90s pop culture is a hella dope way to stay motivated

The AI threat. Ongoing industry layoffs. Constant requests for Figma edit access. The enduring popularity of content-last design.

Is it any wonder that earlier this year I hit a wall with designing content? Even worse, when I went looking for inspiration, the usual suspects (blog posts, newsletters, LinkedIn) had lost their zing. So what to do?

If you’re a Gen-X weirdo like me, you turn to the catchphrases, song lyrics, and movie dialogue that have been living in your head rent-free for decades. And, as it turns out, some of my favourite 90s pop culture moments are quite relevant to content design, when viewed from a suitable angle.

That gum you like

Let’s start with impossibly handsome FBI Agent Dale Cooper, from the TV show Twin Peaks. You may know him better as Kyle MacLachlan. As Cooper tells Sheriff Truman: “I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it. Don’t wait for it. Just let it happen.”

So how does this apply to content design? Well, the work is challenging. The environment chaotic. Many content designers have to justify their existence on a daily, weekly, or hourly basis. The only way to survive is by treating yourself as often as possible. Even if it’s just a cup of damn fine coffee.

This idea is so powerful that it appeared decades later on the show Parks & Recreation, condensed to “Treat yo self.” In that case, it was an annual holiday, not a daily ritual. But still.

Heavy bricks

Next up is rock band L7. In “Pretend We’re Dead,” from the 1992 album Bricks are Heavy, Donita Sparks sings “They can’t hear a word we’ve said / When we pretend that we’re dead.”

In other words: Don’t give up. Don’t go silent. It can be easy for content designers to get frustrated and play dead. But we don’t win that way.

All you need is Love

Courtney Love, lead singer of the band Hole, gave us this pithy but profound insight: “I fake it so real, I am beyond fake.”

That of course is from the song Doll Parts, which appears on the 1994 album Live Through This. And unfortunately, this one is relevant because of the continued popularity of imposter syndrome. But it’s critical we minimize those imposter vibes.

For example: Every single one of us is trained on untold pages of text from magazines, books, and blogs. That means content designers are the original large language models. We have nothing to fear from AI.

Final thought: as satirical punk website The Hard Times reminds us, Ms. Love has not always had an easy time of things. I’m not here to apologize for everything or everyone, but clearly mistakes were made. So let’s cut her some slack, please and thank you.

Broke the first rule

Switching gears, we have Fight Club’s Tyler Durden. As Tyler puts it, “Stop trying to control everything and just let go!”

So yes, okay, a few paragraphs ago I told you not to play dead. But it’s also important to pick your battles. It feels really good to stop caring about something that was never your problem to begin with.

This was not the only 90s film to make this style of observation. As convenience store employee Dante Hicks in Clerks puts it: “A little word of advice. Sometimes you got to let those hard-to-reach chips go.”

Granted, he says that to a customer who got their hand stuck in a can of Pringles. But still.

Get a haircut

Let’s not forget about indie rock band Pavement. To quote Logan Hill, writing in Esquire, “Gen X — a term that’s still most accurate when applied to the sort of person who has strong opinions about Pavement.”

Guilty as charged.

“Is it a crisis or a boring change?” That’s from their song “Gold Soundz,” which appears on the 1994 album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.

These 8 magic words will allow you to take a step back and carefully assess most work situations — and most life situations too. (I speak from personal experience here).

Spoiler alert: 95% of the time it’s a boring change. Sorry, but it’s true.

Rapid transit

And last, but certainly not least, we have Homer Simpson. To paraphrase lawyer Lionel Hutz, Homer is “the greatest hero in American history.”

In Season 8 of The Simpsons, we find Homer chatting with his co-workers Lenny and Carl: “I saw this in a movie about a bus that had to speed around the city, keeping its speed over fifty, and if its speed dropped, the bus would explode! I think it was called ‘The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down.’”

Every single content designer reading this article has dealt with a ridiculous naming challenge. Usually involving someone very important who insists that the new product should be called the equivalent of “the bus that couldn’t slow down.”

And while we can’t win every naming battle, it’s important to make sure that your company avoids as many terrible names as possible. Because as content strategist Chappell Ellison recently noted on LinkedIn, inscrutable nomenclature remains incredibly popular in the tech world:

• GPT-4o
• o3
• o4-mini
• o4-mini-high
• o4-mini-high-that-can’t-slow-down

Okay, that last one is fake. But just barely.

Say the right things when electioneering

Finding an appropriate koan is not just a way for individuals to get out of a rut. It can also help your entire content design team improve their working lives.

Earlier this year, I led a vision-setting exercise with the 1Password content design team. But 5 minutes into the session, despite a lovely FigJam template, it was clear my approach wasn’t working. So I did something bold.

I told the team my template wasn’t working.

And then, in the moment, I came up with a new approach. I asked everyone to think of an aspect of content design that they were passionate about. Something so important that they were willing to repeat it for the rest of the year to the larger design team. That worked. We came up with some fantastic vision statements in that session. Although we ended up calling them t-shirt slogans instead.

Speaking of slogans, let’s recap:

• Whenever possible, give yourself a present
• Don’t play dead, but don’t fight every battle to the death either
• Content designers are the original large language models
• It’s okay to let a few hard-to-reach Pringles go
• It’s probably a boring change, not a crisis
• Stakeholders are bad at naming things

Hopefully I’ve inspired you to go out and find your own unique bits of inspiration, from whatever generation best speaks to you.

This blog post is based on a talk I gave at Button 2025

A few weeks ago I was asked to do some last minute copywriting on a project. What was really needed was content design, but it was clear that meaningful sense-making or concept definition wasn’t going to happen. So, my choices were: spend my energy complaining or make things slightly better.

I opted for the latter.

