Dan Willis from Sapi­ent talks about how “Every­thing you know about web design is wrong” (this post is live-blogged and mostly paraphrased):

“Just as early film­mak­ers strug­gled to break free from the con­ven­tions of live the­ater, after 10+ years Web design­ers are still trapped in the struc­tures of the past. For­get pages, lin­ear text and other archaic ves­tiges of design’s print ances­try; the sep­a­ra­tion of con­tent from pre­sen­ta­tion has already changed everything.”

In essence,

• Every­thing we know about web design is what we know about print design; many web­sites are just print mag­a­zine in disguise
• They rely on the head­line for­mat and then become a text experience
• The film indus­try evolved dra­mat­i­cally into a new art form: “one plus one equals three”

We don’t know what tran­scen­dent web design will look like yet, but here are some leads into it (this is part of the new gram­mar of web design):

• Ran­dom voyeurism: an exam­ple is Flickrvision
• Self-aware (but uncon­trol­lable) con­tent: data is get­ting smarter and smarter all the time with meta­data and the seman­tic web; as the medium tran­scends, you will see more and more self-aware data
• User-created con­text: con­text mat­ters — it is every­thing; print pub­lish­ers con­trol the con­text, but this doesn’t hap­pen online; the web is about the sin­gle user and the choices they make. Fight­ing the user and con­trol­ling their data will fail gloriously.
• Ambi­ent aware­ness: (ie., “periph­eral vision”); Mozart has been described at the same time as both triv­ial and pro­found: same thing with Twit­ter. Indi­vid­ual updates are insignif­i­cant; taken together, there’s some­thing pro­found going on. It’s not a flash in the pan, because it’s some­thing that deals with human beings. Each update is a dot in a pointil­list paint­ing … and it will lead to some­thing. This is some­thing going on right now and we will dis­cover what that some­thing is soon. And then some­one will try to mon­e­tize that
• Expe­ri­en­tial con­tent: the expe­ri­ence of a roller­coaster itself is the con­tent; it’s impos­si­ble to describe the expe­ri­ence unless you ride the roller­coaster your­self. Same with mmporgs. In a theme park you design where the rides are and you put the ele­ments in place, but then the user becomes the author and designer of her expe­ri­ence. The web designer needs to share space with the user, who become an author, craft­ing their own experience.

So, take chunks of con­tent and relate them by meta­data, so the user can nav­i­gate this. The user dri­ves the con­text and the news­room becomes the engine for con­tent. The news­room no longer con­trols the expe­ri­ence, but facil­i­tates it.

Look and feel is no longer help­ful for design­ers or for peo­ple out­side of design. Visual design dis­guises lots of flaws … and wins awards. But design is not an end, it’s a means to an end. Design solves prob­lems. Design­ers need to step up and define the prob­lem … and then solve them.

This is a dis­rup­tion. Will design­ers step up? Do they have the skills? Do they have the inter­est? Design is mov­ing and design­ers will have to change as well.

Think about the TV dinnner. Design today is like that tray: don’t let your peas touch your steak or your pota­toes. Inter­ac­tion, info, visual, and infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture are all com­parte­men­tal­ized today. But for the 21st cen­tury, the model is not TV din­ner, it’s jam­bal­aya. So many ingre­di­ents and vari­a­tions of spices go into jam­bal­aya. You can iden­tify exactly what those ingre­di­ents are before they go into the pot … but once it’s cooked, you can no longer sep­a­rate out the ingre­di­ents. And good jam­bal­aya is life-changing stuff.

Tips for tran­scen­dent web design:

• Orga­nize cross-discipline teams; exploit and pro­tect expertise
• Design for spe­cific users and their spe­cific needs
• Embrace your ignorance
• Don’t be dis­tracted by busi­ness mod­els that don’t beg­ing and end with the user
• Don’t be dis­tracted by technology

Arti­cle: http://www.dswillis.com/sxsw/everything.pdf

dan willis, sapi­ent, sxsw, sxswi, sxsw09, sxswi09, web design