Last year I worked with Delve Networks to design their user experience. This week, O’Reilly’s InsideRIA blog mentioned Delve as one of the most usable Rich Internet Applications.

Here is what Theresa Neil thought of the design:

Delve designers realized content creators weren’t interested in navigating through a bunch of screens to accomplish tasks. They have applied the one-screen-per goal philosophy which results in a lot less screens, each with deep interactions. To keep these rich screens from being completely overwhelming they have employed the following patterns: inline editing, dialog overlays, refining search, and progressive disclosure.

This is a very accurate description of our design goals. We were not interested in creating yet another digital asset manager. We studied the tasks that users wanted to perform at every step, and we took a task-centered approach in creating the interface and interaction. One of the unique interaction paradigms in Delve is that each screen contains a component that acts as a bridge to connect it to subsequent screens and tasks. Animated transitions are used to enforce that mental model for the user and keep them in context while taking them to the next part of the interface.

Here is a demo of Delve’s UI in action