Al Woods words

Web3, or Web 3.0, is currently a concept. The next iteration of the Internet, our current Web 2.0 upgrade, has been getting people excited for some time now, from tech savvy people to those in online chat rooms.

What will that look like and how will things like decentralization affect our very reality, which is increasingly becoming online? One of the many things web3 is set to change is the way we approach web design, a change the rest of this blog is dedicated to exploring, with insights from leading web agency, Webheads.

Web design will ease the transition

As new technologies become more widely adopted, it will be up to web design to facilitate this transition, web design that will decide how easy or difficult it is for the general public to navigate these revolutionary spaces. Web3 has the ability to be so radically different from the Internet as we know it today, that it’s hard to say exactly how web design will facilitate this transition – the only thing that’s certain is its centrality in the transition.

A conceptual obstacle

Web designers will need to help people navigate significant design hurdles. One of them is to reconceptualize the internet, to reevaluate how it works as blockchain technologies are increasingly adopted at all levels. Web design will play a major role in this conceptual revolution of the Internet.

Designers will need to help the general public understand just how different Web3 will be, and the differences will be profound, enabling them to understand entirely new systems and the security and intellectual property implications they might have.

Encourage simplification

Web3 has the potential to be very complex, potentially to a degree that creates a barrier to access. To ensure that web3 is widely adopted, web designers will need to contribute to a period of rapid simplification. A big part of that will be reinventing the technical jargon that has evolved around blockchain technologies.

Some new terms may be unavoidable, but where they are, things like help icons can be used to provide real-time, intuitive understanding of these new concepts. Keeping homepages accessible and simple will be a priority, so as not to prematurely alienate visitors with concepts that can be overwhelming.

Airworthiness aid

New users won’t know where to go or why. Navigability should be intuitive, but also informative; those same help icons that can help people understand and learn new lexicons can be used to help people around the site for the first time.

Sites such as Netflix are already using these techniques effectively, allowing visitors to watch the next episode and the like without having to search. Making the next common route easily accessible, without explicitly indicating that this is the route to take, can also be massively effective in facilitating this type of passive steering.