I read Die Dashboards Die – by Nir Eyal recently and it resonated with me – but it also got me thinking about how some of this could be applied to traditional web design.
Personally, I feel that for too long now websites have just been a way of taking what would have been your printed marketing brochure and putting it online for anyone to see. We’ve replaced the job of the traditional salesman with Google search results, no longer do we have someone cold calling customers or driving from town to town meeting with prospective clients, instead we have optimised our sites to appear in search engines for favourable terms and then created funnels to see how well we convert these prospects once they reach our online brochures (websites).
Surely it’s time we moved beyond the traditional approach of a logo, menu, hero section, h1, intro text, icon, h4, paragraph, button, etc? Just taking a look at various ‘web design’ inspiration sites one can see that most sites all look the same, with the only real difference being how meticulously the visual design has been crafted.
Maybe (most) websites will essentially become some form of a live chat interface, where the website acts more as an enabler, rather than a passive arrangement of images and text? Where we will be talking to a website, rather than moving a mouse around a screen and clicking on a button based on its color. We can already do a lot of this with bots on our phones, but when will we see major changes in the way we are designing websites? How can your websites desktop experience complement and build on the experience of your customers interaction with your more ‘intelligent’ mobile experiences? If I find some good examples of this I will be sure to post a follow-up to this.