be afraid to sacrifice brevity for clarity, especially when extra context is needed or useful.
People want to be able to skim long blocks of text, regardless of sight or audio, so it’s extremely important to structure your longform writing with headers, short paragraphs, and other content design best practices.

Write Chronologically, Not Spatially

Writing chronologically is about describing the order of things, rather than where they appear spatially in the interface. There are so many good reasons to do this (devices and browsers will render interfaces differently), but screen readers show you the most valuable reason. You’ll often be faced with writing tooltips or onboarding elements that say something like, “Click the OK button below to continue.” Or “See the instructions above to save your document.”

Screen readers will do their job and read those instructions aloud to someone who can’t see the spatial relationships between words and objects. While many times, they can cope with that, they shouldn’t have to. Consider screen reader users in your language. Embrace the universal experience shared by humans and rely on their intrinsic understanding of the top is first, bottom is last paradigm. Write chronologically, as in Figure 5.5.

FIGURE 5.5 Password hint microcopy below the password field won’t help someone using a screen reader who hasn’t made it there yet.

Rather than saying:

Click the OK button below to continue.
(A button that scrolls you to the top of a page): Go to top.

Instead, say:

Next, select OK to continue.
Go to beginning.

Write Left to Right, Top to Bottom

While you don’t want to convey spatial meaning in your writing, you still want to keep that spatial order in mind.

Have you ever purchased a service or a product, only to find out later that there were conditions you didn’t know about before you paid for it? Maybe you didn’t realize batteries weren’t included in that gadget, or that signing up for that social network, you were implicitly agreeing to provide data to third-party advertisers.

People who use screen readers face this all the time.

Most screen readers will parse information from left to write, from top to bottom.¹ Think about a few things when reviewing the order and placement of your words. Is there information critical to performing an action, or making a decision, that appears after (to the right or below) an action item, like in Figure 5.5? If so, consider moving it up in the interface.

Instead, if there’s information critical to an action (rules around setting a password, for example, or accepting terms of service before proceeding), place it before the text field or action button. Even if it’s hidden in a tooltip or info button, it should be presented before a user arrives at a decision point.

Don’t Use Colors and Icons Alone

If you are a sighted American user of digital products, there’s a pretty good chance that if you see a message in red, you’ll interpret it as a warning message or think something’s wrong. And if you see a message in green, you’ll likely associate that with success. But while colors aid in conveying meaning to this type of user, they don’t necessarily mean the same thing to those from other cultures.

For example, although red might indicate excitement, or danger in the U.S. (broadly speaking), in other cultures it means something entirely different:

In China, it represents good luck.
In some former-Soviet, eastern European countries it’s the color strongly associated with Communism.
In India, it represents purity.

Yellow, which we in the U.S. often use to mean “caution” (because we’re borrowing a mental model from traffic lights), might convey another meaning for people in other cultures:

In Latin America, yellow is associated with death.
In Eastern and Asian cultures, it’s a royal color—sacred and often imperial.

And what about users with color-blindness or low to no vision? And what about screen readers? Intrinsic meaning from the interface color means nothing for them. Be sure to add words that bear context so that if you heard the message being read aloud, you would understand what was being said, as in Figure 5.6.

FIGURE 5.6 While a simple in-app message warning a user to save their work before proceeding is more effective, visually, if it is red and has a warning icon, as seen on the left, you should provide more context when possible. The example on the right explicitly says that a user won’t be able to proceed to the next step before saving their work.

Describe the Action, Not the Behavior

Touch-first interfaces have been steadily growing and replacing keyboard/mouse interfaces for years, so no longer are users “clicking” a link or a button. But they’re not necessarily “tapping” it either, especially if they’re using a voice interface or an adaptive device.

Instead of microcopy that includes behavioral actions like:

Click
Tap
Press
See

Try device-agnostic words that describe the action, irrespective of the interface, like:

Choose
Select
View

There are plenty of exceptions to this rule. If your interface requires a certain action to execute a particular function, and you need to teach the user how their gesture affects the interface (“Pinch to zoom out,” for example), then of course you need to describe the behavior. But generally, the copy you’re writing will be simpler and more consistent if you stick with the action in the context of the interface itself.

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Making Room for Variation

Making a brand feel unified, cohesive, and harmonious while also leaving room for experimentation is a tough balancing act. It’s one of the most challenging aspects of a design system.

Graphic designer and Pentagram partner Paula Scher faced this challenge with the visual identity for the Public Theater in New York. As she explained in a talk at Beyond Tellerrand:

I began to realize that if you made everything the same, it was boring after the first year. If you changed it individually for each play, the theater lost recognizability. The thing to do, which I totally got for the first time after working there at this point for 17 years, is what they needed to have were seasons.

You could take the typography and the color system for the summer festival, the Shakespeare in the Park Festival, and you could begin to translate it into posters by flopping the colors, but using some of the same motifs, and you could create entire seasons out of the graphics. That would become its own standards manual where I have about six different people making these all year (http://bkaprt.com/eds/04-01/).

Scher’s strategy was to retain the Public Theater’s visual language every year, but to vary some of its elements (Fig 4.1–2). Colors would be swapped. Text would skew in different directions. New visual motifs would be introduced. The result is that each season coheres in its own way, but so does the identity of the Public Theater as a whole.

Fig 4.1: The posters for the 2014/15 season featured the wood type style the Public Theater is known for, but the typography was skewed. The color palette was restrained to yellow, black, and white, which led to a dynamic look when coupled with the skewed type (http://bkaprt.com/eds/04-02/).

Fig 4.2: For the 2018 season, the wood type letterforms were extended on a field of gradated color. The grayscale cut-out photos we saw in the 2014/15 season persisted, but this time in lower contrast to fit better with the softer color tones (http://bkaprt.com/eds/04-03/).

Even the most robust or thoroughly planned systems will need to account for variation at some point. As soon as you release a design system, people will ask you how to deviate from it, and you’ll want to be armed with persuasive answers. In this chapter, I’m going to talk about what variation means for a design system, how to know when you need it, and how to manage it in a scalable way.

What Is Variation?

We’ve spent most of this book talking about the importance of unity, cohesion, and harmony in a design system. So why are we talking about variation? Isn’t that at odds with all of the goals we’ve set until now?

Variation is a deviation from established patterns, and it can exist at every level of the system. At the component level, for instance, a team may discover that they need a component to behave in a slightly different way; maybe this particular component needs to appear without a photo, for example. At a design-language level, you may have a team that has a different audience, so they want to adjust their brand identity to serve that audience better. You can even have variation at the level of design principles: if a team is working on a product that is functionally different from your core product, they may need to adjust their principles to suit that context.

There are three kinds of deviations that come up in a design system:

Unintentional divergence typically happens when designers can’t find the information they’re looking for. They may not know that a certain solution exists within a system, so they create their own style. Clear, easy-to-find documentation and usage guidelines can help your team avoid unintentional variation.
Intentional but unnecessary divergence usually results from designers not wanting to feel constrained by the system, or believing they have a better solution. Making sure your team knows how to push back on and contribute to the system can help mitigate this kind of variation.
Intentional, meaningful divergence is the goal of an expressive design system. In this case, the divergence is meaningful because it solves a very specific user problem that no existing pattern solves.

We want to enable intentional, meaningful variation. To do this, we need to understand the needs and contexts for variation.

Contexts for Variation

Every variation we add makes our design system more complicated. Therefore, we need to take care to find the right moments for variation. Three big contextual changes are served by variation: brand, audience, and environment.

Brand

If you’re creating a system for multiple brands, each with its own brand language, then your system needs to support variations to reflect those brands.

The key here is to find the common core elements and then set some criteria for how you should deviate. When we were creating the design system for our websites at Vox Media, we constantly debated which elements should feel more expressive. Should a footer be standardized, or should we allow for tons of customization? We went back to our core goals: our users were ultimately visiting our websites to consume editorial content. So the variations should be in service of the content, writing style, and tone of voice for each brand.

The newsletter modules across Vox Media brands were an example of unnecessary variation. They were consistent in functionality and layout, but had variations in type, color, and visual treatments like borders (Fig 4.3). There was quite a bit of custom design within a very small area: Curbed’s newsletter component had a skewed background, for example, while Eater’s had a background image. Because these modules were so consistent in their user goals, we decided to unify their design and create less variation (Fig 4.4).

Fig 4.3: Older versions of Vox Media’s newsletter modules contained lots of unnecessary visual variation.

Fig 4.4: The new, unified newsletter modules.

The unified design cleaned up some technical debt. In the previous design, each newsletter module had CSS overrides to achieve distinct styling. Some modules even had overrides on the primary button color so it would work better with the background color. Little CSS overrides like this add up over time. Whenever we released a new change, we’d have to manually update the spots containing CSS overrides.

The streamlined design also placed a more appropriate emphasis on the newsletter module. While important, this module isn’t the star of the page. It doesn’t need loud backgrounds or fancy shapes to command attention, especially since it’s placed around article content. Variation in this module wasn’t necessary for expressing the brands.

On the other hand, consider the variation in Vox Media’s global header components. When we were redesigning the Verge, its editorial teams were vocal about wanting more latitude to art-direct the page, guide attention toward big features, and showcase custom illustrations. We addressed this by creating a masthead component (Fig 4.5) that sits on top of the global header on homepages. It contains a logo, tagline, date, and customizable background image. Though at the time this was a one-off component, we felt that the variation was valuable because it would strengthen the Verge’s brand voice.

Fig 4.5: Examples of the Verge's masthead component

The Verge team commissions or makes original art that changes throughout the day. The most exciting part is that they can use the masthead and a one-up hero when they drop a big feature and use these flexible components to art-direct the page (Fig 4.6). Soon after launch, the Verge masthead even got a Twitter fan account (@VergeTaglines) that tweets every time the image changes.

Fig 4.6: The Verge uses two generic components, the masthead and one-up hero, to art-direct its homepages.

Though this component was built specifically for the Verge, it soon gained broader application with other brands that share Vox’s publishing platform, Chorus. The McElroy Family website, for example, needed to convey its sense of humor and Appalachian roots; the masthead component shines with an original illustration featuring an adorable squirrel (Fig 4.7).

Fig 4.7: The McElroy Family site uses the same masthead component as the Verge to display a custom illustration.

Fig 4.8: The same masthead component on the Chicago Sun-Times site.

The Chicago Sun-Times—another Chorus platform site—is very different in content, tone, and audience from The McElroy Family, but the masthead component is just as valuable in conveying the tone of the organization’s high-quality investigative journalism and breaking news coverage (Fig 4.8).

Why did the masthead variation work well while the newsletter variation didn’t? The variations on the newsletter design were purely visual. When we created them, we didn’t have a strategy for how variation should work; instead, we were looking for any opportunity to make the brands feel distinct. The masthead variation, by contrast, tied directly into the brand strategy. Even though it began as a one-off for the Verge, it was flexible and purposeful enough to migrate to other brands.

Audience

The next contextual variation comes from audience. If your products serve different audiences who all need different things, then your system may need to adapt to fit those needs.

A good example of this is Airbnb’s listing pages. In addition to their standard listings, they also have Airbnb Plus—one-of-a-kind, high quality rentals at higher price points. Audiences booking a Plus listing are probably looking for exceptional quality and attention to detail.

Both Airbnb’s standard listing page and Plus listing page are immediately recognizable as belonging to the same family because they use many consistent elements (Fig 4.9). They both use Airbnb’s custom font, Cereal. They both highlight photography. They both use many of the same components, like the date picker. The iconography is the same.

Fig 4.9: The same brand elements in Airbnb’s standard listings (above) are used in their Plus listings (below), but with variations that make the listing styles distinct.

However, some of the design choices convey a different attitude. Airbnb Plus uses larger typography, airier vertical space, and a lighter weight of Cereal. It has a more understated color palette, with a deeper color on the call to action. These choices make Airbnb Plus feel like a more premium experience. You can see they’ve adjusted the density, weight, and scale levers to achieve a more elegant and sophisticated aesthetic.

