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Hayden Library - R133.G76 2019

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Technique could be used to create quantum-information systems

Revamped accelerator will soon be smashing electrons and positrons together

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Mobile app interfaces have been utilizing on/off sliding switches for a while. These are most commonly found on the settings page where users can update preferences for their account. But web designers have taken notice and have built many open platforms to generate your own on/off switch sliders. In this tutorial I want to look […]

Many portfolio websites include a list of previous clients to build trust from other potential customers. Reading what other people have said about a service or product is one way to garner support from visitors who have never heard about your company before. (Of course, this design technique only works if you have previous clients […]

Accessibility can be tricky. There are plenty of conditions to take into consideration, and many technical limitations and weird exceptions that make it quite hard to master for most designers and developers.

I never considered myself an accessibility expert, but I took great pride in making my projects Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliant…ish. They would pass most automated tests, show perfectly in the accessibility tree, and work quite well with keyboard navigation. I would even try (and fail) to use a screen reader every now and then.

But life would give me a lesson I would probably never learn otherwise: last October, my abled life took a drastic change—I started to feel extremely dizzy, with a constant sensation of falling or spinning to the right. I was suffering from a bad case of vertigo caused by labyrinthitis that made it impossible to get anything done.

Vertigo can have a wide range of causes, the most common being a viral infection or tiny calcium crystal free floating in the inner ear, which is pretty much our body’s accelerometer. Any disruption in there sends the brain confusing signals about the body’s position, which causes really heavy nausea, dizziness, and headaches. If you’ve ever felt seasick, it’s quite a similar vibe. If not, think about that feeling when you just get off a rollercoaster…it’s like that, only all day long.

For most people, vertigo is something they’ll suffer just once in a lifetime, and it normally goes away in a week or two. Incidence is really high, with some estimates claiming that up to 40% of the population suffers vertigo at least once in their lifetime. Some people live all their lives with it (or with similar symptoms caused by a range of diseases and syndromes grouped under the umbrella term of vestibular disorders), with 4% of US adults reporting chronic problems with balance, and an additional 1.1% reporting chronic dizziness, according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

In my case, it was a little over a month. Here’s what I learned while going through it.

Slants can trigger vestibular symptoms

It all started as I was out for my daily jog. I felt slightly dizzy, then suddenly my vision got totally distorted. Everything appeared further away, like looking at a fun house’s distortion mirror. I stumbled back home and rested; at that moment I believed I might have over-exercised, and that hydration, food, and rest were all I needed. Time would prove me wrong.

What I later learned was that experiencing vertigo is a constant war between one of your inner ears telling the brain “everything is fine, we’re level and still” and the other ear shouting “oh my God, we’re falling, we’re falling!!!” Visual stimuli can act as an intermediary, supporting one ear’s message or the other’s. Vertigo can also work in the opposite way, with the dizziness interfering with your vision.

I quickly found that when symptoms peaked, staring at a distant object would ease the falling sensation somewhat.

In the same fashion, some visual stimuli would worsen it.

Vertical slants were a big offender in that sense. For instance, looking at a subtle vertical slant (the kind that you’d have to look at twice to make sure it’s not perfectly vertical) on a webpage would instantly trigger symptoms for me. Whether it was a page-long slant used to create some interest beside text or a tiny decoration to mark active tabs, looking at anything with slight slants would instantly send me into the rollercoaster.

Horizontal slants (whatever the degree) and harder vertical slants wouldn’t cause these issues.

My best guess is that slight vertical slants can look like forced perspective and therefore reinforce the falling-from-height sensation, so I would recommend avoiding vertical slants if you can, or make them super obvious. A slight slant looks like perspective, a harder one looks like a triangle.

Target size matters (even on mouse-assisted devices)

After a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, some tests to discard neurological conditions, and other treatments that proved ineffective, I was prescribed Cinnarizine.

Cinnarizine is a calcium channel blocker—to put it simply, it prevents the malfunctioning inner ear “accelerometer” from sending incorrect info to the brain. 
And it worked wonders. After ten days of being barely able to get out of bed, I was finally getting something closer to my normal life. I would still feel dizzy all the time, with some peaks throughout the day, but for the most part, it was much easier.

At this point, I was finally able to use the computer (but still unable to produce any code at all). To make the best of it, I set on a mission to self-experiment on accessibility for vestibular disorders. In testing, I found that one of the first things that struck me was that I would always miss targets (links and buttons).

