[Sigia-l] The future of WWW...

[Listera]

Dave:
 
> The web is a usability mess

What isn't?

We could rephrase that as: many sites on the web have significant usability
issues. 

We could also posit: many applications not on the web have significant
usability issues.

That is, it's entirely possible, and far too common actually, to make a mess
of an application while using standard OS UI components and functionalities.
Look at MS products. :-)

(Un)fortunately, you don't get to see the vast majority of non-public,
non-web apps out there, so it's easier to criticize the web ones.

> and still this is why Flash built in their own standard component, so that
> core interaction patterns derive from learnable conventions instead of a
> hob-goblin of differences.

Yes, but there's another side of this story. For example, most OSes do not
have a "conventional" UI widget for navigation of text-areas without
scrollbars. Flash and DHTML designers who need that functionality have had
to do their own. Button rollovers before the web, while available, weren't
used much at all. The web changed that in a big way. Most may be gratuitous,
but some disclose valuable info/state and add positively to UX. Hypertext
linking was rarely used before the web, now it's an essential part of even
non-web apps. Ditto the back button. And so on.

For these new "conventions" to emerge you need a playground. That playground
is the web. Playgrounds are by definition messy.

> When building web-applications the #1 problem is that users don't know how to
> do things that are web-based b/c the expectation is that of their primary OS
> system and 90% of them are Windows users and in an Enterprise environment more
> than that.

That's not entirely true. A lot of the web conventions (back button, search
field, url field, submit button, etc) are actually stronger than OS ones. In
fact, Windows put in the back button into the OS following the web. MS was
criticized roundly for merging web conventions in display and navigation
components in the OS.
 
> Personally, I think that the web and the PC (all the OSes) are a big
> mess, but that is a larger issue. But to say that the web proves
> anything about usability just seems to be giving in to the notion that
> the web is a great success for humanity in every way and is infalable
> and should be granted saint-hood.

Do you know another medium which, starting from zero, extended itself in
less than a decade to half a billion users, generating billions in revenue
and unlocking information repositories of all kinds to more people than all
other attempts in history combined? How can you not declare the web a
success?

The world is not divided into designers who use standard Windows UI
widgets/conventions and who don't, it's divided into good designers and bad
designers . And nowhere else is this proven better than on the web itself.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba