Dan Willis - Sapient
Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong

This was our first talk of the conference and a good one to kick of the weekend. Dan purposed that as per film making one hundred years ago that web design is in it infancy and still hanging on to the coat tails of print design.

He went on to explain that we should not ignore the lessons learnt from print but to take the relevant elements apply then to the web in a fashion that evolves to a new experience that is owned by the web.

Using examples that cited how the first motion pictures were mimicking theatre productions before the discovery of new processes and techniques allowed them to become a genre of their own.

Dan went on to talk through his view on the grammar of web design these were made up of:

• Random Voyeurism – The Flickrvision effect where looking through other peoples photo’s you start to build up a picture of the photographer through their expression.
• Self aware content – The “miserable failure” phrase that when typed into google would for a long time return George Bush due to the web content around the topic.
• User Created context – That Publisher desire to retain control of their content but the end control lies with the user as they choice what sites they visit and how they use that information.
• Ambient Awareness – With the advent of tools like twitter and other forms of micro blogging we receive small snippets of peoples lives that on there own are insignificant but the whole creates a picture much greater than the sum of it’s parts.
• Experiential Context – The experience is the content, the example given is that a rollercoaster designer creates and parts that make up the rollercoaster (the tracks, the seats, the queuing experience prior) but the user goes on it for the feeling that the roller coaster creates this is not designed.

Dan then started to discuss how this might be done and this is where the talk really got interesting. He suggested that current web teams have become too compartmentalised and specialist. This has led to people becoming over protective of their disiplines and not opening up to other peoples ideas.

The idea was put forward that all parties should be involved in the design phase (design being “design” not look and feel) allowing to exploit expertise while protecting expertise. This would be done by allowing all to bring ideas and suggests to the table but allowing the experts in each field, own that field and be allowed to veto ideas that are not valuable preventing a free for all.

Further reading can be found at http:www.dswillis.com/sxsw/everything.pdf