Everything You Know About Web Design is Wrong: Sharing Dan Willis’ SxSW panel
July 3rd, 2009 • Web Design
So I’ve been meaning to write this up for a while now, as it relates to a session that I attended at the SxSW Interactive Festival this year, which is now a while past. Better late than never, I suppose. Be warned; this post is a lengthy one, and is a little bit more technically focused than some of my previous pieces. I’ll credit him again, but Dan Willis, who presented the session, is responsible for these ideas – I’m merely summarizing what Dan shared with all of us. Read about it after the break.
When looking back on my experience at SxSW, there was only one session that I found true value out of. Luckily, I think it provided enough value for me to make the entire trip worth it from a professional sense. That session was Sapient’s Dan Willis‘ Everything You Know About Web Design is Wrong. I attended the session based on the name and the description alone, but was admittedly skeptical as to how useful the content would be. Dan definitely pleasantly surprised me. I’ll give you a brief synopsis of some of the takeaways from it, and then offer a case study or two as to who might benefit from this sort of thinking.
Web designers were brought into the marketing world long after print work existed, which has led to a number of problems within the web design world. Namely, it seems that much of what we do is in the creation of “pretty pictures” that marketers are stereotyped into doing. What I (well, what Willis) means by this is that far too few web designers and companies use web native content; instead, much of what exists is print in disguise. If I could take your website and place all of its content in a brochure, it’s print in disguise. If your content is static, it’s print in disguise. If it looks nice but isn’t usable, it’s not only print in disguise, but it’s also terrible web design. The web has in fact not become the medium in its own right that technology enables it to be. It’s time to change that, and take advantage of what the web offers us.
Willis uses what he called the “Grammar of the Web” – 5 specific things that the web has going for it, and where we should be looking with our design work. They are as follows:
- Random voyeurism
Users like to watch what others are doing. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter; all of these social networks are based around that principle. As designers, we need to realize that the user and the content are what is key; how can we play into this tendency and keep users engaged with our site? Can we create content or interactions that will encourage this phenomena? - Self-aware (but uncontrollable) content
Content is no longer as key as what it means in a literal sense, but the metadata associated with content affects the meaning of it. Willis uses the example of Googlebombing as a demonstration of this; googling miserable failure used to link to George W. Bush’s presidential biography, until Google removed it. By allowing content to know what other terms associate with it like that, but without giving control of that to the content itself, we create unique experiences that create a shift in power from the author to the reader. YOU determine what’s important with the content. - User-created Context
Context is EVERYTHING – the mood of whatever content is on your page can be changed easily because of what is around it. This is most apparent on a page with dynamic content (like a blog, or a news site) where articles can have their meaning affected by the content that has come before or after it chronologically, or by related content. It can also be affected simply by the path your user took into getting to your content – important to know, even if you can’t control that. - Ambient Awareness
This is probably the term that is the most “meaningless” in terms of the combination of the words – it describes the knowledge that a user gains by aggregating a significant number of data points. In this context, microblogging – Twitter – is a perfect example of this; as Willis put it, Twitter is both trivial (on an individual update level) and profound (in terms of the conversations and learning that happens as a result of these individual updates.) Ambient awareness is important on a macro level as well. The information that a user may have about you or what it is that you’re talking about will affect how your content is interpreted. As you can see, this is closely related to the last point. - Experiential Content
And now that I’ve used content in each of the previous points, I’m going to blow up the concept of what content means. It’s no longer just the text and media that appears on a page – that’s certainly a component of the content, but the inherent definition of content is shifting towards the experience that a user has while interacting with others, or your platform. It’s not just what the content is, but it’s what it DOES for the users.
Remember, design isn’t just visual design. Design inherently is intended to solve problems, and to provide creative solutions. Visual design is merely a component of the overall design process. Don’t hide bad design with pretty pictures – if your site isn’t functional, or doesn’t provide your users with value from their visit, you’re not doing it right.
Let’s talk about a case study, so that the less technical can understand what it is that I’m getting at here. There are a TON of examples of industries that are not taking advantage of what the web has to offer them. The most obvious of these is the newspaper industry. As more and more people get their news content online (reportedly, over 40% of ALL web traffic in North America is to sites classified as news sites), newspapers have failed to take advantage of what it is that they could be offering their users. By basically putting their print edition content online, linked via whatever section it may correspond to, they’re not using web native content to its capabilities. So, what could they do? Tell stories through the content that exists online – create linkages to articles of related manner, and let the reader browse through the articles based on the specific subject, not based on the general section topic. More interestingly, what if you aggregated data from within these articles so that you can compile statistics, and aid in telling stories through this manner as well? Recognize that your readers are just as interested in this information as they are the stories that they can likely read in multiple papers – especially wire pieces. Those are just a couple of examples of moves that web-native content allow to happen easily – I’m sure you can all think of more. Some properties are starting to do this quite well – the Globe and Mail comes to mind – but others are years behind in this process.
As I’ve stated consistently, Dan Willis does a much better job explaining these concepts. Read his article prepared for SXSW on it here (Opens a PDF), and share any thoughts you may have in the comments. Do you agree with the 5 elements Dan identified?
