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Showing the Difference
Years ago, way back in the '90s and early 2000's, it was exciting for a business just to get a website.
"We're online! Contact us by email! Spinning logo!"
A few years later, a business or organization website went from a novelty to a given, and what used to be exciting became a chore:
"Well we need a website so let's it out of the way get back to our day-to-day."
Good enough became just that. Fast forward a few years to now, and company websites are commodities built with templates and over-used patterns. That growing 'sameness' was recently explored poignantly in Travis Gertz's Design Machines, an article well worth your reading time.
Is that all there is?
But not everyone wants the same thing. We get regular inquiries about re-making someone's web presence. In more and more of these conversations, we're hearing something like this:
"I'm not sure a website can even do what we need."
The 'what we need' is more than showing and telling, it's getting across the often intangible things that set them apart: how they work with clients, the insights they can find, the process that makes a change as much as it produces deliverables. If their website can't get that difference across, there's a real concern about being lost in the crowd despite having some real specialness.
These clients have seen the sexy stuff out there: the big hero photo, the quiet background video, the parallax scrolling, the animations. They charm, and sometimes impress, but the most interesting and passionate people that we're meeting can't see those things being enough to truly represent them.
Are we at the edge of what the web can say?
Is what they're asking for even possible? The web started as a way to share linked documents, not brand differentiators cultivated over years. The tendency of software is to normalize: to get things into regular containers that can be re-arranged, re-flowed, re-aggregated. The differences, the things that grab us in that special way, are often smoothed out or left behind. Because that's just how software is.
Or maybe not. Sure, it's exciting to be asked to push past the ordinary. But beyond us and our clients, we take this as a sign that expectations for web design are changing: where more businesses are placing their bets on brand and culture distinctiveness, they're looking for new approaches to get that difference across.
We don't have solid answers for these clients yet, but we're willing to forge into new territory to find them. We've started pushing for untraditional interaction instead of jazzy tricks, and for sites that listen instead of trying to say everything to everyone. We've given up most of our web design checklists and are treating each new project as a place to discover new methods and fresh terrain.
How well our industry serves this itch to go beyond the usual might determine whether company websites remain a checkbox in creating brand identity, or truly make a difference by making that connection.
This yearning for communicating something special in websites is one of two 'hard problems for the web' that we've noticed in the last year. The second, around events, will be the subject of next month's Substantiator.
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Recent Works - Keys to the Streets
Earlier this summer we got to know Keys to the Streets, a community-building group that does something a little audacious: they put pianos into public spaces for anyone to play.
And people do play. And listen. And talk. And feel better about their city. It's kind of magical. And it's worked so well that originators City Studio decided to spin it out into its own organization.
We pitched in with a pro-bono-publico donation of a Keys to the Streets website, designed to echo some of the experience of a public piano encounter. In addition to a piano map, we partnered with illustrator Ty Dale to re-create each uniquely painted piano, set in its place in the city to make them recognizable.
The keys themselves are interactive, and play a subset of actual piano notes. It works with touch or a mouse, but can also be played on a keyboard where it really gets fun.
Projects like these not only make us feel good, but they align with our interest in making memorable moments with interactivity. Where we work with digital, Keys to the Streets creates interactivity with pianos in unexpected places as an invitation to participate. It's just our kind of thing, and we're really glad to have helped.
Read more about the website in our blog post, or visit keystothestreets.com and try it for yourself.
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What's Next?
We're excited for the next few months when several client projects will be roll out publicly. From architecture to community-building, from games to Internet of Things, these projects have pushed us further in combining creative technology, business smarts, and an understanding of people.
But we're also excited for what's over the horizon. If combining the strategy, brand, design, and engineering of interactive work is feeling hazy or overwhelming, we can make help make sense of the issues, and make it that idea real.
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