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Fighting a losing game

For a Future-Friendly Web

It is time to move toward a future-friendly web. Our current device landscape is a plethora of desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets, feature phones, smartphones, and more, but this is just the beginning. The rapid pace of technological change is accelerating, and our current processes, standards, and infrastructure are quickly reaching their breaking points. But while this era of ubiquitous connectivity creates new challenges, it also creates tremendous opportunities to reach people wherever they may be.

No one knows what the landscape will look like even just two years down the road, so it would be foolish to say that we can create anything that is truly future proof. But while there aren’t cut-and-dried prescriptive solutions for dealing with this increasing diversity, there are things we can do as web creators to better prepare for what’s in store.

We must acknowledge and embrace unpredictability to become more future friendly. We need to abandon comfortable assumptions that say disruption is temporary and that, given time, things will normalize. With more and more connected devices emerging every day, we’re entering an era of perpetual diversity and constant change. These facts require us to rethink the content we create and the contexts in which people interact with our products and services.

The rise of relevance

People’s capacity for bullshit is rapidly diminishing. Americans on average get firehosed with over 34GB worth of content a day, so out of necessity they’re finding ways to reduce their exposure to noise. Automatic bill payments reduce the flow of junk that once clogged physical mailboxes. DVR, Netflix Instant, Ad Block Plus, and BitTorrent allow people to sidestep time slots, video advertising, and filler content. Tools like Instapaper, Readability, Safari Reader, and Flipboard offer readers an escape from the bombardment of social widgets, blogrolls, animated ads, and obnoxious overlays.

Mobile is also a huge catalyst in this rise of relevance. Most Americans sleep with their mobile phone, where it becomes the last thing they touch before they go to sleep and the first thing they reach for when they wake up. Because we have such an intimate relationship with our mobile devices, we expect them to be extensions of ourselves. We count on them to deliver only the content and utility we desire at precisely the instant we request it. There’s simply not enough time, bandwidth, or screen real estate to trouble ourselves with extraneous noise.

As web creators, we need to embrace these trends to create worthwhile experiences that respect users’ time, or risk getting tuned out.

Laser focus

So how can we deal with increasing device diversity and decreasing attention spans? Perhaps the most significant thing we can do to become more future friendly is to focus. We must pinpoint what really matters to our users and our businesses.

Over the years, we’ve become the virtual equivalent of hoarders, tacking on content and features without stopping to clean house. As a result, sites and services have become obese and sluggish to adapt to this fast-moving landscape. Users bear the burden as they slog through slow page loads, awkwardly huge navigation, sidebar clutter, and a kitchen sink full of half-baked features.



To remedy these problems we need to analyze our content and establish strong content strategies to ensure our content is meaningful to our users and our businesses. Every product feature, every line of copy, every included script needs to have purpose and needs to be relevant to a growing number of contexts. We need to be ruthless in stripping away cruft to deliver strong, focused user experiences.

Former Ford and Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca asked “Where is it working?” when determining which automotive features, products, and initiatives to stick with or scrap. We need to apply Mr. Iacocca’s test to our web products and services and ask “Where is it working?” when we consider content and functionality. Does this really enhance the user experience? How does this make good business sense?

Shedding dead weight frees us up to develop core features and content that users really want and that sets our products apart from the competition. And from a user perspective, focused sites and apps offer clarity, faster page loads, and streamlined user flows.

Users have very little patience and even less so on small mobile screens. Unless you focus your design, users will simply give up on your product before they even know what it can do. —Marcos Lara

If we want to be agile enough to keep up with all this change, we need to shed some weight. Focusing our experiences makes it easier for our content to go anywhere, which is important because it is going everywhere.

Content like water

Whether we’re prepared or not, people are already interacting with our creations on devices that in many cases didn’t exist when we originally built them. This realization led mobile interaction designer Josh Clark to proclaim that we need to think of our content like water that can be poured into a multitude of containers.

Fighting a losing game

In many ways organizations simply react to whatever gets thrown at them: new devices, browsers, native platforms, social media channels, and more. We’re starting to look like Lucy Ricardo on the assembly line , frantically trying to keep up with an increasing number of channels. Instead of chasing down the platforms du jour, we should recognize the fact that our content now needs to reach a lot more places and turn inward to invest in our content infrastructure. It’s an investment in the future.


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 862


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