Venture Geek

Aza Raskin has a nice thought piece on a topic near to my heart. His basic argument is that the advent of standardized AJAX toolkits has stunted user interaction innovation on the Web by homogenizing the ways people design applications and, more importantly, doing so in the direction of mimicking desktop PC metaphors.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-AJAX (and I suspect neither is Aza), but I do find that the bells-and-whistles phenomenon has been more prevalent in the last year or so, as the AJAX toolkits become so easy to use. I have seen many examples of UIs that are clearly showing off how sophisticated they can be, even as they break basic web UI paradigms that I find frustrating as a user. Examples include simple things like the “Back” button in a browser — as far as I’m concerned, if you are deploying an application on the Web and it breaks in non-trivial ways because the user hits the “Back” button (or “Reload” for that matter) that’s an egregious bug.

I have to admit that I’m fairly old school when it comes to the Web — makes me feel kinda old just to say “old school” and “Web” in the same sentence, frankly. Personally, I’m the kind of person who opens several windows with several tabs each when using the Web, and many modern web apps make that hard or impossible because all the AJAXy goodness locks me into the user interaction vision of the site’s designer rather than the familiar ways of the Web.

I’m getting away from Aza’s original point (by the way, do check out his slides on the topic of the Death of the Desktop) here about toolkits, and I don’t want to make it seem like I never want to look beyond the clumsy HTML form-drive interfaces that still dominate the Web. I do, though, want to make sure that in the quest to be different developers and designers aren’t actually making their products harder to adopt for people who are just now finally becoming comfortable with the Web.