While browsing the blogosphere we came across this article on Mashable: “Web design is dead” by Sergio Nouvel for UX Magazine. “Web pages themselves are no longer the center of the Internet experience,“ he writes.

What does he attribute this shift to? Frameworks like WordPress created consistency in web design and this consistency sets expectations for how content should look and feel. Other drivers include automation and social– Facebook is becoming the new homepage. Symptom #5 in particular caught our eye: “mobile is killing the web.”

Nouvel asks us to consider how often we directly type a URL into the address bar when using our phone or tablets. Probably not a lot, he suggests, because you’d probably just use an app instead. "People don’t seem to think much in terms of web pages these days,” Nouvel writes. “They think of digital brands, which mostly translate to apps or subscriptions … we are transitioning to a push-based model of content consumption.”

Content is at the forefront and our digital experiences are shifting around it. By focusing on the content technology is “fad(ing) into the background” and “the value transmitted by it” is at the forefront.

This reminded us of Steve Cheney’s analogy that we are all “cursors for the physical world.” At Cuseum we’ve developed a mobile-first platform to drive visitor engagement at museums and other places of culture and learning. We are big fans of how beacons help with this goal and are happy that this technology is getting better every day.

The future, writes Sergio Nouvel, is “self-self-sufficient bits of information that can be combined to other services to deliver value.” We believe there’s no better place to creatively and collaboratively solve real-world problems with technology than museums.

How can your museum be leveraging mobile to deliver more value? We can help answer that! Contact us today.

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