Exploring Usability Guidelines for Rich Internet Applications

Abstract: Usability guidelines are commonly considered a useful tool for developers to enhance the usability of interactive systems. They represent distilled knowledge from many disciplines related to usability and provide developers with solutions and best practices to achieve usability goals. However, the newly developing field of highly interactive web applications (Rich Internet Applications) still lacks appropriate usability guidelines. This work takes desktop usability guidelines and web usability guidelines as a basis to create an outline of Rich Internet Application usability guidelines. Three professional developers are being interviewed in order to get an insight into their work with guidelines and get their ideas of how possible Rich Internet Application guidelines should be structured.