The standard listing page, on the other hand, is more functional, with the booking module front and center. The Plus design pulls the density and weight levers in a lighter, airier direction. The standard listing page has less size contrast between elements, making it feel more functional.

Because they use the same core building blocks—the same typography, iconography, and components—both experiences feel like Airbnb. However, the variations in spacing, typographic weights, and color help distinguish the standard listing from the premium listing.

Environment

I’ve mainly been talking about adding variation to a system to allow for a range of content tones, but you may also need your system to scale based on environmental contexts. “Environment” in this context asks: Where will your products be used? Will that have an impact on the experience? Environments are the various constraints and pressures that surround and inform an experience. That can include lighting, ambient noise, passive or active engagement, expected focus level, or devices.

Shopify’s Polaris design system initially grew out of Shopify’s Store Management product. When the Shopify Retail team kicked off a project to design the next generation point-of-sale (POS) system, they realized that the patterns in Polaris didn’t exactly fit their needs. The POS system needed to work well in a retail space, often under bright lighting. The app needed to be used at arm’s length, twenty-four to thirty-six inches away from the merchant. And unlike the core admin, where the primary interaction is between the merchant and the UI, merchants using the POS system needed to prioritize their interactions with their customers instead of the UI. The Retail team wanted merchants to achieve an “eyes-closed” level of mastery over the UI so they could maintain eye contact with their customers.

The Retail team decided that the existing color palette, which only worked on a light background, would not be clear enough under the bright lights of a retail shop. The type scale was also too small to be used at arm’s length. And in order for merchants to use the POS system without breaking eye contact with customers, the buttons and other UI elements would need to be much larger.

The Retail team recognized that the current design system didn’t support a variety of environmental scenarios. But after talking with the Polaris team, they realized that other teams would benefit from the solutions they created. The Warehouse team, for example, was also developing an app that needed to be used at arm’s length under bright lights. This work inspired the Polaris team to create a dark mode for the system (Fig 4.10).

Fig 4.10: Polaris light mode (left) and dark mode (right).

This feedback loop between product team and design system team is a great example of how to build the right variation into your system. Build your system around helping your users navigate your product more clearly and serving content needs and you’ll unlock scalable expression.

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Request with Intent: Caching Strategies in the Age of PWAs

Once upon a time, we relied on browsers to handle caching for us; as developers in those days, we had very little control. But then came Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), Service Workers, and the Cache API—and suddenly we have expansive power over what gets put in the cache and how it gets put there. We can now cache everything we want to… and therein lies a potential problem.

Media files—especially images—make up the bulk of average page weight these days, and it’s getting worse. In order to improve performance, it’s tempting to cache as much of this content as possible, but should we? In most cases, no. Even with all this newfangled technology at our fingertips, great performance still hinges on a simple rule: request only what you need and make each request as small as possible.

To provide the best possible experience for our users without abusing their network connection or their hard drive, it’s time to put a spin on some classic best practices, experiment with media caching strategies, and play around with a few Cache API tricks that Service Workers have hidden up their sleeves.

Best intentions

All those lessons we learned optimizing web pages for dial-up became super-useful again when mobile took off, and they continue to be applicable in the work we do for a global audience today. Unreliable or high latency network connections are still the norm in many parts of the world, reminding us that it’s never safe to assume a technical baseline lifts evenly or in sync with its corresponding cutting edge. And that’s the thing about performance best practices: history has borne out that approaches that are good for performance now will continue being good for performance in the future.

Before the advent of Service Workers, we could provide some instructions to browsers with respect to how long they should cache a particular resource, but that was about it. Documents and assets downloaded to a user’s machine would be dropped into a directory on their hard drive. When the browser assembled a request for a particular document or asset, it would peek in the cache first to see if it already had what it needed to possibly avoid hitting the network.

We have considerably more control over network requests and the cache these days, but that doesn’t excuse us from being thoughtful about the resources on our web pages.

Request only what you need

As I mentioned, the web today is lousy with media. Images and videos have become a dominant means of communication. They may convert well when it comes to sales and marketing, but they are hardly performant when it comes to download and rendering speed. With this in mind, each and every image (and video, etc.) should have to fight for its place on the page.

A few years back, a recipe of mine was included in a newspaper story on cooking with spirits (alcohol, not ghosts). I don’t subscribe to the print version of that paper, so when the article came out I went to the site to take a look at how it turned out. During a recent redesign, the site had decided to load all articles into a nearly full-screen modal viewbox layered on top of their homepage. This meant requesting the article required requests for all of the assets associated with the article page plus all the contents and assets for the homepage. Oh, and the homepage had video ads—plural. And, yes, they auto-played.

I popped open DevTools and discovered the page had blown past 15 MB in page weight. Tim Kadlec had recently launched What Does My Site Cost?, so I decided to check out the damage. Turns out that the actual cost to view that page for the average US-based user was more than the cost of the print version of that day’s newspaper. That’s just messed up.

Sure, I could blame the folks who built the site for doing their readers such a disservice, but the reality is that none of us go to work with the goal of worsening our users’ experiences. This could happen to any of us. We could spend days scrutinizing the performance of a page only to have some committee decide to set that carefully crafted page atop a Times Square of auto-playing video ads. Imagine how much worse things would be if we were stacking two abysmally-performing pages on top of each other!

Media can be great for drawing attention when competition is high (e.g., on the homepage of a newspaper), but when you want readers to focus on a single task (e.g., reading the actual article), its value can drop from important to “nice to have.” Yes, studies have shown that images excel at drawing eyeballs, but once a visitor is on the article page, no one cares; we’re just making it take longer to download and more expensive to access. The situation only gets worse as we shove more media into the page.

We must do everything in our power to reduce the weight of our pages, so avoid requests for things that don’t add value. For starters, if you’re writing an article about a data breach, resist the urge to include that ridiculous stock photo of some random dude in a hoodie typing on a computer in a very dark room.

Request the smallest file you can

Now that we’ve taken stock of what we do need to include, we must ask ourselves a critical question: How can we deliver it in the fastest way possible? This can be as simple as choosing the most appropriate image format for the content presented (and optimizing the heck out of it) or as complex as recreating assets entirely (for example, if switching from raster to vector imagery would be more efficient).

Offer alternate formats

When it comes to image formats, we don’t have to choose between performance and reach anymore. We can provide multiple options and let the browser decide which one to use, based on what it can handle.

You can accomplish this by offering multiple sources within a picture or video element. Start by creating multiple formats of the media asset. For example, with WebP and JPG, it’s likely that the WebP will have a smaller file size than the JPG (but check to make sure). With those alternate sources, you can drop them into a picture like this:

<picture>
  <source srcset="my.webp" type="image/webp">
  <img src="my.jpg" alt="Descriptive text about the picture.">
</picture>

Browsers that recognize the picture element will check the source element before making a decision about which image to request. If the browser supports the MIME type “image/webp,” it will kick off a request for the WebP format image. If not (or if the browser doesn’t recognize picture), it will request the JPG.

The nice thing about this approach is that you’re serving the smallest image possible to the user without having to resort to any sort of JavaScript hackery.

You can take the same approach with video files:

<video controls>
  <source src="my.webm" type="video/webm">
  <source src="my.mp4" type="video/mp4">
  <p>Your browser doesn’t support native video playback,
    but you can <a href="my.mp4" download>download</a>
    this video instead.</p>
</video>

Browsers that support WebM will request the first source, whereas browsers that don’t—but do understand MP4 videos—will request the second one. Browsers that don’t support the video element will fall back to the paragraph about downloading the file.

The order of your source elements matters. Browsers will choose the first usable source, so if you specify an optimized alternative format after a more widely compatible one, the alternative format may never get picked up.

Depending on your situation, you might consider bypassing this markup-based approach and handle things on the server instead. For example, if a JPG is being requested and the browser supports WebP (which is indicated in the Accept header), there’s nothing stopping you from replying with a WebP version of the resource. In fact, some CDN services—Cloudinary, for instance—come with this sort of functionality right out of the box.

Offer different sizes

Formats aside, you may want to deliver alternate image sizes optimized for the current size of the browser’s viewport. After all, there’s no point loading an image that’s 3–4 times larger than the screen rendering it; that’s just wasting bandwidth. This is where responsive images come in.

Here’s an example:

<img src="medium.jpg"
  srcset="small.jpg 256w,
    medium.jpg 512w,
    large.jpg 1024w"
  sizes="(min-width: 30em) 30em, 100vw"
  alt="Descriptive text about the picture.">

There’s a lot going on in this super-charged img element, so I’ll break it down:

This img offers three size options for a given JPG: 256 px wide (small.jpg), 512 px wide (medium.jpg), and 1024 px wide (large.jpg). These are provided in the srcset attribute with corresponding width descriptors.
The src defines a default image source, which acts as a fallback for browsers that don’t support srcset. Your choice for the default image will likely depend on the context and general usage patterns. Often I’d recommend the smallest image be the default, but if the majority of your traffic is on older desktop browsers, you might want to go with the medium-sized image.
The sizes attribute is a presentational hint that informs the browser how the image will be rendered in different scenarios (its extrinsic size) once CSS has been applied. This particular example says that the image will be the full width of the viewport (100vw) until the viewport reaches 30 em in width (min-width: 30em), at which point the image will be 30 em wide. You can make the sizes value as complicated or as simple as you want; omitting it causes browsers to use the default value of 100vw.

You can even combine this approach with alternate formats and crops within a single picture. ????

All of this is to say that you have a number of tools at your disposal for delivering fast-loading media, so use them!

Defer requests (when possible)

Years ago, Internet Explorer 11 introduced a new attribute that enabled developers to de-prioritize specific img elements to speed up page rendering: lazyload. That attribute never went anywhere, standards-wise, but it was a solid attempt to defer image loading until images are in view (or close to it) without having to involve JavaScript.

There have been countless JavaScript-based implementations of lazy loading images since then, but recently Google also took a stab at a more declarative approach, using a different attribute: loading.

The loading attribute supports three values (“auto,” “lazy,” and “eager”) to define how a resource should be brought in. For our purposes, the “lazy” value is the most interesting because it defers loading the resource until it reaches a calculated distance from the viewport.

Adding that into the mix…

<img src="medium.jpg"
  srcset="small.jpg 256w,
    medium.jpg 512w,
    large.jpg 1024w"
  sizes="(min-width: 30em) 30em, 100vw"
  loading="lazy"
  alt="Descriptive text about the picture.">

This attribute offers a bit of a performance boost in Chromium-based browsers. Hopefully it will become a standard and get picked up by other browsers in the future, but in the meantime there’s no harm in including it because browsers that don’t understand the attribute will simply ignore it.

This approach complements a media prioritization strategy really well, but before I get to that, I want to take a closer look at Service Workers.

Manipulate requests in a Service Worker

Service Workers are a special type of Web Worker with the ability to intercept, modify, and respond to all network requests via the Fetch API. They also have access to the Cache API, as well as other asynchronous client-side data stores like IndexedDB for resource storage.

When a Service Worker is installed, you can hook into that event and prime the cache with resources you want to use later. Many folks use this opportunity to squirrel away copies of global assets, including styles, scripts, logos, and the like, but you can also use it to cache images for use when network requests fail.

Keep a fallback image in your back pocket

Assuming you want to use a fallback in more than one networking recipe, you can set up a named function that will respond with that resource:

function respondWithFallbackImage() {
  return caches.match( "/i/fallbacks/offline.svg" );
}

Then, within a fetch event handler, you can use that function to provide that fallback image when requests for images fail at the network:

self.addEventListener( "fetch", event => {
  const request = event.request;
  if ( request.headers.get("Accept").includes("image") ) {
    event.respondWith(
      return fetch( request, { mode: 'no-cors' } )
        .then( response => {
          return response;
        })
        .catch(
          respondWithFallbackImage
        );
    );
  }
});

When the network is available, users get the expected behavior:

Social media avatars are rendered as expected when the network is available.

But when the network is interrupted, images will be swapped automatically for a fallback, and the user experience is still acceptable:

A generic fallback avatar is rendered when the network is unavailable.

