Matt and Iwein get FOWD
Matt and myself went to London town to find out more about the Future of Web Design yesterday. And it was good!
Patrick McNeil talked about inspiration and how it’s an everyday process and something you need to practice. One way to get better at it is to force some regularity into it by publishing an “inspiration gallery” (like we used to have on our old website).
Steve Pearce and Andy Clarke provided the best session in my opinion about brand experience versus user experience. They confirmed what we already know: you can’t see them in isolation. You can have a great and satisfying interaction with a website, but if the visual aspect is lacking, you’re unlikely to talk to your friends about it. Conversely, if a really slick looking site lets its visitors down in its interaction, you’re not likely to come away feeling good about it.
Andy Budd talked about the user experience and likened it to his experiences with hotels and their staff. He highlighted first impressions, attention to detail, consistency, efficiency, feedback and making it fun as some of the things that can make visitors happy advocates.
Larissa Meek suggested an interesting idea in her talk about client sign-off: by doing more research and engaging your client in that research, providing a single design concept (and getting it right first time!) is a much better and efficient way than providing multiple design directions.
Jon Hicks took us through how to build a website. I didn’t expect to learn a whole lot in this session, but came away pleasantly surprised. Jon showed us some interesting ideas on how to make the front-end development process more efficient and scaleable.
Paul Farnell talked about less obvious ways to get more high quality traffic to your website. It was interesting that most of it comes down, again, to a good user experience. In this case it was applied to how you interact with communities and how being decent and helpful gets you the greatest rewards. His idea of “satellites”, small and free products or websites to complement the main (monetized) offering, sounds like it has a lot of potential.
Daniel Burka emphasised the importance of iteration: a design or style guide is never finished. It is really important to make small improvements to your website (and its user experience) on a regular basis.
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