I’m from the generation that grew up with desktop computers, so using a mouse is second nature. The pointer is pretty much an extension of my mind, as it is for many who use it regularly. But while Cinnarizine helped with the dizziness, it has a common side effect of negatively impacting coordination and fine motor skills (it is recommended not to drive or operate machinery while under treatment). It was not a surprise when I realized it would be much harder to get the pointer to do what I intended.

The common behavior would be: moving the pointer past the link I intended to click, clicking before reaching it at all, or having to try multiple times to click on smaller targets.

Success Criterion 2.5.5 Target Size (Level AAA) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s WCAG recommends bigger target sizes so users can activate them easily. The obvious reason for this is that it’s harder to pinpoint targets on smaller screens with coarser inputs (i.e., touchscreens of mobile devices). A fairly common practice for developers is to set bigger target sizes for smaller viewport widths (assuming that control challenges are only touch-related), while neglecting the issue on big screens expected to be used with mouse input. I know I’m guilty of that myself.

Instead of targeting this behavior for just smaller screen sizes, there are plenty of reasons to create larger target sizes on all devices: it will benefit users with limited vision (when text is scaled up accordingly and colors are of sufficient contrast), users with mobility impairments such as hand tremors, and of course, users with difficulty with fine motor skills.

Font size and spacing

Even while “enjoying” the ease of symptoms provided by the treatment, reading anything still proved to be a challenge for the following three weeks.

I was completely unable to use mobile devices while suffering vertigo due to the smaller font sizes and spacing, so I was forced to use my desktop computer for everything.

I can say I was experiencing something similar to users with mild forms of dyslexia or attention disorders: whenever I got to a website that didn’t follow good font styling, I would find myself reading the same line over and over again.

This proves once again that accessibility is intersectional: when we improve things for a particular purpose it usually benefits users with other challenges as well. I used to believe recommendations on font styles were mostly intended for the nearsighted and those who have dyslexia. Turns out they are also critical for those with vertigo, and even for those with some cognitive differences. At the end of the day, everybody benefits from better readability.

Some actions you can take to improve readability are:

• Keep line height to at least 1.5 times the font size (i.e., line-height: 1.5).
• Set the spacing between paragraphs to at least 2.0 times the font size. We can do this by adjusting the margins using relative units such as em.
• Letter spacing should be at least 0.12 times the font size. We can adjust this by using the letter-spacing CSS property, perhaps setting it in a relative unit.
• Make sure to have good contrast between text and its background.
• Keep font-weight at a reasonable level for the given font-family. Some fonts have thin strokes that make them harder to read. When using thinner fonts, try to improve contrast and font size accordingly, even more than what WCAG would suggest.
• Choose fonts that are easy to read. There has been a large and still inconclusive debate on which font styles are better for users, but one thing I can say for sure is that popular fonts (as in fonts that the user might be already familiar with) are generally the least challenging for users with reading issues.

WCAG recommendations on text are fairly clear and fortunately are the most commonly implemented of recommendations, but even they can still fall short sometimes. So, better to follow specific guides on accessible text and your best judgement. Passing automated tests does not guarantee actual accessibility.

Another issue on which my experience with vertigo proved to be similar to that of people with dyslexia and attention disorders was how hard it was for me to keep my attention in just one place. In that sense…

Animations are bad (and parallax is pure evil)

Val Head has already covered visually-triggered vestibular disorders in an outstanding article, so I would recommend giving it a good read if you haven’t already.

To summarize, animations can trigger nausea, dizziness, and headaches in some users, so we should use them purposely and responsibly.

While most animations did not trigger my symptoms, parallax scrolling did. I’d never been a fan of parallax to begin with, as I found it confusing. And when you’re experiencing vertigo, the issues introduced by parallax scrolling compound.

Really, there are no words to describe just how bad a simple parallax effect, scrolljacking, or even background-attachment: fixed would make me feel. I would rather jump on one of those 20-G centrifuges astronauts use than look at a website with parallax scrolling.

Every time I encountered it, I would put the bucket beside me to good use and be forced to lie in bed for hours as I felt the room spinning around me, and no meds could get me out of it. It was THAT bad.

Though normal animations did not trigger a reaction as severe, they still posed a big problem. The extreme, conscious, focused effort it took to read would make it such that anything moving on the screen would instantly break my focus, and force me to start the paragraph all over. And I mean anything.

I would constantly find myself reading a website only to have the typical collapsing navigation bar on scroll distract me just enough that I’d totally lose count of where I was at. Autoplaying carousels were so annoying I would delete them using dev tools as soon as they showed up. Background videos would make me get out of the website desperately.

