Ajax and UI Standards

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, August 15, 2006 @ 9:00 am

I think it was some time in the early 1990's that Apple released it's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). What are HIG's? From the Wikipedia:

Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) are software development documents which offer application developers a set of recommendations. Their aim is to improve the experience for the users by making application interfaces more intuitive, learnable, and consistent. Most guides limit themselves to defining a common look and feel for applications in a particular desktop environment. The guides enumerate specific policies. Policies are sometimes based on studies of human-computer interaction (so called usability studies), but most are based on arbitrary conventions chosen by the platform developers.

Human User Interface guidelines will dictate a set of rules for general usability. They often describe the visual design rules, including icon and window design and style. Frequently they specify how user input and interaction mechanisms work. Some describe the language style.

A number of HIG's exist for a variety of platforms, including the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, the KDE User Interface Guidelines, the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, the Microsoft Windows User Experience guidelines, and the Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines.

At the time, for a designer of Unix command line applications, these guidelines seemed interesting if incomprehensible. After all, command line interfaces were pretty limited and thus very familiar to our users. But as I began to develop GUI apps, these guidelines became an important touchstone, even when I moved beyond the world of the Apple desktop into Windows and X11. To many designers of web applications, these guidelines must also seem somewhat foreign. Until recently, the very limitations of the browser made the typical web forms interface familiar to our users. Now comes Ajax and with it a new love affair with the DHTML/Javascript widgets that were disdained not even two years ago. The web is moving from a primitive forms-based interface to a rich interface experience. Building frameworks and widgets and applications without any thought to some common experience is a common occurance.

I've been interviewing Ajax framework developers and asking them what the biggest problem is with Ajax. If I put the question to myself, I'd have to say that a lack of User Interface Guidelines is a burgeoning threat. If everyone has widgets that sort-of works like the corresponding desktop widget or, worse yet, doesn't work like them at all, users will rebel. That's just what happened in the early days of the Mac and Windows, when developers and software publishers just had to do their own thing. Very few of these mavericks remain.

So, who is thinking about HIG's for Ajax now? Not too many people, it seems. One person who has been wrestling with this questions is Luke Wroblewski (note: Luke has worked with my company in the past). His article on Ajax and Interface Design is well worth reading.

Technorati : ajax, human interface guidelines, usability, user experience

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