Calmly acknowledging reality and being clear on the impact I could have was my way of mindboxing the project. You’re probably familiar with timeboxing — spending a fixed amount of time on something. Mindboxing is about investing the right amount of psychological or emotional energy into a project. Now, this part is important: mindboxing isn’t passive apathy. It’s a strategic way of tackling certain kinds of content design requests to avoid burnout and frustration.

For the copywriting-that-should-have-been-content-design project, mindboxing meant that I spent most of my effort on rationale. Here’s the NDA version of what I put into Figma:

• A lesson I learned the hard way at another company: everything in one place isn’t a value proposition, it’s a junk drawer. Everything in one place forces the user to imagine how their life will be better.
• We need to convince people who are busy, tired, or skeptical that the effort required to use this new feature will be worth it. To do that, we need to help people imagine how their life will be better if they start using it.
• We need to be concrete and specific whenever possible (llama, chinchilla, wolf). This helps to expand people’s understanding of the feature and makes them more likely to try it out.
• Whenever possible, centre the messaging around the user (“your llamas” “your partner’s chinchilla” “you can find wolves right away.”)
• Each of the tiles needs to be able to stand on their own and convince a user to take action. So we can’t just say “tell us about your llama, chinchilla, and wolf.” Those labels assume the user already understands the value of the feature. And they don’t — yet.

I knew my last minute copywriting wouldn’t solve many of these key product challenges. So I used my rationale to highlight the underlying problems so that they’d be addressed after the deadline was met. This made me feel useful, which is a super nice side effect of mindboxing.

Having more confidence in myself and my work has also made it easier to mindbox. I know I’m not the only content designer in this position — Jason Fox’s article about the limits of wording is a great example of confidence in action: “Words should describe reality, not bear the burden of making something broken appear less broken. If you find yourself toiling over a torturous UX writing task, chances are your words are overburdened.” Knowing what my skills can and cannot accomplish makes it easier for me to set boundaries and act accordingly.

Now, an important disclaimer: mindboxing works best on consulting projects like office hours. On embedded projects, it’s critical that content designers feel empowered to shape the process and the end result. You should invest more of yourself into work you have more control over. But keeping these two scenarios separate is something I’ve struggled with in the past, creating the content design equivalent of the sunk cost fallacy. And if you sink too much time and passion into the wrong thing, you’ll get sunk.

Last week I consulted on a short flow with yet another tight deadline. Instead of investing my heart and soul into the “perfect” solution, I made incremental improvements over a couple of quick collaboration sessions. This combination of timeboxing and mindboxing created space for the rest of the team to build upon my suggestions and fill in the gaps. Instead of acting like a hero trying to save the day at the eleventh hour, I was a mix of content designer and catalyst. Yes, I made the flow better, but the entire team made the flow a lot better.

There are, of course, limits to this approach. As Erica Jorgensen notes in her great article 11 key content design considerations, “Content design is complicated. It’s nuanced. And it’s often quite time-consuming. It’s not at all something that you want to rush.” In an ideal world, content designers wouldn’t have to rush, but that isn’t always possible.

Meanwhile, in her amazing Button 2022 talk “What is the value of content design” Relly Annett-Baker argues that word people are not “bad decisions paramedics” and boldly proclaims “death to office hours.” I think she’s right, but imperfect content design office hours can be useful if you’re clear on their limitations. Mindboxing my office hours means I act like a pragmatist instead of a paramedic, which is healthy and sustainable. As the old cliche goes, “we’re not saving lives here.” But learning how to invest the right amount of me into smaller projects is a real lifesaver.

Last April, I was skimming my Medium Weekly Digest when I spotted a familiar name: Scott-Ryan Abt.

I did a double, maybe even triple-take. I know that guy. I went to high school with him. What’s he doing in my Gmail?

And so began a lopsided reunion. After a quick back and forth in the comments for an article about late 90s music (Me: “You’re great with words!” Him: “Thanks, old friend.”) I now silently read his articles at lunchtime. Sometimes I applaud/clap but usually I don’t, since that interaction pattern has always felt a bit weird to me.

Because Scott-Ryan is trying to make money from his Medium adventure, and because I used to be a freelance journalist, I find what he’s doing quite fascinating. Most of the time I read his articles because they’re great (his batting average is quite good, especially given the frequency of his posts). Other times I read them because I can still hear his voice, his delivery, his inflections after all these years. He’s changed of course, but not so much that I can’t hear the younger Scott-Ryan peeking through now and then.

Finally, I read his articles because they provide a small window into what it’s like to try and become financially successful on Medium. (The short answer: next to impossible).

In late November, after lurking for many months, Scott-Ryan’s article about “Never Let Me Down Again” by Depeche Mode flipped a switch in my brain. It’s a song I’ve never really thought much about, but after reading the article, I was in a slightly new and different place. Which is always a very nice place to be indeed.

So I used Ko-fi to buy Scott-Ryan a coffee. In the message box, I instinctively wrote an inside joke from junior high science class: “Do not use the coarse adjustment under the high power!” I could have written something sane or useful or vaguely adult-ish. But no, I wrote something that only a handful of people on planet earth would find vaguely amusing.

A few hours later, Scott-Ryan replied, “Do I have to SPOONfeed you?” Explaining this call and response would take forever and kill the frog. But suffice to say, it was the best $3USD I spent in 2022.

Years and years and years ago, in 1998, I was doing research into Douglas Coupland. His novel Girlfriend in a Coma had just been published, and I managed to find a rickety GeoCities site with links to dozens of interviews. I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but a former colleague said, “The best thing about a new novel from Douglas is that I get to spend a few uninterrupted hours inside his head.”

Although a bit hagiographic, that quote has always stuck with me. I think about it sometimes when I read an article from Scott-Ryan. How often do you get a chance to slip inside the eye of someone’s mind? Especially for a sustained period of time? Until Scott-Ryan decides to slow down or do something else, I get to spend at least 10 minutes each week inside his head.

I can think of far worse places to visit.

