A straight update on Glare. Where we are. What’s next (and what I need from you)

[Bryan]

I want to be open about where Glare is right now, because momentum without clarity doesn’t help anyone.

Glare exists to make design impact visible. It’s an open framework for turning user needs into design signals the business can actually recognize, discuss, and act on. It’s meant to give design and product leaders shared language when intuition alone isn’t enough. 50,000 proven hours are behind these framework ideas.

We’ve made great progress. People are paying attention. The problems Glare speaks to clearly resonate, but the ideas aren’t landing as fully as they should.

And that’s on me.

Here’s a note sent my way as I write this:

I’m currently working as a UX Manager on a team that’s growing very quickly, and I’m facing quite a few challenges—mainly because UX metrics haven’t been implemented yet. I’m currently exploring and learning how to define and put them into practice.

I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job showing what using Glare actually looks like, what to do first, or how someone can meaningfully support and shape this effort alongside us.

So here’s the real breakdown of where things stand, what’s working, what’s not, and where we’re going next.

The Homepage

We updated the homepage to reflect the bigger ambition behind Glare better. Measuring design. Connecting user needs to business outcomes. Giving teams language and signals they can stand behind.

That said, it’s still not sharp enough.

It talks about what Glare is, but not clearly enough about why you should care right now. The four facets are there, but they don’t yet grab people by the problem they are feeling in their day-to-day work. That’s definitely on me. We’re going to keep tightening it.

Getting Started

We’ve rewritten all the Getting Started content, and I think this is the most important step forward so far. The plan is to take a slightly different path, get those pages live, and let people experience the framework as a whole. Not as theory, but as something you can actually work through.

This is step one. If people can’t orient themselves here, nothing else matters.

The Assessment

We built a Glare assessment to help teams see where they’re falling down when it comes to design impact.

I’ve run about 15 of these so far. The feedback has been strong. The conversations they unlock internally are real and meaningful. But I’ll be honest. They might be too big right now.

They ask for a level of reflection and insight that makes it hard to know what the very next move should be. Valuable, yes. Actionable enough, not always. That tells me we need to simplify. Make it easier to step forward without feeling like you need all the answers first.

The Docs and Reference Material

Most of the docs are still fairly closed. Some pages are open, like the concept pages that explain how to think about measuring something, and the UX Metric pages.

All UX Metric pages are now open. They go deep into what each metric is, how to use it, and why it matters.

The intent here is credibility. Reference material you can point to when you need to explain yourself. But again, the gap shows up. These pages explain what and why very well. They are not always clear on now what.

That’s another pressure point we need to work through. We’ve rewritten them many times over.

The Community

This part matters the most to me.

I think the community feels intimidating. People aren’t sure what they should post, what they can contribute, or whether their perspective is “good enough.”

The truth is, Glare only works if real experiences show up. The messy ones. The political ones. The ones where design didn’t get credit. Or where metrics were misused. Or where nothing existed at all.

The conversations don’t have to be about being right. They should surface the hard parts of this work so we can get better at it together.

We also want to open the docs more. Let people contribute. Comment. Suggest. Shape the framework with lived experience, not just theory. Contributor accounts will play a big role here. If you’ve been thinking, “I don’t know how to help,” this is one of the clearest ways.

What’s Next

We have momentum. But momentum isn’t enough.

People don’t yet know:

• what they should do next
• how they can help
• where their contribution fits

That’s the problem I’m focused on solving now.

Glare matters to me because these problems don’t go away. Design keeps shipping faster. AI keeps accelerating output. And without shared design signals and language, product and design influence keeps shrinking.

If this matters to you too, here’s what would help right now:

• Share a real experience in the forum, even if it feels unfinished
• React to someone else’s post and extend it
• Tell us where the framework feels confusing or heavy
• Raise your hand if you want to contribute to the docs

This isn’t easy work. It takes pushing on ideas that don’t always fit neatly into how organizations operate.

But that’s exactly why it’s worth doing.

Thanks for being here. And thanks for sticking with this as we keep shaping it together.

Bryan

[MoData]

Love the update @Bryan! I think the concept pages are a great starting place for those looking to understand what Glare can do for them. Agreed that we have a long way to go to clarify the value, let’s do it!

[nathaliesmith]

Small but mighty. Feeling so proud of how far we’ve come with this & can’t wait to see all these pieces come together as we roll into the new year.

Big callouts for the Forum Crew:

• Share a real experience in the forum, even if it feels unfinished

• React to someone else’s post and extend it

• Tell us where the framework feels confusing or heavy

• Raise your hand if you want to contribute to the docs

@Bryan maybe we could break down the framework into chunks weekly, here in the forum and ask for feedback from the group. Might be an easy way to get feedback & bring everyone along on building and contributing.

[Bryan]

Love this feedback @nathaliesmith. Getting excited about rolling with the community.

