As you may know, I count myself (someone must) among those focused on the realization of the social web. It's an exploration and a service -- the two things I'm most passionate about. Anyway, a necessary part of that effort will be the redesign of the web user experience along social lines. And the first step in that direction is to breath a little life into the UI.
So what would that mean? What would it look like? Let's start simple and leave out the interaction component -- the social engagement component -- and focus only on life in basic design. I've been studying the work of Christopher Alexander lately. I believe this quote of his provides a clue to assessing the life in things -- even in things of the web designed kind:
One aspect of this structure is the "wabi-to-sabi" of Zen teaching: the Japanese concept of beauty which is best translated as "rusty beauty." These things are all beautiful, but they are all damaged. Life itself is damaged, and nothing which is perfect can be truly alive.
The following is, I believe, an example of the difference between what's rusty beauty and what's not:
Life, rust and all:
This is in my front yard and the kids actually hang there sometimes.
No life:
This is not mine, but I own something like it another part of my yard. The old-fashioned tire swing in the front sees a lot more action.
Examples in web design are trickier if only because professionals seem to be trained to deliver anything but life. Professional "practice", commonly held beliefs regarding professionalism, appear to get in the way. That's further complicated by the tier two, or content, focus that dominates the web design, and web usage, mind set today -- though of course the latter is quickly changing.
With all that said, here are some examples of the inorganic: machine-like thing one; we-are-Vista-resistance-is-futile example two. I picked on Microsoft, but I could have picked any two, three, or fifty pages at random from any corporate site in the world and got the same results. Those are just two of billions of pages we might have selected.
As an aside, I have reason to believe the first example is coming around -- before I left, we were pushing simple things like by-lines and photo's of contributors. Little things like that go a long way towards humanizing a site. "Microsoft" doesn't publish a thing -- only the real people that work there create and publish. For example, where does your eye go on this page? The photo's, however, have to be real.
I'm just certain the lovely folks above were caught right in the middle of a session with our Home Products. Does anybody actually like to see photos of usually colorful and always attractive people pretending to be engaged in stereotypically fun and meaningful activities?
MySpace, unsurprisingly, offers a number of examples of both living and less alive sites (I just can't bring myself to expose examples of "less alive" individual Myspace sites -- though you might consider my own MySpace. I've done nothing whatever with it. I'm just not a Myspace kind of guy). It is, of course, the very unruliness of Myspace properties that the quote from Alexander suggests can contribute to "life". And it's that same unruliness that makes a lot of people cringe -- though perhaps they cringe less because of any inherent failure of the sites themselves and more because of the blatant disregard for the status quo in web design they represent. Criticism is a common reward for taking the path less traveled.
Still, professional web design is far from hopeless. Even tier two designs can "look alive". I visited the venerable CSS Zen Garden site in search of examples of rusty life. Sadly, despite attractive fonts, colors, and tasteful graphics, I got no sense of life from the landing page itself. Elegance in Simplicity struck me the same way -- a bit like the room in your mom's house you were forbidden to enter. Several others did, however, feel more alive to me:
I was torn over Lily Pond.
In closing I should point out that it's not at all clear (to me at least) that Alexander himself would concede that "life" is even possible in virtual spaces. I'd like to ask him.
And it may be that my view here is tempered by a reaction against the apparently contrived, and an equal and opposite pull in the direction of authenticity. Sure "authenticity" sounds good, and "apparently contrived" sounds bad, but it's tough to know how much is lasting change, or the natural evolution of a more "fit" solution, and how much is counter-culture claptrap. I suppose we can only do the best we know and let time sort it out. For the time being, it's Wabi-sabi for me. That should only take a lifetime or two.