Designing for the future

If your website is a decade old and completely ill-equipped for your current needs, I am your man. In two years, I completely relaunched four large web properties for clients. I’m currently working on relaunching an entire ecosystem of websites for a large non-profit.

The websites all have one thing in common. Precisely the same thing in common, which is almost comical. The websites were all designed exactly for the organizations’ needs at the moment they were created. And they served those needs perfectly. In that one moment.

Technology is not static, neither are you. Precisely what you need today will be completely useless to you in the not-too-distant future. The websites began to become outdated the moment they were launched.

How do you design (a website, a business, an organization) for the future?

Anticipate change, not the future.

Whatever you predict about the future will be wrong. All believable predictions will be wrong and any accurate prediction would be completely unbelievable. Anticipate change, rather than a particular outcome.

For instance, rather than designing a website with features you think you will need in 3 years, build a website where you can easily add, change, or remove features in the future. When you create a five-year plan to change the world, build into that plan constant evaluation and adjustment.

One social change group I worked in had difficulty in presenting their plans to institutional funders because many of the plans were along these lines:

We will take what we learn from This Program and apply it to craft The Next Program. We’ll know Who we need to recruit, and Where To Go Next because it will be obvious from the outcome of This Program.

They were always right.

How Do I Design For The Future?

What does that look like in principle?

When designing web sites, I rely on flexible and adaptable frameworks. WordPress is Open Source and also supported by a Foundation. It will be around for a long time. It is easy enough to use with no technical knowledge and it is complex enough that I can rip it apart and make it do whatever I want. Clients can add plugins, move widgets, and change themes. The folks at EAPE experiment ruthlessly with the Red Letter Christians site I built for them. They test a new plugin or feature once a month.

When designing for the future, I also look into the future. The present reality of tomorrow is simply the horizon of today. Before Facebook was ubiquitous, it was the domain of students at elite universities. Not every New Thing has the staying power to create the future, but some do. I keep a pulse on What’s Coming Next. I’m plugged into Google+ (despite protests from some of my friends that “No one uses it”) to observe (and participate in) discussions about the future of the Internet. I read Kevin Kelly. I followup on Mashable finds. One of the greatest insights is paying attention to my sister, six years my junior, and her age cohort. What are they using and how are they using it? She rarely uses her cellphone for talking, I learned years ago.

Another way to design for the future is to create the future. How? By experimenting (and learning from others’ experiments). Within the past 3 months, I have visited every major LGBT non-profit’s website; along a dozen websites from other sectors. Charity:Water is constantly updating and innovating on their website, I visit it every few weeks. Observing—and imitating—others is insufficient for me. Copycats never design the future. So I take what I learn from observations and design my own experiments, then I iterate. I experiment with page layouts and navigational styles, I experiment with color pallets and font families. I experiment with media players and photography. I experiment with service providers.

How do I know if my experiments work? I track them. On my Premium Dispatch, I will be sharing how I obsessively track experiments to determine their effectiveness. Signup by November 27 to receive it.