RIAs, UI and UX

Ryan Steward has published this post about RIAs, UX and UIs. It is tiring to follow the discussions on his blog because they seem to revolve about whether animations are useful or useless. Angry trolls voice their opinion about Windows dialogs and similar.

But Ryan’s point is of interest. It is that the “R” really stands for improved and useful user interface. We wholeheartedly agree. That’s why we have spent an awful lot of time on designing viibee’s user interface. And for the most part we took things out again: mostly animations that were cool to play with, but did not increase the value for the user. So we ended up with just the animations were we could truthfully say “this animation makes it easier for the user to understand why the screen changed form state 1 to state 2″ or “this animation makes it easier to understand the state of the application” or similar.