WUI Woes

Which would you prefer to write a letter to your grandma: A word
processor, such as Microsoft Word, or a text entry widget in a
browser? Or which would you prefer to read your email: Microsoft
Outlook or web-based Yahoo! Mail?

There’s no denying it. Despite the many advantages of web-based user
interfaces, or WUIs for short, they’re generally a major step back
from the desktop application GUIs (graphical user interfaces) that
came before.

It’s not that the windows-icons-menus-pointer (WIMP) interface
paradigm of typical desktop applications is all that great. But
browser-based interfaces, while admittedly adding a few neat new
ideas, are much more limited.

In a WUI, you can’t provide an application-specific menu. You can’t do
drag-and-drop style interaction. You can’t create a context menu that
pops up when the user right-clicks on an item. You can’t create your
own interaction gizmos that suit your particular application’s needs.
Some things you can do using JavaScript, Java, Activex, and
similar technologies, but they’re generally not stable or responsive
enough, and ActiveX in particular will only work on Microsoft
platforms.

To make matters even worse, the WIMP-features of the browser, i.e.,
the menus and the tool bars, clash with the web-style content of the
page to produce an unpleasant and inconsistent mess. Almost 20% of
the screen real estate is used up by features of the browser, such as
the menu, the toolbar, and the status bar, that aren’t part of the web
user interface itself.

There are of course a number of advantages to web-based user
interfaces, the most important one being that you don’t have to
install software on your machine to use it. And there’s no on-going
system administration cost, e.g., for upgrading the application to a
later version. You just need a computer with a browser. And
browser-based interfaces have also cut down significantly on the
amount of work it takes to develop the user interface part of a
software application, which can run upwards of 75% of the number of
lines of code in traditional desktop applications.

How long will users put up?

Microsoft’s take.