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Webguild Presentation – The Future of Site Design

I went to a presentation by the Silicon Valley Webguild on the Future of Site Design. The panel included Alex Limi, User Interface Designer – Google, Bill Scott, Ajax Evangelist & Design Manager – Yahoo!, and Luke Kowalski, Corporate UI Architect – Oracle. Bill Scott’s presentation was very polished on all the latest web design tricks and delivered a good perspective of how to balance all the different aspects of it.

I gathered three top trends for 2007:

- Better Internet properties integration: Google and Yahoo! will invest heavily in making all their web apps work together as a holistic platform

- Web “bubbles”/“boxes”: services are burgeoning to allow people a better control over how and with whom they share their data and content. The example that comes immediately to mind is photo-sharing: do you really want someone else than your family to see your family pictures

- Consumer/enterprise mash-ups: for instance Google Maps mashed up with a CRM app. According to Luke, this is quite understandably a fast-growing segment of the enterprise market, as well as a very visual way to lead on SOA.

Alex and Bill also revealed that we can expect something big from both Google and Yahoo! in the coming months. I guess after the iPhone release, every big players in the Silicon Valley has to find ways to reinject some excitement into their properties!