What is Web 2.0 Design?


 

 

When you really get down to it, Web 2.0 is impossible to pin down to one, comprehensive, cohesive definition. It’s conceptual, encompassing, fluid, evolving, malleable, and changeable. If you were to compare it to something within the animal kingdom, it would probably be best to choose a chameleon due to its ability to constantly change.

The term “Web 2.0” came into being a little over 3 years ago (2004) as a way to describe the shift in design and development of all things World Wide Web. While Web 2.0 started out as a way to define design shift and function for the web, it has now become a marketing strategy…taking on another life in that arena. Web 2.0 is also now an advertising buzz word of sorts.

Rather than attempting to define Web 2.0, it should instead be viewed simply as a set of characteristics. These characteristics should encompass the move from creating websites that essentially were stand alone ‘vaults’ of information to now designing fluid, interactive, user-oriented sites. One of the major defining features of anything Web 2.0 is its ability to be interactive and social in nature (user participation). The incorporation of features such as weblogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (along with other forms of people to people publishing), social software, web application programming interfaces (APIs), and online web services (think eBay, Flickr, and Gmail) provide significant enhancements over the older, read-only websites. While many of these features existed prior to the birth of the Web 2.0 phraseology, they have been lumped into this growing movement to embrace the web as a platform for engaging its users.

There are several ways to attempt to categorize the concept of what makes a site “Web 2.0”. One prevalent list of design parameters comes from Frog Design (the designers of both Apple and Microsoft operating systems). While these guidelines were in place well before Web 2.0 was around, they are still helpful in examining how Web 2.0 was born. Here are a few of their guidelines:

These guidelines are designed to assist you in developing products that provide Mac OS X users with a consistent visual and behavioral experience across applications and the operating system. Following the guidelines is to your advantage because:

  • Users will learn your application faster if the interface looks and behaves like applications they’re already familiar with.
  • Users can accomplish their tasks quickly, because well-designed applications don’t get in the user’s way.
  • Your application will be easier to document, because an intuitive interface and standard behaviors don’t require as much explanation.

The implementation of Apple’s human interface principles make the Macintosh what it is: intuitive, friendly, elegant, and powerful.

These are only a snapshot of all of the guidelines they list in their User Experience Guidelines. Actually, the sentence at the end of their guidelines could be considered as one of the best summaries for Web 2.0’s goals in functionality: “intuitive, friendly, elegant, and powerful.”

Web 2.0 is user-centric. Its mission is to make the users the developers. It removes the need to know how to put up a web page. It moves the Internet from being the voice of web designers and programmers to the voice of every man. It is the evolution of who does the work, beginning with the programmers, moving to designers, and now to lay people. The content in Web 2.0 is the users; whether it is forum posts, videos, links, comments, blog entries, or photos. Web 2.0 sites are not as much planned as they are organic. While Web 1.0 is/was a planned city on a grid, Web 2.0 is an unplanned city with crazy streets. A good example of this is Google maps (one of the applications that put Web 2.0 on the map) which allow users to add in landmarks, their own 3d models of buildings, and create their own overlays to show things that are important to them. So, essentially it is not defined but rather very well designed in its unplanned nature which makes it hard to pin down. It is this user input ability that has brought it to the forefront above everything else on the web.

Another great example of this user-centric focus is found in this article about IBM’s new Mashup Starter Kit. “IBM, which sells to corporate customers, sees a lot of potential in giving businesspeople the ability to build their own applications via tapping into various information sources.” The Mashup Starter Kit includes a server component called the Mash-up hub which “is like a Web 2.0 website where people can register feeds, rate feeds–the things are inside the catalog. Business people not only wanted to do mash-ups, they want to have more control of information, like a freshness of it for instance.” This product is a prime example of the nature of Web 2.0, which is to give the user control.

Ultimately when using the term Web 2.0, you have to examine your reasons for using it. Are you a site developer/designer attempting to describe your creative style to a prospective client? Are you the client attempting to explain your website idea to a designer? Or are you a web surfer discussing a really cool site you stumbled onto? The irony is that the term covers it all!

Whatever position you’re in with Web 2.0, it seems that the discussion eventually comes back around to this phrase: ‘user-friendly and interactive’. The complex blend of emerging technologies, old standard systems, and everything in between is what ultimately creates anything Web 2.0.

Here is another good resource about the Apple guidelines: Click Here

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