What I look for in a Webby Entry

The #Webbys are here again, and judges around the world are sorting and grading submissions to define this year's winners. The zeitgeist of 2022 is, how do you say, tumultuous. I expect - and hope - that the submissions are reflective of our current cultural feeling. Just within our little screen powered world, we have seen epochal upheavals of what is possible to create with a small and scrappy team.

I've been making web sites and experiences since 1995, and over the past 4 decades we have seen trends and patterns that define excellence. Browsers, technologies, frameworks and design trends have constantly evolved, but the essence of what makes an experience great is the same: great narrative, excellent craft and something unique. There are other things I'm always looking for that I will describe in detail in another article, but these are my big three. My bugaboos.

Great Narrative

During my graduate program at Savannah College of Art and Design , we worked as teams of cross-disciplinary artists and engineers that were all learning the fundamentals of Non-linear Narrative Design. SCAD produces as many game designers as web developers, and even more commercial artists and film makers. What we all had in common was the need to fundamentally understand the basics of linear narratives. Great stories - films, books, songs - all have the benefit of taking their audience from Point A to Point B on a pre-defined path. We don't have the same luxury in digital experiences.

Great digital experiences structure the experience so that no matter what path they choose to take, they will grasp the meta-narrative of the experience. As creators of digital experiences, our users have the ability to navigate a website, app or physical experience on their own. We want them to explore, and have tools to nudge them into the directions we want them to go. These user experience tools and methods shouldn't be detected by our users, but rather make them flow between different actions they can take, information can than learn, or content that they experience.

Meta-Narratives

Meta-narratives are what we want the user to take away from the experience. That's often a branded message in the world of brand powered experiences, but games and non-linear content sites can also bestow a feeling and understanding beyond just what the content is.

Non-linear User Narratives

To me, this is simply the meaning that the user assembles in their head during their journey through the site or experience. When you study game archetypes, you quickly learn that every human is wired slightly differently, and will consume and explore your experience at their own pace, with their own intent. Don't fight it, design for it.

Winning Narratives

What separates the best experiences from the mediocre, are the adherence to both a meta-narrative and a user's journey that creates their personal narrative. Sites that lack focus on choice and options, or lead to dead ends fail at providing both of these crucial elements. Experiences that force users onto a path or punish them for exploration create negative experiences for the guests at the expense of over-indexing on the need to nail the meta-narrative.

Excellent Craft

Balancing performance and experience, the teams behind the best work in the world must walk a tightrope to deliver on the possible vision, while balancing the technical requirements of the day.

Over the years, we've had waves of trends that radically effect the tools that go into creating websites and apps. Not always related, the way in which our audiences experience what we make has changed and molted too. Guests may stumble upon our site huddled in line during a rainstorm while they have a free minute. Others might be set to expect the same experience to take full advantage of their free evening in front of a giant screen with an expensive audio system. Our job as creators and makers, is to ensure the quality of experience doesn't degrade based on the context of our users.

Trends in technologies aren't just fashionable - though they often change at the same pace as high fashion - they enable new capabilities with major or minor innovative steps. When choosing what technologies to use, it's hard for teams to resist the desire to constantly use the newest and latest. The challenge lies in our ability as engineers to deliver the highest quality experience, even if we're using a new tech for the first time. Great teams know how to prepare to bring in new technologies to their kit, and have the rigor to not let anything out the door that doesn't meet their standard.

And because I'm a software developer, and suffer from PTSD of great testers that excel at finding the faultlines in our work, I have to say that I delight in trying to break the submissions that I fall in love with. It's that last stress test that really separates the experiences that look good from an angle, but fall down like stage sets when given a push.

Something Unique

I am for sure partial to innovative experiences, or submissions that leverage a bleeding-edge technological innovation in an experience that I've never seen before. But those are rare, and in general at the yearly Webbys, we see patterns amongst submissions, as different teams all lean into a new type of technology.

But using new tech isn't any type of requirement for the award show, and it shouldn't be. Creators around the world should see technology choices as just that, choices. They empower us to deliver holistic experiences against our brief or vision. But to stand out, a submission must have something unique that grabs our attention, and makes us think about it long after our first exposure.

Leveraging New Innovations

2022 has birthed some of the most powerful technological tools in the past century. I'm incredibly excited to see how teams have brought emergent AI enabled projects and products into broader experiences. Those that do should lean heavily into the tension around the use of AI, as the cultural reverberations of AI are actively creating global uneasiness. We know this power is maturing, and we have complex feelings about this. By using this technology in 2022, we are making a statement about the technology itself whether we intend to or not.

Creating Memorable Moments

At Crispin we were all indoctrinated into the Press Release process of ideation. It forced our minds to think about what someone else would say, unprompted about what it is that we made. It was an ingenious process that everyone should adopt. It allows teams to evaluate ideas semi-objectively: do you believe that this press release could be authentic? And it also allowed us to evaluate an ideas promise, relative to other ideas.

This year's most memorable moments could be as simple as a unique interaction, a novel take on a subject, an impressive display of technical prowess, or a twist on a preconceived expectation. If a submission lacks anything that makes judges remember them, or mention them, they won't rise to the top.

Rewarding Experiences

The Webbys give all of us judges the same rubric for evaluation, and each submission and judge follows a clearly laid out process. But as we look at submissions, we each have our own process for what we think deserves the accolades and adulation. Nailing these 3 mean that whatever the official criteria for the Webbys or any other show might be, your project and your effort has a chance to rise to the top. And even if you don't get the official acknowledgments of a panel, you will have made an incredible experience for all of your users.

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