“Not too long ago we used to design websites. A little bit of time passed and we started designing web apps. Now we design product experiences that go across a multitude of devices and platforms. We live in a world where our design solutions are expected to work totally seamlessly across all kinds of different phones, screens, kiosks and televisions and all these amazing devices. Mobile has gone from an afterthought to the forefront of our minds and is constantly driving the core experience.”
Josh Brewer, Industry Conf 2013
This is exacerbated by the proliferation of web browsers. We have grown from the mid 90s gruesome twosome of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator into an ever-expanding club of devices, using different platforms, apps, screen sizes and resolutions. Not to mention app or platform versions, multi-lingual support and web accessibility features. When reflecting back there is a stark difference between designing now and back in the ‘good old days’. What will the future hold?
Front and centre of this future is the Internet of Things (IoT) – the backbone of the futuristic techno geek lifestyle where you can set the colour of your lights and room temperature within your home by winking in a certain fashion into your smart glasses, whilst you Segway your route through rush hour listening to the latest podcast streamed over a mobile network through your smart watch to your wireless headphones. Data will flow between animal, vegetable and mineral and anticipate your every quantifiable need.
According to Gartner Inc. there will be nearly 26bn devices on the IoT by 2020. This is a truly ‘mind boggling’ number – an exciting yet daunting prediction for us, as well as any other IT trade. Will our coding standards continue to digress as our industry snowballs ever larger and crosses boundaries into new technology areas? Will we be able to cope, designing and developing for so many different platforms? What new skills should we muster, and old ones leave behind?
Our industry as a whole has certainly grown up over the past decade. We have come a long way since the days of font tags, yellow ‘under construction’ GIFs and ‘best viewed in IE6+’. We have become agile and nimble in our development workflows, and embraced and incorporated professional design into our world. All of these changes were made possible as our structural and platform technology was rethought, enhanced and modernised over time (on both sides of the users screen).
How do we prepare for what is to come? Here are some thoughts on how we may want to approach the future.
We can never comprehensively prepare for the future in any walk of life, covering all of the unknowns, without any risk at all. We have to learn as we go with new technologies, trends and styles – try, fail, learn, repeat – growing as we have done in the past. We have to make our voices and opinions heard by those controlling our standards so that we can influence their direction.
Adapting is a part of who we are in this business – at heart we are little more than problem solvers in the centre of an ever-changing landscape, equipped with a refined toolbox that we constantly reach into. Web development has indeed grown up in leaps and bounds in the 20 years I have seen it first-hand. But with the changes that lie ahead, are we unaware that we have ‘never had it so good’? Is this a golden era for web design and development? I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.
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