The shape of web design in 2012

When I last wrote a predictive web design article, it was early 2010. I wrote of four visual web design styles that I thought would prove popular. I still like what I said back then (and it was our most-visited blog post that year), but I’d feel like I was somehow missing the point if I were to try something similar – there are some big forces influencing the field of web design right now.

An austerity squeeze

2011 has been a shocker for the economy. There’s less money going round, and clients are being rightfully cautious about appointing new suppliers and approving web projects. What money there is has to really demonstrate a return. If things look to be tight for years to come, how might this affect the web design industry?

Big web agencies will continue to win work due to their size and ‘all under one roof’ promise, but the higher internal collaboration costs mean some hard questions might be asked in 2012, like “what percentage of my big web budget will actually be spent on the final product?” Could it have been delivered sooner and for less without affecting the quality?

Small companies with capable teams offering specialised services will fare well this year because they are lean, efficient and fit a niche. They will be pulled in to add the greatest value to specific parts of a larger web project.

I think the squeeze will mostly be felt by the many medium-sized ‘full-service’ agencies who can’t bring something specific to market, and who offer mediocre or outmoded web design services. It’s a process of natural selection which can’t be resisted.

Big bangs & little pops

In this economic climate, the traditional big-bang redesign mentality needs to change radically or die out. By ‘big bang’ I mean the assumption that every three years you need to spend a chunk of money to reinvent your website which gets launched amid a fanfare of marketing effort. It’ll turn heads for the first few months, look good for another year, then become a bit stale and outdated the following year while budget is gathered and arguments against a redesign become less and less tenable.

It’s a bizarre cycle. Why spend a lot of money to guess upfront what the market needs three years down the line? It’s risky, and always requires more upfront exploratory work (and therefore cost) to have the conviction to proceed based on this (more-or-less) educated guesswork.

So what’s the opposite of a ‘big bang’ approach to design? It’s an ongoing sequence of ‘little pops’ that don’t expend all the resources in one meticulously planned and designed final execution, but rather an ongoing process of trying things out, watching how well they work, and periodic pruning into a better shape.

A key ingredient in the ‘little pops’ approach is trust between client and supplier. Such projects need to start quickly and lightly; the exact conditions of project completion are not exhaustively documented; it’s an iterative approach. For these reasons, it suits either a healthy existing relationship, or a new relationship based on extensive getting to know one another and clarity around responsibility and approach.

Simplicity & focus

Back in November 2009, Luke Wroblewski was already proposing an approach to web design called ‘Mobile First’ in which he argued that the challenge of designing mobile experiences should benefit all users’ web experiences by demanding simplicity and focus.

This ruffled a lot of peoples’ feathers, because it calls for a rethink of what a web design actually is. Are all those signposts really needed? Are those secondary and tertiary calls-to-action improving the user experience? What about all those cross-marketing links that are so handy for filling in that awkward white space? In short, why shouldn’t the ‘desktop’ version of a website benefit from this simplicity and focus too?

Supporting this is a trend for the lean or ‘just enough’ design approach that has found favour among startups and the many independent web-based products and services that have sprung up recently.

Starting simply is easy for a startup, but what about the rest of you? Well, to shift toward a ‘little pops’ approach, some serious pruning is the order of the day. It’s time to challenge every bit of your business to be as lean, mean and keen as possible, and this includes your large and complex website.

At Cubeworks, we always aim to formalise a set of measurable goals for both your business and your users, and to run every existing assumption, process and system past these goals to see what might be pruned, automated or integrated. This activity doesn’t take very long, costs a fraction of a ‘big bang’ budget, and doesn’t lock you into one particular supplier. It’s what you need to to do to prepare your existing site to weather the economic storm ahead. If your website IS your business, then this should be top of your list when thinking about your web strategy for the next three to five years.

So what’s it all going to look like?

A big factor in 2012 will be the continuing rise in the variety of ways people can access the web. I’ve covered this before, but in a nutshell, it’s becoming impossible for a business to look at any single visual design and say “That’s what we look like on the web.” A page needs to let itself be carved up, resized, stretched and split into modular components so that it all rejigs perfectly into any one of the many possible web browser sizes it might find itself placed in.

So I think in 2012, page designs will become simpler and learn to fill up the available screen size appropriately instead of being, say, a minuscule, centre-aligned article in a 12 pixel font squinted at on an internet-ready TV from the comfort of your sofa.

If you really want a colour prediction, then I’ll support Pantone’s prediction that 2012 will be all about Tangerine Tango. Enjoy!