purpose it's going to serve in people's lives. Creating a very simple easy to use,

easy to understand experience,

that's the challenge of designers.

It really comes down to

understanding that someone is a person on the other end of the thing that you make.

They're not a number.

When Tim Berners-Lee created HTML, he was writing something that would allow scientists

to share physics papers over the internet.

HTML is so simple; it's just take your content and structure it and make it accessible

to any device. It used to be that you used html to do your lay out.

That's how most designers in the nineties did their stuff. They used html table cells,

sliced and diced images and that's how they worked. But the content was all mixed up with the layout

so CSS allowed designers to separate structure of their content from the

presentation of their content.

That was a big advance

and behavior, that's controlled by javascript, that's separate again. The

next big thing that happens is the dominance of flash for several years,

because that's where they had

real control over

typography and they could do all kinds of dynamic stuff that were much harder to pull off in html.

But, flash was really good if you thought of the web as something that a

small corps of artists used

to entertain the masses.

But it turns out, they don't really want to go to the web for that.

What they want to go to the web to do is share.

Now designers realize people come here for the content.

So lets put the content first and make it accessible to any device. And

HTML five becomes stable enough that developers start paying

attention to it.

All of a sudden it's about apps, it's about applications being built with

HTML. So HTML is the cockroach that will survive a nuclear winter.

People judge web design through the

lens of print design but

the two are not that analogous. The screen is a very different medium than a page.

There are myriads of different decisions that

you can make and that's the interesting process as a designer.

I usually start with content but, beyond that, start thinking about how

someone's going to navigate and traverse all of the information that you're putting

on to these pages. So the grid is a system for layout. It's the structure

that you can apply to a canvas to help

you organize content in a systematic way.

But also the grid will allow you to structure

things in a hierarchical way so that,

through contrast, you can create importance and meaning. There are also

very important aesthetic considerations and color

is a very big one of those.

Being onscreen, we're talking about color being made with light, that being additive color.

So something that you might

like in print design, you know, a very

vibrant yellow or a very strong

black might not look that good

on screen because it could be too contrasted

or it might not be contrasted enough.

And choosing the right typeface becomes another asset on a page just like an image or video or

anything like that. When I'm considering arranging type, I have to think of

someone actually needs to read this. If something is a headline or if I want

someone to read something first, I'm going to make that stand out.

I'm going to make sure that it's either the biggest, it's the first on the page,

it's the most eye catching and that will once again then reinforce the structure

of all the other content on the page.

On the web you can always change something, you can always evolve it, you can always

try to make that experience better. Does it resonate with people and do they get

something out of it? Do they learn something? Are they moved to action?

I think all of those are goals of the art of web design.

User research is all about understanding peoples behaviors.

When you're using a website that is impossible to get through, that

is a failure of user experience because the person who created it never

took the time to understand what their target audience actually need.

An example of a company that's really getting this right is Etsy. They were

really thoughtful about the unique ways in which their target audience would want to

search for items, like being able to look for something by color or by

texture or by the age of an item. When you have a site like Facebook that has

features all over it, that's the result of having to meet so many different

segments needs. And so, don't put roadblocks up for people to overcome because the

truth is if you have a great user experience, user interface fades into the

background. For example, Craigslist. That website isn't much to look at but the

user experience that they create is so helpful to people that it doesn't really

matter what that user interface looks like. Design isn't really about the bells

and whistles. It's about serving people's needs and if the bells and whistles serve

people's needs, then great, and if they don't, they don't belong there.

The most fundamentally important thing in web design is not how the site looks, it's is the

content accessible to everyone? And it's really that thinking that allowed us to

move into mobile the way we have now

and is allowing mobile to become the new mass media. Now we don't even know the

physical context in which users are accessing our websites. They may be at home,

they may be at work, they may be sitting on the toilet,

and we have to take into account where are they are and what information they

may need at that point. In recent years, with the rise of something called

responsive web design,

people are designing one website and allowing that content to reflow and

adapt to

different screen sizes and different resolutions and that experience is more tailored to

the device that you are on.

The rise of apps has changed things considerably, too, but I feel as though

that's even more young, obviously, than web design

and it still remains to be seen what the real impact of that is.

But I feel as though the average web user has matured a lot.

Once people have that language, once they understand it, you can keep building

upon it and make

new things out of that.

Now, truly, anyone with a phone, from a protest in Egypt or anywhere, can say

something to the whole world. So that's pretty magical

and i think that's the most important change that has happened.

Involving your users

in the process of designing your website at every stage is so crucial. Now

anyone on facebook can be a mommy blogger,

so all the things that we use to need background skills to accomplish are now

accessible to everyone and I think this is great.

The bar is so low that I feel like everybody can very easily make a website and that's very empowering.