Designing for the web and mobile — Key takeaways from our groupinar
Recently, I had the good fortune of moderating the panel discussion on Connectedreams titled “Designing for the web and mobile” (if you missed it, you can watch a recording at this link.)
On the panel were Prof Anirudha Joshi (Interaction Design head at IDC, IIT-Bombay), Caroline Sinders (Interaction designer at IBM, Cyber ethnographer, photographer) and Vineeth Nair (Sr User Experience Designer at Salesforce). Talking to fantastic people always widens your horizons, and being able to be part of this scintillating conversation did the same to me. These are some thoughts and take-aways I felt were worth noting down from the groupinar.
How design and research have evolved with technology
The technology surrounding the web and mobile has seen phenomenal leaps in recent years, and with it, we have seen corresponding changes in the way designers are designing for it. As Vineeth Nair put it, the design process can no more be pinned down into discrete phases but instead, has become a fast, flexible and a nebulous exercise in reacting rapidly to feedback and designing for it. This high fidelity of feedback that is possible to collect makes it almost like a conversation the designer has with their design. As Prof Joshi said, within his students too, he has seen a rising trend of projects resulting in fast executions — instead of just being reports on shelves, projects have now quickly turned into real apps.
The panel noted significant progress in an area within design as well: Design research. It is increasingly being taken seriously by businesses now. In the past, for a while, even though design research was theoretically accepted as an important phase, in practice, it was often ignored or sacrificed in the interest of a faster output. That is now changing and businesses are starting to realise the importance of informing design with strong and reliable research.
The web as a platform for communities, and its implications
An interesting theme that rose out of the panel discussion was that of online communities: how designers are designing for this new phenomenon, and the interesting ways in which these communities are different than physical communities.
As more and more platforms enable creation of online communities, a new sub-field is emerging within ethnography: Cyber Ethnography. Studying a new phenomenon often requires inventing new tools and even a new understanding of what an old term used to mean. Cyber ethnography is just that — it lends a new interpretation to how ethnography can be conducted. Online communities are much easier to observe passively without affecting the behaviour of its participants. This gives cyber ethnography an unexpected upper hand. However, while traditional ethnography meant that the researcher would immerse themselves deeply in the physical community; in online communities that could be composed of many geographies and personalities, not only is that often not possible, but it is sometimes even dangerous, as Ms Sinders had personally experienced in her work.
The world in general, she notes, is yet to grasp the true impact of online communities. Too often, an interaction that took place only online is discarded as ‘not real’ even when, to the people who were part of that interaction, it’s as real as any face-to-face interaction. As Ms Sinders pointed out, we need to give names to the new, sometimes dangerous, things that happen in these communities because once something has a name, people find it easier to identify its occurrence. Indeed, we are seeing emergence of terms such as doxing (releasing someone’s personal information online), swatting (sending emergency services to someone’s location), dog-piling (multiple people piling hateful comments onto one person) etc. for some of the worst examples of harassment that online communities unwittingly give birth to.
The impact of the web and mobile on emergent users
Technologists and designers today are deeply interested in ‘the next billion’ — the users who will come online in the next five years. The web and the smartphone have made a tremendous impact on the lives of these ‘emergent users’, as Prof Joshi calls them.
An interesting example he quoted from his work sums up quite succinctly, why and how the smartphone affects the emergent user: In India, he notes in the groupinar, WhatsApp has suddenly spread like wildfire among the emergent users. He observes multiple strands that have come together simultaneously to make this happen: first, onboarding in WhatsApp is elegantly simple. Signing up for an online platform, otherwise, is often the first and one of the most difficult hurdles for this user. Second, text input evolved to include the emergent user’s native languages. Native language input keyboards such as Swarna Chakra and others enabled the emergent user to use communication platforms to communicate in their own language. Third, WhatsApp enabled nuances of group communication hitherto unheard of, but important to this user: being a passive observer to a group’s discussion, being able to send pictures and being able to send audio. It’s so deceptively simple to send audio, he notes, that most of the people he talked to had a story to tell about how they sent an audio message by mistake on WhatsApp!
So, with simple onboarding, the ability to input one’s native language, and nuances of group communication important to them being enabled, the emergent user caught on to WhatsApp almost as soon as they could lay their hands on a smartphone. Now one can see WhatsApp playing an important role in small business marketing, healthcare and even politics for the emergent user.
Access to the web, similarly, is going to affect the emergent user in a manner that is different in important aspects. Being part of a community made up of one’s family and friends means a lot more to this section of users — it’s a deeper part of their identity and social standing. Communities on the web today are blind to nuances like these and when the emergent user arrives on these communities, design will have to respond to these stronger needs for a close-knit community. Access to the web will also, of course, mean unprecedented access to information for the emergent user. However, as Prof Joshi observes, the web today is built for information foraging — people simply seek out the information they need. The emergent user, on the other hand, is accustomed to serendipitous access to information — they ‘come across’ information organically. It will be interesting to see how design responds to this need for serendipity in the future.
In all, this was a great session that brought out many interesting aspects of designing for the web and mobile, and its evolution — in the past as well as in the future. For the full discussion that also covered other fascinating areas like designing content for changing touchpoints, building businesses that cater not only to the urban user but also to the emergent, rural user, and much more, head over to the Connectedreams website and watch the full groupinar.
