Jan 1, 2011 0
Web Design Predictions for 2011
Fragmentation and Specialization
Desktop, Mobile, Touch, 10-foot… The market is becoming flush with many new gadgets and technology. From Internet-TV to SmartPhones, everything is accessing data from as wide a variety of sources and with as wide a variety of design challenges. After many recent advances in HTML standards the desktop browser market is maturing with support for controlled presentation of text, graphics and interactive media. Some of that is changing thanks to the fragmentation of media by several consumption changes that are growing in 2011.
Enter the growing mobile market. Within the next 5 years, it is expected that the consumption of content will more likely take place on a mobile device than a desktop or laptop. This challenge is being met be designers right now. Although smaller resolution device present some hurdles for designers, advances in mobile browsers have made adaption intuitive.
Add now, the tablet market. With Apple’s iPad the leader, Adobe’s Flash plug-in has become the pariah of the internet development community. Although a strong technology with incredible market saturation it is suffering from a bad rap. Regardless, there is a move to HTML5 and JavaScript technologies for video delivery. There is also a move back to a more conservative 1024 X 768 browser resolution for usability. All of these changes influenced by personal, less-powerful mobile browsing and media consumption platforms.
Internet TV consoles are going to be big players in the consumer space this year. Devices that can search the web for video and audio content and deliver it to your living room with the ease of a Google search. Google, Apple, Boxee and Roku are all contenters in this space and the winners will take a huge portion of our couch-time. To designers: Your media should be streamlined for the consumption in short-burst from a couch-born viewer. This user interface, the 10-foot interface is presented by the device. By most specs (Google, Boxee and Roku) your presentation is stripped and data held on the page presented by proxy for the waiting viewer.
HTML5
HTML5 will spread its wings in 2011. Coming on strong in 2010, HTML5 has seen a respectable uptake. The ability for developers to deploy HTML5 classes and methods and still have the ability to support older browsers like Internet Explorer 6 presents a lot of flexibility. This, combined with the search benefits of HTML5 content hierarchy makes it a logical choice for anyone developing a new website.
2011 will bring a new crop of devices that access the internet. Almost all will provide support for the HTML5 spec and all will support a transitional specification. Apple’s iOS devices for example have been able to supply strong video support and overcome the incompatibility with Adobe’s Flash only because of HTML5’s media ability.
HTML5’s rise will also come at the cost of aging corporate hardware. Enterprise, making up a majority of the IE6 instances still in the wild, will be forced to abandon older Windows hardware still in the workforce. Facilitated by the stability and warm reception on Windows7 and also a waining support for WindowsXP by Microsoft, new hardware introduced into the field will have better software support for HTML5. The introduction of a new browser, IE9, will mark an official entry into modern browsing by Microsoft.
Fonts
A maturing web is becoming a beautiful place. Once the bastion of print-designers, unique fonts are now becoming a coming commonplace for web designers. This past year, independent developers, font-houses and design-collective began widespread use of tools that can embed, stream and deliver to the end-user fonts for use in rendering webpages.
These new technologies employ several methods and tactics with as wide a range of executions. They all promise to deliver platform agnostic typographic freedom from the somewhat stale, though reliable, suite of fonts that have been used to build every webpage in the last 15 years.
TypeKit, FontSquirel and Google are a few of the leaders in this space. All provide transparent fall-backs for developers in the event that a solution is not supported of there is a technology failure. This combined with commonplace broadband to feed the solution to end users presents an new playground for designer, developers and content owners.
The effect is fantastic: unique designs, once only executed by embedding images, is done by feeding a temporary file for font rendering. It is lightweight for the end-user and allows the site to be accessible to all devices (with and without font support). The palette of fonts is growing everyday and the devices supporting custom fonts is growing as well.
Although every operating system interprets and presents fonts in its own way, the essence of custom fonts gives designers the ability to express themselves and their brands in a whole new way never before available to their visitors.
Giving Up On The Fold
There is no fold. I had never been especially concerned about the fold. I’ve worked on many projects where the discussion of “the fold” led to some seriously compromised designs. The argument about the fold is typically transference for too many or not properly designed call-to-action items. A well designed page (with strong content) should have a user scanning the page, clicking deeper or committing (or not) to reading the content and scrolling the page until they consume all that they want, or need to.
The growth of the mobile market, the emergence of tablets (representing a return to the 1024 x 768 standard) and the popularity of add-ons and toolbars, the fold leaves designers with solutions that look more like a print-spread than a dynamic web page. Most users are visiting websites with a distinct intention. Determining that intention and making that actionable is much more important to the designer than proving a multitude of visible destinations to the user.
If you are fortunate enough to design or create content for a website that has a large percentage of browsing users, or are driving traffic to the homepage on a product website, you should be directing users to several key destinations. By offering users too many options from the homepage, you may end up overwhelming or confusing them. Focusing calls-to-action is also a way to capture information about your audience. If you are able to segment them to key areas, you can better address their individual needs with more niche links and actionable items within the site.
Listening For What Works
No matter what trends emerge for 2011, you should take the new year as an opportunity to look at your analytics. Google’s solution is free and provide in-depth reporting on your users, your content and also offers A-B testing so you can determine how your designs are effecting user behavior and traffic.
