Who is the woman with the big … ahmm … tallent in the first picture?
The snozzberries taste like snozzberries.
Perhaps the reason people might dislike web UI looking like desktop application is because the way we approach these applications is different. Desktop applications are uniform looking, clinical and basically tools. Web sites, on the other hand, can be much more. People do and want to attach more personal feelings on the sites they spend their time on. This follows from the fact, that you often interact with people when you’re online, and the applications you use have the same function. This bonding process becomes much more difficult if they look as clinical as the desktop applications.
Good timing. Microsoft recently changed their Hotmail UI from something imitating desktop software to something more Web-ish in the way that gmail is Web-ish.
Make a post on Flex/Silverlight as a follow up. How does that fit in for you
I actually have a web application that looks like a desktop one and I believe it it one of its strength ( http://www.rw-designer.com/online_icon_maker.php ). Then again, it is fairly simple and things may change if someone tries to make a complicated online application look as if it were on desktop…
… dude? What happened with that Jasen guy?
If this article is listened to and followed progress would die. This kind of thinking would have all of us still typing commands into blue or orange texted monitors.
oops - green or orange not blue or orange - wow the 80’s were a long time ago.
I’d work for that fembot! I dunno…the characters looked pretty real in resident evil degeneration.
Woo hoo! Nice for mentioning Understanding Comics.
This is a very interesting topic.
I have noticed this oddity as well in my own personal experience; I always felt that applications that look like desktop applications felt sluggish and cramped, and I usually didn’t like them.
But I could never figure out exactly why. This topic actually seems to make perfect sense.
nice article. I was introduced with uncanny valley in an article in this month’s Scientific American (Indian).
I think you’re dead on here Jeff. When I can’t navigate a Java open file dialog by typing in paths and hitting enter, or the common folders on the left aren’t the custom ones I set, or Explorer’s context menu items aren’t supported, I tend to get a little angrier than if it didn’t pretend to be a Windows application in the first place. Great parallel.
I disagree with you about the web apps. While that particular app might be a bad clone, web apps like Gmail and Yahoo Mail are great and function much better than Outlook and other desktop based programs. It depends on how you do it. Trying to make it LOOK LIKE a Windows app is obviously not a good idea, anyway, but making it function as a desktop app (e.g better UI, drag drop, tabs, etc) are definitely a good idea. If you do it gracefully, i.e showing loading graphics smoothly, people will actually get to enjoy the tiny flaws of web apps
I agree with all that has been said about how the metaphor is stretched and about how the uncanny valley doesn’t really apply to UI.
However, this did make me think about how people might feel about desktop applications that use the web for content and/or interaction, such as widgets, gadgets and such. I’ve always felt like my model or my idea of what a desktop application should be is being broken by the interactivity or the connection that these apps have with the internet and how independent they seem from the data only on your computer. This is really a feeling I have welcomed no matter how unfamiliar and I do feel like we need the paradigm shift and it will be uncomfortable because of our models.
While it’s a clever application of the uncanny valley theory, uncanny doesn’t apply here in the same way as it does with humans. The visual appearance of another person provokes a much more visceral and emotional reaction than the visual appearance of anything non-human.
Let’s say someone made a trash compactor with an appearance and interface very similar to that of a dishwasher. Upon using it, would your reaction be one of revulsion? Probably not. There’s nothing particularly uncanny about it. Odd, perhaps. You may ask Why in the heck does it have a Rinse button? Is there anything useful about it? You expect that the designer had reasons to do it that way, and your disorientation comes from those reasons not being readily apparent.
An important question to ask is: What is the point of the resemblance? Why make a robot look like a person? My guess is that it was initially so that people would feel more comfortable around them, and that there’s not much that’s directly functional about the resemblance. Why make a web app look like a desktop one? In my opinion, that’s incidental. There is technology that has long been available to desktop apps that only became available to web apps relatively recently.
I’ve been an Ajax engineer with Zimbra since the early days. I’ve never been an Outlook user - my last heavily-used mail client was exmh. At no point have I thought This is too much like a desktop app, we’d better back off or This is not enough like a desktop app. Instead, it’s more like Given the technology available, how can we deliver a better user experience?
As pointed out earlier, the web is young and evolving. There’s really no reason to limit improvements in functionality simply because they are changes from what people have been used to. Moving the hot water faucet to the right would not improve its functionality, and it would violate long-held user expectations. Adding (for example) drag-and-drop and tooltip features to web apps improves their functionality.
One example of the difference is left-click actions. The HTML visual presentation of that is a link; the typical Ajax method is something that changes the cursor when hovered over. While there are things about Gmail that I like, I feel overwhelmed by the number of links presented. On logging in, I see at least 50 of them - for example, each folder is a link. Having all those links feels busy and unnecessary to me. Note that the messages themselves are clickable, but not as visual links. The cursor tells you that you can click on the message. To take the link idiom to the extreme, they could have made each message’s subject a link to the message, but that would have plunged them into a cluttery and unappealing valley.
The best example of an uncanny valley involving email was some client (I don’t remember the name) that used animated scenes as a metaphor. For example, there was a pool scene where an incoming message was represented by a babe swimming up to you. Now that was creepy.
It’s interesting for me since I really love Zimbra. I dropped desktop app for mail and will not go back.
The browser or the windows manager is just a container. If the content is good let it be in one or the other… it doesn’t matter for me (same goes for badly designed apps).
Maybe I read too much Asimov where robots were like humans 
This is why I use Yahoo Mail Classic.
The modern Yahoo Mail is a UI disaster.
There is a similar issue with dolls. In the western culture, we grow up with dolls, so we’re used to them. But I once read a story about an Indian girl who was given a doll - she threw it away saying it’s a demon.