Dan Saffer is the Senior Interaction Designer at Adaptive Path, a widely respected San Francisco web design firm. The company's portfolio includes design work for Creative Commons, the United Nations ReliefWeb and Blogger.com.

I caught up with Dan in the halls of the SXSW conference and asked about the changing landscape of web design and community interaction.

Dan summarized what's changed in recent years as a shift towards the web as a platform for applications, less a means of providing information and more a tool for two way communication. "People are feeling more empowered," he said, "and the tools available are more empowering." Everyone is struggling with the question of how to leverage bottom up power, how to filter and redistribute community contributions while maintaining the integrity of an organization's work and brand. Journalistic integrity is another issue that Dan identified as a key issue in the changing web.

"After the London bombings there were pictures up on Flickr within minutes. Organizations are asking - how do we keep up with that?"

Dan said there are serious tools issues that have to be dealt with by web designers building in means to collect data. Some organizations are using a combination of human and computer filtering, he said, citing the example of an Amazon experiment in paying people to look at discovered images to determine which are inappropriate for the organization's purposes. That's something that a computer cannot do, but a human can do quickly, as opposed to more automated work like keyword spam filtering.

We also talked about the emergence of new roles and responsibilities that correspond with the huge increase in data available. Since memory and storage is no longer an issue the question has become "what's being done with the data?" Dan cited the US government's office of Total Information Awareness as an example of the way that new questions of ethical responsibilities regarding data are arising in the web development world.

We also discussed usability in design. I asked Dan how some one concerned with usability could build organizational support for dedicating resources in regard to the issue. "There is aesthetic beauty and there is functional beauty," he said. "Aesthetic beauty brings people in to a site, but functional beauty, making things useful and usable, creates site stickiness. If users can't easily accomplish their goals on a site, they won't come back."

Dan Saffer is the the Senior Development Designer at Adaptive Path and the author of the forthcoming book Designing for Interaction. He blogs about web issues at odannyboy.com/blog.