Over time I started using mouse selection as a pointer; a visual indication of what I’d already read so I could get back to it whenever something distracted me. Then I tried custom stylesheets to disable transforms and animations whenever possible, but that also meant many websites having critical elements not appear at all, as they were implemented to start off-screen or otherwise invisible, and show up on scroll.

Of course, deleting stuff via dev tools or using custom stylesheets is not something we can expect 99.99% of our users to even know about.

So if anything, consider reducing animations to a minimum. Provide users with controls to turn off non-essential animations (WCAG 2.2.3 Animation from Interactions) and to pause, stop, or hide them (WCAG 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide). Implement animations and transitions in such a way that if the user disables them, critical elements still display.

And be extra careful with parallax: my recommendation is to, at the very least, try limiting its use to the header (“hero”) only, and be mindful of getting a smooth, realistic parallax experience. My vertigo self would have said, “just don’t freaking use parallax. Never. EVER.” But I guess that might be a hard idea to sell to stakeholders and designers.

Also consider learning how to use the prefers-reduced-motion feature query. This is a newer addition to the specs (it’s part of the Media Queries Level 5 module , which is at an early Editor’s Draft stage) that allows authors to apply selective styling depending on whether the user has requested the system to minimize the use of animations. OS and browser support for it is still quite limited, but the day will come when we will set any moving thing inside a query for when the user has no-preference, blocking animations from those who choose reduce.

After about a week of wrestling websites to provide a static experience, I remembered something that would prove to be my biggest ally while the vertigo lasted:

Reader mode

Some browsers include a “reader mode” that strips the content from any styling choices, isolates it from any distraction, and provides a perfect WCAG compliant layout for the text to maximize readability.

It is extremely helpful to provide a clear and consistent reading experience throughout multiple websites, especially for users with any kind of reading impairment.

I have to confess: before experiencing my vestibular disorder, I had never used Reader Mode (the formal name varies in browsers) or even checked if my projects were compatible with it. I didn’t even think it was such a useful feature, as a quick search for “reader mode” actually returned quite a few threads by users asking how to disable it or how to take the button for it out of Firefox’s address bar. (It seems some people are unwittingly activating it…perhaps the icon is not clear enough.)

Displaying the button to access Reader Mode is toggled by browser heuristics, which are based on the use (or not) of semantic tags in a page’s HTML. Unfortunately this meant not all websites provided such a “luxury.”

I really wish I wouldn’t have to say this in 2019…but please, please use semantic tags. Correct conversational semantics allow your website to be displayed in Reader Mode, and provide a better experience for users of screen readers. Again, accessibility is intersectional.

Reader Mode proved to be extremely useful while my vertigo lasted. But there was something even better:

Dark color schemes

By the fourth week, I started feeling mostly fine. I opened Visual Studio Code to try to get back to work. In doing so, it served me well to find one more revelation: a light-text-on-dark-background scheme was SO much easier for me to read. (Though I still was not able to return to work at this time.)

I was quite surprised, as I had always preferred light mode with dark-text-on-light-background for reading, and dark mode, with light-text-on-dark for coding. I didn’t know at the time that I was suffering from photophobia (which is a sensitivity to light), which was one of the reasons I found it hard to read on my desktop and to use my mobile device at all.

As far as I know, photophobia is not a common symptom of vestibular disorders, but there are many conditions that will trigger it, so it’s worth looking into for our projects’ accessibility.

CSS is also planning a media query to switch color schemes. Known as prefers-color-scheme, it allows applying styles based on the user’s stated preference for dark or light theming. It’s also part of the Media Queries Level 5 spec, and at the time of writing this article it’s only available in Safari Technology Preview, with Mozilla planning to ship it in the upcoming Firefox 67. Luckily there’s a PostCSS plugin that allows us to use it in most modern browsers by turning prefers-color-schemequeries into color-index queries, which have much better support.

If PostCSS is not your cup of tea, or for whatever reason you cannot use that approach to automate switching color schemes to a user’s preference, try at least to provide a theming option in your app’s configuration. Theming has become extremely simple since the release of CSS Custom Properties, so implementing this sort of switch is relatively easy and will greatly benefit anyone experiencing photophobia.

Moving on

After a month and some days, the vertigo disappeared completely, and I was able to return to work without needing any meds or further treatment. It should stay that way, as for most people it’s a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

I went back to my abled life, but the experience changed my mindset for good.

