As a developer I notice things about web sites that the average person wouldn’t think twice about. I also know that the level of technology that’s available to build user interfaces is well beyond what we had in the early 2000’s. And, the ability to build amazing, user-centric interfaces is as easy as ever. But, I’m always perplexed that most major web sites today incorporate very little of this technology in their full functionality web pages.
So, I’ve been doing an informal survey for the past month and my list includes major news sites, airline web sites and retailers. The vast majority of them aren’t much easier to use than they were five years ago with a great a selection of hyperlinks, tabs and full page refreshes. For the fun of it I decided to travel back in time using an internet time machine call the Wayback Machine and compare some of these sites to their predecessors. I challenge you to do the same.
I have a few suspicions as to why this is happening, or not happening as the case may be. First, plug-in based technology such as Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight typically require some amount of time to load the initial payload into the browser. Sometimes you can create highly optimized or lazy-load packages, but it challenging. It’s rare to find one of these apps that load in the sub-second timeframe required in today’s hyper-competitive environment. The general impression is that the longer your page takes to load, the fewer the visitors you will have. So most major websites code is mostly made up of HTML, JavaScript, jQuery and CSS which most browsers have gotten really, really good at parsing extremely fast.
Second, it’s challenging to build Flex and Silverlight websites so that web crawlers can read text-based content. This seems fairly academic. If you can’t effectively index the content of your site, then potential visitors can’t search it via external search engines such as Bing and Google. Period.
These two items alone may explain why visually spectacular interfaces are limited to small portions of most public websites such as video plug-ins, or just specific sections of a much larger website. Where these more advanced interfaces typically reside are in back office applications where functionality trumps the need for millisecond application load times. There are some very cool exceptions for consumer apps such as the end-user experiences shown Mini Cooper’s build your own car online website. Yet, unfortunately for us as consumers, these are few and far between as consumer companies cater to the vast hunger for ever faster page load times.
The good news for advanced web technology in consumer apps is I’m seeing a large opening with mobile deployments. The plug-in technologies now have the capability to allow you to deliver visually enticing experiences across a wide array of devices. And this can be done, for the most part, without the tedium of worrying about all the vast nuances of different browser types and versions. Plus there is a bonus: the application is manually loaded and ready to go on your device minus the on-device load time when you turn on the app. I’m seeing some really innovative uses of the technology in what I call focused solutions, or applications built for a very specific purpose. Unfortunately most are in commercial beta and I can’t link to them. But, you’ll see them soon in an online marketplace right at your fingertips.
References:
Mobile Development with Adobe Flex 4.5
Silverlight for Windows Phone
Flex.org Showcase
Study: Consumers abandon slow loading websites (April 2010)
Let’s make the web faster (Google, May 2010)