Machines, including the likes of search engines, content aggregators and countless applications, are increasingly consuming web content. Take Twitter.com for instance: only 25 per cent of the traffic is generated by people accessing the site directly. The remaining 75 comes through its API and from the 'Machine' which, acting as proxy for humans, is personified by the thousands of third-party applications that exist in the Twittersphere.
So what does this mean for designers and developers? Working recently on a couple of very large web projects I realised that although the semantic web is now a well-established, trusted and accepted model, it surprised me how little forward planning was put towards designing and developing web solutions that work for machines as well as humans.
Research has shown that brands that have jumped on the API bandwagon have seen increases in sales, innovations, reach, partner synergies and customer satisfaction. So why is it that, despite the fact that now even CEOs hear about the need to create 'open platforms', we're still primarily designing websites for humans only?
Then I realised. We are missing a persona. The all mighty user-centered design process, which uses personas at its heart, is missing a major profile: the machine-based persona.
