How web 2.0 users have changed the design and development of web ?
Web 1.0 was about publishing, portals and eyeballs. Web 2.0 is all about participation, social media and self-expression. How these new Web 2.0 users/usage have affected the web design and development ? What is your personal experience or observation...
Good Answers (1)
To answer your question santonsh i think im going to break it into two parts:
I believe you must remember where you have been to know where you are going.
So in order to answer your question i think its important to examine "Why the web changed".
The earlier mode of content consumption was that it was created by one publisher (eg: Yahoo) and consumed by people like you and me.
Companies spent millions of dollars each year creating or sourcing content they believed was relevant to their user base.
As you can imagine, content like this had a very short shelf life as it did not change or evolve in any way.
The challenge that arose was to be able to "create more relevant content at a cheaper price , thereby increasing its shelf life".
As the blogging revolution took of (which in its nascent stage was primarily in the form of text and some Hyper text) and theories like the "wisdom of crowds" gained popularity the Internet industry realised that they had potentially found an answer to their challenge.
(of course the proliferation of "always on connections and flagging PC prices didn't hurt ;)
Their new challenge thus became "Enabling the infrastructure to create such content". and so the paradigm shift on how websites were built stemmed from this challenge.
The main considerations you must account for are:
1) Facilitate User Contribution through the IA and Design :
Design must be functional and minimalistic so that the user sees existing content and his path to creating his own.
2) Service Availability
Network Up time and availability must be highly scalable and you must work towards ensuring optimal UE for all users independent of geography.
3) Operations is Strategic
If design no longer matters in its traditional sense and all services are similar then the war has shifted to how nimble you can be operationally. This is where the battle is being fought.
4) Data Management is key
5) Dynamic Interaction Design
6) Perpetual Evolution and Rapid Application Development
Most of the web 2.0 sites are in BETA (for a good reason). The market is still nascent and the companies are still analyzing and changing their offerings at breakneck speed to ensure that they survive the innevitable shake-out.
7) Generic Platform Design with Components that are boot -strapable and easily combined.
If said this alot. "The best platform will own the user." and id like to add to that by saying that the components (functionality if you will) that run on the platform also matter greatly.
Their design must be flexible enough for the user to combine them in a way that is most meaningful to him/her.
I could go on but i think ive covered the main points.
In the end, keep in mind a concept called "Pay it forward" ...paying it forward refers to repaying the good deeds one has received by doing good things for other unrelated people.
In a similar fashion, users must be able to benefit from their contribution in some way and the ultimate extrapolation of this goal would be that users would be able to monetize their contributions to a web service or platform on a performance basis.
Good Luck.
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More Answers (14)
Brian M
at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories
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Hello Santosh,
I think the question is a little backward.
The people who changed the design and development of the Web are the designers. The users validated those changes as valuable to them.
The biggest effect to me is to open up the thinking of everyone involved. Customers, commissioning bodies, designers, developers: everyone is trying to understand and capture the essence of the new capabilities and experience.
Regards
Brian MacLeod
Hey Santosh,
Web 2.0 has been here for a while now and everyone from the consumer to the advertiser to the portal business stakeholders have noticed it employed it and are now reaping the benefit of this wonderful thing.
The main difference between web 1.0 and web 2.0 is the fact that it emphasizes and re-emphasizes the fact that "consumer is the king" which is actually more evident here then any other filed.
Till now, in web 1.0 the content was primarily provided by the content provider but in web 2.0 the user is in charge for the content.
He can decide what to present whom to invite whom to connect with, giving rise to thing like social networking, pod casting et al.
This content is decided by the user and is everything becomes much targeted the advertisers also have to take it into their stride and the metrics which used to be the guiding factor of what's and what’s out or what’s selling and what’s not are changing.
Now the metrics are not just restricted to eyeballs or page views but are more to do with how many connections can you reach out with a single ad (social networking).
So in a nut shell Web 2.0 has just changed the design and programming but has changed the basic experience, the functionality and perception of web.
