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When is AJAX Appropriate for Users?

7 replies on 1 page. Most recent reply: Jun 30, 2006 7:48 AM by Frank Sommers

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Bill Venners

Posts: 2284
Nickname: bv
Registered: Jan, 2002

When is AJAX Appropriate for Users?

Posted: Jun 28, 2006 9:16 AM

Summary
Vikram Goyal describes a simple AJAX enhancement that he and his manager liked, but his users hated. How do you decide what kinds of situations are appropriate for AJAX?

In his blog post, Did you ask the users before implementing AJAX?, Vikram Goyal relates a story about adding an AJAX feature similar to Google Suggest to his application. Google Suggest sends a request to the server for each character you type into the search box, returning and displaying a drop down list of possible search queries that match. This allows the user to just select the desired query, if it appears in the list, instead of always typing the whole thing. Vikram said his users were confused and asked questions such as:

Why is this page not refreshing?
What is this drop down and why doesn't it go away?
Where is my result?
How do I select my result
Why is this thing preselecting a partial result?

AJAX can improve the user experience, but it can also degrade it. What experiences have you had regarding when to use, and when not to use, AJAX? What lessons have you learned?

Jeff Ratcliff

Posts: 242
Nickname: jr1
Registered: Feb, 2006

Not really an AJAX issue

Posted: Jun 28, 2006 9:41 AM

I don't think using AJAX as a technology implies any particular application behavior.

The real issue is whether you want to implement what your users want or what you want. In general, that's a technology-neutral question.

Merriodoc Brandybuck

Posts: 225
Nickname: brandybuck
Registered: Mar, 2003

Re: Not really an AJAX issue

Posted: Jun 28, 2006 2:06 PM

I've used AJAX very sparingly and only in contexts like choosing a member from a list and updating a report on the page. Generally speaking if the user touches something and only part of the page changes then I would use it. I guess you can think of it as being used in similar contexts as rollovers. Instead of swapping graphics out you just swap out the text.

> The real issue is whether you want to implement what your
> users want or what you want. In general, that's a
> technology-neutral question.

I don't think that's true. At the end of the day the technological decisions you make will have some impact (sometimes a very great impact) on the design of the application and how it works.

It would be as if you were an artist and you got a contract to "Make some art", which is about the level of requirements I'm used to dealing with. Ok, do you want a painting? A sculpture? A poem? The medium in this case has a very definite impact on what you make for art.

Programming languages and techniques are in general very malleable but I think by taking a "technology-neutral" approach you are, in most cases, setting everybody up for disappointment on some level. I've found that most people who take a "technology-neutral" approach believe that they can pick the technology they like most and implement anything they need to in it. In theory this is probably correct. In practice the quality of the product and the time to deliver it will vary greatly depending on the technology you use to solve a specific problem.

If you can find out some specifics from your user population before you start implementing then you can pick the appropriate technology to do the implementation. Need an application that does crazy text processing? Ok, you probably will pick perl. Need a Windows only app and have to roll the application out real fast with a pretty GUI? VB6 or .NET are the two obvious choices to me. Need a cross platform app that has a GUI on all the platforms? Some scripting language and cross-platform toolkit for the interface is in order. Need to have a lot of remote users and good response time for the application? You should probably (I'm sure I'm blaspheming here...) write a client-server app and skip the web based stuff or web services, especially if you have to move a lot of data.

Jeff Ratcliff

Posts: 242
Nickname: jr1
Registered: Feb, 2006

Re: Not really an AJAX issue

Posted: Jun 28, 2006 3:02 PM

My point was not that all technologies are equally appropriate for implementing a set of requirements. My point was that the choice of the technology doesn't usually dictate whether you are or are not going to honor your users' opinions.

Nothing stops you from writing an AJAX application that doesn't follow all of the Google-style idioms.

robert young

Posts: 361
Nickname: funbunny
Registered: Sep, 2003

Re: When is AJAX Appropriate for Users?

Posted: Jun 29, 2006 6:50 AM

> <p>
> AJAX can improve the user experience, but it can also
> degrade it. What experiences have you had regarding when
> to use, and when not to use, AJAX? What lessons have you
> learned?
> </p>

well, welcome to a 1980's unix terminal character mode interface. back then, users loved it over the 3270 block mode interface of the mainframe. they got what AJAX now makes possible. without AJAX, the browser is just a 3270 with lots o pixels. 20 years of ignorance will come a tumblin down.

Merriodoc Brandybuck

Posts: 225
Nickname: brandybuck
Registered: Mar, 2003

Re: Not really an AJAX issue

Posted: Jun 29, 2006 6:54 AM

> My point was not that all technologies are equally
> appropriate for implementing a set of requirements. My
> point was that the choice of the technology doesn't
> usually dictate whether you are or are not going to honor
> your users' opinions.

Ok. My point was that honoring your user's opinions may (probably should in some cases) dictate your choice in technology. I don't consider that technology neutral.

Jep Castelein

Posts: 2
Nickname: jepc
Registered: Jun, 2006

Re: Not really an AJAX issue

Posted: Jun 29, 2006 8:24 AM

We've done dozens of AJAX projects for our clients in the last 3 years, and we've always involved an Interaction Designer: someone who is aware of technology but who focuses primarily on the user experience. The interaction design is then discussed with the developers before it is presented to the client, to avoid technology problems later on. Once approved, developers can choose the most appropriate technology to implement it.

So I tend to agree it's not technology-neutral, but it certainly isn't driven by technology alone, far from that.

Frank Sommers

Posts: 2642
Nickname: fsommers
Registered: Jan, 2002

Re: Not really an AJAX issue

Posted: Jun 30, 2006 7:48 AM

> We've done dozens of AJAX projects for our clients in the
> last 3 years, and we've always involved an Interaction
> Designer: someone who is aware of technology but who
> focuses primarily on the user experience.

This is something I became a big believer of after reading Alan Cooper's Inmates book. It's not a designer, in the sense of a graphic or UI designer, nor a developer, but someone really trained to examine how a user interacts with the information presented through the software.

> So I tend to agree it's not technology-neutral, but it
> certainly isn't driven by technology alone, far from that.

Ideally, the user should not even be aware of what technology is used in constructing the UI, since a good UI sort of blends into the background and becomes invisible, simply aiding the user to accomplish his tasks.

At the same time, some technologies make it harder to create such seamless and invisible UIs, and I think pre-Ajax HTML is one such example. When you have to press a submit button for persisting every single change, and then wait for a whole Web page to download, that kind of UI interaction can really interfere with the user's flow. That's why I think Ajax can complement simple Web pages, but then ideally users should not even notice that Ajax is used, only that the UI became "friendlier."

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