Now, imagine that you’re a managing director at a large corporation. You’re going about your normal business day when… BAM! The corporate website goes down; you learn that the call center is being flooded by panicked customers; and members of the media are calling you to comment on the surge of negative comments on your Twitter page. What should you do first? How are you going to respond to this crisis and return your business’ functions to their normal state?

These and other questions were running through my clients’ minds. They wanted to investigate how they might be affected by a hypothetical cybercrime, and they were asking questions. “What if we lost electricity?” “What if we lost control of the website or our mobile apps?” “What if sensitive customer data were stolen?” “What would we do?” Instead of waiting for a crisis to occur so that they could learn from the school of hard knocks, they decided to simulate a handful of devastating “What ifs” ahead of time in the form of a game.

Fortunately for my client, games that simulate business processes have been around for a while — since the 1950s, in fact. Business-simulation games enable facilities managers, operations directors, IT managers and even business students to explore a potential crisis, test their response, identify intelligence gaps and try out recovery plans before facing the crisis — whatever it might be — in real life.

While these games tackle serious problems, they are fun and thought-provoking and can generate a great deal of insight in just a few hours of play. Let’s look at a few games that enable organizations to enter and play inside possible futures.

Table-talk role-playing games are a form of role-playing game. Each player takes on the role of a character whose choices shape the direction and outcome of the game. Players determine the actions of their characters, describe their characters’ actions through speech and have the freedom to improvise as the game progresses.
Business war games simulate the moves and counter-moves in a commercial setting. Unlike military war games or fantasy war games, which can take place hundreds of years in the past, business war games are usually set in the present.

Crisis-management drills have teams and participants practice aspects of an emergency response plan and prepare them for more extensive exercises — or the real event. Schools, hospitals and businesses generally conduct evacuation, shelter-in-place and lockdown drills with a large number of participants (including employees, students, staff, healthcare providers, firefighters and law enforcers) to demonstrate the steps they should take in an emergency.

Scenario-based planning games allow organizations to test out and make flexible long-term plans. A game requires participants to act out possible yet very uncomfortable scenarios in today’s world. The plausible outcomes challenge assumptions, uncover blind spots and align people around common goals. A scenario-based planning game was used by my client to explore a hypothetical cybercrime event.

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The edge case is this: If a browser doesn’t natively support picture or srcset and has JavaScript turned off, then you’ll get a frowny face. I can already feel your eyes rolling, but knowing the limitations of a system is important before you rely on it on a large scale. If a user were to come across a Picturefill’ed image in an unsupported browser with JavaScript turned off, they would see the image’s alt text — a nice little way to reinforce the importance of descriptive and meaningful alt text, isn’t it?

Alternative text is the fallback because the previous

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If this is the first test on the project, it will probably reveal deeper issues. Much deeper than an easy to fix button miss-alignment or a typo.We’ve conducted quite a few preflight usability studies and many times we discovered a core problem. On one occasion, the registration steps hadn’t been ordered in a sequence that had been logical to the user. On another, the touch-screen equivalent to drag ‘n’ drop with a mouse was missing.

Fixing a broken experience that’s discovered only a day or two before launch is usually postponed until the next release. Many more times still, there’s no clear roadmap after the project delivery, so the issue is never repaired. The solution? Test your designs early.

With both picture and srcset HTML syntaxes seeming like too much effort in the wrong places, we looked for a simpler solution. We wanted to be able to add a single image path and let the CSS, JavaScript and PHP deal with serving the correct image — instead of the HTML, which should simply have the correct information in place.

At the time of developing the website, no obvious solution matched our requirements. Most centered on emulating picture or srcset, which we had already determined weren’t right for our needs.

The Etch website is very image-heavy, which would make manually resizing each image a lengthy process and prone to human error. Even running an automated Photoshop script was deemed to require too much maintenance.
Our solution was to find the display width of the image with JavaScript at page-loading time, and then pass the src and width to a PHP script, which would resize and cache the images on the fly before inserting them back into the DOM.