As I said before, I always cared for making my projects compatible for people using keyboard navigation and screen readers. But I learned the hard way that there are plenty of “invisible conditions” that are just as important to take into consideration: vestibular disorders, cognitive differences, dyslexia, and color blindness, just to name a few. I was totally neglecting those most of the time, barely addressing the issues in order to pass automated tests, which means I was unintentionally annoying some users by making websites inaccessible to them.

After my experience with vertigo, I’ve turned to an accessibility-first approach to design and development. Now I ask myself, “am I leaving anyone behind with this decision?,” before dropping a single line of code. Accessibility should never be an afterthought.

Making sure my projects work from the start for those with difficulties also improves the experience for everyone else. Think about how improving text styles for users with dyslexia, vertigo, or visual problems improves readability for all users, or how being able to control animations or choose a color scheme can be critical for users with attention disorders and photophobia, respectively, while also a nice feature for everybody.

It also turned my workflow into a much smoother development experience, as addressing accessibility issues from the beginning can mean a slower start, but it’s also much easier and faster than trying to fix broken accessibility afterwards.

I hope that by sharing my personal experience with vertigo, I’ve illustrated how we can all design and develop a better web for everybody. Remember, we’re all just temporarily abled.

A family buys a house they can’t afford. They can’t make their monthly mortgage payments, so they borrow money from the Mob. Now they’re in debt to the bank and the Mob, live in fear of losing their home, and must do whatever their creditors tell them to do.

Welcome to the internet, 2019.

Buying something you can’t afford, and borrowing from organizations that don’t have your (or your customers’) best interest at heart, is the business plan of most internet startups. It’s why our digital services and social networks in 2019 are a garbage fire of lies, distortions, hate speech, tribalism, privacy violations, snake oil, dangerous idiocy, deflected responsibility, and whole new categories of unpunished ethical breaches and crimes.

From optimistically conceived origins and message statements about making the world a better place, too many websites and startups have become the leading edge of bias and trauma, especially for marginalized and at-risk groups.

Why (almost) everything sucks

Twitter, for instance, needs a lot of views for advertising to pay at the massive scale its investors demand. A lot of views means you can’t be too picky about what people share. If it’s misogynists or racists inspiring others who share their heinous beliefs to bring back the 1930s, hey, it’s measurable. If a powerful elected official’s out-of-control tweeting reduces churn and increases views, not only can you pay your investors, you can even take home a bonus. Maybe it can pay for that next meditation retreat.

You can cloak this basic economic trade-off in fifty layers of bullshit—say you believe in freedom of speech, or that the antidote to bad speech is more speech—but the fact is, hate speech is profitable. It’s killing our society and our planet, but it’s profitable. And the remaining makers of Twitter—the ones whose consciences didn’t send them packing years ago—no longer have a choice. The guy from the Mob is on his way over, and the vig is due.

Not to single out Twitter, but this is clearly the root cause of its seeming indifference to the destruction hate speech is doing to society…and will ultimately do to the platform. (But by then Jack will be able to afford to meditate full-time.)

Other companies do other evil things to pay their vig. When you owe the Mob, you have no choice. Like sell our data. Or lie about medical research.

There are internet companies (like Basecamp, or like Automattic, makers of WordPress.com, where I work) that charge money for their products and services, and use that money to grow their business. I wish more internet companies could follow that model, but it’s hard to retrofit a legitimate business model to a product that started its life as free.

And there are even some high-end news publications, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, that survive on a combination of advertising and flexible paywalls. But these options are not available to most digital publications and businesses.

Return with me to those Halcyon days…

Websites and internet startups used to be you and your friends making cool stuff for your other friends, and maybe building new friendships and even small communities in the process. (Even in 2019, that’s still how some websites and startups begin—as labors of love, fashioned by idealists in their spare time.)

Because they are labors of love; because we’ve spent 25 years training people to believe that websites, and news, and apps, and services should be free; because, when we begin a project, we can scarcely believe anyone will ever notice or care about it—for these reasons and more, the things we make digitally, especially on the web, are offered free of charge. We labor on, excited by positive feedback, and delighted to discover that, if we keep at it, our little community will grow.

Most such labors of love disappear after a year or two, as the creators drift out of touch with each other, get “real” jobs, fall in love, start families, or simply lose interest due to lack of attention from the public or the frustrations of spending weekends and holidays grinding away at an underappreciated site or app while their non-internet friends spend those same hours either having fun or earning money.

Along came money

But some of these startup projects catch on. And when they do, a certain class of investor smells ROI. And the naive cofounders, who never expected their product or service to really get anywhere, can suddenly envision themselves rich and Zuckerberg-famous. Or maybe they like the idea of quitting their day job, believing in themselves, and really going for it. After all, that is an empowering and righteous vision.