The Endless Toil of the Puppeteer

The eager young puppeteer decided to attend puppet school, as there was no better place for her. She was shy, content to disappear behind a black curtain, letting her puppets express the difficult feelings she avoided. One day, wandering the campus in search of nothing in particular, she found the smoke pit where many of her fellow students took refuge. Along the edge of the uneven circle was a long-haired student she’d never seen before. “Would you like a smoke?” he asked, and extended a red-paper cigarette. She politely declined and stood awkwardly, as was her want. She glanced down and noticed a dull red, pulsing glow coming from the long-haired student’s shoes. ̶O̶n̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶s̶,̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶e̶v̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶l̶o̶o̶k̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶t̶ ̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶f̶e̶e̶t̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶s̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶a̶w̶ ̶a̶ ̶h̶o̶r̶s̶e̶’̶s̶ ̶f̶o̶o̶t̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶’̶s̶ ̶f̶o̶o̶t̶,̶ ̶s̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶d̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶h̶i̶m̶.

“What do you think of my shoes?” he asked. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re the devil,” she said. His face grew serious, and he gestured toward a nearby awning. The puppeteer, curious and fearful both, followed. “Let us say, for the sake of argument, that I am who you say I am,” he said. “Is there anything you would trade your soul for?” The puppeteer laughed for a moment. When the long-haired student did not, she paused to consider. “Okay,” she said. “I want to be twice as good as the puppeteers in my class.”

“Are you sure?” asked the long-haired devil. “Yes,” she said. ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶i̶l̶ ̶s̶a̶i̶d̶,̶ ̶“̶B̶u̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶I̶ ̶m̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶t̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶,̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶m̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶h̶,̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶b̶,̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶r̶i̶m̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶s̶e̶l̶f̶,̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶c̶u̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶h̶a̶i̶r̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶n̶a̶i̶l̶s̶,̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶w̶i̶p̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶e̶y̶e̶s̶.̶” They completed the necessary paperwork and shook hands.

The next morning the puppeteer awoke, feeling heavier. She rolled over and shrieked twice — first in terror and then in joy. She now had four arms, not two. And indeed, for many months, it was as she had wished. Her puppet shows became famous, and crowds grew in size, making rowdy, appreciative noises. But soon enough, scheming theatre owners let greed pollute their minds. ̶C̶u̶t̶ ̶o̶p̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶d̶ ̶b̶i̶r̶d̶,̶ ̶t̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶r̶t̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶k̶e̶e̶p̶ ̶i̶t̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶i̶e̶c̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶g̶o̶l̶d̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶p̶i̶l̶l̶o̶w̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶r̶i̶s̶e̶.̶ ̶I̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶i̶r̶d̶’̶s̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶r̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶b̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶g̶o̶o̶d̶ ̶l̶u̶c̶k̶. Why pay two puppeteers when a single puppeteer could do the same job? Too shy to ask for double the wages, the puppeteer became twice as tired, trapped in a world of her own making. And although she never saw him again, it was clear that the devil would always have a sooty hand on her back, pulling the strings that truly mattered.

The Porcelain Prison

̶A̶s̶ ̶s̶o̶o̶n̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶s̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶,̶ ̶s̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶e̶f̶t̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶k̶s̶h̶o̶p̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶w̶a̶n̶d̶e̶r̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶w̶a̶y̶,̶ ̶o̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶h̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶d̶a̶l̶e̶,̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶i̶m̶e̶s̶ ̶h̶i̶t̶h̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶i̶m̶e̶s̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶t̶h̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶. One day, walking in the forest on a fine spring day, the artist came across a fox. Its paw trapped beneath a large stone, the fox looked up with sad eyes. Taking pity, the artist carefully pushed the stone aside. “Thank you,” said the fox, rubbing its paw. “For your kindness I can grant you one wish.” The artist thought carefully. “I am but a humble pottery maker. I spend my days arguing with clay and kiln and often lose the battle. Give me the greatest skills in the land.” “And so it shall be,” said the fox, and he quickly disappeared into the forest with a sly grin. ̶A̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶s̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶p̶o̶k̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶d̶s̶,̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶r̶t̶ ̶g̶r̶e̶w̶ ̶l̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶i̶n̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶m̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶w̶i̶s̶h̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶g̶r̶a̶n̶t̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶s̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶t̶u̶r̶n̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶h̶o̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶f̶e̶e̶l̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶g̶l̶a̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶f̶o̶r̶t̶e̶d̶.

The next day the artist discovered that the clay obeyed her every command and she could control the chaos of her fiery kiln like an orchestra conductor. She abandoned her usual flower vases and water jugs to create beautiful creatures. A little boy with jaunty hair. Three friends enjoying tea together. A prince in the forest. ̶T̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶o̶f̶t̶e̶n̶ ̶r̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶a̶l̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶g̶a̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶d̶ ̶r̶e̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶r̶r̶i̶e̶s̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶a̶s̶t̶s̶ ̶d̶i̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶h̶a̶r̶m̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶c̶a̶m̶e̶ ̶c̶l̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ ̶t̶r̶u̶s̶t̶f̶u̶l̶l̶y̶. But the details of each were so gossamer fine and delicate that the artist began to fret about their safety. After many sleepless nights, she decided to build them cages. Visitors to her studio grew in number, but they were disappointed that they could not fully appreciate the sophistication and subtlety of her creations through the thick bars of the cages. Eventually the visitors dwindled, which in truth suited the artist, who preferred to focus on her newfound abilities.

