“Is the ‘Web OS’ just a geek’s dream?”
“Is the ‘Web OS’ just a geek’s dream?” writes Martin LaMonica in a recent cnet article. It’s cool to see our new Webtop product written up, but I gotta wonder whether the Web 2.0 crowd is missing the point. We’re not creating elements borrowed from a traditional OS desktop on the Web out of sheer technical exuberance. The web has out outgrown its standard page paradigm with simple, serial transactions.
Almost three years ago, when we did initial usability testing on Laszlo Mail, we worried that people wouldn’t understand that they could drag-and-drop in a web application. Would people be able to recognize traditional cues and forget that they were on a web page? Not only did people immediately grasp how to use the application, but they complained that *double* click didn’t work — this is not the Jakob Nielson web. A later round of focus groups revealed: people aren’t forgetting they are on a web page, most people (and I’m speaking of regular folk, not us techies) don’t even mark the difference between webmail and a desktop email client. They just go to their mail. Some of them double-click on Outlook, others go to their Bookmarks, but the distinction lacks the significance that I had assumed. More significant than client-side caching or user interface responsiveness is that the folks with the bookmarks can access their mail anywhere.
The real WebOS work going on supports what regular folk just expect from the web. Why wouldn’t a web application work just like any other software? People are seeing rich, dynamic graphical user interfaces when they use an ATM. They certainly don’t expect any less when they go to their bank’s web site.