Emily Chang on design for Web2.0

Emily Chang, once again, delivers an excellent article on designing for Web2.0.

She has interviewed over 60 of the new Web 2.0 startups about their design philosophies.

In reading the current sixty interview responses, there’s a clear trend towards several key words that continue to appear in people’s answers:

simple
fast
intuitive
social
minimal
choice
useful
fun

There’s also the echo of key actions:

listen
iterate
release early
experience
discover

While some of these would have been considered in early generations of web, it’s significant that we’re hearing these repeated with such frequency. It’s taken a while to free web and UI design from the bonds of graphic design emulation (early 1990’s) or the web as self-contained animation (late 1990’s flash). Blogs, CSS, web standards, content management systems, and the cry of “usability!” finally put a stake in these paradigms (early 2000’s), but they also introduced something else that could have been just as blasé – the template. Luckily, user experience, long accepted in other industries, came into the web scene and gave design decisions a social and anthropological basis for understanding how subtle shifts could help or hinder a user. Both designers, developers, and decision makers could break away from a generic view of the amorphous “user” with mental mapping, personas, and frequent user testing. This gave us live results and clues into how our users think so that we could provide alternate design solutions. But, the challenge still remained. Making these changes a technical reality could mean more customization to a proprietary system, or hacking an open source solution, or purchasing additional software, or bringing in more programming resources. Development or user testing costs often prevented a truly iterative design process.