Designing for Web 2.0

Via the blog of my ever-interesting friend Mr Coates, comes the slides for Matt Biddulph's XTech 2005 presentation The Application of Weblike Design to Data, which references Web 2.0 for Designers, an article in Digital Web magazine by Richard McManus and Joshua Porter. Both talk about the implications of RSS, Ajax, and web services on the design of web sites.

Mr Biddulph's fine presentation, covering similar material to Messrs et Mme Biddulph, Coates, Bell, and Hanley's ETech 2005 presentation, BBC Programme Information Pages: An Architecture for an On-Demand World, talks about the challenges of creating meaningful and useful URLs that will scale with the data being represented. Their Programme Information Pages have the hallmark of an elegant solution: they bring simplicity to a complex problem without restricting the problem space.

I'd like to see a lot more writing like this. Tim often talks about Apple's old Human Interface Guidelines: best practices for making GUI apps that ensured all apps looked and behaved consistently so the user could succesfully build intuition that would help them drive new apps. I'd like to see Human Interface Guidelines for Web 2.0: PIP-style processes for designing URLs, deciding what content has its own URL and what's contained in other pages, when to use an RSS namespace vs simply exporting XML, best practices for APIs, and every other decision that has to be made when rolling out a user-remixable machine-readable buzzword-compliant web site.

It's interesting to think that web design and usability have all been based around helping people shop or understand, from books like Information Architecture for the World Wide Webi> to Jakob Nielsen. The next iteration of usability is design for remix, a set of practices that will differ greatly from design for purchase or design for comprehension.