My fears about RIA usability are coming true

I’m having a look at Apollo. I commend Adobe for doing a lot of things right: favoring PNG for icons, releasing early to get community feedback, etc. However:

This looks to be creating a new wave of unusable applications. Jakob Nielsen had this to say about Flash in 2000, before Macromedia made serious improvements to Flash’s usability:

… [M]any Flash designers introduce their own nonstandard GUI controls. How many scrollbar designs do we need? … [T]he specification of a new GUI widget is a major human-factors exercise. The current Macintosh and Windows scrollbars emerged after the world’s best interaction designers worked for years testing numerous design alternatives. A new scrollbar designed over the weekend is likely to get many details wrong. And, even if the new design was workable, it would still reduce a site’s overall usability because users would have to figure out how it worked. They know how to operate the standard widget. When you use standards, users can focus on content and their reasons for visiting your site. Deviate, and you reduce their feeling of environmental mastery.

None of these usability problems are inherent in Flash. You can design usable multimedia objects that comply with the guidelines and are easy to use. The problem is simply that current Flash design tends to encourage abuse.

My middle mouse button doesn’t work in Adobe’s sample Apollo applications. Perhaps there are other issues such as this lurking.

Then again, maybe Apollo, which requires basic programming ability to use, will scare away the kind of people who used Flash improperly. However, Adobe is certainly not setting a good standard by creating fucked up, non-standard widgets.

Overall I think Apollo is pretty cool. There are some things about it that are no doubt due to the fact that it’s only an alpha: the applications feel slow and unresponsive, and the only place you can install packaged applications is to a specific pre-chosen directory, for instance. To anyone who’s also playing around with Apollo, realize that possibly the best stuff is yet to come:

• Drag and drop and cut and paste support.
• Additional HTML and Ajax support.
• Window transparency for HTML-based applications.
• Flash within HTML.
• PDF support.
• Native dialog support for opening and saving files.
• …

To Adobe: I personally find this stuff just fine. I’m thinking of people like my grandma, is all. Could you make some tutorials on how to make Apollo/Flex apps look fuckin’ dope, like Finetune?