Pixelmatrix Design

The Future of the Web

My WebVisions name badge. Click to view on Flickr

WebVisions is a local conference for web professionals that’s been going on for a number of years. This year was the first year that I had heard of it, and I was very excited that it was right here in Portland. This year’s topic was about the “future of the web”, and there was a lot of great talks around this topic. I just want to take a few minutes to go over a few cool things I learned and thought about.

FUTURE OF INTERACTION

There was a lot of talk about interaction design at WebVisions, but one of the most notable presentations was about multi-touch and gestural interfaces. After seeing this presentation, it really helped me realize how close we are to fully gesture-based interfaces.

Right now the way we interact with devices is really strange. It doesn’t reflect our interactions with physical objects very well. A mouse and keyboard are not going to be around forever.

We are starting to see gesture-based devices in the marketplace, and while they are still brand new, the technology is getting better and better and someday these devices will be common-place.

FUTURE OF IDENTITY

Identity is a big issue on the web. We’ve been trained into this strange system of signing up with every single site and replicating the same information over and over. Think of how many accounts for websites you have. While it may not seem like a big deal to remember usernames and passwords for every site, why should we have to settle for such a hacked-up solution?

Enter OpenID. Actually, not just OpenID, but a whole host of technologies that are going to revolutionize the web (OAuth, and DiSo for example). In the real world we don’t have “accounts” that we create at every store before purchasing things. If someone needs to check our identity, they look at our drivers license or passport (trusted sources of identity). If we need to pay, we simply hand them a card from our wallet (trusted sources of financial data). On the web, we need a central protocol for identification, and that’s what OpenID is. It’s also important to distinguish that no one “owns” OpenID, which is what makes it work. If everyone stored their information with one specific entity (a la Passport), that entity would have too much power.

There’s lots that will likely happen in the next few years to revolutionize this technology. It’s still brand-new, and has not matured fully yet (which spurs most of the complaints) but there will come a day when this technology is sorted out, and it just works. Feel free to comment with (or without) OpenID on this blog.

FUTURE OF MEDIA

Lynne Johnson from FastCompany spoke about the future of print media, something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. While her views on it are a little different than mine, I think we both agree that the places we go to get our media are changing dramatically.

I first became aware of this concept as I worked in different coffee shops and observed the older generation reading newspapers. It made me think about how rarely I see people in my generation (or even my parents’ generations) reading a newspaper. Then, I realized the only time I ever read any news is from the internet. It really seems wasteful now to print newspaper. Printing millions of copies of the news for one day, when it’s only going to be discarded (hopefully recycled) at the end of the day. It can be argued that the design quality of the daily news is usually not very high either, because the amount of time spent on the design and layout is very limited.

Where Lynne and I disagree is in the medium of books. She believes that this shift from print to digital includes books as well, and I think that books are likely to be preserved in some way or another. Books are prized by loyal readers, and the amount of time that has gone into the design, typesetting and printing of books is a fine quality that cannot be appreciated in a digital format.

There is also a huge issue with the technology. There is no device that I currently feel comfortable reading for long periods of time with. The soothing qualities of books are not at all realized with devices. I have a few ebooks stored on my computer, and I just cannot bring myself to read them. Even with devices like the Kindle, books just don’t feel the same, and I still find it hard to read them.

I can see “pulp fiction”, and other smaller, cheaper books moving to a digital format, where the format is shorter and the quality would not have been as high anyway, but I think we’ll always have some sort of printed books around.

WHERE IT’S ALL GOING

I can’t pretend to know everything about where we’re heading, but there are a lot of signs that we’re moving into a fundamental shift from learned computing behaviors to a more natural model that mimics how we interact in the physical world.

Only time will tell.