Everything you know about web design is wrong!

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: