Brennan’s Blog

The new WPF/E, which runs on multiple browsers including Firefox and Safari on a Mac, is bringing up some memories of the early days of Flash. Concerns about usability with Flash has been an important issue from the start. One website goes as far as claiming Flash is Evil. This same fate could carry over to WPF/E, but with our experiences with Flash we can try to do better this time around.

Over at Telerik Watch there is a good read on WPF/E and usability which ultimately links back to an article by Jakob Nielsen published back in 2000 called Flash: 99% Bad. The points made in these articles are well worth the read.

Where I think Flash has gone wrong is trying to take over the entire website so that the use of the back button and bookmarks become useless. This same problem can also be a problem for AJAX applications which also take over the website and use callbacks to update parts of the page instead of refreshing the content of the page as a whole, perhaps with a different Url which can be uniquely bookmarked.

Flash did make strides in overcoming the major usability issues with Flash MX which introduced toolkits to make it easy to add standard interface elements to Flash applications, such as scrollbars and radio buttons. You can see in the WPF/E video library that these well-known interface elements are a part of the interface used there. So it appears the lessons have been learned.

The features that WPF/E offers are compelling but the potential to head down the path of poor usability is considerable. Clearly mistakes have been made with Flash with some shining examples rising to the top. An excellent example of Flash done right is YouTube. It makes use of Flash to show the video content so that you do not have to select between Quicktime, Windows Media or Real Media. That use of Flash was brilliant because it makes use of it in a limited way while most of the page is still just HTML with a bit of Javascript coordinating the playlist with the player. A good example of this with WPF/E is a recent (and very funny) video with Scott Guthrie. This hybrid between HTML and plugin media seems to work well. I hope to see more of this going forward, whether it is Flash or WPF/E.

There is a great deal about WPF/E which helps it get beyond what is available with Flash, such as integrated Workflow and a richer development environment with a much large base of existing developers. And these developers can leverage what they already know to get on board with WPF/E with little additional learning. It will be interesting where the line between AJAX and WPF/E is drawn for various applications. In many ways they are already married together. The interfaces which will be possible will be very different than we see these days. Perhaps a few will even look like LCARS.