But unbeknownst to the artist, her creations could only stay vibrant with frequent viewings. Bit by bit, the ignored porcelain figurines grew unhappy and eventually tried to flee. The little boy with jaunty hair grew modest wings above each ear. The friends enjoying tea melted fine silver strands into ropes to connect their minds together, in order to better plan an escape. Only the prince in the forest realized the truth of their entrapment, and decided to crawl into an empty tree trunk so that the memory of his handsome face would be preserved forever. ̶I̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶l̶o̶n̶g̶ ̶b̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶u̶n̶e̶r̶a̶l̶ ̶b̶i̶r̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶g̶a̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶c̶r̶y̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶n̶i̶g̶h̶t̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶d̶b̶r̶e̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶c̶o̶l̶l̶e̶c̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶l̶i̶t̶t̶l̶e̶ ̶b̶r̶a̶n̶c̶h̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶v̶e̶s̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶ ̶f̶u̶n̶e̶r̶a̶l̶ ̶w̶r̶e̶a̶t̶h̶.̶ ̶S̶o̶o̶n̶ ̶a̶f̶t̶e̶r̶w̶a̶r̶d̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶i̶l̶d̶ ̶l̶a̶y̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶i̶e̶r̶.

(Andy Healey co-authored this post, based on our 2022 Confab talk.)

Last summer, Andy Healey and I (Ryan Bigge) came across a Medium article that spoke to our (collective) souls: Slack is no place to write the Great American Novel. As author Kieran Snyder notes, “One of the most fundamental mistakes people make when sharing written information is choosing the wrong medium to share it.” In other words, your co-workers might appreciate a long email about a project update, but their eyes will glaze over at the same amount of content in Slack.

If you’re content designers like us, advice about where and how to communicate might seem obvious. But for many other UX people, the opposite is true. Pouring a novel’s worth of words into Slack is a prime example of how poor storytelling erodes the impact of your UX team. Another, harder to ignore example is a typical design review:

Forget about a smooth narrative arc. Too many design reviews are a drunken scribble of missing context, weird tangents, and byzantine plot points. Which means your team gets unhelpful feedback on the wrong things.

Sheer walls of text on Slack. Demolition derby design reviews. Taking inspiration from Lisa Maria Marquis, we call these everyday storytelling opportunities — moments where spending a small amount of time on narrative structure can pay huge dividends. And if your UX org isn’t great at everyday storytelling, it’s costing your company thousands of dollars every month.

That’s right: thousands.

Want to stop wasting money and make stakeholders happy? Keep reading.

We tell ourselves stories in order to get promoted

In October of 2019, Ryan was asked to oversee a new project at Shopify. The new thing was an extension of Shopify Capital, a service that lent money to merchants based on an algorithm. The idea went like this: what if Shopify lent brand new merchants $200 even if there wasn’t enough data to give them a traditional Shopify Capital loan? Turns out this wasn’t a terrible idea:

The final product used words, glorious words, to drive the user experience. But, as important, if not more important, everyday storytelling skills shaped those words into a successful project and launch. Skills such as:

• Giving the product a non-stupid name
• Leading content-first design reviews
• Tailoring project updates to suit the target audience

Naming

Instead of putting a bunch of people in a room and letting them shout about their favourite name, Ryan tried a different approach. He sent out a survey to help the team to align on what they wanted the product name to accomplish, along with voting on descriptive and evocative names. As it turned out, no one could agree on a cool, evocative name. This probably happens more often than people realize, but usually there isn’t a pie chart to prove it:

Luckily, the team was able to align on a descriptive name — “starter loans.” (This was especially good news, since Shopify’s naming guidelines also recommend descriptive over evocative). Why put all this effort into naming a product, especially since it was an experiment? Well, because if you’re not careful, it’s really easy to pick a bad name. Satellite mode in Google Maps was almost called Bird Mode.

As for people chips, well that’s a real actual thing.

Of course, not every product or feature needs a name. But when it does, it’s important to do it well. As you’ll see in a few paragraphs (aka foreshadowing) there were other, unanticipated benefits of good naming.

Content-first design reviews

Since starter loans was very content-driven, it made a lot of sense for the person driving the project to present updates during weekly design reviews. Ryan wasn’t perfect at this right away, probably because content designers are rarely asked to present project work. But after one or two meandering updates, he figured how to control, or at least steer, the narrative. This meant design reviews focused equally on visual and content fidelity. In this way, the refinement of content moved in lockstep with visual design. That meant content challenges weren’t left to the end, which improved the quality of content early and often

Bespoke project updates

Ryan was also able to tailor project updates based on channel, audience, and frequency. Weekly design reviews required less context as the project went on, while team-wide weekly updates via Slack were short bursts focused on how design milestones linked to product and engineering efforts. Once a month, the general manager was given a high-level update. Finally, after starter loans launched, Ryan gave a detailed recap to the entire Shopify Capital team at a live-streamed event. Each of these updates varied in length, context, and central focus, but they all leveraged everyday storytelling techniques to ensure the intended audience got what they needed.

As it turned out, everyday storytelling wasn’t just great for internal communications. When you have a clear, descriptive name for a product that has a clear and compelling story, you can compress that story down into five emojis.

The naming work Ryan did made it easier for the social media team to tell the starter loan story on a very different platform. And all that storytelling paid off — literally — with his first year end bonus. While that shouldn’t be the only success metric, storytelling for the win! As essayist Joan Didion famously wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Well, we also tell ourselves stories in order to get promoted.

What’s the story, morning glory?

After Andy went from content designer to UX lead at Shopify, he gained a new perspective on the power of narrative. Last year, two designers that reported to him were getting ready to present at Fresheyes, a low-key weekly meeting for peer feedback. To protect their identities, let’s call them Designer1 and DesignerB. The day before Fresheyes, Andy asked them both if they wanted any support. DesignerB said yes, so Andy worked through a story template with them.

