Find citations on Bloglines or Technorati. View blog reactions
By category: Accessibility, Browsers, Design, Engineering, Front End Engineering.
Vivabit’s Dan Webb wrote an interesting post a few days ago that touches two important topics, both of which I’ve been thinking about a bunch lately. His entry is called DOM Abuse Part 1: Drag and Drop and he says towards the beginning that:
As more and more JavaScript libraries add solid drag and drop support I begin to shiver. Everyone is going to be doing it soon and Im scared.
I’m not scared – I think we’re entering a great era of web design – but I understand exactly what he means. I would categorise his two points as “the accessibility issue” and “the discovery issue.”
First, accessibility: Advanced interactions and behavior provided via JavaScript must be enhancements, not the sole way to accomplish a task. In desktop cut-and-paste, there are at least three ways: keyboard shortcuts; “Edit” menu options; and drag and drop. Accessibility isn’t an optional characteristic of the Web. With what could be considered a gold rush of JavaScript development powering a big chunk of “Web 2.0”, the accessibility gains won over the last four years (Web Standards) are at risk. For JavaScript, the way forward is clear – progressive enhancement, unobtrusive javascript, and Hijax – and championed by the DOM scripting task force.
His second point I’d summarize as the “discoverability issue”. It’s definitely an issue, but it’s also a symptom of a larger overarching issue, what I call “the low expectations issue.” Here’s what he says:
Drag and drop is not a method of interaction you see on the web (at least at the moment) and as such you do really need to be told when to do it. That’s not good. I’m not used to reading what’s on the screen. How are we supposed to know to and when not to try it?
It’s not that the feature isn’t discoverable (though it could certainly be aided by some visual affordances), it’s that he’s not expecting it to be there! On the desktop there are minimal cues because we expect it to just be there, and often don’t need to be told.
In my opinion (with a hat-tip to colleagues Eric Miraglia, Bill Scott, and others), this is a primary design challenge of the day. It’s not just about adding visual affordances, it’s about something bigger. It’s about raising overall expectations in a careful, purposful, we’ve-got-one-chance-to-get-this-right type of way.
Since the beginning, we’ve been lowering expectations of what’s possible in the browser compared to other desktop software. No double-click in the browser. No drag-and-drop in the browser. No right-click, context menus, auto-save, auto-complete, full screen, minimize, layers, spell-check, not even many tooltips.
More broadly: no direct manipulation, no immediate feedback, and no persistence in the browser. On the desktop, we learn by experiementing. In the browser, users have stopped exploring because there hasn’t been a reason to explore, nothing to find. (To make matters worse, every click has traditionally meant many seconds of page teardown and replacement.)
It’s not that we didn’t want to provide a familiar experience, it’s that the technology wasn’t really available in the browser. That’s not true anymore.
But, the availability of new technology isn’t a cure, or a reason to believe we’ll make a successful transition.
Being able to do something does not mean that we should do something. Why is more important that how. Using animation to create 2006’s version of the 1999 Flash splash screen isn’t a why, it’s a “because we can” (and a bad idea). On the other hand, using animation to ease transitions, provide user feedback, maintain user orientation, and promote learning of new idioms are four good reasons why.
But knowing why isn’t the same as doing it well. When I say that we’re got one chance to get it right, I mean this: If we bring the rich interaction patterns of the desktop to the browser in a recognizable, comfortable, thorough, complete and appropriate way, user’s will break through their doubts and quickly transfer their desktop experience into the browser. We won’t have to put big neon signs on our sites saying “drag here”. If we get it right, users will just assume.
On the other hand, if we don’t get it right, if we’re spotty, if we don’t keep the façade intact, then the illusion will not stick. If we make too many missteps, if we leave to many gaps, then the nearly free “user education” and the potential parity of expectations will be gone again. I’m not scared by drag and drop, I’m scared that if we miss this chance to bring richness to the browser, user’s expectations won’t just be low they’ll be shattered.
To be clear, it’s not about replicating the desktop in the browser. They’re different environments. Instead, we want to take the idomatic language users already understand and express it within this new environment. Same language, new dialect.
Subscribe to this blog.
Dan Webb February 10th, 2006 - 2:56 pm
I like how you’ve broke that down. I do think we need to change expectations so users will start to try richer interactions on the web. We’ve got to move on in this respect but it’s got to happen gradually and I think introducing these things as an alternative method of interaction is the key.
natek February 10th, 2006 - 3:03 pm
Thanks for the comment Dan, and for your post that got me writing in the first place. We’re definitely moving towards a new and better place, but you’re right that it’s not one-size-fits-all, and it doesn’t all need to go live tomorrow. I believe we’re better served (and our users too) if we move thoughfully and steadily, and not shake users lose with too many moves too fast.
