Among the many resources I have at my disposal as a Microsoft employee is access to the Microsoft Library. As you might imagine for a company that spends billions of dollars each year in research and development, the Microsoft Library is a pretty good one. Without fail, every time I've gone looking for a book on a subject for work, the MS Library has something for me.
 
So today I went looking for a book. A quick search identified not only regular books, but some eBooks as well. While I prefer the feel of a "real" book, the information I needed was minimal so I decided that I would go with the eBook. The process for "checking out" an eBook from the MS Library took me over 15 minutes. Quite a bit of this time was due to the site being a bit misleading (IMHO) about what I needed to do to get to the "just let me read the book" step.
 
I won't bother you with the details of my clicking back and forth, nor with the number of times I managed to open a picture of the cover in a separate window. Overall, this was a fairly simple task, it should have been fairly simple to accomplish quickly. I have a technical background and understand how the web site should work from the electrons to the user interface. If it confused me a bit, I shudder to think what would have happened if someone non-technical needed to use it.
 
While this portion of the MS Library web site is outsourced (most likely to allow someone else the headache of dealing with the DRM issues involved), it would not take me too long to find similar examples of the problem in our (Microsoft) products. The problem? The site was not geared toward the task at hand. There was not a logical progression from locating a title to getting the title up in whatever reader was necessary. As the world continues along it's both of making computing more and more accessible to everyone, common tasks (I want to find and read an eBook) must evolve. I suspect that if I could look through a time lens into the twenty second century, I would find that most common tasks will have evolved to the point that movement through it will be as simple as browsing through a magazine.
 
I read an article a couple of years ago about the technology in a book (the old fashioned kind that I can pick up and flip through pages). The article presented the book as a mature technology has become refined to the point that most people that use it don't think about the technology, nor the technological advances that were required to get to where we are today. The web is very young. A dozen years ago or so, most of the web sites that were out there did not have any images and the amount of layout was minimal. Today, there is so much going on in the web that any web developer can put together a somewhat confusing interface and no one balks at having to dig through it. As it matures, conventionalization (as opposed to standardization) must emerge.
 
Side note: As I noted above, in the early days of the web there was little layout. Most early web sites had a few headers via the tags <H1>, <H2> and so forth. They had a paragraphs via <P> and lists <OL> and <UL>, but the content was basically a stream from start to finish with only the most minimal of layout. Today we are seeing a bit of a resurgence for that style of web, pages that by themselves have little layout. The layout is then introduced via the means of CSS. Everything old is new again.