The result? Designer1 went first, showed some work in Figma, got asked lots of clarifying questions, and received some actionable and non-actionable feedback. Standard stuff. Then it was DesignerB’s turn. They started by telling everyone what they were going to share:

• I’ll begin by giving you some context on what we’ll be looking at today
• Then I’ll tell you the kind of feedback I need from you
• The problem we’re solving
• What the current experience is, and why we’re changing it
• Then I’ll walk you through what we’ve been working on
• I’ll explain how we’ll measure if it’s successful or not
• And finally I’ll talk a bit about the next steps

Clear, concise, and engaging. The story they told answered 50% of the questions they would have been asked. This meant more time to gather impactful feedback. That session had a profound impact on the team and set a storytelling bar that inspired other designers to try and match. Afterwards, Designer1 told Andy that they’d felt like a novice designer presenting their work. Although Designer1 had done just fine, DesignerB demonstrated how a little bit of everyday storytelling goes a long way.

Good storytellers can break down complex problems in ways that make people care and understand. A clear story makes it easy for stakeholders to give useful feedback. Which in turn will help your team build a better product and to get it to market more quickly. Good storytellers also anticipate the questions their audience might ask:

• Why are you showing me this?
• What do you need from me?
• How will we know if it works?

And they tweak their presentation based on audience: other designers versus stakeholders versus leadership — like Ryan did with starter loans. Which means fewer meetings and better results.

Storytelling maths

Now, as Ryan once said: “It’s hard to measure the value of good storytelling, but it’s very easy to show the cost of bad storytelling.” So let’s measure the easiest to evaluate factor, cost to time, by roughly calculating the cost of a design review. To keep it simple we’ll assume your designer has a salary of $100,000 per year, which is about $50 per hour. Add in a product manager, along with two stakeholders who earn a bit more (but are definitely worth it, wink-wink) and you’re at $300 for the review.

After the meeting, your designer needs a full day to implement feedback. That’s another 8 hours, another $400. And since most projects require at least 4 design reviews to get sign off, you’re looking at a total cost of $2,800. Now, this is simplified example — many design reviews will have a content designer present, maybe a UX researcher or an engineer. And it assumes your company has a predictable and reliable digital delivery process that everyone has aligned on.

But when process goes awry, the potential for wasted money is shocking:

• additional 6 week sprint needed to get approval ($)
• team of engineers blocked for a week and unable to progress ($$)
• designer getting difficult feedback and deciding to leave the company ($$$)
• a new feature is too slow to market and customers move to a competitor ($$$$)

These kind of things can make or break an organization. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s go back to the original example of 4 design reviews with a total cost of $2,800 — but at a company that has invested in everyday storytelling.

In this review, the designer uses Andy’s template and the people in the room provide focussed and actionable feedback. It still takes a day to implement that feedback, but everyone is aligned on what the next steps are. The team makes great progress. Instead of 4 reviews, they might only need 2.

Why? Well, the key problems are addressed directly rather than getting lost in the backwards and forwards of stakeholder hell. There’s no need to go back to the drawing board after several reviews as happens to some teams, because communication, and so the project moves forward faster. The cost just dropped 50% to $1,400. Cha-ching!

Plus you’ve established trust and credibility, so future reviews will go easier. Multiply those savings across the entire UX org, and you’ll quickly see that storytelling is a worthwhile investment.

How to Nurture Everyday Storytelling

By now you must be unbelievably excited about everyday storytelling. Hooray! Here are four things you can do to promote the habit at your company:

• normalize it
• practice it
• scale it
• enjoy it

Normalize it

When the Shopify UX blog went quiet in early 2018, Ryan decided to normalize storytelling by organizing a Hack Days writing marathon. He created some resources and offered typewriter support to anyone who wanted it. And in only two days, participants wrote 21 blog posts! Some were first drafts, but many were final, and all of them ended up getting published eventually. What better way to cultivate storytelling than by encouraging people to tell stories that matter to them?

Of course, your company might not offer Hack Days — so writing a blog post could be one of your annual craft goals instead. Heck, maybe your company doesn’t have a blog. In which case, you can fake it with an email newsletter sent to co-workers. Or just create a Google doc and share it. Or publish your NDA-approved thoughts publicly on Medium, like this.

Practice it

Shopify’s content design team had a variety of opportunities to practice everyday storytelling, from safe to intimating. Content critiques. Bi-weekly content design meetups. Company-wide Town Halls. Internal and external conferences. And any one of those venues might eventually inspire a blog post, like Gillian Massel’s article about content hierarchy.

There are also less obvious opportunities. Writing or editing a project brief. App release notes. Really, whenever you create or share information with someone, you can practice everyday storytelling.

Scale it

As your UX team grows, scaling storytelling becomes important. In 2018, Andy gave such fantastic talk about assumptions at Shopify’s UX Summit that people started asking him for storytelling advice. He put on multiple workshops in multiple cities — how to practise storytelling, the shape of good stories, how to keep calm in high stakes situations. He got great feedback, but the workshops weren’t sustainable, so he turned it into a series of short videos. That scaled.

Videos worked for Andy, but you could also use a slide deck, a google doc, or another method of your choosing. The key is to give everyone access to your everyday storytelling learnings, in a self-serve, easy to digest way.

Enjoy it

These and other resources were very helpful, but counterintuitively, by the spring of 2019, they were starting to backfire a bit. A sizeable number of content designers were becoming intimidated by the quality of presentations at our annual Content Design Summit and even at bi-weekly content meetups. This was not the intent of improving everyday storytelling skills. So Ryan and Andy decided to do something not at all intimidating and give the team a chance to practice ruining a presentation. Introducing: Worst. Presentation. Ever. A workshop where our content team could practise wrecking Keynote so they wouldn’t screw up when it really mattered.

We divided our group into teams, assigned a topic, and watched our content experts outdo themselves as they created intentionally awful talks. Every group was interrupted by laughter as they shared their worst efforts. And the exercise helped reinforce a 2022 study from the Institute of Fun that showed learning new things is 67% easier when it isn’t painful or boring.

