A Good Start
You'll have better luck if you can influence the data format at the project's outset. For example, it will be easier to display various logos on one page if everyone agrees to include a version of their logo that looks good on a white background.
If you can, work with the technologists who are defining the XML-based description language that you'll be using. Participating in the process is the best way to ensure that your needs and user needs are met.
By now you've probably realized that designing for Web services will involve renouncing control over some elements. The good news is, once you've designed information components that work across many platforms and situations, they should require less maintenance and can be reused.
If you're an information provider, future reuse may mean more compensation for your work. Applications will discover and subscribe to your Web service, paying you a usage fee. It's possible that interaction designs and layout systems will soon be sold or licensed as stock photography is sold now.
Tech Constraints
Understanding technical constraints is a part of every design project. We don't yet know what all the constraints of Web services will be, but we have some early clues. IBM recently released the Web Services Experience Language (WSXL), an XML-based description language that offers methods for creating interfaces, accepting user input, and distributing these interfaces. It has facilities for displaying branding information and integrating with many other XML-based standards. Visit IBM's WSXL site for detailed information on WSXL (www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-wsxl/).
Mozilla's method of interface customization is another experimental option. Mozilla uses XUL, an XML-based user interface language, to define its own user interface. Using XML, CSS, JavaScript, and RDF, you can make full application interfaces—not just Web pages—and experience the same kind of process you might have when designing a user interface for Web services. See Neil Deakin's XUL tutorial at www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/ for more information.
Personalized, Customized
Sometimes dynamic Web sites change based on information from users. Visitors to a portal like My Yahoo use customization to change their content and layout, whereas Amazon.com shows visitors products that they will probably like.
Imagine combining customization and personalization to create a portal that takes advantage of new services offered by various providers. Because new Web services can be dynamically incorporated into a site, you could let the user control the criteria for selecting new information, instead of merely choosing specific types of information.
Users could set up rules like, "I prefer to receive information about soccer, railroads, and long-term bonds; I will pay up to $1 per day for all content; I prefer information from the BBC, CNN, Rail Today, and the Wall Street Journal." You might then combine this rule with collaborative filtering and marketing plans to create a selection of available Web services. Predicting how people will want to use these systems becomes a new experience-design challenge.
Unfortunately, more automation means fewer opportunities for humans to perform quality assurance checks on the information. For example, will people trust unfamiliar news sources when they suddenly appear in a portal? You must foresee these events and shape the design to help build trust and appropriately identify resources.
Of course, user information can also be published more easily than before. Privacy concerns may rise to a new level. A solution is to offer users more specific control over their information, choosing information with a rule-based interface like the one outlined above. One such rule could be, "Never distribute my phone number; prompt me when a service requests my email address; do not prompt me when requesting basic demographic information used for personalization."
Multiple Platforms
When XML was new, our industry hailed it as the key to standardizing data across many platforms—Web browsers, mobile phones, personal digital assistants, and so on—without requiring a complete redesign for each platform. For the most part this has failed to happen because XML alone wasn't enough.
The new Web services description languages look like they may help realize this dream. Accordingly, designers must start thinking about which platforms might display their information. For efficiency reasons, it's helpful to create design elements that work across as many platforms as possible. Again, prototyping will be crucial. Only by testing your designs on each platform will you be able to see which elements work across platforms and which need to be customized for each platform.
For example, a news story headline should be short enough to be read quickly on a mobile phone. However, on a Web browser you may want to use a longer, more descriptive headline because you have more space. This might require authors to type in multiple headlines, so you should consider how to balance system performance with administrative effort.
A Common Language
Web services only provide the syntax for exchanging information; they can't specify its meaning. That's where experience designers, especially information architects, can play a role. For Web services to work, we need common vocabularies. Perhaps you run a site that lets visitors shop for and compare bicycles. Some manufacturers may use terms like comfort bikes and mountain bikes while other manufacturers speak of hybrids and off-road bikes. These terms need to be standardized, at least as far as the metadata is concerned, for computers to communicate without human intervention.
Information architects commonly collect diverse information and organize it into taxonomies, arranging information so that it can be systematically managed. Taxonomies rely on a controlled vocabulary, a standard set of terms, to normalize the information. Table 1 shows an example of how to normalize terms for three different bicycle manufacturers to create one category—bike types—in the taxonomy.
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table 1: Standardizing content terms |
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| Bicycle Brand 1 | Bicycle Brand 2 | Bicycle Brand 3 | Standardized Terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Road Bikes | Racing Bikes | Road | Road Bikes |
| Comfort Bikes | Cross Bikes | Hybrid | Hybrid Bikes |
| Mountain Bikes | Off-Road Bikes | Mountain | Mountain Bikes |
| Tandem Bikes | Two-seaters | Tandems | Tandem Bike |
Designing for Web services will involve similar tasks, but instead of organizing the information for one Web site, the challenge will be to create a standard organization that will work for diverse platforms and uses. Yet the organizational methods we're used to, such as taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, are the same ones we can use to organize the information communicated by Web services.