On the surface, this approach may not seem all that helpful in terms of performance since you’ve essentially added an additional image download into the mix. With this system in place, however, some pretty amazing opportunities open up to you.

Respect a user’s choice to save data

Some users reduce their data consumption by entering a “lite” mode or turning on a “data saver” feature. When this happens, browsers will often send a Save-Data header with their network requests.

Within your Service Worker, you can look for this header and adjust your responses accordingly. First, you look for the header:

let save_data = false;
if ( 'connection' in navigator ) {
  save_data = navigator.connection.saveData;
}

Then, within your fetch handler for images, you might choose to preemptively respond with the fallback image instead of going to the network at all:

self.addEventListener( "fetch", event => {
  const request = event.request;
  if ( request.headers.get("Accept").includes("image") ) {
    event.respondWith(
      if ( save_data ) {
        return respondWithFallbackImage();
      }
      // code you saw previously
    );
  }
});

You could even take this a step further and tune respondWithFallbackImage() to provide alternate images based on what the original request was for. To do that you’d define several fallbacks globally in the Service Worker:

const fallback_avatar = "/i/fallbacks/avatar.svg",
      fallback_image = "/i/fallbacks/image.svg";

Both of those files should then be cached during the Service Worker install event:

return cache.addAll( [
  fallback_avatar,
  fallback_image
]);

Finally, within respondWithFallbackImage() you could serve up the appropriate image based on the URL being fetched. In my site, the avatars are pulled from Webmention.io, so I test for that.

function respondWithFallbackImage( url ) {
  const image = avatars.test( /webmention.io/ ) ? fallback_avatar
                                                 : fallback_image;
  return caches.match( image );
}

With that change, I’ll need to update the fetch handler to pass in request.url as an argument to respondWithFallbackImage(). Once that’s done, when the network gets interrupted I end up seeing something like this:

A webmention that contains both an avatar and an embedded image will render with two different fallbacks when the Save-Data header is present.

Next, we need to establish some general guidelines for handling media assets—based on the situation, of course.

The caching strategy: prioritize certain media

In my experience, media—especially images—on the web tend to fall into three categories of necessity. At one end of the spectrum are elements that don’t add meaningful value. At the other end of the spectrum are critical assets that do add value, such as charts and graphs that are essential to understanding the surrounding content. Somewhere in the middle are what I would call “nice-to-have” media. They do add value to the core experience of a page but are not critical to understanding the content.

If you consider your media with this division in mind, you can establish some general guidelines for handling each, based on the situation. In other words, a caching strategy.

Media loading strategy, broken down by how critical an asset is to understanding an interface
Media category	Fast connection	`Save-Data`	No network
Critical	Load media		Replace with placeholder
Nice-to-have	Load media	Replace with placeholder
Non-critical	Remove from content entirely

When it comes to disambiguating the critical from the nice-to-have, it’s helpful to have those resources organized into separate directories (or similar). That way we can add some logic into the Service Worker that can help it decide which is which. For example, on my own personal site, critical images are either self-hosted or come from the website for my book. Knowing that, I can write regular expressions that match those domains:

const high_priority = [
    /aaron-gustafson.com/,
    /adaptivewebdesign.info/
  ];

With that high_priority variable defined, I can create a function that will let me know if a given image request (for example) is a high priority request or not:

function isHighPriority( url ) {
  // how many high priority links are we dealing with?
  let i = high_priority.length;
  // loop through each
  while ( i-- ) {
    // does the request URL match this regular expression?
    if ( high_priority[i].test( url ) ) {
      // yes, it’s a high priority request
      return true;
    }
  }
  // no matches, not high priority
  return false;
}

Adding support for prioritizing media requests only requires adding a new conditional into the fetch event handler, like we did with Save-Data. Your specific recipe for network and cache handling will likely differ, but here was how I chose to mix in this logic within image requests:

// Check the cache first
  // Return the cached image if we have one
  // If the image is not in the cache, continue

// Is this image high priority?
if ( isHighPriority( url ) ) {

  // Fetch the image
    // If the fetch succeeds, save a copy in the cache
    // If not, respond with an "offline" placeholder

// Not high priority
} else {

  // Should I save data?
  if ( save_data ) {

    // Respond with a "saving data" placeholder

  // Not saving data
  } else {

    // Fetch the image
      // If the fetch succeeds, save a copy in the cache
      // If not, respond with an "offline" placeholder
  }
}

We can apply this prioritized approach to many kinds of assets. We could even use it to control which pages are served cache-first vs. network-first.

Keep the cache tidy

The ability to control which resources are cached to disk is a huge opportunity, but it also carries with it an equally huge responsibility not to abuse it.

Every caching strategy is likely to differ, at least a little bit. If we’re publishing a book online, for instance, it might make sense to cache all of the chapters, images, etc. for offline viewing. There’s a fixed amount of content and—assuming there aren’t a ton of heavy images and videos—users will benefit from not having to download each chapter separately.

On a news site, however, caching every article and photo will quickly fill up our users’ hard drives. If a site offers an indeterminate number of pages and assets, it’s critical to have a caching strategy that puts hard limits on how many resources we’re caching to disk.

One way to do this is to create several different blocks associated with caching different forms of content. The more ephemeral content caches can have strict limits around how many items can be stored. Sure, we’ll still be bound to the storage limits of the device, but do we really want our website to take up 2 GB of someone’s hard drive?

Here’s an example, again from my own site:

const sw_caches = {
  static: {
    name: `${version}static`
  },
  images: {
    name: `${version}images`,
    limit: 75
  },
  pages: {
    name: `${version}pages`,
    limit: 5
  },
  other: {
    name: `${version}other`,
    limit: 50
  }
}

Here I’ve defined several caches, each with a name used for addressing it in the Cache API and a version prefix. The version is defined elsewhere in the Service Worker, and allows me to purge all caches at once if necessary.

With the exception of the static cache, which is used for static assets, every cache has a limit to the number of items that may be stored. I only cache the most recent 5 pages someone has visited, for instance. Images are limited to the most recent 75, and so on. This is an approach that Jeremy Keith outlines in his fantastic book Going Offline (which you should really read if you haven’t already—here’s a sample).

With these cache definitions in place, I can clean up my caches periodically and prune the oldest items. Here’s Jeremy’s recommended code for this approach:

function trimCache(cacheName, maxItems) {
  // Open the cache
  caches.open(cacheName)
  .then( cache => {
    // Get the keys and count them
    cache.keys()
    .then(keys => {
      // Do we have more than we should?
      if (keys.length > maxItems) {
        // Delete the oldest item and run trim again
        cache.delete(keys[0])
        .then( () => {
          trimCache(cacheName, maxItems)
        });
      }
    });
  });
}

We can trigger this code to run whenever a new page loads. By running it in the Service Worker, it runs in a separate thread and won’t drag down the site’s responsiveness. We trigger it by posting a message (using postMessage()) to the Service Worker from the main JavaScript thread:

// First check to see if you have an active service worker
if ( navigator.serviceWorker.controller ) {
  // Then add an event listener
  window.addEventListener( "load", function(){
    // Tell the service worker to clean up
    navigator.serviceWorker.controller.postMessage( "clean up" );
  });
}

The final step in wiring it all up is setting up the Service Worker to receive the message:

addEventListener("message", messageEvent => {
  if (messageEvent.data == "clean up") {
    // loop though the caches
    for ( let key in sw_caches ) {
      // if the cache has a limit
      if ( sw_caches[key].limit !== undefined ) {
        // trim it to that limit
        trimCache( sw_caches[key].name, sw_caches[key].limit );
      }
    }
  }
});

Here, the Service Worker listens for inbound messages and responds to the “clean up” request by running trimCache() on each of the cache buckets with a defined limit.

This approach is by no means elegant, but it works. It would be far better to make decisions about purging cached responses based on how frequently each item is accessed and/or how much room it takes up on disk. (Removing cached items based purely on when they were cached isn’t nearly as useful.) Sadly, we don’t have that level of detail when it comes to inspecting the caches…yet. I’m actually working to address this limitation in the Cache API right now.

Your users always come first

The technologies underlying Progressive Web Apps are continuing to mature, but even if you aren’t interested in turning your site into a PWA, there’s so much you can do today to improve your users’ experiences when it comes to media. And, as with every other form of inclusive design, it starts with centering on your users who are most at risk of having an awful experience.

Draw distinctions between critical, nice-to-have, and superfluous media. Remove the cruft, then optimize the bejeezus out of each remaining asset. Serve your media in multiple formats and sizes, prioritizing the smallest versions first to make the most of high latency and slow connections. If your users say they want to save data, respect that and have a fallback plan in place. Cache wisely and with the utmost respect for your users’ disk space. And, finally, audit your caching strategies regularly—especially when it comes to large media files.Follow these guidelines, and every one of your users—from folks rocking a JioPhone on a rural mobile network in India to people on a high-end gaming laptop wired to a 10 Gbps fiber line in Silicon Valley—will thank you.

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Responsible JavaScript: Part III

You’ve done everything you thought was possible to address your website’s JavaScript problem. You relied on the web platform where you could. You sidestepped Babel and found smaller framework alternatives. You whittled your application code down to its most streamlined form possible. Yet, things are just not fast enough. When websites fail to perform the way we as designers and developers expect them to, we inevitably turn on ourselves:

“What are we failing to do?” “What can we do with the code we have written?” “Which parts of our architecture are failing us?”

These are valid inquiries, as a fair share of performance woes do originate from our own code. Yet, assigning blame solely to ourselves blinds us to the unvarnished truth that a sizable onslaught of our performance problems comes from the outside.

When the third wheel crashes the party

Convenience always has a price, and the web is wracked by our collective preference for it. JavaScript, in particular, is employed in a way that suggests a rapidly increasing tendency to outsource whatever it is that We (the first party) don’t want to do. At times, this is a necessary decision; it makes perfect financial and operational sense in many situations.

But make no mistake, third-party JavaScript is never cheap. It’s a devil’s bargain where vendors seduce you with solutions to your problem, yet conveniently fail to remind you that you have little to no control over the side effects that solution introduces. If a third-party provider adds features to their product, you bear the brunt. If they change their infrastructure, you will feel the effects of it. Those who use your site will become frustrated, and they aren’t going to bother grappling with an intolerable user experience. You can mitigate some of the symptoms of third parties, but you can’t cure the ailment unless you remove the solutions altogether—and that’s not always practical or possible.

In this installment of Responsible JavaScript, we’ll take a slightly less technical approach than in the previous installment. We are going to talk more about the human side of third parties. Then, we’ll go down some of the technical avenues for how you might go about tackling the problem.

Hindered by convenience

When we talk about the sorry state of the web today, some of us are quick to point out the role of developer convenience in contributing to the problem. While I share the view that developer convenience has a tendency to harm the user experience, they’re not the only kind of convenience that can turn a website into a sluggish, janky mess.

Operational conveniences can become precursors to a very thorny sort of technical debt. These conveniences are what we reach for when we can’t solve a pervasive problem on our own. They represent third-party solutions that address problems in the absence of architectural flexibility and/or adequate development resources.

Whenever an inconvenience arises, that is the time to have the discussion around how to tackle it in a way that’s comprehensive. So let’s talk about what it looks like to tackle that sort of scenario from a more human angle.

The problem is pain

The reason third parties come into play in the first place is pain. When a decision maker in an organization has felt enough pain around a certain problem, they’re going to do a very human thing, which is to find the fastest way to make that pain go away.

Markets will always find ways to address these pain points, even if the way they do so isn’t sustainable or even remotely helpful. Web accessibility overlays—third-party scripts that purport to automatically fix accessibility issues—are among the worst offenders. First, you fork over your money for a fix that doesn’t fix anything. Then you pay a wholly different sort of price when that “fix” harms the usability of your website. This is not a screed to discredit the usefulness of the tools some third-party vendors provide, but to illustrate how the adoption of third-party solutions happens, even those that are objectively awful

A Chrome performance trace of a long task kicked off by a third party’s web accessibility overlay script. The task occupies the main thread for roughly 600 ms on a 2017 Retina MacBook.

