O’Reilly: Inside RIA

The rapid growth of RIA technology into the lives of every day people just a few years ago has carried both the usability and user experience industries to a new high in popularity. The success of software (particularly on the web) has driven both of these terms into our vernacular, and yet they are still often confused or thought to be synonymous. This post is meant to help those new to the field or unfamiliar with the intricacies of design to understand the differences between the terms.

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.

Now that the first public beta of Flash Catalyst (formerly known as Thermo) has been released, we can start to explore some of the features that have been added since the Preview release from last November. I will assume you have worked through some of the other introductions to the Flash Catalyst user interface. One of new features that has been implemented in the release is the Data List Component.

The UX Revolution continues as we talk about about the future of RIAs and the story that a great user experience can offer. There are many emerging trends in UX in the way we build and communicate these stories, but becoming just as important, is the form in which they are delivered. I asked 10 professionals creating RIAs today to talk about where they see trends in UX headed.

If you're like me, you've been hearing a lot about this amazing thing called User Experience. It's supposed to turn your normal, old, web 1.0 piece-of-garbage application into a shining beacon of hope in a world beleaguered by bad interfaces. If you're like me, you've been watching the explosion of User Experience from somewhere between the forefront and the sidelines, enjoying the arrival of the requisite acronyms (UX, XD, EX, UXD, etc.), and trying to figure out exactly where and what the forefront even is. If you're like me, you've been a little skeptical of this vague and magical term for a while now, and if you're anything at all like me, you've been wanting someone to clear things up.

Ryan Stewart interviewed me a couple months ago about RIAs and the trends in development and design. The first question we address is how to get into RIA development. We then take a step back and take a look at issues around issues focused on the user and how usability and user experience are the most important factors when thinking about RIAs, the technology decisions will flow from there...

Let me start off by saying that I am - in no way - a usability expert. I hardly even consider myself an Ajax expert. But I've built enough Ajax applications now where I'm beginning to think more and more about the usability aspects of the site. I recently had an opportunity to make improvements to one of my sites based on user feedback, and I thought I'd share what I did and get people's opinions about how I could have done it better.

This platform released today provides an effective solution for slaying one dragon, but a much scarier dragon lurks atop the mountain I call form factor. The danger is in thinking that we have a platform for developing universal experiences, when the truth is, that we have a platform that provides us with a universal runtime to build experiences upon. Just because your code is cross-platform, doesn't mean that your experience is.

Given that I believe RIA technologies should only be used to improve usability and user experience in web software, I'm ecstatic that the role of the usability specialist is getting wide spread attention. It gained a spot in the U.S News list of Best Careers for 2008.

The term RIA (Rich Internet Application) seems to take on many different definitions when it is discussed within the Internet development community. As we prepared for the upcoming launch of InsideRIA, we thought it would be interesting to see how professionals who work in the world of rich internet development would define RIA. So we asked the InsideRIA experts as well as members of the RIA community to give us feedback on what the question "What is RIA?" means to them and compiled their responses in this feature.