Building web2.0 apps – the interface

As some of you may know, my company, infinimedia, has been working on a number of small business apps in addition to our regular client work. All of the projects share one problem, designing within constraints. You might be asking, what do you mean within constraints? this is web2.0, there are no constraints. Au contraire, there are the same constraints that have plagued IA people and UI people for ages, screen realestate.

When you are building a web based application, you have to put a lot of thought into what gets into each screen, you can’t go throwing the kitchen sink in there just because you can. So my current dilemna is that I am limited by the fact we’re trying to design for flexibility and usability at the same time. This is a quesion the average user never thinks about, but its something i’ve been spending alot of time on lately. These are questions every developer faces, and they may seem like little issues here and there, but each extra click you make a user go through adds up.

If all goes well, I’ll post a few teasers in the next week or so.