Creating context
This week I attended a wonderful exhibition opening at Stanford's Green Library. A vision of Paris: Roxane Debuisson collection. It happens to be that Roxane was my grandmother. A Parisian, a collector, a remarkable woman who knew what she liked: drinking Ruinart, singing classic songs, hosting great company, and Paris.
- into a rich pool of context
- UI Crave
- Less to no visuals
- Only visuals
- A mix of both
The crowd listened to the people who made the sale of the collection happen, detailing how they randomly met her, discovered the treasures she had simply archived in her apartment, and then retrieved hundreds of thousands of documents from Paris to the San Francisco Bay Area and went through every single book, postcard, bill, manifest, map and photo.
I realized that her attention to change and documentation had woven these documents into a rich pool of context that scholars were now admiring.
She always connected dots. She introduced people, offering relevant pieces of the past to her guests. She always could see what others could not, with a quiet smile of knowledge when her effort touched their hearts with surprise and delight. It is a rare human skill to have the context needed to make these connections.
As I wondered, I realized even in my relatively short tenure as a UI/UX designer, trends had evolved. So I built this fun UI Crave as a quick trend overview of websites' evolution since the 1990s. I showed my kids and they all made faces looking at where we started from.
A question came from the visuals. Less or more, where is the trend going?
- Less to no visuals. Action-packed websites, schools, cities, businesses. Getting to the data and reducing user friction. More websites will be read and operated by AI and as such don't require any visuals.
- Only visuals. Experiential websites, a brand moment, a marketing moment. Focused on making you buy products, personalization of a service.
- A mix of both. I believe these will slowly diminish and be more about entertainment and user-driven.