.Net magazine asked me (amongst dozens of others) to give them my predictions for next year. The article’s now out and I feel a little bit mis-represented - they seem to have missed my point entirely. To set the record straight here’s what I wrote for them:
I think that next year is going to be incredibly exciting for interaction and user experience design. Right now we are seeing the reinvention of the web application. AJAX has been met with rabid enthusiasm and Dale Dougherty’s Web 2.0 label has crossed over into the mainstream press.
Microsoft recently announced that they will be moving Office online and unveiled live.com to tap the online services market. Google has already made its intentions clear with service offerings like GMail, Google Maps and Google Reader. Yahoo! has entered the fray with some very interesting experiments in user experience, Flickr being my favourite but Yahoo! Mindset is an ingeniously simple enhancement to organic searching. Then throw delicious, Basecamp, Listal, Remember the Milk, Sproutliner, Netvibes, Technorati, Num Sum, Writely, Rojo, ProtoPage, TiddlyWiki and all the other independent apps into the mix. Finally, add the new or forthcoming offerings from high profile web designers like 37 Signals, Adaptive Path, Firewheel Design and Shaun Inman as they establish themselves as application developers. Everyone seems to have a web app in the oven. That’s a very rich and diverse online platform in the making…
These applications require more intense workflows than anything we’ve seen before on the web. I expect to see masses of experimental interaction accompanying new and existing web apps in the name of user experience while everyone figures out what works and what doesn’t. If anything, I think the high end Flash designers probably have a head start, having dealt with interaction issues like latency and interface feedback before. I am looking forward to plenty of experimentation in rich interaction with some blazing successes that change how we use the web but many, many dismal, unusable failures.
