At Jared Spool's Usability Interface Engineering conference in Monterey, CA this week, Yahoo!'s Bill Scott presented on best practices in rich internet application ("RIA") design. The insights into making for delighted users of web-based applications were a painful reminder of how much the CMS world lags behind. But what's working on the public web is not far out. Scott emphasizes the importance of not being novel, and sticking to the emerging successful RIA design patterns: drag-and-drop, auto-complete, fade transition, inline status, cursor hovering tips, and wait indicators (though the dancing hamsters when dragging-and-dropping items on Yahoo! Photos is not recommended). See all of Yahoo!'s design patterns here. These are the interface design techniques that could make for happier content managers. While some CMS vendors are finally starting to deploy RIA features (one customer of CMS vendor FatWire here expressed eagerness to deploy the new AJAX-based version 7), these new CM interfaces, while slick, have yet to be fully tested in the marketplace (i.e., by you). As we mentioned in our Predictions for 2007, we'll see how the AJAX UI trend in CM pans out.