Everyone is pulling in the same direction: the web application, but nobody is quite sure where we’re going designwise.

Yahoo’s portal redesign is a milestone: the first major long-standing site to take definite, Ajaxed steps from hypertext to web application, and it’s made me review some very basic principles.

What is hypertext? It’s a networked cluster of pages. Some pages are full of links to other pages, other pages are end nodes of content, and still others contain both links and content. User navigate by bookmarks, or by climbing down hierarchical branching, then climbing up those branches with back button clicks.

What is a web application? Our first guess is that it will approximate a desktop application, that is, a stable interface that users can manipulate rather than a series of pages that users can jump through.

So, for instance, the Yahoo redesigners use accordian menus that resize when content comes up, preserving the interface and available choices.

This is just one possible solution to a more general problem: you have content, then you have more content. If this isn’t one page after another, what is it? Displacement, appending, overlaying, etc?

The Yahoo designers also use tabbed windows, in which tabs instantly bring up different content in the same window. The lack of refresh feels good, very good, better than I expected. It’s like a Windows desktop application, obviously, but on the web. I wonder if this isn’t the slinking, sidewise return of the frame, a site-within-a site, this time tabbed instead of scrolled?

Tags: interfaceNo Comments