As a senior designer and developer in a digital marketing agency, I spend a lot of time thinking about what a website is meant to achieve. We can design a good-looking set of pages and explain a business clearly. Increasingly, I also want to ask what the website could help someone do.
That might mean comparing products, managing a booking, finding an order or taking a business process out of a chain of emails. The browser is already a familiar place for people to work. I believe web applications will become a larger part of how businesses deliver those services.
The web already does more than publish pages
The distinction between an old web and a new web is not a clean dividing line. Shopping baskets, webmail and account areas have existed for years. What interests me is how more of that usefulness can become part of the websites we design, with the same care we give the public-facing pages.
A brochure site gives someone information. A useful tool can help them apply it. A customer choosing between products may need a comparison, sensible filters and answers to practical questions. Someone arranging a service may need to see availability and understand the next step, rather than send an enquiry and wait for several replies.
Working with WordPress and Magento makes that particularly clear. WordPress is good at helping businesses manage and publish content. Magento 1 already connects product information to accounts, orders and checkout. Magento 2 gives us another platform to consider for newer ecommerce work. The design still needs to connect the information to a task a person can complete.
A shared system can improve the business behind it
There is an internal side to this too. A project, request or document can live in one shared system rather than several people’s inboxes. A person can see what needs their attention and another can review the status, without both keeping a separate list.
The value depends on the information being organised well. If people disagree about what a status means, a faster interface will only let them disagree more quickly. I want to understand who owns each record, who can change it and what happens when it moves to the next stage.
Designing applications draws on the same questions as designing websites, but the repeated use makes small details more significant. A confusing label used once is irritating. A confusing label used throughout the working week becomes something everyone has to work around.
WordPress is opening up more possibilities
The content endpoints introduced in WordPress 4.7 are an interesting step. They give applications a structured way to work with WordPress content. That makes it easier to imagine a useful interface around information the client is already managing.
It does not mean every WordPress project should become a separate JavaScript application. For many sites, a conventional theme remains a sensible way to publish pages and keep the client experience straightforward. I would use a more involved approach where it answers a real need.
Adding live filtering or loading part of a page can make a task smoother. It also creates more states to design: waiting, no results, a failed request and a successful change. Those states deserve the same attention as the first screen someone sees.
Keeping the strengths of an ordinary website
I still want useful addresses, working links and a Back button that behaves as expected. A person should be able to send a colleague a link to the thing they are discussing. If navigation starts behaving unpredictably, the application loses one of the web’s most useful qualities.
The same applies to performance and access. A rich interface should not make someone wait for a large download to read basic information. Public content should remain discoverable, and the main journeys should be usable with a keyboard. These decisions need planning rather than being left until the final review.
On ecommerce projects, I pay attention to preserving context. Filtering products should not make it difficult to return from a product page. A basket update needs clear feedback. If an account action fails, the customer needs to know what happened and what they can do next.
Designing for utility
The opportunity I see is to make more of the website genuinely useful to the customer and the business. It can provide information, support a transaction and reduce the effort of an existing process. Those uses can sit together without every page becoming complicated.
In an agency, that means asking about the work around the website as well as the campaign leading to it. What happens after an enquiry? Which information does the customer need twice? Where does a member of staff repeat a task that the system could help with?
I think web applications have a strong future because they meet people in a place they already use and can connect information to action. I want to keep the clear structure of a good website while building more useful experiences around it. That combination is where I see a lot of worthwhile design and development work.