The Rise Of Contextual User Interfaces
The recent boost in popularity of well-designed web-based applications has seen context-driven UIs becoming increasingly common.
This article, taken from the personal blog of AdaptiveBlue Founder/CEO and ReadWriteWeb contributor, Alex Iskold, highlights many of the subtle but important benefits of contextual UIs.
The new interfaces are winning people over because they are based on usage patterns instead of choices. The key thing about new UIs is that they are contextual – presenting the user with minimal components and then changing in reaction to user gestures.
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It is ironic that it took web UIs so long to discover the elegance and simplicity of context.
Since its dawn, HTML lacked the sophisticated widgets that are present on the desktop and web UIs were always considered more primitive and slow. Contextual, AJAX-based UIs actually seem faster because they do not reveal all possible choices to the user. Instead they focus on surfacing just the bits that are necessary and then surfacing more based on user gestures.
Original article: http://alexiskold.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/the-rise-of-contextual-user-interfaces/