On 5/31/00 8:16 AM, Craig Spooner at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Please forgive me for asking something that has probably appeared
> here a hundred times... What is the rationale for *not* building a
> MetaCard plugin for web browsers?
My guess is that there are two sides to this:
1. Return on investment
2. Scott is too rational
1. Although you and I hear a good many requests for this sort of thing, for
most folks there are only three tolerable plugins: Real, QuickTime, and
Flash. All others have such a tiny slice of the download pie that they're
not even worth mentioning.
While useful for intranet projects, the appeal among the public at large,
who often can't figure out how to even download and decompress common .zip
files, would likely be rather modest.
2. There's a strange thing about Web browsers that I don't understand, but I
no longer fight it: You can make an application for the desktop and folks
will tell you they can't figure it out, but if you put that exact same UI
into a Browser people suddenly feel more confident about using it.
There is no rational explanation for this, and it leads truly rational
people like Scott Raney to suggest that the smarter move would be to make an
"inside out browser", to simply put the HTTP support directly in your
desktop application and avoid the browser altogether. After all, whether
the user downloads a Helper App or a Plugin should matter little, right?
Unfortunately, the murky workings of human psychology suggest otherwise.
For some reason, people really like browsers, far out of proportion to their
intended role.
I've posted a request to the SIG CHI-Web group mailing list asking if anyone
has determined why this irrational behavior is to prevalent. But with or
without a good explanation, I believe this perceptual problem is prevalent
enough to warrant attention.
As software designers it behooves us to consider catering to this bizarre
preference as we look to expand the audience for our wares.
A similar argument could be made for MetaCard's UI: While it is not broken
in any technical sense, to the prejudiced eye of the die-hard Mac or Windows
fan it is perceived with irrational unfairness as "unusable." Rational or
not the perception exists, and we are far more likely to find success
tailoring our designs to fit the prejudices of our users than to change the
psychology which drives those perceptions.
I don't have the data to suggest that Scott should drop whatever he's doing
and jump on making an MC plugin, but merely that the situation warrants a
fresh cost-benefit analysis. Given the problems inherent in downloading
and installing plugins (most users simply don't), it would seem we'd be
limited to intranet deployments. Maybe the best solution is to migrate
projects to Flash as its scripting capabilities continue to grow.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
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