Software Engineering for Internet Applications - Student Community

The team should plan to spend one to two hours together designingthe mobile interface, but may divide the work of prototyping andrefining the mobile interface. A reasonable scope is 8 to 12programmer-hours.The time required for client signoff will vary depending on the client'slevel of interest and familiarity with the mobile Web. Plan spend atleast 30 minutes on the signoff.These encounters between freshly minted Internet applications andfirst users have become increasingly startling for all parties. Onereason is the large and growing user experience gap. In 1994 theaverage Web user was a researcher with a Unix machine on his orher desk. Very likely the user knew how to write at least simplecomputer programs. The average Web page was straight HTML 2.0with no scripts or other active components. All Web pages workedthe same: you read the black text, you clicked on the blue text, youwere reminded by the purple text that you'd already visited a link.Once you learned how to use your first Web site you knew how touse all subsequently visited sites.The user experience gap has grown larger because the users areless sophisticated while the applications have grown more complex.In 2003 the average Web user is a first-time computer user and theWeb browser may be the only application that he or she knows howto use. Despite the manifest inability of these users to cope withcomplex user interface, Web sites have been tarted up withJavaScript, ActiveX, Java, Flash, to the point where they are as hardto use and different from each other as old Unix applications. Usersunable or unwilling to deal with the horrors of custom user interfacehave voted with their mice. They buy at Amazon. They search atGoogle. They get their information from Yahoo! and nytimes.com.162187