| Content is King No More: Web 2.0 Is About Interaction |
| Friday October 7, 2005, 15:20 PM EST |
How many of you are sick of hearing about “Web 2.0”? Alright, put your hands down. Me too. But the fact is, this cute little label hasn’t even reached much of the mainstream yet. We’re going to hear it trotted out so much in the next few years that we’ll always be wearing our iPod Nano earbuds, just to stay sane and stop the noise. But regardless of the hype, we are entering into a very new and exciting time where the web is more powerful, usable, and enjoyable. For all of us in the industry, this is accompanied by a lot of buzz, energy, and optimism – not to mention opportunity. Good things, all.
We hear a lot about the basics of Web 2.0: how it is about user control of content. Or about websites that behave more like thick client applications. Or about web products that are designed to facilitate network effects and serve as a co-collaborative space between the product’s provider and the user community. But we haven’t talked enough about the larger implications of these things, and how this affects the structure and importance of design teams and approaches. In short, what it means to people like us. While a lot can be written on this, the thing that is most glaring and poignant to me is the seismic shift in importance from a focus on content and information to behavior and interaction.
Interaction Design: The New Polar Bear
Industry veterans are well aware of the rise of information architecture (IA) in the 1990’s. Spurred by the terrible state of the web, and the visionary and opportunistic work of people like the Argus Associates team, information architecture became a staple of good web design. Indeed, along with usability, IA and the things surrounding it became – to some real degree – the fulcrum of corporate web design. We kept hearing, “Content is king!” Suddenly, content management specialist Gerry McGovern was one of the most-requested consultants in the industry, and the Polar Bear book – the original O’Reilly tome on IA by Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville that essentially defined the discipline – was the must-have bible. But times are changing.
Don’t get me wrong, the content and information architecture components will always be important to web design. But the truly critical design role in a Web 2.0 world will be that of interaction design.
Interaction design (IxD) stretches well beyond the design of digital interfaces. Indeed, the discipline shares more in common with industrial design than it does IA. It is about behavior, about how people actually interact with a product. With traditional websites, this was an (relatively) unimportant challenge. Unlike desktop applications that demanded rich and deep interaction models, the awkward and limited nature of websites based on technologies like HTML and Flash were alternately either very bland and limited, or very clunky and heavy to use. Interaction design, while certainly a component in the process, was less important than IA in particular. After all, the fundamental issue was one of content management: organizations with no experience in gathering all of their content together and organizing it and making it available for successful use were stuck in a quagmire of figuring out how to best achieve that. It was often the product of multiple redesigns to actually get it right. So not only was the technology too limited to enable rich interactions, the business needs were far more elementary than that. We rarely even got into more serious and complex interaction problems.
Today, it’s different. We have increasingly rich web interfaces, and organizations are relatively far along in achieving workable solutions to their content/information level problems. The essential problem of today is the behavior, the interaction: how do we leverage the available technologies and create truly remarkable web interfaces and applications. Because now we can. Now we have the ability to dramatically upgrade the state and nature of the web, and much of that opportunity lies in the interaction layer of the interface design.
Interface Design: A Really Short Primer
To clarify my basic point, remember that an interface is made up of three layers:
Information – the basic content and data
Interaction – the behavioral model
Presentation – the surface of the user experience
Each of these overlap and work dynamically, while each also presents complex stand-alone design problems. The successful design of an interface requires an appropriate balance of all three layers. However, based on other factors – primarily business need, market opportunity, and the capabilities of current technology – the design challenges shift over time between the three. As we talked about earlier, we’ve been in the midst of a very information-driven period. When the web first became popular, the presentation layer was typically the key problem center. Today – and into the foreseeable tomorrow – the interaction layer will be the most important. This is truly a remarkable and important shift!
What Interaction Design Means to You
As an owner of a company that largely works on rich application design – both on the web and the desktop – I am keenly aware of the dearth of experienced, talented interface designers available today that truly have strong interaction design skills. The skill simply has not been cultivated, compared to IA or usability-related skills and methods or visual design and programming. Relatively speaking, it is very uncommon. Given that the demand for it is going to continue to sharply increase in – dare I say it – the Web 2.0 paradigm, the limited supply is going to make it that much more valuable.
So my suggestion to you, intrepid web professionals, is to start thinking about interaction design as the next great opportunity for growth. Learn about it by joining the Interaction Design Group and getting on their mailing list. Or consider going back to school. Or seek out and work on a juicy application and – either as the provider or team member – soak up everything you can about product behavior and interaction. The essential problems of Web 2.0 – for the time being, anyway – will largely live in the interaction layer. If you are also able to live there you will enjoy increased opportunity, not to mention have the chance to contribute to creating truly amazing and delightful applications.
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