So when a vendor rolls up and promises to solve the very painful problem we’re having, there’s a good chance someone is going to nibble. If that someone is high enough in the hierarchy, they’ll exert downward pressure on others to buy in—if not circumvent them entirely in the decision-making process. Conversely, adoption of a third-party solution can also occur when those in the trenches are under pressure and lack sufficient resources to create the necessary features themselves.

Whatever the catalyst, it pays to gather your colleagues and collectively form a plan for navigating and mitigating the problems you’re facing.

Create a mitigation plan

Once people in an organization have latched onto a third-party solution, however ill-advised, the difficulty you’ll encounter in forcing a course change will depend on how urgent a need that solution serves. In fact, you shouldn’t try to convince proponents of the solution that their decision was wrong. Such efforts almost always backfire and can make people feel attacked and more resistant to what you’re telling them. Even worse, those efforts could create acrimony where people stop listening to each other completely, and that is a breeding ground for far worse problems to develop.

Grouse and commiserate amongst your peers if you must—as I myself have often done—but put your grievances aside and come up with a mitigation plan to guide your colleagues toward better outcomes. The nooks and crannies of your specific approach will depend on the third parties themselves and the structure of the organization, but the bones of it could look like the following series of questions.

What problem does this solution address?

There’s a reason why a third-party solution was selected, and this question will help you suss out whether the rationale for its adoption is sound. Remember, there are times decisions are made when all the necessary people are not in the room. You might be in a position where you have to react to the aftermath of that decision, but the answer to this question will lead you to a natural follow-up.

How long do we intend to use the solution?

This question will help you identify the solution’s shelf life. Was it introduced as a bandage, with the intent to remove it once the underlying problem has been addressed, such as in the case of an accessibility overlay? Or is the need more long-term, such as the data provided by an A/B testing suite? The other possibility is that the solution can never be effectively removed because it serves a crucial purpose, as in the case of analytics scripts. It’s like throwing a mattress in a swimming pool: it’s easy to throw in, but nigh impossible to drag back out.

In any case, you can’t know if a third-party script is here to stay if you don’t ask. Indeed, if you find out the solution is temporary, you can form a plan to eventually remove it from your site once the underlying problem it addresses has been resolved.

Who’s the point of contact if issues arise?

When a third-party solution is put into place, someone must be the point of contact for when—not if—issues arise.

I’ve seen what happens (far too often) when a third-party script gets out of control. For example, when a tag manager or an A/B testing framework’s JavaScript grows slowly and insidiously because marketers aren’t cleaning out old tags or completed A/B tests. It’s for precisely these reasons that responsibility needs to be attached to a specific person in your organization for third-party solutions currently in use on your site. What that responsibility entails will differ in every situation, but could include:

periodic monitoring of the third-party script’s footprint;
maintenance to ensure the third-party script doesn’t grow out of control;
occasional meetings to discuss the future of that vendor’s relationship with your organization;
identification of overlaps of functionality between multiple third parties, and if potential redundancies can be removed;
and ongoing research, especially to identify speedier alternatives that may act as better replacements for slow third-party scripts.

The idea of responsibility in this context should never be an onerous, draconian obligation you yoke your teammates with, but rather an exercise in encouraging mindfulness in your colleagues. Because without mindfulness, a third-party script’s ill effects on your website will be overlooked until it becomes a grumbling ogre in the room that can no longer be ignored. Assigning responsibility for third parties can help to prevent that from happening.

Ensuring responsible usage of third-party solutions

If you can put together a mitigation plan and get everyone on board, the work of ensuring the responsible use of third-party solutions can begin. Luckily for you, the actual technical work will be easier than trying to wrangle people. So if you’ve made it this far, all it will take to get results is time and persistence.

Load only what’s necessary

It may seem obvious, but load only what’s necessary. Judging by the amount of unused first-party JavaScript I see loaded—let alone third-party JavaScript—it’s clearly a problem. It’s like trying to clean your house by stuffing clutter into the closets. Regardless of whether they’re actually needed, it’s not uncommon for third-party scripts to be loaded on every single page, so refer to your point of contact to figure out which pages need which third-party scripts.

As an example, one of my past clients used a popular third-party tool across multiple brand sites to get a list of retailers for a given product. It demonstrated clear value, but that script only needed to be on a site’s product detail page. In reality, it was frequently loaded on every page. Culling this script from pages where it didn’t belong significantly boosted performance for non-product pages, which ostensibly reduced the friction on the conversion path.

Figuring out which pages need which third-party scripts requires you to do some decidedly untechnical work. You’ll actually have to get up from your desk and talk to the person who has been assigned responsibility for the third-party solution you’re grappling with. This is very difficult work for me, but it’s rewarding when good-faith collaboration happens, and good outcomes are realized as a result.

Self-host your third-party scripts

This advice isn’t a secret by any stretch. I even touched on it in the previous installment of this series, but it needs to be shouted from the rooftops at every opportunity: you should self-host as many third-party resources as possible. Whether this is feasible depends on the third-party script in question.

Is it some framework you’re grabbing from Google’s hosted libraries, cdnjs, or other similar provider? Self-host that sucker right now.

Casper found a way to self-host their Optimizely script and significantly reduced their start render time for their trouble. It really drives home the point that a major detriment of third-party resources is the fact that their mere existence on other servers is one of the worst performance bottlenecks we encounter.

If you’re looking to self-host an analytics solution or a similar sort of script, there’s a higher level of difficulty to contend with to self-host it. You may find that some third-party scripts simply can’t be self-hosted, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the trouble to find out. If you find that self-hosting isn’t an option for a third-party script, don’t fret. There are other mitigations you can try.

Mask latency of cross-origin connections

If you can’t self-host your third-party scripts, the next best thing is to preconnect to servers that host them. WebPageTest’s Connection View does a fantastic job of showing you which servers your site gathers resources from, as well as the latency involved in establishing connections to them.

WebPageTest’s Connection View shows all the different servers a page requests resources from during load.

Preconnections are effective because they establish connections to third-party servers before the browser would otherwise discover them in due course. Parsing HTML takes time, and parsers are often blocked by stylesheets and other scripts. Wherever you can’t self-host third-party scripts, preconnections make perfect sense.

Maybe don’t preload third-party scripts

Preloading resources is one of those things that sounds fantastic at first—until you consider its potential to backfire, as Andy Davies points out. If you’re unfamiliar with preloading, it’s similar to preconnecting but goes a step further by instructing the browser to fetch a particular resource far sooner than it ordinarily would.

The drawback of preloading is that while it’s great for ensuring a resource gets loaded as soon as possible, it changes the discovery order of that resource. Whenever we do this, we’re implicitly saying that other resources are less important—including resources crucial to rendering or even core functionality.

It’s probably a safe bet that most of your third-party code is not as crucial to the functionality of your site as your own code. That said, if you must preload a third-party resource, ensure you’re only doing so for third-party scripts that are critical to page rendering.

If you do find yourself in a position where your site’s initial rendering depends on a third-party script, refer to your mitigation plan to see what you can do to eliminate or ameliorate your dependence on it. Depending on a third party for core functionality is never a good position to be in, as you’re relinquishing a lot of control to others who might not have your best interests in mind.

Lazy load non-essential third-party scripts

The best request is no request. If you have a third-party script that doesn’t need to be loaded right away, consider lazy loading it with an Intersection Observer. Here’s what it might look like to lazy load a Facebook Like button when it’s scrolled into the viewport:


let loadedFbScript = false;

const intersectionListener = new IntersectionObserver(entries => {
  entries.forEach(entry => {
    if ((entry.isIntersecting || entry.intersectionRatio) && !loadedFbScript) {
      const scriptEl = document.createElement("script");

      scriptEl.defer = true;
      scriptEl.crossOrigin = "anonymous";
      scriptEl.src = "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v3.0";
      scriptEl.onload = () => {
        loadedFbScript = true;
      };
      
      document.body.append(scriptEl);
    }
  });
});

intersectionListener.observe(document.querySelector(".fb-like"));

In the above snippet, we first set a variable to track whether we’ve loaded the Facebook SDK JavaScript. After that, an IntersectionListener is created that checks whether the observed element is in the viewport, and whether the Facebook SDK has been loaded. If the SDK JavaScript hasn’t been loaded, a reference to it is injected into the DOM, which will kick off a request for it.

You’re not going to be able to lazy load every third-party script. Some of them simply need to do their work at page load time, or otherwise can’t be deferred. Regardless, do the detective work to see if it’s possible to lazy load at least some of your third-party JavaScript.

One of the common concerns I hear from coworkers when I suggest lazy loading third-party scripts is how it can delay whatever interactions the third party provides. That’s a reasonable concern, because when you lazy load anything, a noticeable delay may occur as the resource loads. You can get around this to some extent with resource prefetching. This is different than preloading, which we discussed earlier. Prefetching consumes a comparable amount of data, yes, but prefetched resources are given lower priority and are less likely to contend for bandwidth with critical resources.

Staying on top of the problem

Keeping an eye on your third-party JavaScript requires mindfulness bordering on hypervigilance. When you recognize poor performance for the technical debt that it truly is, you’ll naturally slip into a frame of mind where you’ll recognize and address it as you would any other kind of technical debt.

Staying on top of third parties is refactoring—a sort that requires you to periodically perform tasks such as cleaning up tag managers and A/B tests, consolidating third-party solutions, eliminating any that are no longer needed, and applying the coding techniques discussed above. Moreover, you’ll need to work with your team to address this technical debt on a cyclical basis. This kind of work can’t be automated, so yes, you’ll need to knuckle down and have face-to-face, synchronous conversations with actual people.

If you’re already in the habit of scheduling “cleanup sprints” on some interval, then that is the time and space for you to address performance-related technical debt, regardless of whether it involves third- or first-party code. There’s a time for feature development, but that time should not comprise the whole of your working hours. Development shops that focus only on feature development are destined to be wholly consumed by the technical debt that will inevitably result.

So it will come to pass that in the fourth and final installment of this series we’ll discuss what it means to do the hard work of using JavaScript responsibly in the context of process. Therein, we’ll explore what it takes to unite your organization under the banner of making your website faster and more accessible, and therefore more usable for everyone, everywhere.

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The Untapped Power of Vulnerability & Transparency in Content Strategy

In marketing, transparency and vulnerability are unjustly stigmatized. The words conjure illusions of being frightened, imperfect, and powerless. And for companies that shove carefully curated personas in front of users, little is more terrifying than losing control of how people perceive the brand.

Let’s shatter this illusioned stigma. Authentic vulnerability and transparency are strengths masquerading as weaknesses. And companies too scared to embrace both traits in their content forfeit bona fide user-brand connections for often shallow, misleading engagement tactics that create fleeting relationships.

Transparency and vulnerability are closely entwined concepts, but each one engages users in a unique way. Transparency is how much information you share, while vulnerability is the truth and meaning behind your actions and words. Combining these ideas is the trick to creating empowering and meaningful content. You can’t tell true stories of vulnerability without transparency, and to be authentically transparent you must be vulnerable.

To be vulnerable, your brand and its content must be brave, genuine, humble, and open, all of which are traits that promote long-term customer loyalty. And if you’re transparent with users about who you are and about your business practices, you’re courting 94 percent of consumers who say they’re more loyal to brands that offer complete openness and 89 percent of people who say they give transparent companies a second chance after a bad experience.

For many companies, being completely honest and open with their customers—or employees, in some cases—only happens in a crisis. Unfortunately for those businesses, using vulnerability and transparency only as a crisis management strategy diminishes how sincere they appear and can reduce customer satisfaction.

Unlocking the potential of being transparent and vulnerable with users isn’t a one-off tactic or quick-fix emergency response tool—it’s a commitment to intimate storytelling that embraces a user’s emotional and psychological needs, which builds a meaningful connection between the storyteller and the audience.

The three storytelling pillars of vulnerable and transparent content

In her book, Braving the Wilderness, sociologist Brené Brown explains that vulnerability connects us at an emotional level. She says that when we recognize someone is being vulnerable, we invest in their story and begin to develop an emotional bond. This interwoven connection encourages us to experience the storyteller’s joy and pain, and then creates a sense of community and common purpose among the person being vulnerable and the people who acknowledge that vulnerability.

