DIS2002: Conference Panel reviews the State of the Art

Representatives from several design houses made up a panel mid-way through the "Designing Interactive Systems 2002" Conference to review the state of the industry, particularly the production of websites. There was consensus that design is now viewed as a process, rather than the business of looking good. As Darryl Feldman of Sapient put it: 'It's a universal process that brings people together and not just an output'.

The team discussed how to marry client and user needs. 'The company and its users should not be brought into conflict,' said Ian Curson of Oyster Partners. 'You have to go back to the company's goal.' He gave the example of online registration, with marketing's desire for a 50 question form to secure information defeating the higher company purpose of attracting and keeping visitors. 'Users won't do it,' he said. It was agreed, as Garrick Jones of InnovateUK pointed out, that usability work can give focus to this kind of discussion with clients.

Victoria Bellotti of Xerox PARC chipped in from the audience by raising the delicate balance between advertising and user requirements. Andrea Gallagher of Scient suggested that ads can be designed in so that they do not get in the way of users, while Feldman claimed the problem was with lack of imagination in promotion: the industry is not being creative enough to interest visitors.

Curson went on to look at the progress being made more generally: 'It's no longer "What does the home page look like?", it's "What will this site do for me?" and also now about how experience is integrated across multiple channels.' He said that designers had gone from making things that merely are to making things that work and the next step is to make things that engage.

'There's a lot of baggage,' he said, 'with people thinking they've got to have this feature because it works somewhere else, for instance, Amazon.' That needs turning round to look at differentiation.

Lastly, the role of designer as consultant was discussed. Feldman said that with clients spending a lot of money on design, they wanted reassurance that you can do what they need - they don't welcome being told about iterative design. But Gallagher came back by saying that clients are looking to people to know more than they do. 'They want us to show them that we have good ideas.'

The panel also disagreed on the responsibility of the designer to design for use by all. Feldman commented that there are increasing obligations, and standards coming in to ensure that products have as broad an appeal as possible. Gallagher said that the only responsibility of the designer was to ensure that the client understood the consequences of their decision about who their audience might be. Curson said that the responsibility was both to advise the client and design for as many people as possible. If the inclusive route is just as easy, he reasoned, you may as well do it and not disregard whole sections of the community.

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