Future Of Web Design

Gez and I attended the Future Of Web Design conference in London this week.

The scope of the conference was nice and broad, not everything was relevant to ourselves but interesting to see the work being done by agencies much larger than ourselves.

There were some very interesting concepts being discussed such as "Personas for applications" as a way of standardising the tone in which your service communicates with it’s users. Ryan Singer of 37 Signals made a blindingly obvious but regularly ignored statement that "users are human beings" and we should ommunicate with them as such. e.g. a form field for entering an email address is much friendlier if you replace the label "Email:" with something like "Please enter your email address here". Little details such as this do wonders for the overall perception of a web site/app/service. 37 Signals’ success is testament to how these things should be treated as core disciplines rather than finishing touches.

We came away from the conference feeling informed and inspired, the things we learned will hopefully have a noticable impact on KMPs continuing work.