I was recently forwarded a link to a “New Fandangled” Flex Web E-commerce site. After spending a few minutes of precious project time going through the site, one thought kept going through my head… ‘why did they develop this in Flex?’ With the last few projects I’ve seen, it seems that thought comes up a lot. Sure the site had nice animation, allowed you to preview rich content like music clips and cover art and in general was ‘slick’ – but does that really leverage the power of Flex 3?
The navigation was page-centric – breadcrumbs abound – and transitions between ‘pages’ (although pretty) were not intuitive. Having developed web applications for the better part of a decade, I think most developers and project managers are still shackled to the limitations of HTTP and HTML. With the advent of Flex 3/AS3 there is no longer a need to suffer from ‘page-centricism’ to consider that every state change is a page change, and that user events require server call-backs. There needs to be fresh thinking – from the inception stage, throughout storyboarding and on to design and architecture. Flex 3 represents new opportunities for Information Architecture.
We were involved in a project for a large telecom that really demonstrated the departure Flex 3 could take from a traditional web application. There were complex graphs, geographic locations and tons of data being represented to the user in a very intuitive way. If I would come up with a term for the design, it would be ‘Interest-Centric’ – the user actions, displays, transitions, etc. were all driven by the user’s area of interest. The power of the AS3 event model and the state handling in Flex allowed our team to free ourselves from worrying about navigation breadcrumbs or ‘page’ transitions. Moving from one section to another rearranged the entire display, so that other sections were still available, but the area of interest was font-and-center.
We can gauge the progress of the Flex development community as a function of how far Flex apps diverge from traditional web applications. “Pages? We don’t need no stinkin’ pages!”