Eric Miraglia February 13th, 2006 - 1:59 am
Dan, (in case you come back and read this), I also enjoyed your DOM Abuse article; you capture a really telling moment where expertise is thwarted by interface. I share your concerns to some degree. I find myself saying a lot that DOM animation runs the risk of becoming like the blink and marquee tags thrown in a blender with human growth hormone, the heralding of a new and bizarrely garish age of interaction and visual design.
But at the same time, Drag and Drop is often the *best* “alternative” way for the user to achieve her goals of collection or arrangement, given limitations intrinsic to primitive gestures available via mouse and keyboard.
What I worry about is that the user’s schema for rich desktop interaction, where complete, won’t make it to the web in complete form. We’ll provide drag and drop that mirrors the desktop, but not a selection model that does the same; as a result, the user, upon learning she can drag objects around, will have a moment when she is willing to suspend disbelief and imagine that multiselection with control and shift key transformations is possible. She won’t have to be taught or bombarded with discoverability at that moment; it will just be part of the schema she transfers over from the desktop. And if it’s not there, that little moment of disappointment will be followed by months during which we will have to convince her yet again to try something new once we have figured out a way to make the interaction better.
Gradual is good in some sense, yes, but moving the whole schema, the whole expectation set, over in one undamaged transplantation — where possible — has some compelling advantages for higher-end users.
James Duncan February 13th, 2006 - 9:30 pm
Thanks again for a very timely, informative and well reasoned post.
One of the best things to come out of the past few years in the web (still a really exciting time, no matter which road we all take) was a re-recogniton of the user (whether decision makers knew it or not)
Id hate to think we’d simply forgo any of these gains, giving them interactive decisions theyre either not asking for, or as you said, not expecting.
When theyre asking for them, ofcourse thats a different matter.
Like youve said, done well, they wont have to even ask, they’ll simply adopt the well developed, well designed (and well thought out) experiences presented to them.
Victor Tsaran February 24th, 2006 - 6:20 pm
Great blog entry, Nate!
1. Drag-and-drop as a technique does not present accessibility barriers, it is the lack of alternative methods that does… Just like you pointed out. Drag-and-drop is possible on the desktop with mmajor screen readers although I am not sure how many users take advantage of the feature. Explanation is very simple: it is a very unnatural behavior for someone who cannot see, just like as it is unnatural for a sighted person to stay in the room with lights off. :)
2. Point well-taken. People do not expect D&D in the web browser because this is not an expected behavior on the web. The only way people know something is draggable on the desktop is by way of being told by MS or their friend. Well, the logic follows…
person June 9th, 2006 - 10:53 pm
To be fair people have been employing these techniques for many years, but without an otherwise compelling app, they fail to resonate. The founder of what became Yahoo Mail attempted this long ago with desktop.com and ever since they seem to perk up from time to time. I offer the example of Netvibes. Great site, really a first class aggregator, but over time the dynamic aspects of the site failed to resonate with me, all I noticed was that it took eleven seconds longer than my.yahoo to load the same RSS summaries. So I dropped it and just went back to aggregating in my.yahoo, which lacks features, but my time is a feature too. I know the myspace/cragislist blah blah banter gets old, but there is something to observe in that sites that resonate with users tend to the static.
b7j0c June 13th, 2006 - 12:53 pm
there are economics to consider when considering interface overhauls. our employer isn’t making much more money on its overhauled sites than on previous incarnations. yahoo groups wants to do an overhaul (this is public info). the new yahoo groups will almost certainly make the same money the old yahoo groups did. same with the new yahoo photos. these are now commodity businesses.
now you might say, hey, its not my job to make more money for the site, just to make it better. true. but the economics ultimately comes back down into your schedule sooner or later.
this is not to say an interface cannot induce higher margins, but i would say look at something like linden labs/WoW for an interface that moves way beyond the commodity market, literally breeding addicts. the next step for internet UIs (and high margins) is low-latency and very graphical. note i said internet, not web. the web stack has hit the wall and is already a commodity market with flatish numbers (the only growth is in internationals). in three years, the traffic from graphical environments will be greater than all http traffic. its happening.
want to make the internet interface for the next ten years? in my opinion it is time to dust off the opengl guide.
FACTA ET VERBA » recursos y mas recursos AJAX July 14th, 2006 - 7:09 am
[...] Same Language, New Dialect First, accessibility: Advanced interactions and behavior provided via JavaScript must be enhancements, not the sole way to accomplish a task. In desktop cut-and-paste, there are at least three ways: keyboard shortcuts; “Edit” menu options; and drag and drop. Accessibility isn’t an optional characteristic of the Web. [...]