Three pillars in a company’s lifecycle embrace this bond and provide an outline for telling stories worthy of a user’s emotional investment. The pillars are:

the origins of a company, product, idea, or situation;
intimate narratives about customers’ life experiences;
and insights about product success and failure.

Origin stories

An origin story spins a transparent tale about how a company, product, service, or idea is created. It is often told by a founder, CEO, or industry innovator. This pillar is usually used as an authentic way to provide crisis management or as a method to change how users feel about a topic, product, or your brand.

Customers’ life experiences

While vulnerable origin stories do an excellent job of making users trust your brand, telling a customer’s personal life story is arguably the most effective way to use vulnerability to entwine a brand with someone’s personal identity.

Unlike an origin story, the customer experiences pillar is focused on being transparent about who your customers are, what they’ve experienced, and how those journeys align with values that matter to your brand. Through this lens, you’ll empower your customers to tell emotional, meaningful stories that make users feel vulnerable in a positive way. In this situation, your brand is often a storytelling platform where users share their story with the brand and fellow customers.

Product and service insights

Origin stories make your brand trustworthy in a crisis, and customers’ personal stories help users feel an intimate connection with your brand’s persona and mission. The last pillar, product and service insights, combines the psychological principles that make origin and customer stories successful. The outcome is a vulnerable narrative that rallies users’ excitement about, and emotional investment in, what a company sells or the goals it hopes to achieve.

Vulnerability, transparency, and the customer journey

The three storytelling pillars are crucial to embracing transparency and vulnerability in your content strategy because they let you target users at specific points in their journey. By embedding the pillars in each stage of the customer’s journey, you teach users about who you are, what matters to you, and why they should care.

For our purposes, let’s define the user journey as:

awareness;
interest;
consideration;
conversion;
and retention.

Awareness

People give each other seven seconds to make a good first impression. We’re not so generous with brands and websites. After discovering your content, users determine if it’s trustworthy within one-tenth of a second.

Page design and aesthetics are often the determining factors in these split-second choices, but the information users discover after that decision shapes their long-term opinions about your brand. This snap judgement is why transparency and vulnerability are crucial within awareness content.

When you only get one chance to make a positive first impression with your audience, what content is going to be more memorable?

Typical marketing “fluff” about how your brand was built on a shared vision and commitment to unyielding customer satisfaction and quality products? Or an upfront, authentic, and honest story about the trials and tribulations you went through to get where you are now?

Buffer, a social media management company that helped pioneer the radical transparency movement, chose the latter option. The outcome created awareness content that leaves a positive lasting impression of the brand.

In 2016, Joel Gascoigne, cofounder and CEO of Buffer, used an origin story to discuss the mistakes he and his company made that resulted in laying off 10 employees.

In the blog post “Tough News: We’ve Made 10 Layoffs. How We Got Here, the Financial Details and How We’re Moving Forward,” Gascoigne wrote about Buffer’s over-aggressive growth choices, lack of accountability, misplaced trust in its financial model, explicit risk appetite, and overenthusiastic hiring. He also discussed what he learned from the experience, the changes Buffer made based on these lessons, the consequences of those changes, and next steps for the brand.

Gascoigne writes about each subject with radical honesty and authenticity. Throughout the article, he’s personable and relatable; his tone and voice make it obvious he’s more concerned about the lives he’s irrevocably affected than the public image of his company floundering. Because Gascoigne is so transparent and vulnerable in the blog post, it’s easy to become invested in the narrative he’s telling. The result is an article that feels more like a deep, meaningful conversation over coffee instead of a carefully curated, PR-approved response.

Yes, Buffer used this origin story to confront a PR crisis, but they did so in a way that encouraged users to trust the brand. Buffer chose to show up and be seen when they had no control over the outcome. And because Gascoigne used vulnerability and transparency to share the company’s collective pain, the company reaped positive press coverage and support on social media—further improving brand awareness, user engagement, and customer loyalty.

However, awareness content isn’t always brand focused. Sometimes, smart awareness content uses storytelling to teach users and shape their worldviews. The 2019 State of Science Index is an excellent example.

The annual State of Science Index evaluates how the global public perceives science. The 2019 report shows that 87 percent of people acknowledge that science is necessary to solve the world’s problems, but 33 percent are skeptical of science and believe that scientists cause as many problems as they solve. Furthermore, 57 percent of respondents are skeptical of science because of scientists’ conflicting opinions about topics they don’t understand.

3M, the multinational science conglomerate that publishes the report, says the solution for this anti-science mindset is to promote intimate storytelling among scientists and layfolk.

3M creates an origin story with its awareness content by focusing on the ins and outs of scientific research. The company is open and straightforward with its data and intentions, eliminating any second guesses users might have about the content they’re digesting.

The company kicked off this strategy on three fronts, and each storytelling medium interweaves the benefits of vulnerability and transparency by encouraging researchers to tell stories that lead with how their findings benefit humanity. Every story 3M tells focuses on breaking through barriers the average person faces when they encounter science and encouraging scientists to be vulnerable and authentic with how they share their research.

First, 3M began a podcast series known as Science Champions. In the podcast, 3M Chief Science Advocate Jayshree Seth interviews scientists and educators about the global perception of science and how science and scientists affect our lives. The show is currently in its second season and discusses a range of topics in science, technology, engineering, and math.

Second, the company worked with science educators, journalist Katie Couric, actor Alan Alda, and former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly to develop the free Scientists as Storytellers Guide. The ebook helps STEM researchers improve how and why they communicate their work with other people—with a special emphasis on being empathetic with non-scientists. The guide breaks down how to develop communications skills, overcome common storytelling challenges, and learn to make science more accessible, understandable, and engaging for others.

Last, 3M created a film series called Beyond the Beaker that explores the day-to-day lives of 3M scientists. In the short videos, scientists give the viewer a glimpse into their hobbies and home life. The series showcases how scientists have diverse backgrounds, hobbies, goals, and dreams.

Unlike Buffer, which benefits directly from its awareness content, 3M’s three content mediums are designed to create a long-term strategy that changes how people understand and perceive science, by spreading awareness through third parties. It’s too early to conclude that the strategy will be successful, but it’s off to a good start. Science Champions often tops “best of” podcast lists for science lovers, and the Scientists as Storytellers Guide is a popular resource among public universities.

Interest

How do you court new users when word-of-mouth and organic search dominate how people discover new brands? Target their interests.

Now, you can be like the hundreds of other brands that create a “10 best things” list and hope people stumble onto your content organically and like what they see. Or, you can use content to engage with people who are passionate about your industry and have genuine, open discussions about the topics that matter to you both.

The latter option is a perfect fit for the product and service insights pillar, and the customers’ life experiences pillar.

To succeed in these pillars you must balance discussing the users’ passions and how your brand plays into that topic against appearing disingenuous or becoming too self-promotional.

Nonprofits have an easier time walking this taut line because people are less judgemental when engaging with NGOs, but it’s rare for a for-profit company to achieve this balance. SpaceX and Thinx are among the few brands that are able to walk this tightrope.

Thinx, a women’s clothing brand that sells period-proof underwear, uses its blog to generate awareness, interest, and consideration content via the customers’ life experiences pillar. The blog, aptly named Periodical, relies on transparency and vulnerability as a cornerstone to engage users about reproductive and mental health.

Toni Brannagan, Thinx’s content editor, says the brand embraces transparency and vulnerability by sharing diverse ideas and personal experiences from customers and experts alike, not shying away from sensitive subjects and never misleading users about Thinx or the subjects Periodical discusses.

As a company focused on women’s healthcare, the product Thinx sells is political by nature and entangles the brand with themes of shame, cultural differences, and personal empowerment. Thinx’s strategy is to tackle these subjects head-on by having vulnerable conversations in its branding, social media ads, and Periodical content.

“Vulnerability and transparency play a role because you can’t share authentic diverse ideas and experiences about those things—shame, cultural differences, and empowerment—without it,” Brannagan says.

A significant portion of Thinx’s website traffic is organic, which means Periodical’s interest-driven content may be a user’s first touchpoint with the brand.

“We’ve seen that our most successful organic content is educational, well-researched articles, and also product-focused blogs that answer the questions about our underwear, in a way that’s a little more casual than what’s on our product pages,” Brannagan says. “In contrast, our personal essays and ‘more opinionated’ content performs better on social media and email.”

Thanks in part to the blog’s authenticity and open discussions about hard-hitting topics, readers who find the brand through organic search drive the most direct conversions.

Conversations with users interested in the industry or topic your company is involved in don’t always have to come from the company itself. Sometimes a single person can drive authentic, open conversations and create endearing user loyalty and engagement.

For a company that relies on venture capital investments, NASA funding, and public opinion for its financial future, crossing the line between being too self-promotional and isolating users could spell doom. But SpaceX has never shied away from difficult or vulnerable conversations. Instead, the company’s founder, Elon Musk, embraces engaging with users interests in public forums like Twitter and press conferences.

Musk’s tweets about SpaceX are unwaveringly authentic and transparent. He often tweets about his thoughts, concerns, and the challenges his companies face. Plus, Musk frequently engages with his Twitter followers and provides candid answers to questions many CEOs avoid discussing. This authenticity has earned him a cult-like following.

Musk and SpaceX create conversations that target people’s interests and use vulnerability to equally embrace failure and success. Both the company and its founder give the public and investors an unflinching story of space exploration.

And despite laying off 10 percent of its workforce in January of 2019, SpaceX is flourishing. In May 2019, its valuation had risen to $33.3 billion and reported annual revenue exceeded $2 billion. It also earned global media coverage from launching Musk’s Tesla Roadster into space, recently completed a test flight of its Crew Dragon space vehicle, and cemented multiple new payload contracts.

By engaging with users on social media and through standard storytelling mediums, Thinx and SpaceX bolster customer loyalty and brand engagement.

Consideration

Modern consumers argue that ignorance is not bliss. When users are considering converting with a brand, 86 percent of consumers say transparency is a deciding factor. Transparency remains crucial even after they convert, with 85 percent of users saying they’ll support a transparent brand during a PR crisis.

Your brand must be open, clear, and honest with users; there is no longer another viable option.

So how do you remain transparent while trying to sell someone a product? One solution employed by REI and Everlane is to be openly accountable to your brand and your users via the origin stories and product insights pillars.

REI, a national outdoor equipment retailer, created a stewardship program that behaves as a multifaceted origin story. The program’s content highlights the company’s history and manufacturing policies, and it lets users dive into the nitty-gritty details about its factories, partnerships, product production methods, manufacturing ethics, and carbon footprint.

REI also employs a classic content hub strategy to let customers find the program and explore its relevant information. From a single landing page, users can easily find the program through the website’s global navigation and then navigate to every tangential topic the program encompasses.

REI also publishes an annual stewardship report, where users can learn intimate details about how the company makes and spends its money.

Everlane, a clothing company, is equally transparent about its supply chain. The company promotes an insider’s look into its global factories via product insights stories. These glimpses tell the personal narratives of factory employees and owners, and provide insights into the products manufactured and the materials used. Everlane also published details of how they comply with the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act to guarantee ethical working conditions throughout its supply chain, including refusing to partner with human traffickers.

The crucial quality that Everlane and REI share is they publicize their transparency and encourage users to explore the shared information. On each website, users can easily find information about the company’s transparency endeavors via the global navigation, social media campaigns, and product pages.

The consumer response to transparent brands like REI and Everlane is overwhelmingly positive. Customers are willing to pay price premiums for the additional transparency, which gives them comfort by knowing they’re purchasing ethical products.

REI’s ownership model has further propelled the success of its transparency by using it to create unwavering customer engagement and loyalty. As a co-op where customers can “own” part of the company for a one-time $20 membership fee, REI is beholden to its members, many of which pay close attention to its supply chain and the brands REI partners with.

