The Next Wave

Sunday March 18, 2007

What's "Good Enough" ?

I've been reading many blogs of late discussing the merits of the Web UI (usually in the context of AJAX) and whether they are suitable replacements for the classic Desktop app.

Joel Spolsky concludes we're doomed to a life where everything is web-centric and we're just going to have to get used to dealing with what is (IMHO) a sub-standard user experience.

I'm fairly sure most have read Bruce Eckel's Hybridizing Java which concludes that the future is Flash as opposed to HTML. The UI is certainly richer, but the cost of being locked into Adobe and the hybrid which is Flex doesn't make me warm and fuzzy either ...

Meanwhile, Jeff Atwood concludes that the path of least resistance is what will eventually win (and no, not happy about that prospect either), meaning the Web UI. Like Jeff, I wonder why we have to settle on second best.

Personally, I hope we're just in this weird state of discovering (or re-discovering) ourselves and will arrive at a state where the Rich Desktop re-materializes as the UI of choice. We've made a ton of progress over the years in rich graphics, 2D, 3D, hardware (and software) acceleration ... where we've failed (I believe) is in making all that technology accessible to "mere mortals" and as a result:

• We've made it way too hard for your average developer (or worse a designer) from being able to develop a reasonable UI, one with a reasonable user experience that performs (at all)
• Impossible to rapidly iterate on a design, meaning that in the end we either end up with a crappy UI which is largely programmer-built or a sub-standard app built by a designer which integrates poorly with the rest of the system (or is unmaintainable, usually because of automated tools)
• Arrived at systems which are largely hacks, for instance the plethora of XML-derived variants (where XML might be "OK" to some for layout, but lousy as a programming language)

I personally believe we're on (or will be on) the path that takes us to the RIA of tomorrow. Historically, users/consumers accept "Good Enough" as a new technology or product becomes available ... but only for a while. Witness the simple cases of latency, where we've gone through multiple cycles where high-latency was acceptable on early network-based systems but as the technology and volume requirements grew, users required increasingly lower-latency for their (then) desktop apps. With the web, the cycle continues and while for now users are willing to deal with "Good Enough", that trend will not continue. Users will want a richer experience, they will not want to be bound to the idiosyncrasies of the browser model, they will want more direct interaction with their desktop and hopefully they will in time reject being bound into proprietary models for achieving this.

For one such possible future, look at what Chris is doing ... (more later on that specific project ...)

Posted by brewin Mar 18 2007, 09:31:50 PM PDT Permalink Comments [1]