Karl G
CTO/Owner Intelligent Fusion, Enterprise Architect, Business Strategist, PhD
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I would've argued more that web 2.0 is a buzzword meant more to capture emerging trends already taking place in the internet.
These trends represent a natural evolution as the internet becomes increasingly integrated with our real life. In this respect, we see discrete avenues of our real life being extended into virtual life such as networking, myspace, or blogs, etc.
Web 2.0 is more of a snapshot of a longer-term evolution where the internet (or connectivity) becomes second nature and our own virtual world is a much more natural extension of our real life than the piecemeal stovepipes we see in Web 2.0 today.
I think it's an immensely exciting time to watch, live, and learn.
Well, if it's the web designers you are talking about, then web 2.0 has effected one major shift: Less is Better.
Web 1.0 would focus on showing more colours, flashy & techie smarts, etc. Web 2.0 is about how to keep things simple, clean, modular, and light. Web designers who entered the industry thinking it was a promising extension of their graphic design background will find it tough if they don't keep their minds open, for these web 2.0 sites have become so popular that readers want even their 'web 1.0' sites to follow the norm - as it is easier on their eyes.
Web designers will also increasingly have to go beyond just design and understand usability as well. I see you are based in India, and from experience, I find this to be a fairly big gap in India.
The other trick, business-wise, of course, is how to achieve this and yet allow enough options to make money at the same or better ROI!
(Having said that, I really think one should not keep using web 1.0 and web 2.0 as if they were fixed categories. Web 2.0 is just a wave - a stage that defines how the users have adapted further to the wired world, and it is imperative that all businesses having a stake in this world adapt themselves. That applies to portals, your traditional web 1.0' too, and the answer is not just in creating a 'blogging' or a social networking space, etc.)
Swapna
Sumit J
Co-Founder, www.CommonFloor.com
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My personal experience says an application to be characterised as Web2.0 must look cool. It has to offer an extremely good and rich user experience enabling the wide user acceptance and usage of the service or application. Application should be built in keeping the targeted users of your application in mind. And after that all the technologies should follow, be it AJAX or any other Web2.0ish technology which had been there for over a decade already.
Cheers,
Sumit
Hi Santosh,
I think Web 2.0 is more concern about User Experience and Personalization, so "Simple is the Best". The web designer nowadays required rich knowledge of javascript and interactive technologies. But in the past, only brilliant colour, attractive graphics and flash animation can gain enough traffics. Nowadays most popular website are simple and highly customized, such as iGoogle, MySpace, Xanga, etc. So the web designers have to decide how users can understand the way they customize their page and how much they can involve.
Hope I can answer your question. :)
From a development point of view, the Web 2.0 has provided a new set of API and toolset, that developer (and designers) have to learn/understand and integrate to their system.
For example, you can see numerous Java/Javascript libraries and "components" that help developers to answer end user requirements regarding "Web 2.0 user experience" expectations. eg: GWT, Scriptaculous, new JSF components with more interactivity, .Yahoo!, JMaki, ...
Hi Santosh
I beg to differ with some of the answers.
Web2.0 is mostly about commercial web sites. The very first, and generally non-commercial, web sites were about about what we call web2.0 before graphic tools were even available. University sites, Bulletin Board sites and the like, including some private sites I built with friends back in the 80's.
You'll find the all the hallmarks of web2.0 there:
• The user generated content or social networking, in the form of a forum, bulletin board, directory or 'help wanted' device, IRC, Newsgroups, etc.
• The opportunity to be a hero (vanity) with great stories, photographs, expertise, assistance or the like.
• The outlet for creativity, again, art, drawings, creative writing, graphics.
For a designer, these are the 3 hallmarks of web2.0: Community, Vanity and Creativity. Design for their exercise, and you'll make your customers happy.
Typically, the trendsetters blaze their own pathways, and the marketers spend all their efforts in finding them, tracking them and than marketing to their followers, once the "movement" has matured.