Maybe they believe that by taking the initial investment, they can do more good—that their product, if developed further, can actually help people. This is often the motivation behind agreeing to an initial investment deal, especially in categories like healthcare.

Or maybe the founders are problem solvers. Existing products or services in a given category have a big weakness. The problem solvers are sure that their idea is better. With enough capital, and a slightly bigger team, they can show the world how to do it right. Most inventions that have moved humankind forward followed exactly this path. It should lead to a better world (and it sometimes does). It shouldn’t produce privacy breaches and fake medicine and election-influencing bots and all the other plagues of our emerging digital civilization. So why does it?

Content wants to be paid

Primarily it is because these businesses have no business model. They were made and given away free. Now investors come along who can pay the founders, buy them an office, give them the money to staff up, and even help with PR and advertising to help them grow faster.

Now there are salaries and insurance and taxes and office space and travel and lecture tours and sales booths at SXSW, but there is still no charge for the product.

And the investor seeks a big return.

And when the initial investment is no longer enough to get the free-product company to scale to the big leagues, that’s when the really big investors come in with the really big bucks. And the company is suddenly famous overnight, and “everybody” is using the product, and it’s still free, and the investors are still expecting a giant payday.

Like I said—a house you can’t afford, so you go into debt to the bank and the Mob.

The money trap

Here it would be easy to blame capitalism, or at least untrammeled, under-regulated capitalism, which has often been a source of human suffering—not that capitalism, properly regulated, can’t also be a force for innovation which ameliorates suffering. That’s the dilemma for our society, and where you come down on free markets versus governmental regulation of businesses should be an intellectual decision, but these days it is a label, and we hate our neighbors for coming down a few degrees to the left or right of us. But I digress and oversimplify, and this isn’t a complaint about late stage capitalism per se, although it may smell like one.

No, the reason small companies created by idealists too frequently turn into consumer-defrauding forces for evil has to do with the amount of profit each new phase of investor expects to receive, and how quickly they expect to receive it, and the fact that the products and services are still free. And you know what they say about free products.

Nothing fails like success

A friend who’s a serial entrepreneur has started maybe a dozen internet businesses over the span of his career. They’ve all met a need in the marketplace. As a consequence, they’ve all found customers, and they’ve all made a profit. Yet his investors are rarely happy.

“Most of my startups have the decency to fail in the first year,” one investor told him. My friend’s business was taking in several million dollars a year and was slowly growing in staff and customers. It was profitable. Just not obscenely so.

And internet investors don’t want a modest return on their investment. They want an obscene profit right away, or a brutal loss, which they can write off their taxes. Making them a hundred million for the ten million they lent you is good. Losing their ten million is also good—they pay a lower tax bill that way, or they use the loss to fold a company, or they make a profit on the furniture while writing off the business as a loss…whatever rich people can legally do under our tax system, which is quite a lot.

What these folks don’t want is to lend you ten million dollars and get twelve million back.

You and I might go, “Wow! I just made two million dollars just for being privileged enough to have money to lend somebody else.” And that’s why you and I will never have ten million dollars to lend anybody. Because we would be grateful for it. And we would see a free two million dollars as a life-changing gift from God. But investors don’t think this way.

We didn’t start the fire, but we roasted our weenies in it

As much as we pretend to be a religious nation, our society worships these investors and their profits, worships companies that turn these profits, worships above all the myth of overnight success, which we use to motivate the hundreds of thousands of workers who will work nights and weekends for the owners in hopes of cashing in when the stock goes big.

Most times, even if the stock does go big, the owner has found a way to devalue it by the time it does. Owners have brilliant advisers they pay to figure out how to do those things. You and I don’t.

A Christmas memory

I remember visiting San Francisco years ago and scoring an invitation to Twitter’s Christmas party through a friend who worked there at the time. Twitter was, at the time, an app that worked via SMS and also via a website. Period.

Some third-party companies, starting with my friends at Iconfactory, had built iPhone apps for people who wanted to navigate Twitter via their newfangled iPhones instead of the web. Twitter itself hadn’t publicly addressed mobile and might not even have been thinking about it.

