We need a new UI paradigm

In my mind, one of the most exiting web 2.0 innovations for businesses (sometimes called Business 2.0) is mashups. The Summer edition of Innovations listed mashups and making data more available as trends in the business world. Working for a medical college, I can foresee the day when faculty members could use current medical trends to determine what areas to emphasize, or even analyze areas where the student body is weak in order to focus on those areas more. (Perhaps even both) The point is that in order to take full advantage of the increases in data accessibility, users will need to be able to create their own mashups. Of course I'm not advocating a Coghead type approach (I agree with Alex from Worse than Failure on this subject). I expect that developers will probably continue to build reusable mashups and reports, but for basic ad-hoc mashups to be effective, users will need to be able to do it themselves. The key to this, I think, will be the creation of a new UI paradigm.
If you think about it, most applications have general UI paradigms. If you are familiar with one Word Processor, you can perform basic operations on pretty much any word processor on the market. For advanced features, you've still got to learn the specific product. The same is true for everything from Email to mapping software (Google maps, or even something like Zillow don't work much differently than old standards like Mapquest.) The only questions left is "Who will introduce the new paradigm?", and "How long will it take to become Standardized?".

Labels: business 2.0, enterprise 2.0, mashup, user interface, web 2.0

posted by Luis - 2 comments

Gettin' Reorganized

I came back from Vacation a few weeks ago to find out that my department is reorganizing. It's taken a few weeks to find out what exactly that means, but essentially I (and my colleagues) are in the process of deciding to either be full time web developers or move into middleware. It's an interesting decision to make. In my case, most of what I currently work on, falls under the middleware umbrella, but moving over there means probably less coding (at the very least less, ColdFusion coding, probably no Actionscript work, and most certainly no Flex). It would mean, however moving into other interesting things like identity management, and data integration, that would give the reconstituted web development group broader access to interrelated data from various systems. At the moment I'm trying to figure out whether it'll be more interesting enabling this access, or building the mashups that will hopefully be and end result. Decisions, decisions... In any event, I'll either keep this blog Adobe/Web related, or have it removed from MXNA.

Labels: Actionscript, Adobe, ColdFusion, Flash, Flex, mashup, middleware

posted by Luis - 0 comments