Designing for the future

photo credit: kevindooley

In some time I’ll be doing something awesomely cool. I’ll be a part of a project that aims to deliver design and user experience from the future. Basically client aims to be few years ahead of competitors.

Sounds good to me. The problem is that I’ve misplaced my crystal ball and without it is hard to predict stuff. You know how it is. So instead of looking into the future let me make some educated guesses what might be needed right now to deliver a product form the future. Seems like fun.

Let’s make some assumptions to get things going. Main technology for the site will be HTML with JS and CSS goodness. Client opts for complete environment serialization through URLs so this is an argument for going with HTML and not Flash. Also, since it is a top notch client there will be some serious SEO involved thus another point for HTML based design.

Initial requirement is for the site to deliver application / virtual desktop kind of experience. So we will be transcending basic look and feel that chosen technology offers and moving past flash kind of app into the mentioned earlier application from the future.

And here is the big question: what would you use (not talking design here, more like development solution) to deliver such an experience? What do you do to ensure that site will be awesome now and additionally will be far out there? When you will stumble upon it in two years I’d like you to think “Whoa, that’s cool” and not “Meh. Seen it.”

The challenge just keeps getting better and better.

Let me break it down to a small list to show you the process of how development should look like to get to “awesome now” state and allow venturing a guess of delivering “awesome in the future” experience.

• semantic markup - an obvious start point. We are not talking W3C valid but a bit more: a truly valid piece of HTML code that can then be properly modeled any way we will need.
• astounding CSS - all the styling for the app should be done in CSS having progressive enhancement in mind. (sorry to all the pros here for those mind numbing obvious stuff but I am rethinking every little bit here)
• JavaScript effects - since the designs are animation heavy we need add some js effects. Question is how to incorporate those effects into a project. Obvious way: a framework of some kind. Currently I’m struggling between YUI and jQuery. Will need some more research on that.
• Web3.0 elements (microformats) - yep, this is something that will definitely be in the project. If there is one single aspect of future web that I am sure about is the semantic web and microformats are an ideal place to start.

This is where all starts. I need to find confidence in me that what we are going to settle for will be the best possible thing. Great challenge. Sounds like a fun project.

And now goes a big question to all of you dear readers, what else would you add to the mix to make the site ready for the future? Care to share your thoughts?