[TYPO3-hci] Innovate - don't imitate

[JoH asenau]

<quote from "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications" by Jesse James
Garrett February 18, 2005>
The biggest challenges in creating Ajax applications are not technical. The
core Ajax technologies are mature, stable, and well understood. Instead, the
challenges are for the designers of these applications: to forget what we
think we know about the limitations of the Web, and begin to imagine a
wider, richer range of possibilities.
</quote>

The above quote is the end of Garrett's article but I think it's a good
start for a new thread in this HCI list.
After all HCI stands for "Human Computer Interaction" and IMHO this is one
of the areas that will be mostly affected by the AJAX way of doing things.
The interesting thing is, that scarcely anybody in this list seems to
realise these new possibilities.
Instead there are lots of approaches that are basically using the same
oldschool stuff like DHTML-popup-flyout-movearound-some-umpteen-items-menus,
Dividers-2-tabs-and-everything-looks-like-flexforms et al.
Of course they are tuned with some AJAX technology working behind the scenes
but none of them makes use of the real advantages AJAX has to offer.

One of the core features of AJAX (and part of the acronym) is the fact that
you can deliver stuff asynchronous which basically means, anything can
happen on demand.
You can change even the smallest part of a website (and the TYPO3 BE is
nothing else but a website) whenever necessary, making the whole web
application change it's appearance to give the user only those things that
might be useful in the current context.

Keeping this in mind, could you explain, why one would still need a fully
blown DHTML menu with 2 or more levels? Just because it's looking cool, when
the layers are opened and closed with a fading effect? Wouldn't it be good
to have just a main menu that would open only one level of the active item
on demand using AJAX technology? Wouldn't it be even better to have no menu
at all but links, buttons or icons spread over completely different places,
which are not directly connected to a "level" but positioned for a real
improvement of usability instead?

IMHO it would be a great innovation to get rid of this level based "website
way" of thinking and create a completely new approach to this web based
_application_ called TYPO3.
With real interaction between the user and the interface to give people a
completely new experience because the application is helping them to cope
with their daily tasks instead of surpassing their capabilities.

So what do you think?
Could it be worth to open our minds and throw away the old school stuff?
After all this is what design is about: Take what is already there and
create something better out of it.

So where are the inventors and designers?
Anybody willing to accept the challenge?

Let's show that we can do more than just implement a new hype technology to
achieve the same old stuff.

Joey

PS: Of course this isn't something that could be achieved by just one
person.
So if there are some more people interested in a new approach to HCI I would
like to setup a team for a proof of concept.
I'm not that good as a coder so I would like to offer my experience for the
design/CSS part.

-- 
Wenn man keine Ahnung hat: Einfach mal Fresse halten!
(If you have no clues: simply shut your knob sometimes!)
Dieter Nuhr, German comedian
openBC: http://www.cybercraft.de
T3 cookbook: http://www.typo3experts.com