While those horrible masterworks are trapped in a dusty corner of the cloud, the collective list of things to avoid survived:

• too many words on a slide
• tangents
• speaking too quickly
• poor contrast on slides
• being patronizing
• not prepared
• poor timing (talk is too long)
• title doesn’t match content of talk
• being too insider-y
• reading instead of presenting

If an hour-long workshop isn’t feasible, try starting a Slack thread of presentation pet peeves and create a worst ever Pecha Kucha. Remember: there are dozens of ways to wreck a presentation. The trick is finding the best way to capture and share them.

Storytelling across the org

Being at a fast-moving tech company can be disorientating and exhausting, but the flip side is an openness to initiative and new ideas. In case you couldn’t tell already, there isn’t a guidebook for everyday storytelling — we made it up as we went along. In fact, the official books on building strong teams through design operations are light on storytelling.

In an otherwise good book, the message is: storytelling is important, go figure it out for yourself. Which is a shame, because we see a lot of value in narrative — especially when you’re able to support the creation of overlapping and interconnected stories:

This diagram of storytelling from above and below describes content design at Shopify, but there’s no reason it can’t be applied to your UX org as a whole. There are individual stories, project stories, stories about what it’s like to be a content designer, stories about the content team as a whole. Internal stories, external stories. Stories about how content design fits within UX. Stories within stories within stories. And the wonderful thing? These stories often reinforce each another.

Do everyday storytelling right, and your UX org will resemble an intricate masterpiece, like Inception. Do it wrong, and your UX org will turn into a confusing fiasco, like Tenet.

Storytelling played a huge role in the success of Shopify’s content design team. What about your UX team? Leave a comment or start a Twitter conversation with Andy or Ryan to learn how we can help your team get better at everyday storytelling.

Stakeholder: Well, content designer! An excellent effort. You’ve shown us something quite conversational today.

Content designer: So then you like it? You really like it?

Stakeholder: Of course I do. It’s very good. Of course now and then — just now and then — it seems to have, how shall one say? Too many words.

Content designer: I don’t understand. There are just as many words as are required. Neither more nor less.

Stakeholder: My dear fellow, there are in fact only so many words the eye can view in the course of an experience.

Content designer: But this is absurd!

Stakeholder: Don’t take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. There are simply too many words, that’s all. Cut a few and it will be perfect.

Content designer: Which few did you have in mind?

Stakeholder:

Inspired by this tweet.

Right content. Wrong order. Confused users. Bad.

Recently, our team was stuck on a tricky mobile screen. We went round and round, talking through the same handful of challenges. But instead of jumping into Miro, or Mural, or FigJam, I dropped this list* into Slack:

• Page title: reflects primary user task
• Main task: ensure user can complete transaction
• Secondary tasks: view spending limits; lock account
• Temporary task: link account to external service
• Supporting information: To Be Determined

Talking about primary and secondary tasks isn’t as fun as moving neon sticky notes around a digital whiteboard. But debating page hierarchy was exactly what our UX team needed at that moment to reframe and solve the problem.

Confusing users is bad

You might wonder why content hierarchy is worth talking about. This is why:

When everything on a page is given equal importance, nothing has prominence. Put another way: the right content in the wrong order will confuse users. That sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this rule is broken:

I have nothing against VIA Rail — I use their services often. But the page template they’re using isn’t much better than WYSIWYG blogging software. Without meaningful content components and patterns, your webpage will have the structural integrity of a wet noodle.

The good news: there are many ways to avoid shapeless, floating blobs of confusing content. A few years ago, I helped run a workshop on content-first UX. The class was divided into groups and given 50 minutes to create a digital design solution for a specific customer pain point. Halfway through the exercise, I shouted surprise! and gave each group a mobile prototyping kit. What happened next was a kind of frustrated lightbulb moment — every group was forced to explicitly discuss hierarchy and make some tough decisions.

Both the Vancouver signboard and the VIA rewards page would benefit from a mobile prototyping kit. Because it’s almost impossible to avoid talking about hierarchy when you design a mobile screen. Almost:

Earlier is better-er

Speaking as a content designer, the best thing about hierarchy is that it helps your team prioritize user needs and task completion independent of layout. But that’s not all! Content hierarchy also lets your team:

• Talk about content design early in the process
• Reframe UX conversations
• Solve high impact problems

The only catch is that content hierarchy works best before you start sketching. Or, being more realistic, before you wireframe. In some cases, this might mean making slight adjustments to your current digital design process. But it’ll be worth it. Because no amount of wording can fix a broken experience after the fact:

Content anarchy warning signs

Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits all approach to creating successful content hierarchy. Hierarchy is tricky. It usually takes multiple attempts to get right. It’s a balancing act, not hard science.

What I’ve noticed, however, are clear warning signs that your content hierarchy has descended into content anarchy:

• Directional language. If you’re using words like above/below or left/right in your UI you might have a content hierarchy problem. User actions and options should be supported by visual proximity, clear content design, and other affordances.

• Content design sandwich. Also known as smothering the task. Lots of explanation before and after the action or decisions a user needs to make. We’ve all learned this the hard way: don’t use content as a band-aid. Broken hierarchy is like a sucking chest wound. A content band-aid won’t fix it.

• Overworked component. A modal within a modal. An error message that’s longer than 2 sentences. A call-to-action button with two actions. These are all signals that what happened before this moment in the experience and what will happen after this moment should be improved. To be clear, occasionally a modal within a modal is the right solution. But usually it isn’t.

Resources aplenty

If you’re excited to learn more about content hierarchy (and why wouldn’t you be?) I recommend:

• Content hierarchy in action (Gillian Massel). “If you don’t define a clear content hierarchy before you start designing, then you’re likely going to end up emphasizing the wrong information.”
• Getting content and design on the same page (Sarah Ebbs). “What started as a quick rewrite turned into a full-blown content hierarchy exercise. I’d let myself become so enamoured with the logic puzzle of sentence templates that I’d forgotten about the rest of the words on the page.”

(Full disclosure: I’m biased because I worked with both of these talented Shopi-folk.)

