Getting Chet Haase to speak up

Over on his Pushing Pixels blog, Substance creator Kirill Grouchnikov has been interviewing a number of Desktop Java luminaries about the state of Swing, where JavaFX is taking Desktop Java, and the platform's user-facing future. We've noted some of his previous installments, such as his interview with Amy Fowler.

Well, now he's snagged an interview with Chet Haase, one-time Desktop Java guru, java.net blogger and author, and source of many corny jokes and puns. Chet has moved over to Adobe, and in Desktop, browser and RIA - interview with Chet Haase, he acknwoledges that what he's doing over there is to add additional animation support to the Flex SDK.

Kirill asks an important question about that: do slick GUIs matter? Specifically, can business applications justify sleekness, animation, 3D effects and the rest? Chet makes the case for these being important cognitive assets that productive applications should want to have:

I think that it's easy to write off graphical and animated effects as just being eye-candy. But I believe that any application can benefit from some level of effects in order to make the application more powerful, effective, and useable. In the case of a business application, you might not want to put throbbing buttons and spinning sprites all over the screen, or to make the application look more like a media player than an HR forms database front-end. But the same techniques can be used to make this kind of business application more useable; you just need to know how and when to apply them. For example, animation can also be used to provide a subtle pulsation of the default button, or transitions between states of the application. It's this last one that has been of particular interest to me for some time. Why give your users new GUI pages to figure out whenever the application screens change? Keep them connected to the application, and more productive, by animating between the states so that they can more quickly determine what's going on and what they have to do.

Read on for Chet's thoughts on leaving the GUI to the designers, cross-platform UI toolkits, the three most important things for a good user experience with a UI, and more.