[Sigia-l] DHTML Menus and Usability

[Listera]

"MATTHEW GODDARD" wrote:

> When you move to a restrictive medium such as PDA's, Cell Phones etc. you're
> right you should modify the UI so that it's appropriate,

Thank you. 

So you agree with me that the web (the combination of HTTP and HTML with
their specific requirements such as stateless connections, limited UI
widgets, restricted interactivity, browser incompatibilities, non-fixed
fonts, user-variable app window space, etc.) should require designers to
change their approach and not necessarily use what may be dominant (let
alone efficient and elegant) on another platform, such as the PC desktop?

Or are you claiming that users are utterly lost because, just for one
glaring example, something they use all day long on their desktop is absent
on their web pages, the (system wide) trash can?

> but then the users expectations are different as well, they don't expect to
> have a fully featured application.

Users are not designers; they don't expect anything. They adapt to what's
given to them. Users didn't "expect" anything specific out of the web and
the web *is* quite different as a UI paradigm vs. the desktop, and yet it
took off extremely quickly for a new medium, also among tens of millions of
novice users.

Lucky for us, the original web designers did not mindlessly attempt to
emulate the then-dominant desktop UI paradigm.

Look, I *am* a two-decade long advocate of "consistency". And I was fighting
that battle when every Windows app had a different UI for every imaginable
action. I was there criticizing some of the absurd UI "innovations" brought
to us by the early Flash designers. Etc.

But I can recognize the difference between being a slave to whatever is
considered "dominant" at any moment and tuning one's design choices to
whatever is appropriate for a given platform, project and task.

Best,

Ziya