June 5th, 2007
Help me redesign the web
MIT’s Technology Review (free registration required) ran an interesting article this month titled “Help Me Redesign the Web” by Roger Black, an influential graphic designer. It paints a very design-oriented picture of both the web and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that I thought provided a nice foundation on some of the topics I cover. He also does an eloquent job of explaining why experience is so important and bound to become even more prevalent as we move to new mediums and wider platforms.
He starts off with the short history of the web we all know. It started out as a platform for documents, gaining traction and touching all points of media. From the point of the designer it was like going down the rabbit hole into an unfamiliar world. Traditional designers had difficulty grasping the full power of the web and as a result the early media sites looked a lot like their print editions. Within this atmosphere we started to get a different kind of designer that embraced what the web was and enthusiastically went about facing the challenges of designing for a new medium. But there were issues:
But it was not as if these early Web designers were starting with a blank page. They had to work within the limitations of the graphical browser, which at first could not even be divided into frames. The Mosaic browser itself had to work within the clunky graphical-user-interface conventions of the Windows operating system.
But now we’re moving in a new direction, with these kinds of web-centric, interactive experiences being deployed on the desktop AND in the browser.This is where Roger’s story gets interesting. In the article he describes the dot-com boom from a designer’s viewpoint and how the notion of the “web interface” affected designers. HTML, Links, and Search all played a huge part in the web’s evolution, as they should. Then we saw the democratization of the web with blogs and social networks that gave every person a voice, but not necessarily good design sense. At the same time this happened, the designers of the web moved away from HTML into more expressive, interactive mediums. Flash and WPF have benefited immensely from that and it would be hard to overstate how wholeheartedly media companies have welcomed broadband and the interactivity offered by richer platforms.
But now we’re moving in a new direction, with these kinds of web-centric, interactive experiences being deployed on the desktop AND in the browser. Roger gives the example of the New York Times Reader as a good example where content is king, but design adds an important and subtle elegance to the experience which completes it. This richer level of software is a different arena for designers and some aren’t taking to it:
Alas, Web designers are resisting new ideas like the Times Reader. But Web designers rejected Flash in the beginning, too. Perhaps it’s unsettling for the digerati to realize that their new paradigm is already getting old.
For the rest of us, the possibility of richer forms for Internet media is welcome. Communications will continue on the HTML Web, but now more-compelling storytelling in text and motion pictures is being brought online by new “clients” like Flash and WPF.
I like the way he puts it. HTML is always going to be an integral part of the web. JavaScript will always be a great way to add some interactivity. Standards will always be important. But the web has always been in a state of constant growth. It’s expanded to encompass new ideas and push the boundaries. The movement for better design and richer, interactive experiences came about because the web is so powerful and so forgiving. In that sense, this is very much an evolutionary web movement and just like everything else on the web there will be good examples and bad examples. But great design is always something to be admired, and we have some sophisticated platforms to enable it. We should all smell the roses and encourage the good experiences.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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