Cockpit Commonality and RIAs · 333 words posted 12/19/2003 01:13 PM
An NPR commentator recently reported that Airbus sales have surpassed Boeing sales because, among other reasons, Airbus supports “cockpit commonality”: once you know how to fly one Airbus plane, you pretty much know how to fly them all. I’m not a pilot, so I have no idea if this is true, but it sounds reasonable.
Rich Internet Application development is in its infancy, but whether the concept achieves its potential depends on developers embracing “cockpit commonality.” Users should expect a consistent set of experiences from RIAs: once they’ve learned how to operate one, they should pretty much know how to operate them all. With some exceptions, this goal has largely become true of HTML interfaces: most users know that typing a few words in a text input box and then clicking the adjacent search button will generate a list of search results. This hasn’t always been the case, however.
Recall the early days of HTML application development; in 1998 I had a client request that each time a checkbox was checked, the user’s computer should play a snippet of Mozart. Even worse, I wasted precious development hours trying to accomodate the wish!
Think about it: if you’re frustrated when Macromedia changes an API call (and you should be), how can you expect users to feel any differently, especially when the time they have to learn a new interface is substiantially less than the time a developer has to learn a new API?
RIAs are in a fertile but precarious state: it’s easy to find clients who want to reinvent the wheel with each app; it’s hard to find a client who understands that their app is made useful by being more like all the other apps out there, not less. As more and more database and application developers like myself enter the RIA field—who know their way around stored procedures and query caching but for whom interaction design is a tertiary skill at best—it’s incumbent on them to remember the concept of cockpit commonality.
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