InformationWeek: Web Power: More Interaction Equals More Value

"Paint manufacturer Behr Process Corp. saw an opportunity to use technology to make paint shopping online and in stores a whole lot easier for consumers. The company also wanted to offer highly interactive capabilities such as very quickly making slight changes of color or finding coordinating shades that stretched the limits of what many Web-development tools could do.

Behr is using a new generation of tools from Laszlo Systems Inc. that offers that kind of interaction on the company's Web site and in kiosks at 1,600 Home Depot stores where Behr is sold. Now customers looking at a shade called Chilled Lemonade can compare it to Pale Daffodil and Satin Soufflé without flipping through a lot of static Web pages."

I played with Behr's app, it's pretty neat. Reminds me of the hotel reservation Flash app that got everyone to pay attention (Furniture.com's room planner was an earlier landmark). The broken promise of ActiveX or client-side Java is slowly starting to be fulfilled, five years later. I know it's the usual lifecycle from hot air to actual delivery in this industry, but damn, for all their apparent breathless speed, computing and IT require lots of patience.

I like how this app is rich and seamlessly interactive, but the use of a self-contained popup bothers me. You can't point to an intermediate point within these apps, you can share either the entry point or the saved outcome. The result is you can't use it synchronously with someone else online (at least not without some third-party whiteboarding tool, provided that would even work). To collaborate you either need to be side by side in front of the same computer, or to email/IM each other tentative saved results (e.g. color schemes applied to a room). I've never really co-surfed like some web sites and IM apps let you, but for richer apps I can see how it could be useful, rather than bouncing files back and forth.

Behr's app still has progress ahead. I let it linger there while I was writing this entry, and got this when I eventually tried to save my color scheme: "Your session has expired! Usually, this is due to an extended period of inactivity. Also, bookmarks to pages that are dynamically created will result in this message." Guess where the back button sent me (thanks to my 5-button mouse, the average user would simply kill the popup at this point). That's right, to the very beginning, not to the last step I had reached.

At this point my question is, will companies spend as much money on rich, useful online apps as they've been willing to waste on useless Flash intros in the past? Now that the industry has matured, will the end users and clients follow?

04/07/04 update: Edit photo features at Yahoo Photo: "Undo is a bit dismaying: one can only start over, one can't undo a single action."

09/16/04 update: Arc, Arnold Take Top Honors at WebAwards.