I’ve been working on building stuff for the web for about 13 years now, and I’ve finally come to an important conclusion: the web is boring.

When we all started jumping onto the web in the mid-to-late 90s, it was exciting – the new frontier. We rushed through the Dot Com bust, inventing entire new ways of interacting with each other (Myspace, Facebook, Twitter) and creating an entire ecosystem to support our lives that never existed before. From then, up until now, it was pretty exciting.

But now, it’s getting boring. We’ve moved from a pioneering spirit to one full of static and parity. With the economic downturn, companies reduced spending on web-related projects, often stripping them down to merely content repositories and distribution channels.

Additionally, the web has decontextualized much of our daily life. As we sit down in front of the computer (the way the vast majority of people still consume the web throughout their day), technological support of our human context has been framed up inside a plastic black bezel. Put bluntly, so much of our web experience is stripped of sensory experience. Our sense of touch is mostly limited to the glazed tops of keys and a curved mouse (or even worse, a flat touchpad). Our sense of smell and taste are completely removed from the experience, and even our sense of hearing is limited to a few forms of media-based audio: mostly that of videos and music, piped through to us on demand as we continue the quest toward our fattening consumption of various media.

Yes, the web has become a stale experience, comprising mostly of social support frameworks and heaps of consumable media. As user experience designers, our job has mostly been to try to create a nicer facade for these compartmentalized experiences. While momentarily exciting, the caffeine rush is temporary: an exciting world of technology, progress and complete social change, neutered down to headers, blocks of text and sexy real-time error delivery in forms. Boring.

I know this sounds rather dark and pessimistic, but I want to look at this as an opportunity to call technologists and businesses to action.

I know a bunch of brilliant – and I mean brilliant - technologists. People who astound me with their understanding of how code and machines work. These folks can code anything, making any machine do their bidding. What a waste to spend that talent building another sidebar component for a CMS, or making Ajax work quicker to validate a form.

As we look toward the future, I want to challenge technologists and businesses to look outside the web. Yes, the web is always going to play a role. Yes, mobile will probably always be around. But, let’s look further. Let’s look at how technology can make the bus riding experience better. Let’s make the TV experience better. Let’s make the furniture shopping experience better. And, let’s do it not using more mobile apps to add a layer of augmented reality on top of our world – let’s fundamentally change how we do things, by leveraging technology in more boundary-breaking ways.

So, next time you sit down and code another header or incrementally improve the way a slideshow transition works on a mobile device – ask yourself this: are you really using your talents and vision to their fullest extent? While, yes, someone has to take care of these details, I believe they’ll be taken care of as a natural part of a larger innovation picture. If you find yourself bored with the web, get off the web and build something in the real world.