Although Twitter was transitioning from a fun cult thing—used by bloggers who attended SXSW Interactive in 2007—to an emerging cultural phenomenon, it was still quite basic in its interface and limited in its abilities. Which was not a bad thing. There is art in constraint, value in doing one thing well. As an outsider, if I’d thought about it, I would have guessed that Twitter’s entire team consisted of no more than 10 or 12 wild-eyed, sleep-deprived true believers.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I showed up at the Christmas party and discovered I’d be sharing dinner with hundreds of designers, developers, salespeople, and executives instead of the handful I’d naively anticipated meeting. (By now, of course, Twitter employs many thousands. It’s still not clear to an outsider why so many workers are needed.)

But one thing is clear: somebody has to pay for it all.

Freemium isn’t free

Employees, let alone thousands of them, on inflated Silicon Valley engineer salaries, aren’t free. Health insurance and parking and meals and HR and travel and expense accounts and meetups and software and hardware and office space and amenities aren’t free. Paying for all that while striving to repay investors tenfold means making a buck any way you can.

Since the product was born free and a paywall isn’t feasible, Twitter must rely on that old standby: advertising. Advertising may not generate enough revenue to keep your hometown newspaper (or most podcasts and content sites) in business, but at Twitter’s scale, it pays.

It pays because Twitter has so many active users. And what keeps those users coming back? Too often, it’s the dopamine of relentless tribalism—folks whose political beliefs match and reinforce mine in a constant unwinnable war of words with folks whose beliefs differ.

Of course, half the antagonists in a given brawl may be bots, paid for in secret by an organization that wants to make it appear that most citizens are against Net Neutrality, or that most Americans oppose even the most basic gun laws, or that our elected officials work for lizard people. The whole system is broken and dangerous, but it’s also addictive, and we can’t look away. From our naive belief that content wants to be free, and our inability to create businesses that pay for themselves, we are turning our era’s greatest inventions into engines of doom and despair.

Your turn

So here we are. Now what do we do about it?

It’s too late for current internet businesses (victims of their own success) that are mortgaged to the hilt in investor gelt. But could the next generation of internet startups learn from older, stable companies like Basecamp, and design products that pay for themselves via customer income—products that profit slowly and sustainably, allowing them to scale up in a similarly slow, sustainable fashion?

The self-payment model may not work for apps and sites that are designed as modest amusements or communities, but maybe those kinds of startups don’t need to make a buck—maybe they can simply be labors of love, like the websites we loved in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Along those same lines, can the IndieWeb, and products of IndieWeb thinking like Micro.blog, save us? Might they at least provide an alternative to the toxic aspects of our current social web, and restore the ownership of our data and content? And before you answer, RTFM.

On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram? Tantek Çelik thinks so, and he’s been right about the web for nearly 30 years. (For more about what Tantek thinks, listen to our conversation in Episode № 186 of The Big Web Show.)
Are these approaches mere whistling against a hurricane? Are most web and internet users content with how things are? What do you think? Share your thoughts on your personal website (dust yours off!) or (irony ahoy!) on your indie or mainstream social networks of choice using hashtag #LetsFixThis. I can’t wait to see what you have to say.

In Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development, the Storming stage happens as a group begins to figure out how to work together. Previously, each person had been doing their own thing as individuals, so necessarily a few things need to be ironed out: how to collaborate, how to hit goals, how to determine priorities. Of course there may be some friction here!

But even if your team doesn’t noticeably demonstrate this kind of internal Storming as they begin to gel, there might be some outside factors at play in your work environment that create friction. During times of team scaling and organizational change—the water we in the web industry are often swimming in—managers are responsible for things like strategy-setting, aligning their team’s work to company objectives, and unblocking the team as they ship their work.

In addition to these business-context responsibilities, managers need to be able to help their teammates navigate this storm by helping them grow in their roles and support the team’s overall progress. If you and your teammates don’t adapt and evolve in your roles, it’s unlikely that your team will move out of the Storming stage and into the Norming stage of team dynamics.

To spur this course-correction and growth in your teammates, you’ll end up wearing four different hats:

• Mentoring: lending advice and helping to problem solve based on your own experience.
• Coaching: asking open questions to help your teammate reflect and introspect, rather than sharing your own opinions or quickly problem solving.
• Sponsoring: finding opportunities for your teammate to level up, take on new leadership roles, and get promoted.
• Delivering feedback: observing behavior that is or isn’t aligned to what the team needs to be doing and sharing those observations, along with praise or suggestions.

Let’s dive in to how to choose, and when to use, each of these skills as you grow your teammates, and then talk about what it looks like when teammates support the overarching direction of the team.

Mentoring

When I talk to managers, I find that the vast majority have their mentor hats on ninety percent of the time when they’re working with their teammates. It’s natural!