If you're in the business of interactive marketing, just remember, by the time you see it in a commercial manifestation, its been through umpteen board room meetings and brainstorms, strategy sessions, functional specification developments, user testing, and finally development and marketing. Than, the ultimate testing of consumer appeal.
Web2.0 isn't new, not by a long shot. Its just commercialised. Thinking about tertiary web? That's what's happening now.
I blog on these topics, stop by and see if there's anything else that interests you.
Links:
Claus A suggests this expert on this topic:
She knows loads about web 2.0
Vikas D
Transformation through Innovation
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Web 2.0 is all about connecting people to people.
The Web 2.0 site is typically just and infrastructure combined with a set of rules for users to interact with each other. This is redefining both, peer to peer interaction, as well as business to customer interaction over the web.
Web 2.0 has had a strong impact on web design and development:
- Business applications are replacing static web-sites ('software as a service'). 'Users' can be other applications and not just humans
- Websites are richer and data-driven with more interactive content as well as continuous refresh of parts of the page (even without any action from the user)
- Web-sites are becoming bi-directional, providing more control to users, even to the extent of trusting users as co-developers
- Various social interaction tools come under the collective umbrella of Web 2.0: Blogs, wikis, comparison shopping, social networking, content syndication, peer-to-peer networks, and so on.
- Web applications being built are based on SOA best practices using AJAX related technologies, which greatly simplify the development of complex applications
- Many user interactions are possible without round-trips to the server reduces server-side processing as well as bandwidth requirements
etc. etc..
YouTube is an excellent example of a Web 2.0 site that managed to achieve an amazing market capitalization. Web 2.0 is increasingly becoming the de facto standard for the next generation web applications and services.
I think that a typical process that lead to 2.0 was the rejection of classical category-driven navigation in favor of direct text search by the users.
The old way, "we pretend to know how you think/navigate/organize yourself" doesn't work any longer and only websites that allow enough freedom to use the site the way the user wants to offer a satisfactory user experience. This means, many roads lead to the goal; there is not "one right way".
AJAX, drag and drop and other widgets are only the means, and they are not necessary at all. Using widgets in order to "do web 2.0" means to confuse the way and the goal.
I feel the biggest change has been that Web 1.0 was about 'telling' and Web 2.0 is about 'doing'.
Web 1.0 would focus on the best and most attractive way to communicate information. Web 2.0 focuses on creating the architecture for converting that into action.
A simple example would be that a few years back I could only see the tariffs / network etc. of a cellular provider. Today, I can take it a step forward and do entire account management activities (see / pay bills, add value-added services, buy new instruments etc.) through the net.
This goes even further for mapping services where I could earlier see only a picture of a map. Today I can zoom in and out to street level, measure distances, create my own map with saved places etc.
From a Read-only to a Read-Write platform, a participatory platform. The web has now become (or has the potential of being used as) a Read-Write platform, where all users can participate in content creation as well, and not just in consumption.
I think it is not so much about visual design. It is a change in the manner in which users interact (or can now interact) with the medium.
Below is a link of a presentation I put together on this topic.
Links:
Julia S
Web Product Manager | User Experience Architect | Information Architect | GUI Specialist | Usability Expert
Hello Santosh,
Like in every evolution, in web 2.0 things have changed in a natural manner - one after another. If some years ago a web site's owner might think that because he spent money on content, his web site is so great, that users will use it even if text is too small, fonts are not readable, and dimensions do not fit users' screen resolution or color palette.
Nowadays, websites become "all about content", which means that websites must have flexible layouts (because users decide what to display), readable texts, friendly GUI, light pages for faster loading and so on.
That is why graphic headers are left in the past, text is written in live HTML, tables are replaced by DIV's, formatting is assimilated in external CSS files and colors became clear and contrast.
Today, the terms "usability", "accessibility", "user experience" and "information architecture" mean success or failure.
Hope it helps,
Julia.
