Design Considerations for Web-Based Applications

The rapid growth of weblications—application-oriented software delivered as a service over the Web—has revealed a lack of effective guidelines for their design and implementation. Existing Web usability guidelines hinder weblication usability since they are primarily based on interactions within a browsing metaphor. Interface design guidelines for client applications, on the other hand, do not address the conventions of Web users, limitations of the Web environment, nor the new possibilities inherent in the Web. This paper outlines a set of guidelines for weblication interfaces, which fuse translated client-application guidelines and re-purposed Web usability guidelines together to form a solid foundation for weblication interface design. The goal of these recommendations is to address the issues associated with weblication interface design and to present an overall method for thinking about them, emphasizing an understanding of how and why this approach should be adopted.