In mentoring mode, we’re doling out advice, sharing our perspective, and helping someone else problem solve based on that information. Our personal experiences are often what we can talk most confidently about! For this reason, mentorship mode can feel really good and effective for the mentor. Having that mentor hat on can help the other person overcome a roadblock or know which next steps to take, while avoiding drastic errors that they wouldn’t have seen coming otherwise.

As a mentor, it’s your responsibility to give advice that’s current and sensitive to the changing dialog happening in our industry. Advice that might work for one person (“Be louder in meetings!” or “Ask your boss for a raise!”) may undermine someone else, because members of underrepresented groups are unconsciously assessed and treated differently. For example, research has shown that “when women are collaborative and communal, they are not perceived as competent—but when they emphasize their competence, they’re seen as cold and unlikable, in a classic ‘double bind’”.

If you are not a member of a marginalized group, and you have a mentee who is, please be a responsible mentor! Try to be aware of the way members of underrepresented groups are perceived, and the unconscious bias that might be at play in your mentee’s work environment. When you have your mentor hat on, do lots of gut checking to make sure that your advice is going to be helpful in practice for your mentee.

Mentoring is ideal when the mentee is new to their role or to the organization; they need to learn the ropes from someone who has firsthand experience. It’s also ideal when your teammate is working on a problem and has tried out a few different approaches, but still feels stumped; this is why practices like pair coding can help folks learn new things.

As mentors, we want our mentees to reach beyond us, because our mentees’ success is ultimately our success. Mentorship relationships evolve over time, because each party is growing. Imaginative, innovative ideas often come from people who have never seen a particular challenge before, so if your mentee comes up with a creative solution on their own that you wouldn’t have thought of, be excited for them—don’t just focus on the ways that you’ve done it or seen it done before.

Managers often default to mentoring mode because it feels like the fastest way to solve a problem, but it falls short in helping your teammate connect their own dots. For that, we’ll look to coaching.

Coaching

In mentoring mode, you’re focused on both the problem and the solution. You’ll share what you as the mentor would do or have done in this situation. This means you’re more focused on yourself, and less on the person who is sitting in front of you.

In coaching mode—an extremely powerful but often underutilized mode—you’re doing two primary things:

1. Asking open questions to help the other person explore more of the shape of the topic, rather than staying at the surface level.
2. Reflecting, which is like holding up a mirror for the other person and describing what you see or hear, or asking them to reflect for themselves.

These two tools will help you become your teammate’s fiercest champion.

Open Questions

“Closed” questions can only be answered with yes or no. Open questions often start with who, what, when, where, why, and how. But the best open questions are about the problem, not the solution. Questions that start with why tend to make the other person feel judged, and questions that start with how tend to go into problem solving mode—both of which we want to avoid while in coaching mode.

However, what questions can be authentically curious! When someone comes to you with a challenge, try asking questions like:

• What’s most important to you about it?
• What’s holding you back?
• What does success look like?

Let’s say my teammate comes to me and says they’re ready for a promotion. Open questions could help this teammate explore what this promotion means and demonstrate to me what introspection they’ve already done around it. Rather than telling them what I think is necessary for them to be promoted, I could instead open up this conversation by asking them:

• What would you be able to do in the new level that you can’t do in your current one?
• What skills are required in the new level? What are some ways that you’ve honed those skills?
• Who are the people already at that level that you want to emulate? What about them do you want to emulate?

Their answers would give me a place to start coaching. These questions might push my teammate to think more deeply about what this promotion means, rather than allowing them to stay surface level and believe that a promotion is about checking off a lot of boxes on a list. Their answers might also open my eyes to things that I hadn’t seen before, like a piece of work that my teammate had accomplished that made a huge impact. But most important, going into coaching mode would start a two-way conversation with this teammate, which would help make an otherwise tricky conversation feel more like a shared exploration.

Open questions, asked from a place of genuine curiosity, help people feel seen and heard. However, if the way you ask your questions comes across as judgy or like you’ve already made some assumptions, then your questions aren’t truly open (and your teammate can smell this on you!). Practice your intonation to make sure your open questions are actually curious and open.

By the way, forming lots of open questions (instead of problem solving questions, or giving advice) is tremendously hard for most people. Don’t worry if you don’t get the hang of it at first; it takes a lot of practice and intention over time to default to coaching mode rather than mentoring mode. I promise, it’s worth it.

Reflections

Just like open questions, reflections help the other person feel seen and heard, and to explore the topic more deeply.

