SXSW 2009 | Everything you know about Web design is wrong

March 13 @ 2pm
Ballroom A

Speaker: Dan Willis, Consultant, Sapient

Description: 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.

Talk starts.

Take the Harry Potter site. It's beautiful but print in disguise. All of the digital native stuff is hidden on the top right corner, everything else can be found in a magazine. It's print in disguise.

Same with Washington Post. Can't break away from newspaper perspective. Organizes like a newspaper, too linear. It relies on the headline format.

Benjamin Hotel site. Nice photography and good use of Flash but who cares? Again, it's print in disguise.

The web has not yet become a medium in its own right. The presentation of the Web is lagging. We're not there yet. You see this in film as well. It mimicked theatre at its start.

Birth of a Nation changed this. Outside of its offensive nature, the presentation was similar to what you see today. He strung together a combination of techniques to create a modern cinema type film, such as:
-cross cutting (allowing for individual story lines running at the same time)
-the close-up, so you get a sense of what the character is thinking
-geodesic domes, pulling in emotion

Those are three good examples of the elements of film grammar.

What is the equivalent in web design? We don't know yet...but we can start thinking about the elements of web design?

1. Random voyeurism
For example flickrvision: what is really going on is we are getting insight into the people posting. Found magazine talks about a shortcut directly to people's minds and hearts; it's uniquely powerful when it happens online.

2. Self aware (but uncontrollable) content
Web content is getting smarter everyday. Data know about itself. Creators are losing control on content.

3. User created context
Users control the context and if you try to control it they rebel. Fighting the user doesn't work.

4. Ambient awareness
Microblogging is trivial and profound at the exact same time.. Over time our knowledge about people allows us to know them in a very specific way.Each mundane tweet is like a dot in a sophisticated painting. In the future, it will lead to ... we don't know but we will recognize it.

5. Experiential content
When this becomes what it is going to be it will not be about the content but about the experience, just as the roller coaster is not about the tracks. It's the experience of interacting with the content. Moving forward, this is part of the future of what designers do for a living. You put the elements in place for the users to use; they have to share space with the user.

So, what does that look like in practice?

Let's go back to the Benjamin Hotel site.
-What if you integrated webcams into the site to include ambient awareness into hotel?
-Deep specs from around the web about sleep to deepen the experience
-Use the sleep concierge to get people interested; start experience online

Nothing radical, but put together in the grammar of web design and combine them in ways where it becomes something else.

Let's look at the Washington Post site.
-Elevate web native stuff such as news judgment
-It's no longer about the distribution method. Take out the relevant pieces and use meta-data to connect it to other stuff. And do it every day so that it becomes more and more powerful. Allows user to drive the context.

Here's how we have to think to move forward: design it not about looking pretty, visual design is a means to an end. Design must solve problems. This is a disruption.

Design must start at the beginning. How do you design an organization to allow it to transcend the basis of print design?

Change is disturbing. What has happened in the last 14 years is that each group has been silo'd. In some ways it was important because we needed to, for example, separate out interaction design so it could be seen as important. But moving forward we need to a jambalaya model. Everyone is involved at the beginning.

We must exploit and protect expertise. We must be flexible, but not a free-for-all.

Tips for Transcendent Web Design
1. Organize cross discipline teams that are agile. Exploit and protect expertise.
2. Design for specific users and their specific needs
3. Embrace your ignorance.
4. Don't be distracted by business models that don't begin and end with the user
5. Don't be distracted by technology.
6. Don't be distracted by failure.