O’Reilly: Inside RIA

If you've been following the news in the web and/or RIA industry at all lately you've undoubtedly come across two little letters, U and X. UX of course, is the abbreviation for the big trend in application development right now known as User Experience. You've worked hard to become a great developer. You've learned the best practices to write bulletproof code, you've even mastered a crazy framework. Now it's time to go to the next level, you need to create an exceptional experience that matches your solid code.

In my last blog post, I discussed a CSS trick I recently discovered. That post spawned a lot of comments, and at one point in the discussion I stated that I felt that just because a technique is popular and has been put forward by one or more resources as best practice, that it doesn't necessarily make that technique better practice than a new practice I (or any developer really) might come up with. The question was asked, "where do best practices come from?"

...I think any developer, consumer, or citizen has the right to put in the research time to study what current practices are and the reasons for them and put forward alternatives that can be considered for adoption as best practices.

I hear a lot of talk about "best practices" these days, and I'm sure you do too. As design has become a more visibly important differentiator for web development professionals and companies, understanding the "best way" to accomplish any given task has been a big deal, leading to a plethora of blogs, conferences, podcasts, etc. on the topic. How can I communicate that there's more information to fill out? How can I make my form most intuitive? How can I present an intuitive interaction? These are the types of questions "best practices" are called upon to answer.