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

[Listera]

Stew Dean:
> At 04:38 03/06/2004, Listera wrote:
>> Look and feel should not be mandated.

> But  from experience a consistent look and feel is beneficial to the user.

(Those were not my word, I was quoting from the article.)

Here's the crucial passage for me:
------------
[Regarding the 8 different web sites/apps pictured at
<http://tinyurl.com/3axwu>:]

What do they have in common? graphics, text, hyperlinks. The appearance,
layout, navigation ­ in other words, the user experience ­ is unique to
each. From a design perspective, they have more in common with their offline
counterparts than with each other.

HTML, perhaps inadvertently, provides the ability to create custom
presentations of information with a visual design that may be unique to the
document. The same flexibility is now required for interaction design. Like
it or not ­ and many UI specialists don't ­ the Web is a varied, diverse
place, where the lines between application functionality, content, and
branding are already blurred and becoming more so over time. Even desktop
operating systems are morphing, becoming more graphical and media-like. The
age of standardized, rule-based UI design ­ "any color you like, as long as
it's black" ­ is coming to an end, and the underlying systems need to take
this into account.
------------

Before WWW, we never had such an intertwining of UI and content. While many
of the web *sites* on the Internet don't look like conventional
*applications* we are accustomed to from our desktop experience, they are
very much interactive applications in every sense of the word. That
"consistent look and feel" you mention is dissolved into an amorphous form
suggested by its own content. That alone shouldn't mean that it's not
usable. If it is not usable, it only means that it was designed
incompetently, not that it lacks "conventional" look and feel.

For example, the Disney site at <http://disney.go.com/home/today/index.html>
could have started with a Windows wizard, all bedecked with conventional UI
widgets. Yes, perhaps that may have been more familiar (as an
"application"), but better or more effective? I don't think so. If the
Disney site/app fails past the homepage for reasons of consistency,
architecture, navigation, etc., so be it. But that's a design competency
issue, not a matter of not adopting conventional UI paradigms.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba