Why is there so little published about Rich Internet Application (RIA) usability?
Is it because:

• RIAs are so easy to do the right way?

I recently heard of a couple of Aussie and NZ developers going three times over budget because there were so many ways the interface could be built! It is actually harder to do well because there is so much interface flexibility.

• Nobody is building RIAs?

They are around - Silverlight, Flex, Flash, AJAX [If you call that a RIA?]

• No-one researches RIA usability?

Probably not, but the vendors (Adobe and Microsoft) all talk about ‘Customer Experience’?

In my recent preparatory research, for my Web on the Piste presentation, most of what I could find was old stuff on the Adobe Site from Macromedia days.  For example:

• The Essence of RIAs - (2003) Macromedia Whitepaper with great models of a well designed product and the Experience Ideal for RIAs
• Business Case for RIAs - (2007) Forrester on RIA best practice
• Usability testing on Pet Market (2003) run by Macromedia and Jared Spool and UIE. This article and another here (2002) give some good tips on design and testing.

My favorite one was on Flash Workflows (2007) - http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/ria_workflow_print.html

Have you seen any RIA usability articles - tell me about them please!?