After a deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, REI members urged the company to refuse to carry CamelBak products because the brand’s parent company manufactures assault-style weapons. Members argued the partnership violated REI’s supply chain ethics. REI listened and halted orders with CamelBak. Members rejoiced and REI earned a significant amount of positive press coverage.

Conversion

Imagine you’ve started incorporating transparency throughout your company, and promote the results to users. Your brand also begins engaging users by telling vulnerable, meaningful stories via the three pillars. You’re seeing great engagement metrics and customer feedback from these efforts, but not much else. So, how do you get your newly invested users to convert?

Provide users with a full-circle experience.

If you combine the three storytelling pillars with blatant transparency and actively promote your efforts, users often transition from the consideration stage into the conversion state. Best of all, when users convert with a company that already earned their trust on an emotional level, they’re more likely to remain loyal to the brand and emotionally invested in its future.

The crucial step in combining the three pillars is consistency. Your brand’s stories must always be authentic and your content must always be transparent. The outdoor clothing brand Patagonia is among the most popular and successful companies to maintain this consistency and excel with this strategy.

Patagonia is arguably the most vocal and aggressive clothing retailer when it comes to environmental stewardship and ethical manufacturing.

In some cases, the company tells users not to buy its clothing because rampant consumerism harms the environment too much, which they care about more than profits. This level of radical transparency and vulnerability skyrocketed the company’s popularity among environmentally-conscious consumers.

In 2011, Patagonia took out a full-page Black Friday ad in the New York Times with the headline “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” In the ad, Patagonia talks about the environmental toll manufacturing clothes requires.

“Consider the R2 Jacket shown, one of our best sellers. To make it required 135 liters of water, enough to meet the daily needs (three glasses a day) of 45 people. Its journey from its origin as 60 percent recycled polyester to our Reno warehouse generated nearly 20 pounds of carbon dioxide, 24 times the weight of the finished product. This jacket left behind, on its way to Reno, two-thirds [of] its weight in waste.”

The ad encourages users to not buy any new Patagonia clothing if their old, ratty clothes can be repaired. To help, Patagonia launched a supplementary subdomain to its e-commerce website to support its Common Thread Initiative, which eventually got rebranded as the Worn Wear program.

Patatgonia’s Worn Wear subdomain gets users to engage with the company about causes each party cares about. Through Worn Wear, Patagonia will repair your old gear for free. If you’d rather have new gear, you can instead sell the worn out clothing to Patagonia, and they’ll repair it and then resell the product at a discount. This interaction encourages loyalty and repeat brand-user engagement.

In addition, the navigation on Patagonia’s main website practically begs users to learn about the brand’s non-profit initiatives and its commitment to ethical manufacturing.

Today, Patagonia is among the most respected, profitable, and trusted consumer brands in the United States.

Retention

Content strategy expands through nearly every aspect of the marketing stack, including ad campaigns, which take a more controlled approach to vulnerability and transparency. To target users in the retention stage and keep them invested in your brand, your goal is to create content using the customers’ life experiences pillar to amplify the emotional bond and brand loyalty that vulnerability creates.

Always took this approach and ended up with one of its most successful social media campaigns.

In June 2014, Always launched its #LikeAGirl campaign to empower adolescent and teenage girls by transforming the phrase “like a girl” from a slur into a meaningful and positive statement.

The campaign is centered on a video in which Always tasked children, teenagers, and adults to behave “like a girl” by running, punching, and throwing while mimicking their perception of how a girl performs the activity. Young girls performed the tasks wholeheartedly and with gusto, while boys and adults performed overly feminine and vain characterizations. The director then challenged the person on their portrayal, breaking down what doing things “like a girl” truly means. The video ends with a powerful, heart-swelling statement:

“If somebody else says that running like a girl, or kicking like a girl, or shooting like a girl is something you shouldn’t be doing, that’s their problem. Because if you’re still scoring, and you’re still getting to the ball in time, and you’re still being first...you’re doing it right. It doesn’t matter what they say.”

This customer story campaign put the vulnerability girls feel during puberty front and center so the topic would resonate with users and give the brand a powerful, relevant, and purposeful role in this connection, according to an Institute for Public Relations campaign analysis.

Consequently, the #LikeAGirl campaign was a rousing success and blew past the KPIs Always established. Initially, Always determined an “impactful launch” for the video meant 2 million video views and 250 million media impressions, the analysis states.

Five years later, the campaign video has more than 66.9 million views and 42,700 comments on YouTube, with more than 85 percent of users reacting positively. Here are a few additional highlights the analysis document points out:

Eighty-one percent of women ages 16–24 support Always in creating a movement to reclaim “like a girl” as a positive and inspiring statement.
More than 1 million people shared the video.
Thirteen percent of users created user-generated content about the campaign.
The #LikeAGirl program achieved 4.5 billion global impressions.
The campaign received 290 million social impressions, with 133,000 social mentions, and it caused a 195.3 percent increase in the brand’s Twitter followers.

Among the reasons the #LikeAGirl content was so successful is that it aligned with Brené Brown’s concept that experiencing vulnerability creates a connection centered on powerful, shared emotions. Always then amplified the campaign’s effectiveness by using those emotions to encourage specific user behavior on social media.

How do you know if you’re making vulnerable content?

Designing a vulnerability-focused content strategy campaign begins by determining what kind of story you want to tell, why you want to tell it, why that story matters, and how that story helps you or your users achieve a goal.

When you’re brainstorming topics, the most important factor is that you need to care about the stories you’re telling. These tales need to be meaningful because if you’re weaving a narrative that isn’t important to you, it shows. And ultimately, why do you expect your users to care about a subject if you don’t?

Let’s say you’re developing a content campaign for a nonprofit, and you want to use your brand’s emotional identity to connect with users. You have a handful of possible narratives but you’re not sure which one will best unlock the benefits of vulnerability. In a Medium post about telling vulnerable stories, Cayla Vidmar presents a list of seven self-reflective questions that can reveal what narrative to choose and why.

If you can answer each of Vidmar’s questions, you’re on your way to creating a great story that can connect with users on a level unrivaled by other methods. Here’s what you should ask yourself:

What meaning is there in my story?
Can my story help others?
How can it help others?
Am I willing to struggle and be vulnerable in that struggle (even with strangers)?
How has my story shaped my worldview (what has it made me believe)?
What good have I learned from my story?
If other people discovered this good from their story, would it change their lives?

While you’re creating narratives within the three pillars, refer back to Vidmar’s list to maintain the proper balance between vulnerability and transparency.

What’s next?

You now know that vulnerability and transparency are an endless fountain of strength, not a weakness. Vulnerable content won’t make you or your brand look weak. Your customers won’t flee at the sight of imperfection. Being human and treating your users like humans isn’t a liability.

It’s time for your brand to embrace its untapped potential. Choose to be vulnerable, have the courage to tell meaningful stories about what matters most to your company and your customers, and overcome the fear of controlling how users will react to your content.

Origin story

Every origin story has six chapters:

the discovery of a problem or opportunity;
what caused this problem or opportunity;
the consequences of this discovery;
the solution to these consequences;
lessons learned during the process;
and next steps.

Customers’ life experiences

Every customer journey narrative has six chapters:

plot background to frame the customer’s experiences;
the customer’s journey;
how the brand plays into that journey (if applicable);
how the customer’s experiences changed them;
what the customer learned from this journey;
and how other people can use this information to improve their lives.

Product and service insights

Narratives about product and service insights have seven chapters:

an overview of the product/service;
how that product/service affects users;
why the product/service is important to the brand’s mission or to users;
what about this product/service failed or succeeded;
why did that success or failure happen;
what lessons did this scenario create;
and how are the brand and its users moving forward.

You have the tools and knowledge necessary to be transparent, create vulnerable content, and succeed. And we need to tell vulnerable stories because sharing our experiences and embracing our common connections matters. So go ahead, put yourself out into the open, and see how your customers respond.

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An Essential Tool for Capturing Your Career Accomplishments

Imagine you’re ready to apply for your next job. Like most busy professionals, you probably haven’t updated your résumé or your portfolio since you looked for your current job.

Now you need to update both, and you can’t remember what work you’ve done over the past few years. (In fact, you can barely remember what you’ve done over the past few months!)

So you scramble to update your résumé with new content. Then you spend all weekend scraping together a new portfolio using screenshots of whatever work evidence you can find on your laptop. You submit the résumé and portfolio with your application, hoping you didn’t forget to include any major career milestones you achieved over the last few years.

This is the process most of us use to approach our job search. We wait until we’re ready to find a job, panic at our lack of résumé and portfolio, and pull together a “good enough” version of each for the job application. (Trust me, I’ve done this many times myself.)

This is a stressful and ineffective way to approach a job search. There’s a much better approach you can take—and you can start working on it now, even if you’re not on the job market.

The Career Management Document

A Career Management Document (CMD) is a comprehensive collection of your résumé and portfolio content. It’s a document you update regularly, over time, with all the work you’ve done.

When you’re ready to apply for your next job, you’ll have all the résumé and portfolio pieces available in your CMD. All you need to do is assemble those pieces into résumé and portfolio documents, then send the documents off with your job application.

I update my CMD about once a week. I start by reviewing evidence of my recent work. I review Slack messages, Basecamp posts, emails, and any other current work-related content. I write my accomplishments in the format of résumé bullets, using the framework of responsibilities and accomplishments from this Manager Tools podcast. Then I add those bullets to the CMD.

Here are some examples from my CMD:

Coached a student on writing a stronger portfolio story to showcase their advanced UX skills, resulting in the student getting a job interview.
Facilitated an end-of-study analysis in under 90 minutes to help the team synthesize user research data from 12 participants.
Led a remote retrospective with teams in two offices, developed actionable takeaways, and ended on time despite a delayed start.

My CMD has several hundred résumé bullets, and it continues to grow. I organize content by year and by project. Within each project are responsibilities and accomplishments.

I add any content to the CMD that might go into my résumé someday. I include everything I can think of, even if it seems insignificant or trivial at the time.

For example, I sometimes help with social media marketing at Center Centre, the UX design school where I’m a faculty member. I include it in my CMD. I don’t plan to pursue social media marketing as a career, but it may be relevant to a future job. Who knows—I may apply to work for an organization that makes social media marketing software someday. In that case, my social media experience could be relevant.

Include portfolio artifacts with your CMD

In addition to capturing bullets for my résumé, I capture content for my portfolio. Each week, I gather screenshots of my work, photos of me working with the team, and any other artifacts I can find. I store them in an organized system I can reference later.

I also take brief notes about the work I did and store them with the artifacts. That way, if I look back at these materials a year from now, I’ll have notes about what I did during the project, reminding me of the details.

For example, after I facilitated a user research analysis session late last year, I captured evidence of it for my portfolio. I included photos of the whiteboard where I recorded public notes during the session. I also captured brief notes about who attended the session, the date, and when it took place during the project.

You can use whatever tools you’d like to gather evidence of your work. I use Google Docs for the résumé portion of my CMD. I use Dropbox to store my portfolio artifacts. I create Dropbox folders with dates and project names that correspond to the contents of my CMD.

Résumé content from my CMD. I wrote about coaching a student on crafting a presentation for her job interview. The highlighted areas are where I left comments reminding me of the details of the work. Note that some of the résumé bullets seem redundant, which is OK. When I create my next résumé, I’ll choose the most appropriate bullets.

I took notes on a whiteboard while coaching the student. I stored a photo of the whiteboard in Dropbox in a folder named with the date of the work and a description of what I did.

The key is to collect the evidence regularly and store it in an accessible, organized way that works for you. To know if you’re storing work evidence effectively, ask yourself, “Will I understand this CMD content a year from now based on how I’m capturing and storing it today?” If the answer is “yes,” you’re in good shape.

Update your CMD regularly

For the CMD to work when you need it, it needs to be comprehensive and up-to-date. As I mentioned before, I update my CMD once a week. I schedule thirty minutes on my calendar each week so I remember to do it.

Sometimes I have a busy week, and I can’t spend thirty minutes on my CMD. So I spend whatever amount of time I have. Some weeks, I only spend ten minutes. Ten minutes per week is better than zero minutes per week.

