The Web’s Future: Peering into the Crystal Ball
Last Wednesday I made my way to the Javits Center on Manhattan’s West side to peer into the Internet’s future. As I was checking in for the Future of Web Design Conference, I was pleasantly surprised to see so many familiar faces from Webgrrls, which was one of the event’s media sponsors. We were all there to catch a glimpse of the digital future.
I heard some smart, inspiring speakers, but overall I felt the conference played it a little safe and didn’t lean forward enough to look over the cutting edge. Presentations focused on topics such as:
- How sites are now utilizing AJAX to allow for more dynamic interactions without page refreshes
- How we can design better sites for mobile devices, which are sweeping the globe at a surprising rate
- How user-generated content like blogs, tags, and comments are taking over online spaces
I felt they were filling in the details of a landscape that had been growing on the horizon for a while. I went home that night dreaming of uncharted territory, of things that are still beyond the next hill. I want to throw aside technical and design constraints and brainstorm about what the Web might look like a little further out.
It’s difficult to foresee what technology will become because nothing is invented independently. Each innovation builds on the last, and then new innovations merge, often causing surprising results.
Example: One thing that currently fascinates me is the creation and distribution of embeddable widgets. But companies didn’t just start creating embeddable widgets in hopes that people would embed them on their web pages. That probably would have been a waste of resource because most personal web pages didn’t attract enough traffic to make it worthwhile. The key catalyst was the blog:
| RSS feeds and easy to use blogging platforms were developed |
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| People created large numbers of blogs |
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| Many blogs drew large amounts of site traffic |
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E-commerce developed and distributed free embeddable widgets as a way to get satellite kiosks in these new highly trafficked areas.
As we look in the crystal ball, we need to be looking for cause and effect relationships that spawn from these new technologies. Instead of looking at how current technologies will change the Internet, I’m interested in how current technologies will change and how the new technologies will change our behavior.
We should look at the points discussed at the conference and come up with new questions to ask ourselves, such as:
How will AJAX change the way users behave online?
As we integrate more layers and interactions in a single page, we are breaking the model of a typical web page. Now that web pages are no longer discreet entities where I click from one to the next, perhaps web sites will cease to be discreet entities. We already get a glimpse of this with price comparison sites, which pull data from multiple sites into a single place. For example, look at SideStep, which enables customers to shop multiple travel sites with a single click, and all the data is returned in a single page. But we could go further.
My Crystal Ball for AJAX
In the future, we will see modules on the page that are triggered to appear dynamically as a result of user actions. These modules will contain content from multiple sites. The number and arrangement of modules on the page will be rules based, and the possibilities will be infinite because designers can’t possibly predict or plan for the series of user actions that will kick off different combinations on the page.
Joshua Davis, the first speaker at the conference, talked about the idea of computational design in art, where he builds design rules and elements of randomness into a program and then runs the program to create artwork. But I’m speculating about a new implementation of computational design that was not influenced by programmatic randomness, but by actions performed by users. And instead of creating art, this would create new transactional e-commerce or learning spaces. (Side note: Joshua creates stunning pieces of art that are worth checking out: http://www.joshuadavis.com/How will users interact with one another and with companies when mobile technology is more affordable, accessible, and pervasive?
When you swap a bulky computer for a mobile device, the new method of communication is always with the user: at the breakfast table, at work, at the mall, in the car. This changes everything.
My Crystal Ball for Mobile
Now that the device is handheld, lightweight, and easily manipulated, people will want to use it to interact with their physical environment. We’ll be able to point it toward a building and pull up that company’s site or information. (This has already started happening in Asia.) We’ll be able to scan UPC barcodes to add items to an online wish list or to have the item automatically shipped to our homes.
As designers, we are currently limited in how we design for mobile devices because of the small screens. In the future, the screens will be able to stretch or unfold so we can view the full 17-inch monitor size. Or maybe they will become more like projectors and project a full-size screen on the wall or desktop. Keyboards will also need to scale. Mobile devices will beam holograms of keyboards so we can type on virtual keys on any flat surface. (A couple years ago I saw a rough prototype for such a thing at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose.)
What will become of all the user-generated content and metadata?
Online users are carving more paths through the Internet than designers could ever plan for. We all watch the viral chaos that we collectively contribute to and try to discover where the mob is moving next. For example, I wrote a blog post a couple weeks ago about how social communities on e-commerce sites have morphed into social shopping sites unlike anything we have yet seen.
Today we see companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon clamoring to collect as much data as possible about each of us. They build handy tools and give them away for free in exchange for collecting loads of information about our individual searching, browsing, and buying behaviors.
My Crystal Ball for User-Generated Content
User-generated content is going to spill outside the Internet arena. As you peruse the cable menu on tv, you’ll be able to see what other people thought of a show to help you decide whether to set your DVR to record it. As silicon chips make their way into paper, newspapers and books will have a place where customers can pull up the latest comments. For instance, I have a favorite recipe of chipoltle nachos with avocado cream dipping sauce that I like to make, and I’d like the option to see what people who like this recipe recommend I also try. I don’t want to pull it up online; I want it to appear in context in my cookbook and to be up to date each time I pull out the recipe.
That brings us to the final and trickiest question:
What will this new generation of technologies blend to create?
Will I be able to scan the page of my cookbook with my mobile device to effortlessly add my latest comment? Will I be able to start a chat session with other people in my online community in a module that I defined in the center of a web page?
OK, so I didn’t expect the conference to go this far. I guess we do need to stay grounded in what’s currently possible so we can push our day jobs forward. But me, I’m a big dreamer, and I like to think up the impossible so we can push dreams to reality.
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