Google Chrome was born explicitly as a platform for Web applications. From the first bits I saw I can say that Google's new creation delivers most of the promises and brings new interesting innovations in the user experience realm. Competitors will find them hard to ignore, especially when you look at the tab concept improvements. For a good review of these points, you can refer to this post on Ars Technica.
Many hailed Google's move as a revolutionary step. And indeed, with Google Chrome, the Web application era is getting real. Let's look beyond the technology and outline some possible models and consequences Chrome might have for the field of user experience:
Firefox's concept, where the Web browser remains the key tool and the main interface for using a Web application, is a service that is completely online. In this case, the user experience is chiefly based on typical Web technologies, that is, the magic triad XHTML, CSS, and Javascript. Standard Web browsing is blended in with Web application interaction. The user jumps between tabs within the same context and tool.
An alternative model seeks to overcome the Web browser, hiding it for the user, like Mozilla Prism, or at least trying to replace it with a different client and dedicated interfaces. This is the model you can see in action with Adobe Air or Microsoft WPF, and also with Apple's iTunes. In this case, the user experience is based on a mix of locally installed software components and user interfaces, online contents and services. With this model you get the best performances and a more consistent user experience while the Web remains in the background as a distribution channel for data exchange. Any device and system has its own client, designed and created ad hoc. Nevertheless, as you can see with iTunes, the user sometimes is locked into a "walled garden."
The pure online Web application model based on Chrome, with few local components installed on your hardware, is certainly the most promising one: truly open, flexible, and easy to upgrade. But for now, Chrome is still a Web browser, and its dependency from the Web browser's user experience could be a soft spot, or at least a strong constraint for the Web application's evolution.
Talking about the Chrome "revolution," many commentators are using the metaphor of the operating system. The browser plays the part of the platform, and the Web application is the software. But a real operating system is not only a software platform; it also provides a framework for user interaction, a consistent UI layer, as well as components that the software designer and developers usually have to follow. It puts together many small tools and modules, unifies the user experience, and brings into play every software application built on it.
I think that this is the next big challenge. Will Google be able to change the rules of the Web user experience? With Chrome and Android, Google is getting into the big game: building a consistent and unique experience for end users as well as application designers and developers. Google is an acclaimed leader in Web technologies innovation, but from the end user point of view many Web applications are still nothing more than a toy for geeks. Now they have the opportunity to get their beautiful tech jewels out of the eternal beta phase, into true commercial products focused on the end user.
(Credit:
Scott McCloud/Google)
Google's new Chrome browser is an interesting entry into the revitalized "browser wars." Given Google's Apps and Gears, the browser has essentially become the "OS" that contains them, so it makes perfect sense that Google would want to extend into that area to give it more control, and provide custom functionality that could not be accomplished with other browsers that it does not control.
But what is also interesting is how Google chose to describe some of its capabilities and intentions to the world: with comics.
The comics form has a number of benefits, the most obvious being that it does a better job of explaining technical features of Chrome better than a dry spec sheet would have.
For example, what if Google had said this in a features section of a page describing Chrome: "Multi-process rendering engine eliminates browser hangs due to single-threaded JavaScript executions."
I would have thought, "Gee, that sounds great, but I don't really know what it means." Well, the comics form allows the company to explain that in a non-intimidating way. It's still not exactly lay-person speak. (It is more geared toward journalists and bloggers who will be more familiar with the jargon than the general public.) But many more people will now understand what's going on under the hood and, more importantly, the resulting benefits.
A nice side benefit for Google is that because the team of people who worked on it are brought to life through the comic (rather than stultified by press-release lingo), it humanizes Google at a time when it is starting to get a bit of a big-bad-wolf-Microsoft reputation due to its size and clout. By focusing on the individuals, it takes the mega corporation out of the picture (literally and figuratively).
The comic itself was created by well-known online comics artist Scott McCloud, after doing many interviews with Google engineers. It's a great example of using someone outside the nitty-gritty of the product development process, with a knack for story-telling, to craft the narrative of the product. Too many good products fall by the wayside because not enough attention has been paid to the narrative--in other words, telling the value proposition in a way that the audience can relate to.
McCloud also wrote the mini-classic book Understanding Comics, which is a must-read for anyone who makes use of storyboards or scenarios to describe how a yet-to-be-made product will be used. Back when I was teaching industrial design I would get all my students to buy it.
Unfortunately, navigation of the Chrome comic itself is a bit clunky. There are just back and forward links at the bottom, which look pretty old-school considering how advanced the product they are talking about is supposed to be. There's also no sense of where you are in the "book." Is page 8 still early at the beginning, and do I need to get comfortable for the long haul, or am I almost done? (It's 38 pages long, so, yes, it takes awhile.) It's been treated more like a series of static pages than a slide show, and slide shows can be done much better and dynamically than this (in fact McCloud has some interesting uses of dynamic navigation on his own site).
(Credit:
Areae)
It's not the most innovative name but the concept may be revolutionary. Metaplace, a virtual community that is currently being tested for launch in spring 2008, was one of the most talked about start-ups at the TechCrunch40 Conference. The new platform allows anyone to build a virtual world from scratch -- for the web or even mobile applications -- without any programming knowledge. Like other virtual communities such as Second Life, There, Entropia Universe, or World of Warcraft, the Metaplace worlds can be used for gaming, socializing, and e-commerce. And they come with the usual community features: forums, user ratings, wikis etc.
Unlike Second Life et al, however, users will not need to download any special software to engage in their respective virtual spaces; the service is hosted, so everything happens inside a browser. Because the Metaplace worlds are based on standard web technology, they can be embedded in blogs, Facebook profiles, MySpace pages, or web sites. "It's basically an MMO accessible through Flash apps, 3D clients, cell phones," as Om Malik writes: "While Second Life is evolving as an immersive 3D metaverse which slowly incorporates web elements like XML and RSS in-world, Metaplace is beginning as a web-based network which swallows the attributes of online worlds."
Metaplace is the brainchild of Ultima Online creator Ralph Koster. Koster ultimately envisions people share thousands of user-created virtual worlds with one another and tear down the walls between existing platforms. "We want to see 10,000 virtual worlds so that lots of wild and crazy stuff gets made because that is the only way it will advance as a medium," Koster says. His vision is just the latest in a series of moves to open up the "walled gardens" in online communities: Facebook opened up its platform for third-party developers, Second Life did, and MySpace is supposed to follow soon. Technology Review depicted a mash-up of Google Earth and Second Life into a "Second Earth" meta-verse, and models like Pageflakes allow users to completely customize their homepages. Metaplace presents an even more radical step -- the fully convergent virtual meta-platform for divergent user-generated content.
Slowly but surely we are seeing what may be the tentative contours of web 3.0: a user-generated, entirely customizable "world wide sim" that is mashed-up of geo-mapping (Google Earth), immersive 3D virtual worlds (Metaplace), and social networking features (Facebook) -- peppered with the power of the semantic web (Radar Networks) and a constant lifestream of user content.
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