Author: Daniel Redman

The Next Generation in Defining the Web Experience

There are two illicitly strong undertones in nearly every marketer’s digital mindscape over the next few years: 'How can we meet the needs of a more demanding online community?' and 'How do we make our web content more socially desirable?'

The struggle for designers will be to enforce a new wave of dynamic web tech allowing for enterprise level content management and sharing but keeping with highly restrictive brand standards and guidelines. In a perfect world for designers, brands will adapt alongside technology loosening restrictions with changing search, ecommerce, and web behavior.

Everything in this world that we experience shapes the way that we approach consumables. As more people find and master the newest social platforms (Twitter, foursquare, etc.) the expectations are set and reset that design fill follow suit and implement modular units that provide the same content exchanges that people familiarize themselves with elsewhere.

Below are three areas of foreseeable change that designers can capitalize on now to forge the next generation of dynamic web experience.

Sound Biting

There are best practices in blogging and some content writing that have established it is proper method to have pull out comments mid post to accentuate a point and give the reader more digestible text elements. We certainly see that this behavior has translated to Twitter. The small digestible text bite has become a communication staple in the new iWorld. This hasn’t yet translated to a desirable means of micro-sharing content. In order to make sharing top of mind for readers, push-button social should be in-text at critical places. This would mean that we are not only stimulating the share of an article, but also some of the individual thoughts within it.

But that is really only the beginning of micro-sharing. With the explosive rise of video content and its consumption, cueing small segments of video for miniclips would be an ideal feature upgrade rather than simply sharing an entire video or requiring the user to pull out their own 3rd party software to chop up your video content.

Real Time Content Integration

It’s time for site content to get it’s just desserts. Strangely enough, the design community skipped the opportunity to pull back the curtain to reveal popular on-site content and went straight for the blog posts. It’s no secret to anyone that cross-pollinating visitors with blog posts is a tried and true method of engaging an audience with resources. Though, the lost opportunity may lay on-site. As a visitor, I’m not always at the luxury of knowing what navigation funnel you’d like me to follow, and if I should simply guess my way through until I get tired of trying to find what I want or I seek help. Nobody is provided a map to your website when they arrive, it’s simply not realistic to auto-print them. However, if you present/rank the most popular site content to a visitor they will undoubtedly be able to visualize a path through the site. This isn’t your mother’s cookie crumbs, it is real-time visitor viewable funnels.

Live User Trending

On the note of providing deeper transparency to an ever becoming more savvy audience; designers may look to data units as a means of showing web solidarity across content. In taking away the experience of web surfing as a typically singular chore, you can create a new mindset for readers. The simple subtlety of including current on page data could be meaningful to not only dictate standard viewing behavior across your site, but also stimulate a bigger than thou sensation for visitors. If I know that currently 40 people are in the checkout stage of a shopping cart at the time that I am, I will feel positively rewarded in my decision to have chosen that site to do business with.

In conclusion; plenty people speculate what the future will bring for website development, most concur that the socialization will be the strong suit of popular sites and that content will adhere to more of a crowd-sourced standard. There are different approaches to getting the attention of visitors outside of simply adding a twitter widget. Designers need to take a step back and remember that we are not just dealing with herds of data, people have definable behavior that we can adapt to, better understand, and provide with more intelligent user experiences.

Peter

Great article! More of these please

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