Occasionally, I don’t get a chance to update it because my week is so hectic. That’s OK because I’ll probably get to it the following week.

I recommend updating your CMD once a week and not once a month or once a quarter. If you wait even a month, you’ll have trouble remembering what you did three and a half weeks ago. Even worse, if you schedule a CMD update once a month and then miss it, you won’t get to it until the next month. That means you have to think back and remember two months of work, which is hard to do.

Updating your CMD every week, while the work is fresh in your mind, gets the best results.

The CMD benefits you in additional ways

The CMD can help you prepare for your job search beyond your résumé and your portfolio.

You can use it to prepare for a job interview. Since you’re capturing work evidence from each stage of the process in your CMD, you can use that evidence to remember what you did throughout a project. Then, you can craft a story about your role on that project.

Hiring managers love to hear stories about your work during job interviews. For instance, if you’re a designer, they want to know the journey you took during your design process, from the start of a project to the end. A detailed CMD will help you remember this process so you can share it in an interview.

I’ve even used my CMD to write blog posts. I’ve been blogging regularly for the past two years, and I often refer to my CMD to remember work experience I had that’s relevant to what I’m writing. When I wrote the article “How to Tell Compelling Stories During a UX Job Interview,” I used my CMD to remember interview preparation exercises I did with students.

The CMD can also help you track work accomplishments for your quarterly or annual performance reviews. Additionally, you can use it to write job ads when hiring for related roles on your team.

Lastly, I find it rewarding to peruse my CMD now and then, especially when I look back at work I did over a year ago. The CMD serves as a record of all my professional accomplishments. This record helps me appreciate my professional growth because I see how far my skills have come over time.

Learn more about the CMD from Manager Tools

At Center Centre, we originally learned about the Career Management Document through the Manager Tools podcast series.

Manager Tools’ podcasts explain how to use a CMD for your résumé. We expanded their approach to include portfolio work as well. I recommend listening to their podcasts about creating and maintaining your CMD:

Prepare for your next job search now

We tell our students at Center Centre that preparing for your next job search is a process that starts early. It’s like saving for retirement—the sooner you start saving money, the more likely you are to be prepared when the time comes.

Similarly, collecting résumé and portfolio content ahead of time will prepare you to find your next job whenever you’re ready to do so. It also prepares you for a sudden job termination like an unexpected layoff. If you lose your job without warning, you’ll likely be under a lot of stress to find a new position. Having a CMD ready will relieve the additional stress of building a résumé and portfolio from scratch.

If you don’t have a CMD yet, now is a great time to start one. Schedule 30 minutes this week to begin crafting your repository of work accomplishments. You’ll be glad you did when you seek your next job.

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Getting to the Heart of Digital Accessibility

Quick! Think of the word “developer” or “coder” — what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Maybe a whiteish male in his twenties living in a busy metropolis, wearing a nerdy t-shirt and hoodie? Someone a bit like Mark Zuckerberg? Or maybe a younger Bill Gates or Sergey Brin? Any of the dudes from the HBO series Silicon Valley, perhaps? Certainly no one like me.

By tech standards, I’m old. I’m also female and a mother. I live in a midwestern town you’ve never heard of and will never visit — a town where the cows vastly outnumber the people. My hair color is (almost) natural and is no longer part of the ROYGBIV collection, so I have no perceived conference street cred. I own about a thousand geeky T-shirts, but never actually wear them in public, opting for more “girly” attire (or so was pointed out by a male colleague). On the surface, I look more suited to taking notes at a PTA meeting than writing code. I’m a bit of an outsider. A tech misfit.

So when my 11-year-old daughter finished her recent coding camp and excitedly declared, “Now I’m a real developer, Mom, just like you!” there was the usual parent pride, but also a small piece of me that cringed. Because, as much as I support the STEM fields, and want the next generation of girls to be coding wizard-unicorn-ninjas, I really don’t want my own daughter to be a developer. The rationale behind this bold (and maybe controversial) statement comes from a place of protection. The tech world we live in today is far from perfect. I’ve endured my share of misogyny, self-doubt, and sexual harassment. Why wouldn’t I want to protect her from all of that?

The (diversity) elephant in the (computer) room

You’ve heard this story before: there is not enough diversity in tech. This puzzling trend seems to continue year after year, even though numerous studies show that by including more people from underrepresented communities, a company can increase its innovation, employee retention, and bottom line. Even with the recent push and supposed support for diversity and inclusivity from many Fortune 500 companies, women and female-identifying people still only hold 20% of all top tech jobs.

The data from FY 2018 shows that the number of women in technical roles at three of the top tech giants was 24% for Adobe, 26% for Google, and 22% for Facebook. While these numbers show that there is still not enough representation for women, these numbers do reflect a slight increase from the previous year (FY 2017: Adobe 22%, Google 25%, Facebook 15%). But even with this upward trend of hiring women in tech roles, the marginal growth rate has not caught up with the real world. The tech workforce is seriously out of touch with reality if, in 2019, a demographic (women) that represents more than half the global population is still considered a minority.

Sometimes this lack of diversity at the top level is blamed on a “pipeline” issue. The logic being: “If there are not enough girls who learn to code, then there will not be enough women who can code.” However, programs aimed at teaching girls how to code have skyrocketed in the past few years. Girls now make up about half of the enrollment in high-school coding classes and are scoring almost identically to their male classmates on standardized math and science tests, yet, young women make up only 18% of all Computer Science degrees. I have to wonder if this steep drop in interest has more to do with lack of representation in the tech sphere, than with girls and young women simply not being “smart enough” or “not interested” in working with code? At the very least, the lack of representation certainly doesn’t help.

Of course, the diversity picture becomes even more abysmal when you consider other underrepresented groups such as people of color, people from the LGBTQ community, and people with disabilities. And while I really don’t like glossing over these deeper diversity issues in tech, because they are abundant and are much more grotesque failings than the male/female ratio, I also don’t feel qualified to speak about these issues. I encourage you to look to and value the voices of others who can speak with higher authority on these deeper diversity issues, such as Ire Aderinokun, Taelur Alexis, Imani Barbarin, Angie Jones, Fatima Khalid, Tatiana Mac, Charlie Owen, Cherry Rae, and so many others. And for those readers who are new to the topic of diversity in tech, watch Tatiana Mac’s recent conference talk How Privilege Defines Performance — it’s well worth the 35 minutes of your life.

The four stages in the digital accessibility journey

However you look at it, the numbers don’t lie. There are some pretty significant diversity issues in tech. So how do we fix this issue before the next wave of young developers join the tech workforce? Simple: teach developers to write accessible code.

This may seem like a joke to some and stretch to others, but hear me out. When we talk about accessible code, what we are really talking about at its core is inclusiveness. The actual process of writing accessible code involves rules and standards, tests and tools; but inclusive development is more abstract than that. It’s a shift in thinking. And when we rethink our approach to development, we go beyond just the base level of simple code functionality. We instead think, how is this code consumed? How can we make it even more intelligible and easier for people to use? Inclusive development means making something valuable, not just accessible, to as many people as we can.

That line of thinking is a bit abstract, so let’s go through an example. Let’s say you are tasked with updating the color contrast between the text on a webpage or app and the background. What happens at each stage in the accessibility journey?

Stage 1: Awareness — You are brand new to digital accessibility and are still trying to understand what it is and how you can implement changes in your daily workflow. You may be aware that there is a set of digital accessibility guidelines that other developers follow, but you are a bit hazy on what it all means in a practical sense.

Stage 2: Knowledge — You know a bit more about digital accessibility and feel comfortable using a few testing tools, so you run an automated accessibility test on your website and it flags a possible issue with the color contrast. Based on your awareness of the guidelines, you know the color contrast ratio between the text and the background needs to be a certain number and that you need a tool to test this.

Stage 3: Practice — Feeling more confident in your knowledge of digital accessibility rules and best practices, you use a tool to measure the color contrast ratio between the text and the background. Then based on the output of the tool, you modify the hex code to meet the color contrast ratio guidelines and retest to confirm you have met the accessibility requirements for this issue.

Stage 4: Understanding — You understand that the accessibility guidelines and tools are created with people in mind, and that code is secondary to all of that. One is the means, and the other is the end. In the color contrast example, you understand that people with low-vision or colorblindness need these color contrast changes in order to actually see the words on your web page.

This is a bit of an oversimplification of the process. But I hope you get the gist — that there are different stages of digital accessibility knowledge and understanding. True beginners may not be to even stage one, but I am finding that group rarer and rarer these days. The word about digital accessibility seems to be out! Which is great; but that’s only the first hurdle. What I’m seeing now is that a lot of people stop at Stage 2: Knowledge or Stage 3: Practice — where you are aware of the digital accessibility guidelines, have some testing tools in your back pocket, and know how to fix some of the issues reported, but haven’t quite connected the dots to the humans they impact.

From the standpoint of getting daily stuff done, stages two and three are okay stopping points. But what happens when the things you need to do are too complex for a quick fix, or you have no buy-in from your peers or management? I feel that once we get to Stage 4: Understanding, and really get why these kinds of changes are needed, people will be more motivated to make those changes regardless of the challenges involved. When you arrive at stage four, you have gone beyond knowing the basic rules, testing, and coding. You recognize that digital accessibility is not just a “nice to have” but a “must have” and it becomes about quality of life for real people. This is digital inclusion. This is something you can’t unsee, you can’t unlearn, and you can’t ignore.

Making digital accessibility a priority — not a requirement

In my role as an accessibility trainer, I like to kick-off each session with the question: “What are you hoping to learn today about digital accessibility?” I ask this question to establish a rapport with the audience and to understand where everyone is in their accessibility journey, but I am also evaluating the level of company and individual buy-in too. There is nothing worse than showing up to teach a group that does not care to be taught. If I hear the words “I am only here because I have to be” — I know it will be an uphill battle to get them anywhere close to Stage 4: Understanding, so I mentally regroup and aim for another stage.

In my experience, when companies and their leaders say “Digital accessibility is a requirement,” nine times out of ten there is a motivating factor behind this sweeping declaration (for example, impending litigation, or at least the fear of it). When changes are framed as mandatory and packaged as directives from on high with little additional context, people can be resistant and will find excuses to fight or challenge the declaration, and any change can become an uphill battle. Calling something “mandatory” only speaks to Stage 1: Awareness.

By swapping out one word from the original declaration and saying “Digital accessibility is a priority,” companies and their leaders have reframed the conversation with their employees. When changes are framed as “working towards a solution” and discussed openly and collaboratively, people feel like they are part of the process and are more open to embracing change. In the long run, embracing change becomes part of a company’s culture and leads to innovation (and, yes, inclusion) on all levels. Calling something a priority speaks to Stage 4: Understanding.

Some of the excuses I often hear from clients for not prioritizing accessibility is that it is too difficult, too costly, and/or too time consuming — but is that really the case? In the same accessibility training, I lead an exercise where we look at a website with an accessibility testing tool and review any issues that came up. With the group’s help we plot out the “impact to user” versus the “remediation effort” on the part of the team. From group to group, while the plots are slightly different, one commonality is that close to 80% of the errors plotted fall into the quadrant of “simple to fix” for the team, but they also fall under “high impact” to the user. Based on this empirical data, I won’t buy the argument from clients who say that accessibility is too difficult and costly and time consuming anymore. It comes down to whether it’s a priority — for each individual and for the company as a whole.

What will your coding legacy be?

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will eventually type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. So by that same logic, a programmer hitting keys at random on a computer for an infinite amount of time will almost surely produce a website that is accessible. But where is the thought process? Where is the human element? While all the things we’ve already talked about — awareness, education, and prioritization of accessibility are important steps in making the digital world more inclusive to all — without intent, we are just going to keep randomly tapping away at our computers, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. The intent behind the code has to be part of the process, otherwise accessibility is just another task that has no meaning.

