Sébastien Berten, co-founder and President of UX-REPUBLIC gives his opinion on the evolution of the web

Is the internet fixed or mobile? The difference between a laptop, a tablet, a mobile, is it ultimately that important? Are there really consumers who consider all these ecosystems to be different? Does a brand experience, or a simple dashboard, necessarily have to be multi-channel? What is certain is that it is definitely not the brand that decides. The brand suffers. She notices and tries to adapt to a rhythm that very often does not allow her to properly structure her digital universe.

Over the past year, we have moved from the era of verticalization of data and services to the era of transversality

If it's not the brand, it's obviously the consumer, the user, who decides. He decides to use such and such a service, to switch to the competition or not, depending on the quality and relevance of what the brand offers him on all his screens. The consumer, although unpredictable, simply reasons. His choice is very often basic. He connects to a brand with the most convenient and available way he has at his disposal. He expects his usual brands to respond with the right service, the right offers, and this on the medium he has chosen: landline, mobile, tablet, connected television, or any other communicating object. In any case, he expects a fast, reliable, secure, adapted, personalized and even contextualized, attractive and pragmatic response.
Faced with its requirements, the technological advances of recent years are significant. From now on, the Internet services of tomorrow can (and must) be designed natively convergent because the Web is not fixed or mobile, it is universal. Services and data must be agnostic to the media that allow access to them. They must not be hostage to the platforms because it is, in fact, the brands and then the consumers who ultimately become their hostages.
We have definitely moved into the new era of transversal visualization of services and data on all screens. This universal visualization is revolutionizing internet services. This is obvious in B2C but also in B2B or B2E. The data-visualization of dashboards from BigData systems or even traditional BI has in common with the visualization of services the absolute need for a rich multi-channel User eXperience. The presentation of data becomes almost as important as the data itself.

Data Design, User eXperience & Html5, are paradoxically the 3 pillars of an innovative and pragmatic multi-screen strategy.

It is this multi-channel User eXperience which is becoming, day after day, the keystone of tomorrow's Web services. If brands do not want to continue to get lost in the jungle of screens and ecosystems, if they wish to move into the era of pragmatic construction of profitable services whose ROI is measurable, then they must go through technologies but also through methodologies that are as agile as they are robust, making it possible to move from 'sandbox' innovation to industrialization while controlling costs. This recipe contains 3 ingredients: Data Design, User eXperience & Html5.
It is no longer conceivable today to process the channels separately. It is no longer conceivable not to be consistent and provide different levels of customer promise depending on the screens and ecosystems. It is no longer acceptable to put priority on one screen and finally let others catch up. This is no longer acceptable because solutions are emerging to provide a qualitative response to this brand issue.
User Experience and Data Design are made up of paradoxes which, once mastered, become powerful tools at the service of brands to create this unbreakable link between them and their consumers. After 6 years spent leading the teams of a mobile agency in the development of mobile solutions, I see that the ecosystem evolves and changes. The Design, UX, and Html5 triptych has become a powerful tool for decompartmentalising the mobile world and recreating a unified, universally accessible web space.
I invite the evangelists of this transformation, passionate about innovation, User eXperience and DataDesign, who find themselves dreaming of a universal web again, to contact me (sebastien.berten@ux-republic.com) to create a state of the art, the state of user experience and data designSebastien Berten is since September 2013, one of the co-founders of UX-REPUBLIC (www.ux-republic.com)