December is for taking stock. Across this year’s projects — page-builder conversions, membership platform launches, AI augmentation pilots — a handful of lessons kept repeating. We are writing them down mostly so we follow them ourselves.
The short list
- Editability is the product. Every client request eventually reduces to: can our own people change this safely? Build for that question first.
- Subtraction wins arguments. The most appreciated deliverables this year removed things — plugins, steps in a renewal journey, fields from a form.
- Volunteers are the real users. Society platforms succeed or fail on whether a volunteer can run them in an evening. Design for the treasurer, not the demo.
- AI value arrived quietly. No transformation programmes — just minutes drafted, inboxes triaged, documents summarised, inside tools people already had.
- Accessibility discipline compounds. Teams that put it in the definition of done stopped needing remediation projects at all.
The thread through all of it: longevity comes from restraint. Build less, build it natively, and make sure the people who live with the work can run it themselves. That is the bar for next year as well.
What we’re changing for 2026
Lessons are only real if they change behaviour, so: every build now ships with its pattern library documented inside the editor itself, where editors will actually find it. Accessibility review moved from pre-launch to per-component, because batching it was producing pre-launch panic. And we now ask membership platform clients to nominate their grumpiest volunteer as a tester — flattery finds fewer bugs than impatience.
We are also writing more down in public, this journal included. The sector shares its research; its operational knowledge mostly evaporates in handovers. Publishing what we learn is partly marketing, candidly — but mostly it is the discipline of having to be sure.
Predictions we’re willing to be wrong about
- More institutions will convert away from page builders than adopt them, for the first time.
- AI policies will consolidate around short, enforceable documents as the long ones quietly fail.
- Accessibility regulation will reach further into member-facing platforms, not just public pages.
- The greenest, fastest, most accessible site in any comparison will keep being the same site.
If any of those age badly, next December’s post will say so. Holding ourselves to that is rather the point.
