This is a selection of the most important ideas expressed in this article: What I Learned About the Web in 2011

User experience

Emotion is at the heart of every decision we make. Emotion shapes our behavior by casting the tie-breaking vote when logic determines appropriate options for our consideration.
It’s centrally important to seek simplicity, and especially to avoid making things hard to use or understand.
Most websites and apps launching today all are beautifully designed with care.
God is in the details.

Mobile apps

A small screen doesn’t signal a desire to do less. The real question isn’t what to take out of a mobile app, but what to add.
Websites are becoming more and more “app-like.”
Mobile payments – increasing percent

Responsive design

Speed: A web application is a “living” thing and all living things are continually changing from cradle to grave. The faster they can respond, the better they can adapt to change.
Websites should be intelligently malleable things—adaptable and responsive to a broad continuum of uses and devices
Silent browser updates: how can we best help our users understand the changes in experiences that they will encounter as we adapt to building single, responsive sites?

The Web

We have to start realizing that our job is no longer solely to produce sites, apps, and pages built in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We have to expand our definition of what the “web” is. More and more, the “web” is not a platform. It’s a service with clients on many platforms.
That iteration is king and that perfection should never be achieved—shipping it is more important than trying to perfect it endlessly behind the scenes. It’s better to release with a solid core set of features and then iterate and add as time or users necessitate it.

Technologies

HTML5! CSS3! Responsive Web Design! Mobile! Web Fonts! Grids!
2011 was the year we all went from thinking “that HTML5 stuff seems cool—maybe I’ll use it later,” and “there are some interesting new ideas floating around that I should really spend some time checking out” to “we need to totally revamp our process to put mobile first, rethink content, design responsively, use real typography, and strip out all this old crap. And we need to hurry!”

Learn!

There is so much now to explore, discover and master.
Always be ready to learn something new.
2011 was the year that, after much resistance, I started reading on my iPhone. […] The outcome was incredibly positive, from a user’s perspective. First of all, I can say that my consumption skyrocketed: I started reading four and five and then six books a month. I learned more: since it was so handy, I started Googling terms and phrases that I didn’t understand or wanted to know more about.
There is still so much to learn. These are exciting times!
It’s an incredibly exciting time to be creating things on the web.
As a conclusion: In all of human history, there has never been a more exciting time to be alive than right now [#]