Tag: ui

IA frontier

having met christina wodtke of boxesandarrows.com fame, i am convinced that the frontier for CMS is in the user-facing layers (information architecture especially), not in the bowels. The lower CMS layers are being commoditized, or at least are maturing considerably.
as a tool vendor, it is our quest to help users develop accessible sites with a sound information architecture. if the tools could somehow steer the users to do the right things by virtue of following the path of least resistance.. this is the real frontier. i will ponder this subject a bit more in the coming days.
oh and christina referred to me as the crazy swiss and was very intrigued by our experience with oscom. in fact, she invited me to a IA conference in february in austin. i’m intrigued.

Web service user interface

its lets create a standard day. wsui is a vendor-neutral standard that enables application developers and sites to deliver entire applications over the Internet as Web services. huh?
my reading of the spec, which is indeed nicely short, brings me to the analysis that wsui will

  • facilitate integration on the gui level
  • provide default actions like start, edit, admin
  • provide a default style sheet for appearance
  • provide default variables for user auth etc

with these properties wsui could come in handy to give user-machine web service interactions a boost. i think the significance of machine-machine web services is way overblown. more likely, they will make their first appearance as human-visible portal parts because humans tend to be more forgiving with less than perfect results. web services will have to prove their reliability with human interaction first before they will be deployed on purely machine-machine transactions.

wsui may therefore shape what users perceive of web services. it will be interesting to watch whether a proposal from a relatively unknown player will garner the attention it needs to be widely adopted. one further wonders whether vendors really have abandoned their traditional (highly profitable) lock-in strategies and don’t just pay lip service to interop on the wire level (like they do with soap). mix and match of components on the gui level would be unheard of, since it levels the playing field so much its scary.. so i am rather skeptical about the success of this proposal.. time will tell.