As we are working towards creating richer applications for our clients and their customers, we need a set of guidelines on what to do and not to do. Well, we’re in luck. Josh Holmes of Microsoft and James Ward of Adobe teamed up a couple weeks ago to deliver a session at JAOO to discuss the do’s and don'ts of RIA architecture. Luckily for us, Josh went and posted the entire slideshow and a nice write-up of the session on his blog.

While I encourage you to go and read it, there are a few points from it that I would like to point out:

Build for ease of use

The fifth best practice is to understand who your users are and what type of users you have. For example if you have a public facing web site, you'll have something like the curve in the slide with some large percentage of your users being first time visitors to your site, some smaller percentage being repeat visitors and some really small percentage being your power users.

Your goal should be to turn those brand new to the site into repeat visitors and then into power users. For those that are brand new to the site, you need to explain what your web site does and why they want to come back. One the other end, the power users shouldn't be bothered by that introductory information that you present to the new visitors. A couple of sites that do this really well are WordPress and Twitter.

Building web 1.0 sites with web 2.0 tech

The first possible worst practice when creating a rich internet application creating a rich internet application in the first place. You shouldn't use 2.0 technologies to build a 1.0 web site. HTML, CSS and light JavaScript can go a really long ways in creating a beautiful site that's rich with information. You have to think about the user's interactivity and context when picking the technologies that you're using. We are all guilty of finding a slick technology and picking it as our hammer going around making every problem a nail.

Getting animation happy

There are good ways and bad ways to leverage animations. Many times there is gratuitous animation that have been thrown in just because they can.

The good is when a particular animation helps the user visualize data in a unique way or leads the user to the next action. For example, you can, when all required fields are filled in, add a shimmer behind the "next" button to draw the user's eye to guide them along the way.

Another example of good use of animation is showing transitions in state or data. As Mike Labriola put it, if your user rolls a ball and it just disappears as it leaves their hand and appears across the room, they would be very surprised. By showing the state transforming through animation, you can show your user what happened.

The above items were pulled directly from Josh’s article about the post. I’ve heard pieces of this talk before and still learned more from this post. I highly recommend heading over there and taking a look.