About RIA design

Last Friday I talked about how to design and create mockup of RIA applications in a community event.

There are many tech talks about it, but, instead, I wanted to talk about the approach to the prototyping.
For me, the most important concept is “user centered design”. An application becomes a RIA not for the technology with which it is built, but for its purpose.

RIA application takes behaviour from both, desktop and web applications. From the first one, it takes the standard menu terms (file, edit, save and delete), the tools menu and the direct manipulation of an object (like drag and drop). From the other one it takes the concept of design based on the content of the site, the information retrieval behaviour and the possibility to open my application and have my preferences everywhere.

All these paradigms have a very strong impact on the user. But we have to understand how we can use them.
The first thing to do is analyze the end user and his needs. At this stage the technology that will be use is not important. We have to analyze his working environment and the vocabulary used in his work.
The information architecture has the most important role designing a RIA: we need to have a strong foundation that is based on a common ground. A RIA is an application built to make a specific task, for example to write document (Gdocs) or to design wireframe (Balsamiq) and something like this. We have to think to a specific user, not a general user.

There are some other things to remember.
When we translate our analysis in a prototype, we have to remember that the user approaches a software first with his instinct and then with his rationality. This doesn’t mean that we have to make something for dummies, but that we have to design an interface that is easy to approach.

For example, I designed Rich Internet Applications (maybe I’ll design Rich Interactive Application based on desktop soon!) that are on the web and I found a paradigm to brake the web standard and create a “desktop area” on the web so the user can immediately understand the different environment: I think that this UI can help the user to have a correct approach with the application.

There are a lot of design concept that I put in my presentation. Here I talk about some of them. But I’ll come back to this topic again in the future.
You can find my speech here. I’m sorry but it’s only in italian for now.