Web as resource, web as experience

I want to put a name to two ways of conceiving of and building the web: one I’ll call web as resource, and the other web as experience. The difference, I think, pivots on the concept of narrative, namely in how actively the creators of the site try to shape a narrative for you to follow. I think this goes some way towards explaining a lot of what you see in modern web design: the page weights, the loading times, the use of imagery and animation.

Web as resource

I might be dating myself here, but to the extent you think of your website as a collection of useful things, sitting out there and waiting to be acted upon by users, you’re doing the web as resource. It’s a spatial metaphor: there are information resources existing in a spaced defined by their interconnections, and there they sit, inert, until somebody comes along and retrieves them.

The web as resource—or really, a collection of resources—is the old way of thinking about things. It’s the language of the architects of the web: of RFCs, and W3C standards, and REST (a retroactive description of web-as-resource). In this mode, a website is just a passive object, containing no real story, and the people that use it have agency. The information that you post on the site is primary, and whatever people do with it is secondary.

In web as resource, the narrative is something each user determines for his or herself. Taken to extremes, you might end up with ergodic literature.

Web as experience

Over time, web as resource has lost ground to web as experience. This is a web in which a site’s creators take much more control of the narrative. This kind of site wants to shepherd you through a pre-planned story. Whereas web as resource is spatial, this metaphor is temporal. (You can see that peeking through when designers talk about spatial areas of the site with words like “moment”.)

The idea of the web as a collection of inert resources, to be accessed in whatever order you please, is foreign to this, or at least a secondary idea, shoved into a “Resources” part of the nav somewhere. At best, the web is the substrate, the how a website works, the technical underpinning beneath the real object of interest, and not something allowed to bubble to the surface. Here, resources and hyperlinks might as well be in the same category as TCP/IP and network switches. What counts is that your interlocutors are leading you through a story. In the case of a marketing or commerce site, that story is a sales funnel or customer journey. In the case of a product site, it’s a pitch. And how you experience the story is as important as what you experience.

Hence, the concept of individual “pages” (resources) gets blurred, and hidden behind to a carefully planned path through a page or a site. You get things like animations keyed to your progression through a page.

The site, in some sense, takes over from your browser. Scrollbars are hidden, basic modes of operation are replaced. What’s primary is not the contents of the page, but that every user sees exactly the same experience of the page. Browser differences are flaws to be paved over with workarounds and polyfills.

Building for the long term

Here’s where I have to editorialize: if it wasn’t obvious already, I don’t think these two epistemes are on equal footing when you consider what the web is good at, or even what it’s for. I think web-as-experience gives you results that are strictly less robust for your money than web-as-resource, especially if you want to build for the long term. A narrative is for a moment in time, but a collection of useful stuff is forever.

So if you’re charged with building experiences on the web, be prepared to build more, and more, and more of them, and probably take each one down within the year. Be prepared for high-pressure, big-bang launches instead of calm, piecemeal garden tending; the audience is only really going to visit once, so you only have one chance to get it right. And be prepared to do lots of throwaway engineering work for the sake of your one-time experiences, because experience demands novelty. The value of what you build doesn’t accumulate.