Adaptive Path Blog

At the workshop I spoke at today, “Web 2.0: The Human Web,” I was asked what I thought were the major trends I’ve seen in the last few years. My response wasn’t exhaustive (a lot has been going on), but these three things were the first ones that came to mind, and I thought worth sharing:

1. The web is moving away from big “sites” with lots of “pages,” and towards applications with interfaces.
This might be an artifact of the kind of work we’re doing, but we at Adaptive Path have been increasingly working on projects that don’t resemble web sites of old. The closest we get is our work with media (where the page metaphor makes sense), but even those are getting more dynamic and application-y.

2. Speaking of media, media websites are scared.
We’ve had a lot of work with media companies over the last couple of years, and much of it is driven by the fear that media has in grappling with what some call Web 2.0. The decentralized, emergent, user-generated reality of the current web frightens media companies used to controlling what was published, and used to being the source of information for the public. Watching this space evolve has been fascinating.

3. Web user experience broadens to incorporate a whole customer experience.
I’ve gone on a lot about this on this blog, and we’re starting to see companies approach it directly. Those companies that lead the way with Web customer experience are now realizing that it is multi-channel… and that their web teams are ideally suited to evolve there.

Those were the ones that came to immediate mind. Thinking about it a little more, I would add not user-generated content (we’ve had that since we’ve had the Web), but the utility of social networks in bringing people together online (MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, even what we’re seeing with Twitter). People are increasingly comfortable participating online.

Nothing earth-shattering here, but I thought it was interesting what came to mind immediately.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Experience design, Web Applications, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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