Lately, I’ve been trying to improve my design skills to fully use the capabilities of technologies like Flex and Lazlo, which we’ve been using extensively at Roundarch.

My first thought was to attend some training programs on the technology. After all, I have a background as a developer, and the way I learned to design for HTML and AJAX was by understanding the technologies from a bottom-up approach.

However, after nearly a year, I still haven’t been able to find a training program that focuses on anything but the very low-level nuts and bolts of writing and developing for Flex — not a thing about what types of front-end interactions are available.

So my new mission is to go at it guerrilla style. I’m going to use my considerable google-fu to locate good examples of interaction design in RIAs — patterns that wouldn’t really work in traditional HTML — and compile them myself.

The first problem in this endeavor is trying to define what “RIA” means. Like so many things in this industry, I’ve found that it can mean drastically different things to different people — and even to the same people in different contexts. So my first step was define what I am specifically looking for:

• Rich — While I agree that lots of “web 2.0″ type stuff (in quotes only because I’m not super fond of that term) qualifies as a rich experience, I am specifically looking for examples that use technologies like Flex or Lazlo. Of course, Ajax works too, but I’m looking for very robust examples that are more like Kayak than Backpack (although I love Backpack — it’s just not the level of richness I’m thinking of in this context).
• Internet — This one should be obvious. However, rich examples of client application design might apply as well.
• Applications — A lot of the work at my company focuses on sophisticated corporate clients who deal with large quantities of complex data and task flows. A lot of the RIA examples I’ve seen so far are completely simplistic: how to edit a text field inline (duh), how to make a drag-and-drop shopping cart (kinda silly), etc.

So that’s my goal, anyway. I’ll keep posting on the results.