Enhancing interactivity means working with the Web 2.0 philosophy, often been described as as a "Web platform”. When interacting with content, we can immediately see how it impacts design to get better results in terms of ROI.

Web 2.0 empowers the new way of working in todays information era, in a networked way sharing data. Imagine a bunch of stores of content provided by different parties—companies, individuals, governments—upon which we could build interfaces that combine the information in ways no single domain ever could. The power in Web 2.0 is that content can be personalized or remixed with other data to create much more useful tools that have become the frontier of design innovation.

The evidence: RSS aggregators, search engines, portals, APIs (application programming interfaces, which provide hooks to data) and Web services (where data can be accessed via XML-RPC, SOAP and other technologies). Google Maps provides the same functionality as similar competing services but features a far superior interface. Flickr’s interface is one of the most intuitive and beloved around. Del.icio.us offers personal and social functionality, and reaches far beyond its own site. Ajax technologies are still growing and evolving.

Interfaces like these are changing the way we store, access, and share information using AJAX technology. For those who navigate and search information it matters very little what domain content comes from.

One of the biggest steps in realizing Web 2.0 is the transition to semantic markup, or markup that accurately describes the content it’s applied to. The most popular markup languages, HTML and XHTML, are used primarily for display purposes, using tags to have absolute control.

In Web 2.0, this description is not only possible, but also critical, demonstrating clearly the power of semantic markup. You can use RSS is an easy way to tell people when there is new content available, instead of having your subscribers browsing to your favorite site over and over again to see if something is new. The aggregator will periodically poll the site, notify them if something is new, and deliver that content. It’s a real timesaver.

During the early years of the Web, before content had semantic meaning, sites were developed as a collection of “pages.” Sites in the 1990s were usually either brochure-ware (static HTML pages with insipid content) or they were interactive in a flashy, animated, JavaScript kind of way. In that era, a common method of promoting sites was to market them as “places”.

With the advent of XML technologies and Web Services began the change of how sites were designed. XML technologies enabled content to be shareable and transformable between different systems, and Web services provided hooks into the innards of sites. Instead of visual design being the interface to content, Web services have become programmatic interfaces to that same content. This is truly powerful. Anyone can build an interface to content on any domain if the developers there provide a Web services API.

Content has become more important than its container at this phase of the Web evolution. Killer applications, such as search, RSS and video-capture software (such as TiVo) - to name just a few - have begun to unlock content from any vessel you try to put it in.

This insight applies equally to the design profession. Web design during Web 1.0 was all about building compelling places (or sites) on the Web. But content can no longer be contained in a single place, at least not without going against the nature of the social Web and locking up your content in a secure site.

Web design in Web 2.0 is about building event-driven experiences, rather than sites. And it’s no coincidence that RSS is one of the key building blocks. RSS feeds enable people to subscribe to your content and read it in an aggregator any time.

Searches can also be mixed with RSS to let people subscribe to content via topic and tag RSS feeds. These so-called “future searches” not only let people mix content from various sources, but end up being yet another way for users to bypass a site’s visual design.

Because content flows across the Web in RSS feeds and can be remixed along the way, Web designers must now think beyond sites and figure out how to brand the content itself.

As a result of the remixing aspects of Web 2.0, most content will be away from local site. This “distributed” navigation might come in the form of a feed reader, a link on a blog, a search engine, or some other content aggregator.

One of the side effects of this is that the sources of and pathways to useful information will continually change, and users won’t necessarily know where to go to find it. Fortunately, content aggregators have a built-in answer for this—they can track what people are doing. By recording what pieces of microcontent are most often visited, aggregators can use past user behavior to predict what users will find most relevant in the future.

With relevance decided within these third-party interfaces, users might even be able to read content without ever visiting the domain it comes from. Navigation schemes, as we know them, will be used less. The most traveled navigation paths will emerge from user behavior instead of being “designed” specifically for it.

One feature of Web 1.0 that seemed to change everything about publishing was the ability to make changes to the primary publication at any time. There are no “editions” or “printings” on the Web like there are in the print world. There is simply the site and its current state. We are used to this paradigm now, and an optimist can hope that Web content will only get better with time: metadata will be added, descriptions will get deeper, topics more clear, and references more comprehensive.

What we see happening in Web 2.0 is a step beyond this, to where users are adding their own metadata. On Flickr and Del.icio.us, any user can attach tags to digital media items (files, bookmarks, images). The tagging aspect of these services isn’t the most interesting part of them, though. What is most interesting are the trends we see when we put together everyone’s tags.

In the last few years, CSS came into fashion to help separate style from structure, with styling information defined in an external CSS file. Even so, the focus was still on visual design—it was the primary way to distinguish content and garner attention.

Enter the Web 2.0 world, which is not defined as much by place and is less about visual style. XML is the currency of choice in Web 2.0, so words and semantics are more important than presentation and layout. Content moves around and is accessible by programmatic means.

With the new Ajax technology we eliminate the start-stop-start-stop nature of interaction on the Web by introducing an intermediary — an Ajax engine — between the user and the server. It seems like adding a layer to the application would make it less responsive, but the opposite is true.

The effects of Web 2.0 are far-reaching. Like all paradigm shifts, it affects the people who use it socially, culturally, and even politically. One of the most affected groups is the designers and developers who will be building it—not just because their technical skills will change, but also because they’ll need to treat content as part of a unified whole, an ecosystem if you will.

Vittox Design & Developement Team can help you to accomplish all this tasks, introducing enhancements to your actual Website or simply by changing the way you want to be perceived. Innovation is a leadership quality you can include into your business startegy by working with our Vittox Team.