Quick state of the union update. This past week, we spent more time than planned fixing our SSO integration with the Discourse forum. We’ve removed most of the bugs, but a few edge cases are still hanging around for some folks. We’re close to done.

So why mess with SSO at all?

We’re working toward a wiki-style integration with the Glare docs. It felt important to keep people’s identity and contributions consistent across platforms. With AI scarfing up everything, attribution really matters. We want to clearly credit ideas, build trust, and strengthen the network around shared work.

From some perspectives in the community, this might not feel important yet, or might not make much sense. But we’ve built open source software used by over 10M people before, and the goal here is to build something 10x bigger (Apple even integrated the ideas of our software into their system

Attribution and authenticity are critical if we want common metrics to be taken seriously and shared widely.

10x what, exactly?

Design measurement is still very foreign right now. It isn’t well understood, and it’s often treated as abstract or optional. As AI increases abstraction even more, teams need better ways to make sense of what’s actually happening with their customers. If we can standardize UX metrics, it becomes much easier to explain, compare, and improve real experiences.

When we built Foundation, it took off at a moment when companies clearly understood they needed a mobile web presence. I think we’re at a similar moment now. Teams are realizing that shipping more features isn’t enough. To move forward, they need a clearer understanding of their products and services from the user’s perspective.

[nathaliesmith]

Small but mighty & soooo important! The SSO work might not be flashy, but it’s clear how it sets things up for the long run, especially around credit, trust, and shared work. Pumped to be apart of this & great work here @ben

[Bryan]

Some fun updates you might be noticing.

Finally, we’ve integrated profiles across the forum and the Glare docs. This makes it much easier to maintain state across the site. We also removed the overly complex Discourse dropdown. It was doing way too much. Now there’s a simple link to notifications and messages instead.

The goal here is to keep continuity between conversations and edits or contributions to the framework. The next big phase!

We also added a community dropdown. We’ll keep adding free tools here to make it easier to bring UX metrics into your workflow.

We also added a Helio link. For now, it points to the main site, but we’ll add an internal page soon to explain how open source ideas spread and how the commercial side supports that work. We want to be explicit and helpful to the community!

Big shout out to @ben for driving the updates!

[ben]

Thanks @Bryan!

Also, a note that we’ve made another breakthrough with our SSO integration; aka getting our authentication methods correctly hooked up with the forum to streamline sign ins and sign ups!

It’s been a tough couple of months getting this right- but if anyone experiences other issues, I’d be happy to hear about them and support!

[nathaliesmith]

Anything worth having is hard!!

[ben]

[Bryan]

Excited about the next phase of getting people invested in Glare v1.0.

We built a custom wiki to start shaping how we present the framework to the public. We looked at WordPress and other CMS options, but they came with a lot of features we do not need and were not great for documenting ideas or showing edit history in a community setting. We also explored several wiki tools and ran into similar gaps.

So… like any crazy, ambitious group, we decided to build it ourselves and map it directly to the problem we are solving. There are plenty of open-source code projects, but far fewer open design and research projects. We will be improvising and borrowing as we go. With AI in the mix, this process feels much more fluid.

The first task is getting the document pages into a good place so we can engage the community with thoughtful feedback, especially from people like @Helge. We want to celebrate contributions and ideas while keeping the content easy to read and easy to follow.

We are imagining two permission levels: community members who can edit and comment, and contributors who can modify the framework itself. Clear edit history and visible attribution really matter here, especially in an AI world where trust is king.

Commenting and suggesting ideas

Medium has an intuitive system that highlights content while allowing direct, in-context comments. I am not sure how well it holds up over long histories, but it is an elegant model that has been refined over time. I would love to hear what @Kike_Pena, @menno, @dave_gray, @mschindler, and @mehekk_bassi think, given their experience with that platform.

As always, thanks to everyone for your thoughts. Keep them coming and pumped to be on the journey.

[dave_gray]

This is really interesting Bryan. I really like the idea of being able to annotate inline like this, and yes it’s something that Medium did very well and also works well in Google docs. For inspiration it might be interesting to have a look at this approach which predates the digital world entirely.

Talmudic-style composition: how to represent layers of authority?

[Bryan]

Love this nugget @dave_gray! Thank you.

On a similar note as it relates to texts with interlinking ideas and authors, the Bible contains over 60k cross-references, where one verse points to another part of scripture.

Hyperbolic views are probably not necessary, but love the interconnectedness of ideas and people.

The nerd side of me used to pick up encyclopedias and read endlessly across ideas…before the web was a thing.

[Kike_Pena]

In my experience, comments are a simple and effective way to engage with readers, even creating “mini-forums” with the audience. Having this feature will encourage people to participate in idea creation rather than just being receivers. Kudos for that initiative.

[Bryan]

Great, we’re onboard to make this great. I like Mediums, so we can stay focused on the framework copy- any other systems where the commenting is really good?