Scott Fegette, Senior Product Manager for Dreamweaver at Adobe, began by telling Abby Johnson that now’s an exciting – but volatile – time.  He believes the industry’s in a sort of 1.0 stage right now, with the best user interface and input methods undecided, even as the landscape is “exploding exponentially.”

Devin Fernandez, Group Product Manager of the Web Segment at Adobe, then added that there’s a fragmentation of browsers and operating systems, not just mobile devices.  And he thinks we can’t arrive at a 2.0 stage of development until everyone’s established design patterns and best practices.

Questions related to limited network access, repurposing content, and the mobile Web versus native applications are posing challenges to people in the industry, as well.

On the bright side, Fegette indicated that HTML5 is a great way to target a variety of devices at a broad level.  He also believes mobile Web applications will reach the same quality as native apps in time.

That should be encouraging news for businesspeople who are looking for fresh ways to promote their sites and reach consumers who are on the move.

Hayes, a travel writer/copywriter who’s made his online home at AndyHayes.com, explained to Abby Johnson, “When someone has an ugly website, it usually means that they’re focused on the things that are important to their customer or their reader and they don’t worry about how it looks.”

That’s a good thing. Not that it’s downright bad to aim for a unique and attractive look. Hayes simply argued, “Sometimes it just gets so shiny and glossy that we lose the fact of what we’re trying to deliver.”

Crazy fonts, dancing figures, and other creative visuals don’t often help provide answers or solve problems, after all. So when it comes to site design, Hayes recommended, “Don’t worry so much about what it looks like . . . does it deliver?”

He later added, “Get out of your own way and let people do what they’re coming to your site to do.”

Keep this advice in mind the next time your site appears a little plain or someone suggests an overhaul.

Morville goes on to say how he was inspired by Christopher Alexander to look at design patterns and patterns of physical behavior. By looking at these behavior patterns that searchers have, he says it is fascinating to study how these patterns can be turned into design patterns that are solutions for very common problems.

On the subject of the future of search, Morville believes the vision of the future is the same as it was several decades ago. He says the future is artificial intelligence with a little bit of information visualization. While he foresees many things happening in the future, he does believe there is significance in location awareness and real-time.

To learn more about Morville and his ideas regarding search, check out his latest book called Search Patterns.

Jean has teamed up with ThisNext as less of a business move and more as a way to drive interest and content to NOTCOT. Users can tag items from ThisNext with “notcot” and they automatically appear on her site with shopping links. When asked about tranforming NOTCOT into a “traditional” business, Aw replied that “as a designer, it’s a living, breathing portfolio.” Already in place a springboard to her design consultancy, it seems to make much more sense for NOTCOT to thrive on this “network of informative and collaborative websites” rather than strike exclusive deals.