Phd Web Design

Every website should try to serve a clear set of purposes. Even a personal blog has a target audience, one's friends or family perhaps. While a good site looks simple, it is often very complicated "under the hood."

Google went from being a grad school project to the world's most important search engine by ditching the design clutter of its competitors for a very clean homepage with maximum white space. This effect focused one's attention on the search function. More PhD's are said to work at Google than at any other company in the world, yet the complicated engineering and the tremendous computer infrastructure that brings that logo and search box to your computer is invisible to the average user.

Read a fabulous article last night and this morning by Diana Boyd, a PhD student at UC-Berkeley and a researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. She's writing about the interactions of culture and technology and it speaks a lot to some of the online and offline conversations I've been having lately.

Here's the link: G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide. And here are some snippets to entice you to follow it:

On culture:

When mass media began, people assumed that we would all converge upon one global culture. While the media has had an effect, complete homogenization has not occurred. And it will not. While some values spread and are adopted en-masse, cultures form within the mass culture to differentiate smaller groups of people. Style-driven subcultures are the most visible form of this, but it occurs in companies and in other social gatherings.

Techies will like her take on "embedded observers":

While the creators have visions of what they think would be cool, they do not construct unmovable roadmaps well into the future. They are constantly reacting to what's going on, adding new features as needed. The code on these sites changes constantly, not just once a quarter. The designers try out features and watch how they get used. If no one is interested, that's fine - they'll just make something new. They are all deeply in touch with what people are actually doing, why and how it manifests itself on the site.

On online communities:

Digital community participants sometimes find that they "accidentally" meet someone. People collide on Flickr because they took similar photos; the find wonderful blogs through search. These ad-hoc interactions typically occur because people are producing material that can be stumbled across, either through search or browsing. They may not intend for the material to be consumed beyond the intended audience, but they also don't see a reason to prevent it. In essence, they are inviting moments of synchronicity. And synchronicity is energizing.