Maybe I’m naive, but I’d like to think we’ve come to a point in our society where we want our work lives to have meaning. And that we don’t want to just hear about the positive change that is happening, but want to be part of the change. Digital accessibility is a place where this can happen! Not only does understanding and writing purpose-driven code help people with disabilities in the short-run, I believe strongly that is key to solving the overarching diversity issue in tech in the long-run. Developers who reach Stage 4: Understanding, and who prioritize accessible code because they understand it’s fundamentally about people, will also be the ones who help create and cultivate an inclusive environment where people from more diverse backgrounds are also prioritized and accepted in the tech world.

Because when you strip away all the styles, all the mark-up, all the cool features from a website or app — what’s left? People. And honestly, the more I learn about digital accessibility, the more I realize it’s not about the code at all. Digital accessibility is rooted in the user; and, while I (and countless others) can certainly teach you how to write accessible code, and build you tools, patterns, and libraries to use, I realize we can’t teach you to care. That is a choice you have to make yourself. So think for a moment — what are you leaving the next generation of developers with all that inaccessible code you haven’t given much thought to? Is it the coding legacy you really want to leave? I challenge you to do better for my daughter, her peers, and for the countless others who are not fully represented in the tech community today.

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U.S. Copyright Office, Subscriber Notice

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Patron Services: CANCELLED - Orientation to the European collections of the Library of Congress

Notice: Library buildings are closed to the public until April 1. Public events are canceled until May 11.

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Patron Services: Women Photojournalists: an Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon

Library staff will collaborate with the public at this event to expand and improve information in Wikipedia, the world’s most-used reference source. While we will initially focus on women whose work is represented in Library collections, this event is designed to improve articles about any women photojournalists. Anyone with an interest in learning to use Wikipedia, or in researching women in the arts, is encouraged to attend.

Date: Sat, March 21, 2020, 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM EDT

Location: Library of Congress Jefferson Building, Programs Lab, Room LJ-G25 & LJ-G27

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Request ADA accommodations five days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

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Patron Services: Law Library Classes – March 2020

The Law Library of Congress offers free webinars and in-person classes in Washington, D.C. The in-person classes are held in Madison Building, Room LM-201.

“Orientation to Law Library Collections" (10am-11am) – Thursday March 5. This session is designed for patrons who are familiar with legal research, and would instead prefer an introduction to the collections and services specific to the Law Library of Congress.

WEBINAR "Orientation to Legal Research (OLR): Statutes” (11am-12pm) – Thursday March 19. This entry in the OLR series provides an overview of U.S. statutory and legislative research, including information about how to find and use the U.S. Code, the U.S. Statutes at Large, and U.S. federal bills and resolutions.

"Orientation to Legal Research (OLR): Tracing Federal Regulations” (10am-11am) – Tuesday March 24. This entry in the OLR series provides an overview of U.S. federal regulations, including information about the notice and comment rulemaking process, the publication and citation of regulations, and the tracing of regulations from the Code of Federal Regulations, to the proposed rule in the Federal Register, to the regulation’s docket.

WEBINAR "Congress.gov" (2pm-3pm) - Thursday March 26. This orientation is designed to give a basic overview of Congress.gov. While the focus of the session will be searching legislation and the Congressional member information attached to the legislation, the new features of Congress.gov will be highlighted.

To register, visit the Law Library’s “Webinars and In-Person Orientations” webpage, http://www.loc.gov/law/opportunities/seminar-orient.php .

For maps of the Madison and Jefferson Building see, https://www.loc.gov/visit/maps-and-floor-plans/.

Request ADA accommodations five days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov

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Patron Services: History Unfolded Research Sprint

The Newspaper & Current Periodical Reading Room is hosting a participatory research event with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for their History Unfolded project. In mid-May 1944, the Hungarian authorities, in coordination with the German Security Police, began systematically to deport Hungarian Jews. Help us learn how the United States press reported on these deportations by researching microfilmed newspapers from across America.

Contribute to History Unfolded: https://newspapers.ushmm.org

Space is limited, so please RSVP: http://bit.ly/Feb2020Sprint

Where: Newspaper & Current Periodical Reading Room, LM-133, 1st floor, Madison Building

When: Monday, February 24, 2020, Drop-in anytime between 4pm and 7pm

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Patron Services: Conversations with African Poets and Writers, featuring Lesley Nneka Arimah

The African Section, African & Middle Eastern Division is sponsoring “Conversations with African Poets and Writers”, featuring Lesley Nneka Arimah, author and 2019 Winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, on Thursday, February 20, 2020, from 12:00 -1:00PM, in the Whittall Pavilion, Ground Floor, Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, 11 First St. SE, Washington, DC. A book signing and a display of Africana books and other materials follow.

The Conversations with African Poets and Writers Series presents interviews with current African diaspora writers committed to the literature of continental and diasporic Africa (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, literary criticism) and readings from their written works. Authors include established writers as well as highly talented ‘new’ and emerging writers.

Please forward inquiries to Laverne Page at (202) 707-1979 or email mpag@loc.gov.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or email ADA@loc.gov.

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Patron Services: Saturday Research Orientation: Manuscript Division

Join Manuscript Reference Librarian Lara Szypszak for a focused orientation to resources located in the Manuscript Reading Room. This session will share the letters of love from members of congress to their spouses, writers to their paramours, artists to their muses, and more. Celebrate Valentine’s Day (better late than never) with notes of romance found in the Manuscript Division’s collections, and also learn how to find materials for your research projects utilizing the Manuscript Reading Room’s resources in-person and remotely. The session includes general information on conducting research in the Manuscript Reading Room and time for Q&A about research strategies or steps on specific research projects. All researchers are welcome. See the following link for Maps and Floor Plans in the Jefferson Building: https://www.loc.gov/visit/maps-and-floor-plans/thomas-jefferson-building/first-floor/

Date: Saturday, February 15, 10:00 am - 11:30 am EST

Location: Library of Congress Jefferson Building, Room 139B

Click here for more information and to register.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or email ADA@loc.gov.

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Patron Services: Prints and Photographs Research Orientation

Come learn about the resources of the Prints and Photographs Division. One of the division’s reference librarians will provide an overview of the wide range of pictorial materials in the Prints and Photographs Division and will offer tips on how to make the most of its online offerings and future visits to the reading room.

Date: Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020, 11:00-12:00 EST

Location: Library of Congress James Madison Building, Room 337

Click here for more information and to register.

Request ADA accommodations five days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

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Patron Services: Civil Rights in the 20th Century: Personal Papers and Organizational Records in the Manuscript Division

In this session, Manuscript Reference Librarian Edith Sandler will demonstrate how to search for and access personal papers and organizational records documenting the history of the civil rights movement in the 20th century. Time will be included at the end of the session for Q&A about research strategies or steps on specific research projects. All researchers are welcome.

Please note that the maximum class size is 30 researchers unless otherwise indicated.

Individuals requiring accommodations for any of these events are requested to submit a request at least five business days in advance by contacting (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Patrons are encouraged to arrive 15 minutes prior to the orientation. Seating is available on a first-come basis. Registration does not guarantee entry after the orientation start time.

For more information, please visit: https://www.loc.gov/rr/main/satorient/

Date: Saturday, January 25, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST

Location: Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Room LJ-139B

Click here for more information and to register.

Request ADA accommodations five days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

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Patron Services: Research Orientations to the Library of Congress

The Researcher & Reference Services Division at the Library of Congress is offering research orientation sessions on the following dates in room 139B of the Jefferson Building. You may register for a single session by selecting a date and completing the online form . The sessions, taught by librarians, will cover search strategies for finding items in a variety of formats at the world’s largest library. Individuals requiring accommodations for any of these events are requested to submit a request at least five business days in advance by contacting (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

General Orientation Sessions
Mondays, 10:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m.:

Jan.13^th

Feb.10^th

March 9^th

March 16^th

April 13^th

April 20^th

Thursdays, 6:30 p.m.-8:00 p.m.:

Feb.6^th

March 5^th

April 2^nd

Saturdays, 10:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m.

Jan.11^th

Feb.1^st

March 14^th

April 11^th

Genealogy Orientation Sessions

Wednesdays, 10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.

Feb.12^th

March 11^th

April 8^th

May 13^th

Saturdays, 10:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m.

Feb.8^th
March 7^th
April 4th

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Patron Services: Library of Congress Book Talk: Gods of the Upper Air, by Charles King

The Library of Congress invites you to a talk by Professor Charles King on his new book, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century.

Friday, December 13, 2019

6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

Preceded by a related treasure display: 5:15 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

The Montpelier Room, sixth floor, the James Madison Building, The Library of Congress

101 Independence Avenue, S.E.

Metro station: Capitol South

The talk begins at 6:00pm. Professor King made use of the Margaret Mead papers at the Library of Congress, and a rare showing of several interesting items from Mead’s manuscripts will be available from 5:15pm to 6:00pm, before the talk, in the same room, the Montpelier Room.

Franz Boas (1858-1942), the pioneering German-American professor of anthropology at Columbia University, rejected the then popular notion of cultural hierarchies. His influential teaching, based on observation, was that cultural differences are not the result of biological differences, such as race. This book is a group portrait of Boas and some of his most eminent students: Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Benedict, and Ella Cara Deloria. The book has received acclaim in reviews by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Book sale and signing will follow.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/gods-of-the-upper-air-a-book-talk-with-author-charles-king-tickets-82855185089

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Rabindra Jayanti observed

SGBG seeks steps to stop corona spread from red zones

Concern over Akhil Gogois prolonged detention

Online training being imparted to librarians

Massive protest against killing at Harangajao

Concern over deplorable condition of NH-8

Cachar admin on edge after detection of more COVID-19 cases

Assam students in Andhra, Telengana urge govt to bring them back home

One trampled to death by domestic elephant

Declining quarantine cases may jump up in Darrang

23 arrested for not wearing masks in public places

Man from Lanka tests COVID-19 positive in Dubai

Ensure Visakhapatnam like mishaps dont take place in State, govt urged

Drug peddler arrested, cough syrup seized

Huge quantity of PDS rice seized

Relief for daily wage earners in Dimapur

10 Bangladesh nationals held in Tripura

Grateful workers paint Arunachal school that sheltered them

Tripura COVID-19 scene worsens as 24 more BSF jawans test positive

War of words between MNF, Cong over COVID-19 donations

Nagaland Cong ready to pay train fare of migrant workers

Chamling hits out at Sikkim Govt

Meghalayas lone COVID-19 patient tests positive again

Manipur Speakers Tribunal reserves verdict

Sports without fans possible but magic will be missing

Son Heung-min earns military accolade

Bhaker gets electronic target installed at home

India will not win in Australia if they cant dismiss Smith, Warner early

Arjuna awardees death condoled

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Job Stories

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Usability Testing for Voice Content

The quandary of voice usability

How voice interfaces improve accessibility outcomes

Managing content destined for discrete channels

Other conversational interfaces have it easier

Why written conversational interfaces are easier to evaluate

Eye tracking only works for visual components

Think-aloud and concurrent probing interrupt the conversational flow

Voice usability tests with retrospective probing

What makes voice usability tests unique

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Conclusion

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Typography

Stereotypography

The world wide webfont

Multiple script systems

Visual density

Text expansion factors

Standards for Writing Accessibly

Writing for Screen Readers

Write Chronologically, Not Spatially

Write Left to Right, Top to Bottom

Don’t Use Colors and Icons Alone

Describe the Action, Not the Behavior

Making Room for Variation

What Is Variation?

Contexts for Variation

Brand

Audience

Environment

Request with Intent: Caching Strategies in the Age of PWAs

Best intentions

Request only what you need

Request the smallest file you can

Offer alternate formats

Offer different sizes

Defer requests (when possible)

Manipulate requests in a Service Worker

Keep a fallback image in your back pocket

Respect a user’s choice to save data

Concern over Akhil Gogois prolonged detention

Declining quarantine cases may jump up in Darrang

Ensure Visakhapatnam like mishaps dont take place in State, govt urged

Meghalayas lone COVID-19 patient tests positive again

Manipur Speakers Tribunal reserves verdict

Sports without fans possible but magic will be missing

India will not win in Australia if they cant dismiss Smith, Warner early

Arjuna awardees death condoled

The Untapped Power of Vulnerability & Transparency in Content Strategy