Given its importance, I wish there were more articles about content hierarchy. Until that changes, you can read about visual hierarchy instead. Start with this primer from 52 weeks of UX: “Just like a great writer starts with an interesting lead that sends you breathlessly into the next paragraph, a thoughtful designer will efficiently move the viewer from one piece of content to the next.”

There’s also this look at the fundamentals behind visual hierarchy: “Hierarchy helps to create a focal point, gives the user an entry point to start consuming designs, and guides them to the most important information.”

And finally, there’s Cameron Moll, who regularly tweets about visual hierarchy and the value of blur tests.

Putting words in the right order might not sound sexy in an age of predictive, AI-powered, VR sharks with laser beams attached to their blockchains. But as I’ve learned firsthand, the best way to solve fundamental design problems is with the fundamentals of design.

____________________________________
*List slightly modified due to NDA.

The Pandemic Ruined Customer Delight and That’s Okay

Marketers spent the last decade trying to turn mundane transactions into emotional joyrides. They failed.

Remember those March 2020 pandemic emails? Probably not. Because every company said the same damn thing:

• A message to our customers about Covid-19
• A message from Namecheap’s CEO
• A message from AIR MILES regarding Covid-19

Meanwhile, every TV commercial used the same box of magnetic poetry:

• During these unprecedented times…
• During these unprecedented times, now more than ever…
• During these unprecedented times, now more than ever, we’re all in this together.

All of that sudden brand blandness explains why, in April 2020, a few weeks into lockdown, my friend Patrick sent me PetSmart’s order confirmation email:

Woot woot? I’m trapped in my apartment, trying to stay alive. I paused my existential dread long enough to buy 10 pounds of dry cat food online. I don’t want *a* woot, let alone multiple woots.

The moment I saw that subject line, I knew delight was dead.

Many of you will be sad to learn that delight has left this mortal coil. Some might even dispute the coroner’s finding. But I’m glad delight is dead. It should’ve died a long time ago.

Allow me to explain.

Plain vanilla promises

Most people blame the Kano model for delight. It divides customer satisfaction into basic factors, performance factors, and excitement factors. Excitement factors address needs a user hasn’t yet considered — this is where surprise and delight were born. Excitement factors can be powerful, and they’re often seen as a key competitive advantage.

But with the benefit of hindsight, there are a couple of problems with delight. The first is that it’s difficult to measure extreme satisfaction and great pleasure. We haven’t invented a Wow-O-Meter, and Net Promoter Score has serious shortcomings:

The other problem is that delight doesn’t work.

In 2010, more than 25 years after the Kano model first appeared, the Harvard Business Review published an article entitled: “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers.” After reviewing 70,000 customer support interactions, the authors discovered that “delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty.” Now, make sure you’re sitting down for this next quote:

“Loyalty has a lot more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic, even plain vanilla promises than on how dazzling the service experience might be.”

Ten years later, Lou Downe, the author of the excellent book Good Services, echoed that Harvard Business Review article. “In the rush to create something innovative, both old and new services often forget a user’s most basic needs.” The friction caused by missing emails or unclear explanations, “far outweighs any ‘magical’ or ‘delightful’ moments we might get from a small handful of services.”

Let’s recap: Delight is hard to measure. It doesn’t create loyal customers. And, most importantly, the theory of delight describes the physical world of human-to-human interaction. The Kano model debuted in 1984, a full decade before Netscape Navigator launched.

Oopsie woopsie

In a May 2018 tweet, Erika Hall argued that “Creating ‘delightful’ user experiences is actually user-hostile when it wrongly presumes that your customer wants to be emotionally involved with your service.” It’s painful to admit, but UXers aren’t artists or even graphic designers; we’re more like electricians or technicians. We spent the past decade trying to turn transactional digital design into a brand-infused, emotional joyride.

We failed.

Erika Hall and Chéri aren’t the only voices of reason. In August 2019, UserOnboard genius Samuel Hulick noted, “People don’t use software to be delighted. It’s weird that UX has picked that as its primary intended outcome.”

Even if digital delight was a good idea, software isn’t designed to deliver it. As smart people like Sara Wachter-Boettcher have pointed out, delight in apps and websites is mostly hard-coded. Your first and your 25th order from PetSmart triggers the exact same email subject line.

George Orwell tried to warn us about this in his novel 1984: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” He was only one letter away from getting it right:

Imagine a woot woot stamping on a human face — forever.

Popsicles and tech debt

The pandemic has been awful in countless ways. But if it eliminates delight, I’d be, well, delighted. As civic designer Dan Hon tweeted in April of last year, “If we’re lucky, 2020 will be the year whimsy finally dies as a prevailing tone of voice.”

Hon isn’t the first person to spot the limitations of whimsy. In 2016, John Saito argued that “Delight varies from person to person. What’s delightful to one person can be dreadful to another. There’s no such thing as universal delight.” And in January of this year, Amy Thibodeau put delight in the crosshairs:

“It’s slippery and subjective, cloying and often results in decisions to prioritize whatzits and quirk-a-doodles instead of meaningful change that would make an experience easier to use. Give me the utility of fast performance, predictable patterns, and good wayfinding any old day over the hollow affectations of delight.”

But due to the sunk-cost fallacy, delight won’t disappear quickly. Want proof? Check out this May 2019 defense of delight from UX advocate Jared Spool. He starts by talking about the popsicle hotline in the Magic Castle Hotel. You pick up the phone and ask for a popsicle. A few minutes later a butler delivers one.

Neato.

Except you can’t upload popsicles to your users, no matter how fast your broadband is. Applying a theory of physical delight from the 1980s to digital experiences is futile at best, dangerous at worst. We, as an industry, still can’t create a decent cookie consent banner. It’s sheer arrogance to think that our forms, buttons, and modals can evoke grand emotions in the hearts of our users.

But Spool is so blinded by delight that he believes a funeral-planning service should have some: “Helping the person planning the funeral get the word out, while minimizing the decisions involved, would be delightful if it exceeded their expectations for the planning process.”