We’ll look at an abstracted example of the code, written in HTML, JavaScript, PHP and LESS. You can find a working demo on my website. If you’d like to grab the files for the demo, they can be found on GitHub.

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If this is the first test on the project, it will probably reveal deeper issues. Much deeper than an easy to fix button miss-alignment or a typo.We’ve conducted quite a few preflight usability studies and many times we discovered a core problem. On one occasion, the registration steps hadn’t been ordered in a sequence that had been logical to the user. On another, the touch-screen equivalent to drag ‘n’ drop with a mouse was missing.

Fixing a broken experience that’s discovered only a day or two before launch is usually postponed until the next release. Many more times still, there’s no clear roadmap after the project delivery, so the issue is never repaired. The solution? Test your designs early.

With both picture and srcset HTML syntaxes seeming like too much effort in the wrong places, we looked for a simpler solution. We wanted to be able to add a single image path and let the CSS, JavaScript and PHP deal with serving the correct image — instead of the HTML, which should simply have the correct information in place.

At the time of developing the website, no obvious solution matched our requirements. Most centered on emulating picture or srcset, which we had already determined weren’t right for our needs.

The Etch website is very image-heavy, which would make manually resizing each image a lengthy process and prone to human error. Even running an automated Photoshop script was deemed to require too much maintenance.
Our solution was to find the display width of the image with JavaScript at page-loading time, and then pass the src and width to a PHP script, which would resize and cache the images on the fly before inserting them back into the DOM.

We’ll look at an abstracted example of the code, written in HTML, JavaScript, PHP and LESS. You can find a working demo on my website. If you’d like to grab the files for the demo, they can be found on GitHub.

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I regularly conduct studies for executives who are responsible for business strategy, product planning, operations, sales and marketing, and professional education. At the conclusion of each study, my challenge is to create a final deliverable tailored to a specialized audience.

In the past, my user-research deliverables have consisted of short videos, concept feedback, games, workshops, competitor audits, strategy documents, customer journey maps and very detailed personas. It was only recently that I thought a comic book would make a fine user-research deliverable. Sure, it might seem strange to create a comic book in a staid corporate environment, where they are thought of primarily as light entertainment. But it’s not strange at all.

In 2006, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón wrote The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation to illustrate, “word for word the original report… even including the Commission’s final report card.” In October 2011, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse” to explain how to act in the face of a major “plague.” And in 2012, Kevin Cheng applied methods of sequential art to illustrate the process of planning for new technology products in See What I Mean.

In this article, I will discuss why I created a comic book to help a group of executives explore a business scenario that has multifaceted problems and is set in an imaginary future. I will also talk about how the comic book helped the executives experience the strategic and emotional impact of the problems and how it helped them noodle over possible solutions. Finally, I’ll provide some guidelines for UX designers who would like to use comics or sequential art to illustrate open-ended business scenarios.

Let’s start with a thorny concept most of us have heard of: cybercrime. It’s a mature industry with an extensive professionally run underground economy. As you might know, the cybercrime economy is based on the development and distribution of sophisticated tools to carry out large-scale fraud attacks, consumer-data breaches and politically motivated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks on financial institutions, retailers and governmental agencies result in the loss of billions of dollars every year.

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The difference between a CSS transition and a responsive image is, of course, how they degrade. If a CSS transition doesn’t work, who really cares? Your interface might be a little jumpy, but the experience as a whole won’t really suffer because your users will still be able to accomplish their goal and consume the content they need.

That really isn’t the case with images. How does a new image tag degrade? The img tag is so widely accepted that I couldn’t even find when the W3C recommended it as a standard, other than a small reference in the HTML 4.01 specification. Replacing or even expanding on the img tag would be like telling Frank Sinatra to wear a baseball cap instead of a fedora — you’ll get some pushback.

As responsive design grew in popularity and as the media through which users consume information became uncontrollable, we slowly realized that img by itself wasn’t going to cut the mustard. We started asking questions like, “What screen size is the user on?” and “What’s the pixel density of the screen?” These questions fuelled our image techniques until we realized that screen size and pixel density have absolutely no relationship to the amount of bandwidth available to serve up a huge high-definition image.

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