You gotta understand my point of view here: I'm doing "customer support"
for my parents almost every week to get them around interface issues. I
know we're all very hip and young people here, but i sympathize very
much with the inexperienced end user. JS here and whatnot there, what
we're doing by leaping ahead instead of ambling ahead is leaving people
behind. I know for my sister, who is accustomed to a user interface not
necessarily breaking her computer if it isn't super obvious and has lots
more functionality, slight deviations from what she's used to is no big
deal, but my mom is deathly afraid of screwing up her computer.
We have components that mimic desktop applications and that's fine and
all, but you're forgetting that a large percentage of end users don't
regularly use an extensive range of desktop applications. For my
parents, that's email, word and firefox for my mom and the same +
photoshop and form*Z for my dad. They are also mac users. Flash UI
components mimic a kind of general idea of what a typical UI looks like,
but deploying a UI on windows, mac and linux platforms with a general
similarity is not a step towards unification or whatever, it's more like
defining a new design paradigm for users to learn.
The perfect UI component should completely mimic the OS it runs on, and
if "Flex 5" generates interfaces based on OS UI components that not only
mimic but actually duplicates the native functionality of the OS the
application is executed on, it'd be a huge step in the right direction.
I'm not a fan of designers that think they can do better than what has
been ingrained in culture through time. I'm not saying designs that stem
from Mosaiq are still the way to go with web browsers, but i'm saying
the end user has an understanding for that design that i don't think a
prospective UI designer should take lightly.
A ton of mac users haven't touched Office. A ton of Windows users never
touched a tabbed interface.
I know we can't always go for the lowest common denominator, but taking
a firm stance in web browser UI design methodology is not a bad idea,
and this crazy fear of page reloads strikes me as somewhat illogical
from a usability point of view.
You keep saying Flex delivers easy to comprehend content, but do you
base that in Macromedia's research or on your own? In my experience as a
designer, developer and end user, i haven't seen a single example of a
flash driven RIA that improved anything, not in usability, and not
visually (unless you count animation an improvement).
When public trust in Flash grows and perhaps we see web browsers that
attempt new methods of navigation (if ever), and the general movement of
the web is moving in a "richer" direction, i'll be first in line. Until
then, i don't understand why such staples as web shop solutions (add to
shopping basket. Keep shopping / Proceed to checkout. What's not to
understand) need to be somehow rethought because someone thought a page
reload was scary, and wind up alienating more than it helps.
Then again maybe (probably) i'm just tootin my horn for no reason. I'm
just worried we might forget the end user that didn't get it.
- Andreas
Stan Vassilev wrote:
Ajax mimics better web pages since it uses same technology (HTML)
indeed, it's just about the only way it can go (unless you go to
certain lengths to reinvent the GUI with CSS tricks and images).
Flash doesn't need to mimic web pages since it can simply do better.
It mimics full-blown desktop application interface, which is also
something people are used to. We have buttons, checkboxes, scrollbars,
progress bars. Can you say with a straight face this is incredibly
hard for a casual user to grasp :)?
And the accordion - it's something you can see in Office and plenty of
other places, it's far from being new weird kind of component noone
ever used. And further, we have tabs, windows, panels and what not,
accordion is not forced on anyone.
One of the reasons Macromedia got on the "components" bandwagon in
first place was more consistent desktop-like experience. This was
early in the V.1 framework when they were still experimenting but
trying to bring some consistency to Flash interfaces instead of
forcing Flash developers to reinvent the basic stuff as simple buttons
with every SWF they make.
Flex 2 Framework is advanced, consistent, performant framework which
delivers easy to comprehend GUI targeted at business applications and
widely deployed consumer applications.
As such, it makes total sense to me.
Not long time ago, the widely spread opinion by "experts" and alike
was that JS is a terrible terrible way to use for any serious widely
deployed app.
It took Google and its JS gadgets to convince web application
developers world-wide that *actually*, JS doesn't suck and maybe
there's some value it can add to web apps. Now virtually any web
e-mail provider one could care for rewrites their web mail app to use
JS and "AJAX".
Now Flash meets the same skepticism by some folks as JS before. When
Flex 2 final is out and big companies start using it and show there's
nothing bad in rich internet apps, this "fear" of Flash will go away
just like it happened with JS in web apps.
Regards, Stan Vassilev
I'm extremely jaded. I'm one of those guys that think Flash should
stay the hell away from what already works on the web and rather add
to it instead of restructure it. I think flash sites beyond the
conceptual (ie. the Donnie Darko site for instance) are so deeply and
profoundly annoying they're actually upsetting. In particular the
sites that simply emulate what's already doable online but with some
extra bells and whistles; ie the sites that don't even try to be
special. I'm sure there's an enormous market out there for Flex, but
i'm tempted to say ...
...
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