BayCHI Panel - Rich Internet Applications
Tonight I went to the monthly BayCHI presentation at Xerox PARC. It was my first time going to a BayCHI event or Xerox park, so I was interested to see what it was like. The talk was about rich internet applications and the breakthroughs and challenges that they present for the future of web interfaces. The panel included a senior vice president at “Macromedia”:http://www.macromedia.com, a co-founder of “Laszlo”:http://www.laszlosystems.com/demos/ (which I hadn’t heard of, but it’s a rich platform built on top of Flash, which is the only good way to do such a platform, because with any other method, browser compatibility sucks), and the two guys who founded “Oddpost”:http://www.oddpost.com. The majority of the presentations were demos of various rich internet applications that each presenter’s team had built.
Oddpost is a giant Javascript application that is an exact replica of Outlook, except in a browser. It looks and acts just like Outlook, so you can drag messages from your inbox into a different folder, and you can use Ctrl-N to compose a new message, and things like that. One shortcoming of Oddpost had been that it only worked in Internet Explorer on Windows, but they gave a demo of the app running inside Firefox to show that they have been working on compatibility. There’s nothing wrong with Oddpost, and being able to drag and drop all those things in the browser is quite an achievement, but there’s really not any innovation on display with their app. It doesn’t inspire feelings of admiration and desire to use it more and more the way that Gmail does. Speaking of competing with Gmail, Oddpost was recently bought by Yahoo, so expect the next version of Yahoo webmail to be heavy on the drag and drop. (By the way, when the guy opened Firefox to give his demo, his homepage was definitely www.google.com).
Mike from Macromedia and Dave from Laszlo gave demonstrations of glitzy internet applications that had gorgeous interfaces, animated zooming, animated sliding, 3D flipping, and tons of custom controls. The amount of flexibility that you have with application platforms such as these, in relation to how easy it is to implement them, is far beyond anything that has been available even for desktop applications. From a design standpoint, this is very dangerous territory. My first thought after seeing examples of the bleeding edge of this technology was, “wow, they give you enough rope to hang yourself and all your friends.” In other words, Flash and technologies like it make it possible, and in some cases easy, to make the prettiest and crappiest user interfaces in the history of the planet. Obviously, you can make amazing and brilliantly usable applications as well, but the biggest challenge as a designer working with such a limitless platform is exercising restraint. No matter how smoothly your animations expand your panels into full-screen windows, you still have to stick to the basics in interaction design to make things simple and obvious to use.
There’s so much abuse of Flash on the internet today, and I blame part of it on the type of tool that the full-blown Flash application is. The easiest thing to do in flash is make big rectangles with rounded corners in ugly colors, and then make them fly around the screen. I think it would be a more mature tool if instead of implying that big shapes was what it was best at that it afforded easier ways to organize data and interact with objects in ways that are useful, such as expanding panels and making editable lists of custom data. My favorite uses of Flash on the web are when you don’t really notice that there’s Flash on the page, but you do notice, for example, that you’re not used to such a smooth fade from one image to another, and you investigate further and realize that they did it with Flash. Used sparingly, Flash is compact and perfect for effects you can’t achieve otherwise, but the future success of rich applications depends on being able to use the features that these platforms provide sparingly even when the temptation of an easy way to put your whole application on the sides of a reflecting, rotating cube is staring you in the face.
