Silverlight is still in its infancy, but its user experience needs to be top notch for it to gain traction and compete effectively against Flash. From my minimal exposure to Silverlight so far - my biggest complaint has to do with the installation experience. To be fair, part of my frustration stems from the two different versions currently floating around (.NET version vs JavaScript version). Ex. I go to a site running a .NET Silverlight app and I see the "You must install Silverlight to run this application" message. Clicking on this takes me to the official Microsoft Silverlight site where it is installed. However, when I attempt to reload the original site - I still get the "You need Silverlight" message - grrr. Nothing on the original site says anything about needing a different version - and if I click on the message again it takes me to the Silverlight site and tells me it's already installed. For an ordinary user, this experience would be extremely frustrating and they would probably just think "Silverlight sux". However, I do a little digging and find out that the site I was visiting requires the .NET
version of Silverlight, which is still in Beta. The version that the Silverlight site installed was the most recent version - the JavaScript version. I had to manually dig into the Silverlight site and find the link to install the beta version to run the .NET Silverlight app properly. To cut this story short - the install experience should have been MUCh simpler: I should not have to leave the existing site to install Silverlight; and the calling application should have been smart enough to know which Silverlight version needed to be installed.
As usual, Scott Guthrie to the rescue! Here is an excerpt from an email by Scott outlining how to best support the install experience for your Silverlight apps:
"Silverlight supports two modes of installation:
Indirect install – where you link off to a page where the user downloads Silverlight and then navigates back to your site.
Direct install – where you can launch the installer directly from your page, and automatically refresh the browser when the installation is finished to immediately show the live content.
Earlier today we published a whitepaper with sample code that demonstrates how to implement the direct install option, along with recommended user experience that helps guide a user to click the install link. You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F487DF43-1AFB-4F76-82C8-BB5ACBFFBA1B&displaylang=en
Tim Sneath also just blogged about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/10/29/optimizing-the-silverlight-install-experience.aspx"
Scott also posted a nice article about it on his blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/30/optimizing-the-silverlight-install-experience.aspx