*} CodeBloke

Some other time I will probably write a full-scale blog post (article) on user interface design for web-based applications, but with this post I just want to mark some outlines to be developed later.

FOUNDATION OF THE WEB

For me the adventure with World Wide Web started about 10 years ago with ancient browsers like Mosaic and Netscape (version 2.0).

Both browsers are hardly remembered today, same as Trumpet Winsock, the ancient TCP/IP implementation for Windows 3.11 necessary to connect the dial-up internet.

At that time web was mainly about browsing the documents and frankly talking, even today it’s a main purpose of the web.

WEB-SPECIFIC USER INTERFACE (UI)

So, web is still about providing documents and navigation across the content.

What is the case then? I believe the most important problem here is a mass-scale success of the web that unlike anything else penetrated all aspects of our live. As always all the big players just want their share of The Cake, plus in this particular case they want it now…

What the UI (user interface) has got to do with it? Hmmm… Well, you must have noticed that companies developing operating systems over last 10-15 years were spending more money on fitting the user interface to user’s expectations than on any other aspect of the systems. Unfortunately for them web appeared to be that native that it could not be ignored anymore.

So what? So, that we have a native way of gaining information trough reading and learning curve that follows… and the whole research buzz was related more to a video game interfaces than to a real system intended to be used on the daily base.

If that conclusion is true… Yes, I know it’s tough to admit that the revolution we try to do doesn’t bring anything new and it’s just speeding up our native qualities and skills of reading and learning – all existing! The hardest bit to admit is that Mr. Gutenberg by dissemination of reading skills, even among the poorest peasants and workers, seems to be a direct founder of Web 2.0 ))

Internet could be invented in isolation and it still would do well among government, military and scholars, but the whole power-to-the-people thing is rather a direct follow up of the gifted German, than anything else and this is what the whole Web 2.0 is all about, isn’t?

CONCLUSION

Now, time for good news! Web is all about the documents. If your company understands the nature of relations with current clients and communication with use of “traditional” methods works fine, then there is a huge probability that you will do well online – as long as you wont get yourself a consultant of wankr.com to “restructure and improve old” things that really work.

Static, independent and stateless. Documents (let’s think of them as letters). Good example that does reflect a human nature, same way as the web does that.

If you understand that and your business process as well, then the “only” benefits of the web for you are searching the indexed documents, mass personalization and lowering information distribution cost by removing paper, the hardcopies being sent.

TECHNOLOGY

Last but not least, are the technicalities following the guidelines above:

1. Layout design and navigation shouldn’t overwhelm the actual content (think of it as a document, a message). Because medium is not a message here… not anymore.
2. Access to documents should be structured, so that eventually, after some time of using the system a user pattern or habit would emerge. Think twice here! Changing customers habits later might be more costly than rewriting application’s API. Plus, users turn back from companies not listening to them in terms of “clickability”.
3. Avoiding redundant UI elements, like i.e. copying browser’s buttons. Especially [Back] and [Refresh].
4. Browser interaction safety. Independent of circumstances, once the data is sent, user should not have rights to repost content (i.e. send on [Refresh] of POST form) and going back with browser [Back] button shouldn’t any cause problems as well.
5. Free text search. Website should have an internal (“free text”) search engine and get scanned by search engine robots for external references.
6. Tagging. Today your content must be tagged!
7. You should also provide an option to download *.PDF files (hardcopies) of the documents published.
8. Accessibility first! I mean: font size change, high contrast and storing personalized preferences etc.

COMING SOON…

As promised above I will prepare a full article soon. I will try to explain the reason that web makes such a carrier in the MVC-type applications, event though the http itself is a stateless and in fact tribal protocol and browsers are so unpredictible and unstable…

I will also try to describe implications of that for you as a developer and to your projects at all.

Thanks,

M. (Codebloke)