Websites of the past were built around content, but websites of the future will be built around people. They will be highly tailored, personalised and focused on your interests and your friends.
When you log on to a website – be it The Irish Times or Ryanair, Tesco or eBay – it will know what you are interested in, where you like going, what you like buying and will display items accordingly. So says Intercom head of product design Paul Adams, an Irishman described by Fortune magazine as "Silicon Valley's most wanted".
Adams has internet kudos. Among his work to date, he helped design Dyson vacuums, Gmail, YouTube and Google+. He is a patent holder for the ideas behind Google Circles and his talk on the future of the web is one of the most viewed presentations online.
In that presentation, given at the Matter Web Design conference in San Francisco in 2010, he predicted the web would be rebuilt around people, as a result of the public spending more time interacting with each other online and less time consuming content from websites.
According to Adams, the majority of websites in the near future will be personalised to the visitor. Along with personal preferences they will feature information about the people you care about, what they read, what they bought, where they went, what they think.
His predictions are already starting to come true. Take for example Ticketmaster's Irish site. When you buy tickets on Ticketmaster.ie you can see whether any of your Facebook friends have bought tickets, and if so, where they are sitting. If you want to spend time with them, you can opt to sit next to them. If not, you can sit far, far away.
Another example would be the gifts website Etsy. If you’re searching for a gift on Etsy for a Facebook friend, you can link directly to Facebook, for gift ideas based on his or her interests. This moves the experience from a random and almost limitless set of options, to deep social personalisation.
Speaking to The Irish Times in advance of the Cumulus Dublin design conference this month, Adams said the tailored online experience will also apply to the media and publishing industry, where there will be a shift from mainstream to personalised media. News websites will be aggregated and presented to readers based on their interests, stories their friends are interested in, and stories people like them are interested in.
“In the past, people thought about going online or navigating to a website. Websites just delivered what they wanted to deliver. Everyone gets the same thing/sees the same thing when they log on to a site.”
Sites you visit in the future will have your identity and social network and will show activity on that site from people in your network.
“When you get served data from any company, you will decide whether or not you want to share data with that company. Then you will get a personalised experience based on what you share with the company.”
Adams previously worked as the global head of brand design at Facebook, leading design and marketing projects with companies such as Nike, P&G, Unilever, Coca Cola, and Starbucks.
While Facebook may be a relatively new company, he says social networks are nothing new, as people have formed groups, built relationships, spread gossip and developed links and allegiances for thousands for years. “The emergence of the social web is simply the online world catching up with the offline world.”
A problem with the online version of social networks, he says, is that people only have one group of friends. Offline people have multiple groups of friends that form around life stages and life experiences.
Another problem is that the social networks people are creating online don’t match the social networks they already have offline. Different parts of a person’s life that would never be exposed to each other offline are being linked online.
He says these issues need to be reconciled and website and app designers need to start looking at people’s different social networks. “People are forever looking at existing ways of doing things and trying to apply them to new media. That has always been the case but needs to change. The first items on TV were filmed plays.”
He believes mobile will lead to a resurgence in physical stores, non-anonymous customer interactions and integrated offline/online experiences.
“When the car was first invented people were obsessed with the technology, as before them it was just horses. We are like that now with phones and tablets. Cars created suburbia and reinvented commerce. People could transport goods from all over the country and the world, quickly and easily. The internet is doing the same.”
But there is too much choice and information now, which is why things will move back towards more personalised experiences. “If you turn on your TV you get 999 channels and yet you have no idea what’s on so end up watching the same crap out of habit. TVs in the future will only show what your friends are watching, programmes based on your interests and movies/shows that are popular in your neighbourhood.”
From high street to iStreet
He says shopping in bricks and mortar stores will also become a more personalised experience.
“Screens in shops will have coupons and deals just for you. They will know you have walked into the shop as you will have your phone in your pocket or bag and it will communicate with the network. People will see different prices for the same products depending on their loyalty to the store.
“They are prepared to trade off profit for data on you. The lower price is for the loyal customers. They then use this data to target direct mail. Marketing for the past 50 years has been predominantly mass marketing, but that is changing. With Intercom, for example, you can segment customers into different groups and target them depending on whether they are loyal, or leaving you.”
One store that is already doing this is B&Q in the UK. The high street chain is currently testing an electronic price tag that alters the price of an item depending on the profile of the customer.
Wifi-enabled price tags at the edge of shelves recognise the customer by their mobile phone and offer different prices, depending on whether that customer has a loyalty card or their past purchase history.
The company is looking at varying the in-store prices of some products from day-to-day, in the same way that airlines vary the prices of their seats.
At the centre of all these changes is design education, something which Adams says needs to become multi-disciplinary.
“Look at Nike for example. It used to be a sportswear company that just made runners and clothes. Now it is also a technology company. They make apps, wearable technology such as the fuelband and intelligent clothing.
“Nike Plus trainers use a sensor to measure an athlete’s distance or how high they jump. Designing them involved a mixture of app design and fashion design.
"Design education needs to change. People tend to avoid studying programming and technology as they find it too hard. A core requirement of design jobs in the future will be how technology works."
Inbed the internet
Speaking at the Cumulus Design conference at the National College of Art and Design, he said product design and visual communications courses are still encouraging students to produce furniture and to design packaging and branding for mass-consumer goods but instead should be teaching students how to embed the internet into everything they design.
But will this future of sharing and highly personalised sites actually work, or will people opt for privacy instead?
“People over-intellectualise things. Between businesses and customers, privacy is just a value exchange. Most things are opt in. Look at Hailo for example. Hailo knows where you go, where you live, maybe even where you work. You decide to give them this information as you know if you leave your bag in the taxi, you can ring them.”
