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

[Dave]

On Wed, 02 Jun 2004 11:19:30 +0100, Stew Dean <stew at stewdean.com> wrote:
> But then I'm an information architect and the technology could be anything
> - the end result is what matters.

Thank you, thank you, thank you ... 

This list is for IA, big and small, and we are a user centered design
community, this means that THE USER needs to come first.

HTML succeeded b/c of simplicity, but more b/c it was text-based and
this allowed for a much simpler set of rendering tools and programming
tools to exist. This has changed dramatically as anyone who does web
sites now can tell you. I remember in 1997 if you were lookin' for
HTML work and you used Dreamweaver you were considered a fraud. Today,
if you don't use Dreamweaver you are considered a fool. Also HTML used
to be a $50/hr. job, now you are lucky if you could do it for $10.

The other major success factor is that the web browser became standard
w/ the OS. This more than anything else changed the ubiquity factor.
Before 1996 the web was a nice game that some played, but after Win 95
and the upgrade years that followed is when the web grew. NOT b/c of
its simplicity, but b/c of its ease of access. AOL is probably the
other contributing historical factor here.

1. HTML made it cheap to produce information based and retail based products
2. Access became easy through a combination of MS and AOL (AOL was
spurned on by the community properties)

One could also argue that e-mail is what brought people out to the
network and thus people needed to build other stuff to make it
worthwhile, eh? Maybe it was just time.

Now, back to the user ... 

People have worried about stagnation. Interesting, b/c isn't the web
pretty stagnant right now? We are dong more and more w/ the back-end,
but when was the last time a site or application really caught on that
did something completely different from a UX perspective. Yes,
companies have been inventive in terms of content and narrative and
should be applauded for their ingenuity, but the platform itself for
building has not changed really since netscape 4.x came out. Sure we
could do more, but the mainstream Internet (not intranet or niche app)
market has not expanded. Look at Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay, Google, etc.
There is NOTHING there that has changed from a GUI perspective in 5-7
years, no? Talk about stagnation? Oh, Yahoo and Gmail use hotkeys
(yea! that's great!).

Ziya mentioned this cool project he is working on. I applaud what you
are doing. Many have had opportunities to do more, but these are not
the norms that we face as designers. These are the outliers b/c the
business rick is too high to make the case.

Pet Store ... pet store is not meant as anything other than an excuse
for richness. I will have to look at the Zulu version when I get to
work latter this afternoon on Netscape/Mozilla (I don't keep it at
home), but from the screen shots that they allow you to see in IE, it
looks better than most things I have seen to date in XUL ... thanx for
pointing it out.

Michal asked what is so bad about the web browser?
After 100 hours of usability test with users on a web-based
application I can tell you quite confidently that the browser adds to
a level of confusion for users beyond that of the application running
on it. Why? b/c there is an application running inside an application.
You have a distracting set of menus and toolbar items and what those
many hours of testing have shown me is that users float between
understanding that this is "the web" vs. just not caring. It was
amazing to see users move between the web browser expecting that the
app presente to them would be effected. Thinking that the "file" menu
would help them open a file from our system, etc. etc.

Ziya, you mentioned being able to do this w/o the browser? x-platform?
w/o any installed code? Please explain more about how you did this b/c
I have never had an engineer express this possibility. You implied
that you could do it w/o any added C or VB code installed and this to
me is the key. If I have to install something then I'm lost. But I am
indeed curious.

-- dave