January 2009
Intermediate to advanced
332 pages
8h 30m
English
Content preview from Designing Web Interfaces
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Chapter 4. Contextual Tools
Interaction in Context
Most desktop applications separate functionality from data. Menu bars, toolbars, and palettes form islands of application functionality. Either the user chooses a tool to use on the data or makes a selection and then applies the tool.
Early websites were just the opposite. They were completely content-oriented. Rich tool sets were not needed for simply viewing and linking to content pages. Even in e-commerce sites like Amazon or eBay, the most functionality needed was the hyperlink and “Submit” button.
However, this simplistic approach no longer exists in the current web application landscape. As the Web has matured, a wide variety of application styles has emerged.
On one end of the spectrum there are simple sites that need no more functionality than the hyperlink and a “Submit” button. On the other end of the spectrum there are full applications hosted as a website. Google Search and Yahoo! Mail are two typical applications that illustrate this variation (Figure 4-1).
Figure 4-1. Google Search needs only hyperlinks and a search button; Yahoo! Mail, on the other
hand, is a full-featured application with toolbars and menus
Between these two opposites are a lot of sites that need to mix content and functionality. It is to this intersection ...
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