I subscribe to the Papervision3D RSS feed, and once in awhile something interesting comes along and gets me thinking. This recent entry was as such: a gallery of sites that utilise Papervision3D to create new, innovative graphical user interfaces for their users. Looking at them got me psyched up to start on my own (long overdue) site.
However, going through some of the sites raised a common issue, and that issue is one of userability.
History
As someone in the comments noted, History repeats itself. Looking back to the early days of gratuitous .gif animations, unusable Flash websites, and then to the more recent AJAX revolution of Web2.0. Whenever something innovative comes forward, people struggle to find “proper” use for it, and instead end up throwing it all at the user in the hope that they will be “shocked and awed” by it. Perhaps, in the Dark Ages of Web1.0, this strategy would have worked (and it did, for a time). However, people on the internet are now tech-savvy: they want their stuff, and they know how to get it. To prevent them from doing so in any way would be a death-sentence to any website. Continue reading