RIA & the user experience

Sunday, April 22nd, 2007

As any computer user know the best tools of your computer (traditionally called applications) are the ones that offers the best user experience (usability) - in the sense that they are easy to learn, easy to use and supports the goal/tasks that you want to accomplish.

Traditionally the desktop application has ruled by offering the best user experience. Since the beginning of 1990's with the advent and success of the Internet browser application the user experience of these have lacked behind. Instead of developing client/server set of applications software companies have used the browser as the basis for the (web) client applications  to manipulate centrally (server) stored "user" data. The main reasons for this has been the easy deployment (a central mantra for many organization's IT department) and the idea to access/manipulate the data from anywhere.

But the web applications have since 2002 gradually become more and more grown-up and have targeted the same user experience as offered by a traditional desktop application. These web applications are called Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

With RIA things are now becoming blurred. Scott Barnes at MS MossyBlog describes 3 levels of user experience offered by RIA (as seen from the perspective of Microsoft as far as I see it):

• Good User Experience (HTML/CSS/AJAX),
• Great User Experience (Silverlight),
• Ultimate User Experiences (WPF).

I'm more inclined to see in this way:

• Bad User Experience (the browser)
• Acceptable User Experience (the browser with plugin)
• Good User Experience (the desktop application)
• Great User Experience (the smart application)

What is it for user experiences that we as users want and have loved throughout the years? It's all about how easy, fast, simple, elegant, etc. we can get, input,  manipulate and store-my data or share-our data/information. It is such areas as:

• Easy transfer/communication (open/save, drag/drop, clipboard, import/export, print)
• Fast and responsive manipulation (on demand, lazy evaluation, multiple views).
• I can see and manipulate my data anytime (search, online/offline functionality)
• Undo functionality (learn by doing without fearing to loose data)
• Number of physical actions to perform goal/task (should be as small as possible).

Another way of seeing this is in terms of data:

• It's my data (not yours) or it is our (shared) data.
• Input of data (open, import, merge, clipboard, drag/drop, download, input media)
• Manipulation of data (search, undo, on demand, lazy evaluation, multiple views)
• Output of data (save, export, print, clipboard, drag/drop, upload)

PS. This reminds me that we need a better clipboard Paste Command user experience. One that merges the Paste and the Paste Special command and use commonly used keyboard accelerators throughout Operating Systems and their applications.