At Least As Useful

Principle: Indieweb UIs should be At Least As Useful as their silo equivalents.

Why

Bigcos/silos have lots of people, time and money to put into building really great UIs. Most indieweb publishers don’t so much (although they often apply focused effort to one specific problem and solve it far more effectively than silos). This leads to our UX not being as nice as on silos.

If we POSSE our content out to silos whilst linking back, the problem is amplified, as our friends still stuck in silos don’t get as good an experience as they would have if we all posted to silos.

Also, if we wish for our experimental technologies to become at all adopted, being At Least As Useful as their silo equivalents is pretty much a prerequisite.

Solution: aim for any indieweb UI to be At Least As Useful as it’s silo equivalent.

Extension: ALAU-INMS

At Least As Useful, If Not More So. All the problems stated above can be turned on their heads if we offer a UI which is more useful, usable, customisable, focused, etc. than the equivalent silo UI.

An example of this in practise is the web action fallback pattern: offer silo actions for everyone (ALAU), wrap them in web actions so people can customise them (INMS).

See Also