Update: The 50 Most Usable RIAs article is now posted on InsideRIA.

We have submitted an article entitled the “50 Most Usable RIAs” to InsideRIA. Here is a sneak peek of the post and 10 of the RIAs included in the list.

Excerpt

Bill and I have reviewed hundreds of rich Internet applications, RIAs, while compiling examples for our book and subsequent presentations and articles.

We recently realized that we had amassed quite a list of applications. Thinking other designers and developers might be interested in these resources, we applied two simple criteria to identify the top fifty:

Number 1: Does it adhere to the 10 basic usability principles?
Number 2: Is it really rich? Developing a product with Ajax, Flex, or Silverlight doesn’t inherently make it rich. A usable RIA will embody these six principles: Make it Direct, Keep it Lightweight, Stay on the Page, Provide Invitations, Use Transitions, React Immediately. For more detailed descriptions of each principle, see the Explore the Book section of this site.

10 of the 50

Aviary

Balsamiq Mockups

CrazyEgg

Mint

Picnik

SlideRocket

Spatial Key

Tumblr

Whitestone Cheese

Wufoo

We’ll let you know when the full list is up on InsideRIA.

Fluency and Rosenfeld Media sponsored the first DelveUI, A 2 Day Masterclass on Designing User (Web) Interfaces last week at the NYU Poly Campus in Brooklyn.

I had an opportunity to speak about my favorite topic: design patterns and principles for rich applications. The talk is titled Designing Rich Applications- and illustrates the need for richness at four levels:

• application structure
• screen layout
• selecting rich UI controls
• interactions

I’m working on a nifty little flip book that has all of the application patterns, screen patterns, rich UI controls and interaction patterns. All the patterns are on index cards and you can carry it into design sessions- and flip through it for inspiration- or to find a certain pattern.
Let me know if you think this would be useful.