It’s almost comical how rarely we get the sense that the person we’re talking to is actively listening to us, or focusing entirely on helping us connect our own dots. Help your teammates reflect by repeating back to them what you hear them say, as in:

• “What I’m hearing you say is that you’re frustrated with how this project is going. Is that right?”
• “What I know to be true about you is how deeply you care about your teammates’ feelings.”

In each of these examples, you are holding up a metaphorical mirror to your teammate, and helping them look into it. You can coach them to reflect, too:

• “How does this new architecture project map to your goals?”
• “Let’s reflect on where you were this time last year and how far you’ve come.”

Occasionally, you might get a reflection wrong; this gives the other person an opportunity to realize something new about their topic, like the words they’re choosing aren’t quite right, or there’s another underlying issue that should be explored. So don’t be worried about giving a bad reflection; reflecting back what you’re hearing will still help your teammate.

The act of reflecting can help the other person do a gut check to make sure they’re approaching their topic holistically. Sometimes the act of reflection forces (encourages?) the other person to do some really hard work: introspection. Introspection creates an opportunity for them to realize new aspects of the problem, options they can choose from, or deeper meanings that hadn’t occurred to them before—which often ends up being a nice shortcut to the right solution. Or, even better, the right problem statement.

When you have your coaching hat on, you don’t need to have all the answers, or even fully understand the problem that your teammate is wrestling with; you’re just there as a mirror and as a question-asker, to help prompt the other person to think deeply and come to some new, interesting conclusions. Frankly, it may not feel all that effective when you’re in coaching mode, but I promise, coaching can generate way more growth for that other person than just giving them advice or sharing your perspective.

Choose coaching when you’re looking to help someone (especially an emerging leader) hone their strategic thinking skills, grow their leadership aptitude, and craft their own path forward. Coaching mode is all about helping your teammate develop their own brain wrinkles, rather than telling them how you would do something. The introspection and creativity it inspires create deeper and longer-lasting growth.

Sponsoring

While you wear the mentoring and coaching hats around your teammates, the sponsor hat is more often worn when they’re not around, like when you’re in a 1:1 with your manager, a sprint planning meeting, or another environment where someone’s work might be recognized. You might hear about an upcoming project to acquire a new audience and recommend that a budding user researcher take it on, or you’ll suggest to an All Hands meeting organizer that a junior designer should give a talk about a new pattern they’ve introduced to the style guide.

Sponsorship is all about feeling on the hook for getting someone to the next level. As someone’s sponsor, you’ll put their name in the ring for opportunities that will get them the experience and visibility necessary to grow in their role and at the organization. You will put your personal reputation on the line on behalf of the person you’re sponsoring, to help get them visible and developmental assignments. It’s a powerful tool, and the one most effective at helping someone get to the next level (way more so than mentoring or coaching!).

The Center for Talent Innovation routinely measures the career benefits of sponsorship (PDF). Their studies have found that when someone has a sponsor, they are way more likely to have access to career-launching work. They’re also more likely to take actions that lead to even more growth and opportunities, like asking their manager for a stretch assignment or a raise.

When you’re in sponsorship mode, think about the different opportunities you have to offer up someone’s name. This might look like:

• giving visible/public recognition (company “shout outs,” having them present a project demo, thanking them in a launch email, giving someone’s manager feedback about their good work);
• assigning stretch tasks and projects that are just beyond their current skill set, to help them grow and have supporting evidence for a future promotion; or
• opening the door for them to write blog posts, give company or conference talks, or contribute open-source work.

Remember that members of underrepresented groups are typically over-mentored, but under-sponsored. These individuals get lots of advice (often unsolicited), coffee outings, and offers to teach them new skills. But it’s much rarer for them to see support that looks like sponsorship.

This isn’t because sponsors intentionally ignore marginalized folks, but because of in-group bias. Because of how our brains (and social networks) work, the people we’re closest to tend to look mostly like us—and we draw from that same pool when we nominate people for projects, for promotions, and for hires. Until I started learning about bias in the workplace, most of the people I sponsored were white, cisgender women, like myself. Since then, I’ve actively worked to sponsor people of color and nonbinary people. It takes effort and intention to combat our default behaviors—but I know you can do it!

Take a look at the daily communications you participate in: your work chat logs, the conversations you have with others, the process for figuring out who should fix a bug or work on a new project, and the processes for making your teams’ work visible (like an architecture review, code review, launch calendar, etc.). You’ll be surprised how many moments there are to sponsor someone throughout an average day. Please put in the time and intention to ensure that you’re sponsoring members of underrepresented groups, too.

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