[Sigia-l] "Standard" interfaces? (was: DHTML Menus and Usability)

[Listera]

"David Heller" wrote:

> IT staff do and IT staff are a hard nut to crack into new spaces, making all
> our missions that much harder.

At some point in life, a person has to make a decision as to whether he
wants to be a saleperson/implementor for various products from Microsoft,
IBM, Oracle, etc., or create focused and appropriate apps for given
projects. (Not saying they are necessarily mutually exclusive.)

If risk/failure aversion and "safety in numbers" are the goals, as is with
most of the IT bureaucrats, then the former method of using what all the
other IT guys are using (the "dominant" standards) is the appropriate one.
So forget about pretty much anything else, buy the "dominant" technology and
implement it, as best as you can. You get as much "flexibility" as they give
you. If the UI is a button bar made up of 67 small, cryptic icons, a file
browser to a RDBMS, modal dialog boxes galore, etc., well that's what the
dominant software gives you. Learn to be happy; that's what everybody else
is using, too. "Business reality." End of story.

Is there a price to pay going against this "business reality"? To be sure.
Are you willing to pay that price? Like I said, the fattest part of the
commodity bell curve is also the most lucrative one.

(Incidentally, a lot of the "business reality" hapless people like me fought
against for years evaporated in an implosion recently, taking down a couple
of trillion dollars worth of market equity. But I digress.)
 
> Flash and Java being built around bytecode for the most don't allow this level
> of customization AND! they aren't nearly as standard as HTML is.

(Not directed at you or your company, but) if a product requires (in a given
instance) so much and such a severe level of "customization" then most
probably it isn't the right product to begin with. The user might just be
better off developing or buying the core frameworks and build on top of
those according to his own requirements.

Also, if you adopt the MVC view of development, to a large extent, you can
preserve the flexibility of divorcing UI from logic. That UI may be HTML,
Java, Flash, VB or pretty much anything else that can talk to your backend.
So, ideally, the *fundamental* customization can occur at the backend,
without involving your end users. The advantage of HTML front-ends is that
you can make a change and it's instantly reflected on the browsers of
potentially millions of users, without any effort or re-installation.
 
> Perceptions around technologies that Java and Flash aren't as safe or
> good or secure or whatever. These are hard perceptions to break.

I haven't heard much about Java not being secure.
 
> Lets face it, HTML is damn! easy to build in compared to other UI
> generation tools.

Actually, many other IDEs allow you prototype or actually develop UIs far
more sophisticated than what you can do with HTML alone, and faster too.

> 2. Marketing: Features sell improvements don't. don't really have to add
> more to that.

Yep.
 
> 4. Oh! Analysts ... they are the devil in carnate. There are both
> financial and market analysts who can break a company w/ their finger
> and VERY few are interested in usability.

Analysts are the carbon copy of the IT bureaucrats: risk/failure aversion
and safety in numbers. Simple, pure, unadulterated herd mentality. If the
performance these charlatans in the past two years haven't convinced us,
then nothing will. 
  
> I think this is the difference between web site design and web
> application design. When I say application, I mean building a tool that
> will be resold over and over again, as opposed to an application that is
> single purpose like a stock trading site.

I'm not getting the difference so clearly.

Best,

Ziya