Joy of Web Usability
(Just some rough notes.)
Many folks assume that a web interface is somehow more primitive and less usable than a native, operating system based interface.
I'd like to point out that the web approach is much better for accessing information – than MS Windows, say. And once you reach the program or dialog you're looking for, the scrollable page allows all the controls you need for a task to be displayed on one page.
Accessing Information
The web lets you bookmark a location. Then you can organize your bookmarks. You can easily share urls via email, and when you receive the email, you can easily access the url. Urls also represent location, and applications and websites can be constructed so that you can find a list of related information by deleting the file-portion of the url, to see what the directory contains.
People rarely question the usability of the gui desktop metaphor, but there are significant limitations. To help someone adjust a setting, you can't do the equivalent of sending a url, or dictate a command on a command line. Instead you say things like "Click on Start. Now click on Settings. Now click on Control Panel. Now click on Networking. Now click on the blah, blah tab. Now you'll see a select list. Click on that and it shows you the list. Click on your ethernet card...." This is inconvenient. Compare that to sending a url by email for the person to click on....
Scrollable Pages
Scrolling a page has many advantages over a dialog box that doesn't scroll, or a dialog box that contains a small scrolling list that cannot be resized.
You can put all controls needed for one action on one page. You have room to indicate all of the steps in a process at the start.. You can put appropriate help information right on the page. (Call it "inline help".) Instead of a dialog box with an error code, you could have a concise, but sufficient description of what happened to reach this point, and what the options are for fixing it or getting further help. You can show an entire list of options in the page, rather than making people scroll through a 20 choices in a four-line box.
Although it's rarely done well, you can use Javascript to handle dependencies between fields.
My point is that there are some advantages to a web-style interface.
Copyright © 1998-2008 J. R. Boynton