Imagine the web site of an architect’s studio, an advertising company or a site to promote the launch of a new product. Inevitably, you think of something very attractive to the eye; whether or not you are aware, your imagination will draw RIAs. Rich Internet Applications, a name generally applied to web applications based on advanced Javascript, Flash, AJAX, Silverlight and the like, are changing the way people interact with the web. For a user, the difference between a web page with buttons, text fields and other standard GUI components, and a RIA is like the difference between reading the biography and being the guy yourself. Some well built RIAs truly make users believe they are part of a fully interactive multimedia experience. And that can make all the difference for a user, even shadowing flaws in functionality, usability or performance.
If the web is the ultimate application platform, RIAs will definitely play a major role in the near future. But attracting users is one thing, and keeping them coming for more is another. Too often, RIA developers get carried away by the wealth of opportunities that these technologies bring them and sacrifice other aspects that can make it an annoying experience for users when they go beyond the flashy first impression. Such aspects include the difficulty for users to get used to UI controls that are non-standard in appearence, behaviour or because of their non-observance of the tab order; the perception of the whole web page as a single monolithic block, whose components and texts cannot be individually selected or changed; the increased loading times, and adding to this the fact that the page cannot be used until it is fully loaded; and the inability to take control of the application in order to, for instance, resize it or go back to the previous step.
Intermediate solutions that integrate RIA technologies in regular web pages (such as pages that use AJAX to refresh one of their components) will help bridge the gap to full-fledge RIAs to the user’s eye.
