Web applications should look like they’re in the Internet

Bill Higgins, Jeff Atwood and many others are discussing about a psychological effect, that affects web application user interface design. Basically they are stating, that making UI in a web app look like a desktop app is a bad idea.

If you’re considering or actively building Ajax/RIA applications, you should consider the Uncanny Valley of user interface design. When you build a “desktop in the web browser”-style application, you’re violating users’ unwritten expectations of how a web application should look and behave. This choice may have significant negative impact on learnability, pleasantness of use, and adoption.

This makes sense to me, when you think about it. Web applications can and should look personal, in order to allow us to create positive images about it. Desktop applications look clinical, and more or less the same, because they’re just tools. Web sites can be a lot more.

Perhaps this phenomenon is also the reason people stand for utterly horrid UI designs in some of the most popular websites in the internet. UI design does not matter in some cases, because people are willing to cut it some slack.