Somehow I am back in the business (literally) of thinking hard about website interface design, functionality, and user experience.
While checking out Digg extensively for the first time, I found this extremely smart article about AJAX.
Here's a representative quote, though by no means a summary of the whole article:
The major reason for the success of the Web is the predictability and simplicity of its UI model. Basically, anyone can move a mouse, click on a link, move a scrollbar, and hit the Back button. With the growing popularity of Ajax, the risk is very real that developers will go overboard and essentially make everything clickable and change the UI in an unexpected and asynchronous manner. The last thing you want to do is force your user to think. For those who are interested in the usability of Web applications, Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think (see Resources) is a must-read. It does not cover Ajax specifically, but teaches important lessons about how important good design is for a Web site.This reminds me of a thought I just had yesterday while hopelessly and angrily clicking around on MySpace. For the first time after registering on myspace about 4 months ago, I hunkered down and really spent time, configuring my profile, inviting people to be my friends, trying to use the calendar and events features, and I confirmed my opinion I had 4 months ago that the myspace interface just SUCKS.
This has nothing specifically to do with AJAX but everything to do with the simple maxim in the above quote: Don't force your user to think. At least not too much. The Myspace interface is like a freaking labyrinth, a puzzle, and I found myself thinking this: The Web has always been about communication, information, and self-expression. The web "1.0" was about enabling anyone who could learn some simple HTML and the basic buttons on a browser to "self-publish." Now, sadly, "web 2.0" is about anybody who wants to take the time to learn how to use sites like Myspace's interface, or some subset of it, enabling them to "self-publish." The problem is that while the results might look pretty some of the time, the possible configurations of those results are really constrained. And, of course, the tools are owned by some big company.
suspira.
Posted by steev at Mayo 10, 2006 11:23 AM