Design for the web is changing fast, thanks to mobile apps and mobile devices. Pages of waffle and arbitrary happy-talk are history, and sleek, well-designed apps that are genuinely useful are sweeping the online world at a pace.
Scan and skim, click and click back…
We realised quite quickly when the web first arrived that people tend to “skim”, looking for their next click, rather than read sites properly (like a book). So web content is typically simple, and in small “chunks” with descriptive headlines. Mobile apps take this to a logical extreme, with their small screen real estate.
Web pages and apps can also be seen as objects. After all, with a magazine or book, you hold it and turn the page. Job done. On the web, you have buttons, and interactivity. There is the whole discipline of making things look and feel pleasing to use, too – objects that “contain” the content.
Mobile is a brave new world
iPhones, iPads, Android phones and so on are in a ballpark where print design is really now a long way behind us, and object design is taking centre-stage. These new apps do things. They’re called apps, not web pages, after all.
Stripped down and functional, and contained within absolute marvels of technology – super-designed phones, tablets and mini-PCs – these new-age digital “things” take lessons from publishing and twist them beyond recognition as they shoe-horn content into new virtual objects.
There are new challenges and new rules, and everyone’s once again working it out as they go along – it’s a really exciting part of the web to be involved in, and we’re loving it.