If the vibe at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo is any indication, the corporate customer-facing Web is in need of a serious makeover. And though the bugbears of user experience brought up at the conference — inexcusable latency, insipid presentation, limited user control of data display and categorization — are certainly well-established, in some cases, Web 2.0’s answer may in fact be a vector-in-progress pointing toward a new set of warts rather than a cure.In a presentation entitled “Corporate Makeover: Web 2.0 Edition,” well-known designers took a crack at redefining large corporate Web sites with the tenets of Web 2.0 design, features, and user experience in mind. “It is about putting services back in people’s hands,” Tom Hobbs, of the experience design group at Adobe, said in overview of the tenets of Web 2.0 design. But as much as the options opened up by the Web 2.0 design ethos succeed in putting users in control of their own site visitation destinies, the overall impression is that of a paradigm in which the designer remains more than essential, but central. Central to the ethos appears to be an exuberance for anticipating every permutation of the user’s experience throughout the design phase, oftentimes to the point of overstuffing. Category slicing for every possible data segment, tagging for every structurable element, relevancy meters of all ilk tracking back to myriad other users’ opinions, immediate access to maps that plot any data entry in the browser that hints of location — in many cases, simply because it can be done. And though there is wisdom in providing users with encapsulated previews to better inform them of the payoff of their next invested click, the proliferation of rollover scripts on many of these site designs seem intent on occluding access to the information presented on the present page, superimposing a trembling layer of where-next teases intent on making you sticky, a structure for encapsulating many possible futures into the present tense, begging the question of whatever happened to the here and now of the here and now? “It’s about guiding from one place to another,” Hobbs said, in a sense summing up the panel, which by and large suggested that the competition for providing the most complete user experience has transformed into a competition for attention among islets of content themselves.To be fair, the Adobe design Hobbs presented for a banking site proved more than compelling — a worthwhile, trustworthy banking Web app, rather than the banking equivalent of a fantasy baseball information site UI. But with Adobe’s design prowess, dedicated user experience team, and Hobb’s real-world experience designing such sites, the results were unsurprising. Naturally, the success of the Adobe demonstration was due in large part to having a team dedicated to reminding developers that one day there will in fact be actual, variably technically adept users on the other end of the line. Many in the Web 2.0 crowd simply don’t have the resources or proclivity to incubate practical user experience design for corporate sites. That said, many of the innovations of the Web 2.0 movement (tagging, offering multiple views of the same content, and so on) are certainly worth incorporating in the corporate Web environment.Next year, “Corporate Makeover, Web 2.0 Edition” will be a competition open to all attendees. Should be interesting to see where a year of Web 2.0 maturity and innovation will lead. Technology Industry