“I guess I don’t get why RIAs get a hall pass from discoverability and accessibility or how rich they can be without a modicum of both. ” ~msweeney from a post on the IAI message list.
There has been a healthy debate on the IAI message list concerning RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) over the past day and the above quote really got me thinking – are we really asking the right questions?
To sum up the debate
RIAs provides better user feedback and richer experiential components while providing more contextual pages for the end user
Traditional or static pages provide better accessibility via screen reading technology and findability via internet search mechanisms
To be sure this is a gross understatement of the discussion but it will serve as a basis for a point I want to make here. Any web application, and by web application I mean any set of components that facilitate user interaction and participation on the web, if designed correctly should accommodate accessibility and findability. The reasons that this is not a common place reality is that most web teams are under immense time and economic pressures to produce a minimum to run application and unleash it on the world under the wonderful term of: BETA.
If we take those constraints away and revert to a purely theoretical paradigm in which time and money hold no sway then – if the process was truly user centered – the issues of accessibility and findability would definitely be addressed. Maybe. This is where it can get a little stickier. Who is driving the application design becomes a major influencer now of how it functions and what its goals are. The business perspective may be that findability is requisite more eyeballs equals more dollars but accessibility is a cost with no real ROI. By the same token every other discipline, if they don’t view the application through the users eyes can short circuit usable/useful design decisions that result in a crippled implementation.
The most difficult part is getting all the “stakeholders” to agree on what is important and what is not. On the surface it would seem that accessibility and findability should be key components in every application and I would strongly agree with that point. But, I am a User Experience Designer, and while I may fall short of always achieving 100% implementation of the goal to create an imminently findable, accessible, usable, and useful web application due to real world constraints that is always my goal.
To the question of why RIAs get “a hall pass” my answer is: they only get a hall pass if they are designed by a non user centric team. Most of the time a web applications flaws are in direct relation to a companies organizational flaws. Flame on if you wish – but, marketers, engineers or other “stakeholders”, have no business holding the reigns of a web application. To finish the thought – Marketers should market, Engineers should create object oriented code and database models, and other “stakeholders” should focus on their core business responsibilities. This type of hierarchy creates sizzle for the sake of sizzle or dreams up SEO and interface requirements that serve only to confuse the end consumer of the application.
Usability and User Centered Design are hot buzzwords at the moment but until they become truly internalized in the corporate structures that spout them we will continue to have RIA and static web applications that don’t live up to the promise they hold as a true platform for everyone.
What is a good structure for a webcentric organization (this really applies to any organization but since this discussion began about web applications we will leave it on the web.)? To be efficient each discipline needs to be represented at a peer based level. Any time there is an imbalance poor decision making and bad web applications get borne RIA or not.
For instance
A company that had it’s marketing department reporting to engineering would probably have a problem effectively marketing themselves. The reason for this – mixed purposes. Engineering would expect and need content to be created and managed and since marketing was a direct report to engineering this would need to come first on the priority list. However, if you pull marketing out into its’ own department now it can make its own decisions and focus on how to best serve the company rather than how to best serve a single department. The same is true of the user experience, design or creative departments. To function as they should and provide the level of strategic thinking they are trained in they need to be autonomous within the corporate structure.
Hmm, this started as a discussion about RIA and accessibility and turned into a discussion on corporate structure. I do believe that until companies can internalize what it means to be user centric and create the internal structure to support it we will continue to see many half-baked, poorly implemented web applications – whether they are RIA or traditional HTML.
I leave with this thought If a web application goes online and no one can find it does it truly exist? But, if it gets found and it can’t be used does it matter if they are there?
Are we asking the right questions?
There has been a healthy debate on the IAI message list concerning RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) over the past day and the above quote really got me thinking – are we really asking the right questions?
To sum up the debate
To be sure this is a gross understatement of the discussion but it will serve as a basis for a point I want to make here. Any web application, and by web application I mean any set of components that facilitate user interaction and participation on the web, if designed correctly should accommodate accessibility and findability. The reasons that this is not a common place reality is that most web teams are under immense time and economic pressures to produce a minimum to run application and unleash it on the world under the wonderful term of: BETA.
If we take those constraints away and revert to a purely theoretical paradigm in which time and money hold no sway then – if the process was truly user centered – the issues of accessibility and findability would definitely be addressed. Maybe. This is where it can get a little stickier. Who is driving the application design becomes a major influencer now of how it functions and what its goals are. The business perspective may be that findability is requisite more eyeballs equals more dollars but accessibility is a cost with no real ROI. By the same token every other discipline, if they don’t view the application through the users eyes can short circuit usable/useful design decisions that result in a crippled implementation.
The most difficult part is getting all the “stakeholders” to agree on what is important and what is not. On the surface it would seem that accessibility and findability should be key components in every application and I would strongly agree with that point. But, I am a User Experience Designer, and while I may fall short of always achieving 100% implementation of the goal to create an imminently findable, accessible, usable, and useful web application due to real world constraints that is always my goal.
To the question of why RIAs get “a hall pass” my answer is: they only get a hall pass if they are designed by a non user centric team. Most of the time a web applications flaws are in direct relation to a companies organizational flaws. Flame on if you wish – but, marketers, engineers or other “stakeholders”, have no business holding the reigns of a web application. To finish the thought – Marketers should market, Engineers should create object oriented code and database models, and other “stakeholders” should focus on their core business responsibilities. This type of hierarchy creates sizzle for the sake of sizzle or dreams up SEO and interface requirements that serve only to confuse the end consumer of the application.
Usability and User Centered Design are hot buzzwords at the moment but until they become truly internalized in the corporate structures that spout them we will continue to have RIA and static web applications that don’t live up to the promise they hold as a true platform for everyone.
What is a good structure for a webcentric organization (this really applies to any organization but since this discussion began about web applications we will leave it on the web.)? To be efficient each discipline needs to be represented at a peer based level. Any time there is an imbalance poor decision making and bad web applications get borne RIA or not.
For instance
A company that had it’s marketing department reporting to engineering would probably have a problem effectively marketing themselves. The reason for this – mixed purposes. Engineering would expect and need content to be created and managed and since marketing was a direct report to engineering this would need to come first on the priority list. However, if you pull marketing out into its’ own department now it can make its own decisions and focus on how to best serve the company rather than how to best serve a single department. The same is true of the user experience, design or creative departments. To function as they should and provide the level of strategic thinking they are trained in they need to be autonomous within the corporate structure.
Hmm, this started as a discussion about RIA and accessibility and turned into a discussion on corporate structure. I do believe that until companies can internalize what it means to be user centric and create the internal structure to support it we will continue to see many half-baked, poorly implemented web applications – whether they are RIA or traditional HTML.
I leave with this thought
If a web application goes online and no one can find it does it truly exist? But, if it gets found and it can’t be used does it matter if they are there?
~sean bell