With the vast numbers of web applications that I interact with on a regular basis, I see many great interfaces, as well as many terrible ones. Through that, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend: the interfaces of enterprise web applications feel like they are still stuck in the 1990’s, while all of the innovation seems to be happening on the consumer level. This may seem obvious, and in many ways it is, but it is a trend that should not exist. There is no reason why the simple design elegance and AJAX functionality that exists in applications like Google’s Gmail, 37signals’ Basecamp, and even Wordpress, which I am using to write this post, should not have a place in enterprise environments.

Basecamp   Gmail   Wordpress

I’ve discussed this problem recently with several of my clients, and I believe I have identified the primary reason: fear of incompatibility. Between company firewalls, ancient browsers, and disabled features in the interest of corporate security, many enterprise developers shun technology like AJAX since many company employees are unable to run JavaScript. This limits the client-side processing that enables interface elegance in the consumer web applications I discussed above. While all of this functionality can be somewhat replicated with server-side processing in languages like PHP and ASP.NET, having to reload the page after any user interaction is slow, cumbersome, and often irritating.

No perfect solution exists to this problem right now, but I believe there are two approaches that developers can take in response:

1. In the short term, designers can implement AJAX functionality in web applications and also implement a server-side fallback plan that allows the application to function without JavaScript. If this isn’t feasible, corporate support of Flash is rapidly increasing with the rise of Flash-powered online streaming video, so sophisticated applications can be developed in Flash form.

2. In the long term, a standard for client-side processing needs to be developed that will be supported by industry. The only true web standards that have ever been widely supported in industry are HTML and CSS, and that needs to change over the next few years. It will remain to be seen whether the W3C is capable of delivering something like this, or whether it will come from somewhere else.