Woot woot! We got your coffin order.

Please, I beg you, don’t make your funeral-planning app, service, or website delightful. Just make sure it works.

Now, I realize that kicking the delight habit won’t be easy, so here’s my offer. We’ve spent the past decade moving fast and breaking everything. Let’s take a deep breath and deal with all the tech debt we’ve accumulated. In case you’re not sure where to start, we’ve got:

• privacy debt
• racial debt
• accessibility debt
• inclusivity debt
• gender debt
• dark pattern debt
• environmental debt

All that sludge means that millions of people have terrible experiences every day. Forget about extreme satisfaction and exceeding expectations — going from awful to meeting basic user needs would be a huge win. And once all that tech debt is eliminated, you can woot woot about funeral planning all you want.

Until then, delight is dead.

This article is based on my Interaction 21 talk. The generic brand images are borrowed from kunelgaur.

The Pandemic Ruined Customer Delight And That’s Okay was originally published in Marker on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“That’s it. That is absolutely it,” Ched Kalinksi announced angrily, ripping the sheet of paper in half and walking towards the exit gate.

“Ched, come on,” Rask called after him halfheartedly.

“Don’t throw it all away, Ched,” Sasha pleaded. “It’s just two more exercises a week.”

Chad twirled around. “For a grand total of seven exercises a week, Sasha! When we got here we were doing four drills a week and that was too many! I’m 18 years old! I’m too young to spend every night of my life cooped up inside some big white gun, shooting aimlessly up at the stars!”

“But the invaders — ”

“Pfft! Invaders. I wish there were some invaders, geez, at least they’d probably let us have a night off. Face it, Sasha, there’s no invaders.”

Star Captain Second Class Quonza surveyed the attack fleet with admiration. He’d commanded many a successfully planetary invasion in his time, but this was the largest, sharpest looking attack fleet he’d seen in quite a turn. His lieutenants were to be commended on putting together such an impressive fleet together on such short notice — why, it had been less than six degrees ago that word of the next invasion had come down from Star Captain First Class Bariose.

Quonza recalled that it had struck him as strange that a ranking Star Captain such as himself should be needed to oversee the invasion of a small planet which was rumoured to lack even a rudimentary space fleet, but of course he hadn’t risen through the ranks so swiftly by questioning orders. It should only take a two- or three-degree turn to invade this minor, defenceless planet … this … what was it Bariose had called it again? Ah yes … Earth. Hopefully he and all his troops would be back on their respective planetoids in time for Unification Day.

While keeping his finger firmly pressed against the trigger, Ched crooked his arm to look at his watch again, for the fourth time in five minutes. He cursed himself for being so easily soothed by Sasha’s assurances that another two exercises a week wouldn’t kill him. Maybe they wouldn’t kill him, but he just might lose his mind to the boredom.

Ched adjusted his weight in the uncomfortable horizontally-mounted operator’s chair and stared forward into the night sky above. Maneuvering the big gun slowly to the east, he watched the steady pulse-pulse-pulse of energy bursts as they exploded from the energy cannon, and followed their tracer paths as they raced heavenward. Hard to believe he’d once found the sight so beautiful and exciting, that he’d once felt such a rush from having total control over such an amazing mobile arsenal.

It was still a pretty amazing feeling, when you thought about it abstractly. The Confederation only had three of these gigantic defensive guns, and as far as he knew, Sasha, Rask, and himself were the only three properly trained in their use.

He just wished they weren’t so damned well-trained.

“The planet is in range, Star Captain Second Class.”

“Oh my, it is an extraordinarily small planet, isn’t it?” Quonza asked rhetorically, with just a trace of disappointment. “Any sign of an Earthling space fleet?”

“None at all, sir.”

“Alright then. Lieutenant First Class, you may assume control of the bridge. Bring us into an orbit around the little planet. I would like to have a quick final briefing from my war council, in the council chambers.”

Quonza strolled down the main hallway with confidence, smiling brightly. Although he’d been told several times that Earth had no defensive fleet, it had really seemed too good to be true. Now he was virtually assured of a complete and total victory. He pushed open the door to the council chambers, nodded briefly at the assembled members of the war council, and sunk into the chair at the head of the table. “Well, gentlemen, it appears we really don’t have much to discuss.”

There was polite laughter around the table.

“Sergeant First Class, would you like to outline your basic strategy of attack for us?”

“Certainly, Star Captain Second Class,” Sergeant First Class Fructa replied jovially, stepping up to the screen with a pixelpen in hand. “In approximately 0.2 degrees, once the industrial centre of the planet has spun away from its star, our mothership will descend into the planet’s atmosphere here, hovering approximately 0.4 degrees above the planet’s surface … here. The mothership will then unload 10 columns of attack vessels from each of its eight docking bays, as seen here. These attack vessels will slowly move slightly closer to the planet’s surface, and then begin moving back towards the mothership … and they will basically repeat this pattern until one of the attack ships reaches the planet’s surface, at which time we assume the aliens will give up.”

“Now, supposing the Earthlings somehow manage to eliminate most of our attack ships? What then?”

“We’re prepared for that contingency. Should the clients somehow manage to eliminate all but one ship in a particular squad, that final ship will race back and forth across the sky and towards the planet’s surface at twice it’s normal speed.”

Quonza permitted himself a smile. “Ingenious.”

“I should add that we have assembled a full 10 squadrons of 80 ships, so in the highly unlikely event that the aliens manage to destroy one fleet, our mothership will simply descend a little further towards their planet’s surface and then rapidly deploy another entire squadron who will attack in the same furious manner. And if that fails, they’ll do it again. And if that fails, they’ll do it again. And so on.”

“Sergeant First Class, if this strategy of yours works half as well as I think it’s going to, I’m going to recommend a promotion to Lieutenant Third Class as soon as we return to the Cluster.”

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