flow|state has a great pair of articles that summarize well the problems a web application will face with too many obstacles for new users. First, in Hurdles at the entrance to a site: It’s not unusual for a site to position a long sequence of hurdles just inside their entrance. Someone walking in the door might have to clear some or all of these hurdles before they can even try out the site… The list that follows isn’t much of an exaggeration. So many sites require signup and verification before you can figure out what they do, let alone start…
Tonight we had a completely different type of client launch: The all-new “Yahoo! Messenger for the Web” let’s people use Yahoo! Messenger without any client download. Instead, it’s implemented in Flash, so from any browser just visit the site and login. It’s not as full-featured as the regular client, but is really fast and has some UI elements that are different but very cool. By avoiding the big (12MB) client download, this should be a good alternative for logging into Messenger wherever you are. We even have a nice shortcut that’s easy to remember: http://web.im Check out the Messenger site…