Silverlight UX: Sum Of The Parts

When talking about Silverlight, it is only natural to compare it to standard web based applications (ASP.NET, PHP, JSF, etc.).  Silverlight has some clear advantages when dealing with large quantities of data, or speed and performance in say grid operations, but there’s another aspect of Silverlight that may be hard to notice at first.  It’s the ‘little’ things.  I call them little, because alone, each of these features isn’t something that will shock or amaze you.  But combined, these features create a User Experience that is specific to Silverlight.  Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Above is the Infragistics XamWebGrid in GroupBy mode.  The part to notice is the small x that shows up when you mouse over the Group indicator.  It makes it easy for a user to figure out how to ungroup the data, and that’s just the start.  Notice the shape of the Group indicator?  When you group by multiple columns, these fit together like puzzle pieces.  Again, indicating to the user exactly what’s happening as shown below.

The differences are very subtle, like a glow animation when you mouse over a button; the same type of differences you see between Windows Forms and WPF.  But these subtle differences can create a totally different experience for a user.  The application feels more alive, and when these features are put to good use, like in the example above, the UX of the application can be improved.  And here I thought storyboards and animations were only used for 3D rotating textboxes with movies playing in the background..