h1My Issues With Ajax, and New UIs/h1First of all, I must say that the new, and widely adopted use of Ajax is a good thing. Theres no doubt about that, and weve all heard the countless benefits of using it before, so I wont bother with that. However, I do have some issues with this new technology. That being one of busability/b.br
brbThe benefit to the old-school forms, and web interfaces is that everyone is used to them/b. With a few exceptions interfaces have remained the same since the mid 90s. A person can visit a web site, and more or less, instantly know how to interact with it, and navigate to what it is they need to find. With the new user interfaces, and everyone trying to be unique in their designs and uses of Ajax, many new people are forced to learn how to use each new website. This will cause much frustration in many people, and ultimately will result in a loss of sales, or visits due to a bad taste left in the visitors mouth.brbrThink about it for a second. When you are surfing around the net, how many sites do you visit? How many links do you jump through to visit new websites? Now think how annoying it would be if you knew nothing about computers, and had to blearn how to use each and every website/b you found. Your frustration level would go through the roof!brbrWith people spending hundreds of millions of dollars online each year, designers must do everything they can to bmake their interfaces as consistent/b, and simple as possible. Im not saying dont use Ajax, its a bad bad thing, but what I am saying is that you must be careful as to how much you implement it into your web applications. You have to remember that most people are very weary of technology, and computers in general. The idea behind each and every website is to promote something. If you do a bad job at having people understand how your website is to be used, you will fail at promoting those things.brbrIm sure that after time the web will calm down again, and there will be consistent well formed rules that most people will conform to in order to increase ease of use (like in the desktop world), however with this technology so hot at the moment, and people trying to push the webs boundaries, we are in a state of buser-interface chaos/b!brbrTake a title=LifeHacker href=http://www.lifehacker.comLifeHacker.com/a for example. A very good website, and one I read on a daily basis. They have a comment system. Everyone knows how to use comment systems, right? Theirs leaves MUCH to be desired. Although its a good idea in theory, in reality it causes some confusion! I scroll down to the bottom, and wish to leave my comment, and sometimes it can take quite a while for that post to be put up. Some of the questions that went through my head were Okay, I submitted my post, now do I have to wait for it to show? The page isnt refreshing, what do I do now? Can I leave the page and still have my comment shown? WHAT DO I DO??? (this was common when they had anonymous posting, but even now if you dont put in your user name/password it will just sit there for a while trying to log you in. This is a problem.)brbrThese problems are all too common, and could be fixed with some simple user messages. Some pop-up messages that come up telling me exactly what I have to do. Or they could just go back to the tried, tested, and true method that was used just 2 years ago. Both would have me posting and visiting more often.brbrEven the great google apps, such as bDocs amp; Spreadsheets/b, and their bgMail /bhave some slight problems with it. My main problem is that of their working status. I have a large screen, with a big resolution, and the only time I check the corners are when I want to close a program. I also get very click happy sometimes, and I wont wait for the status to go away (not knowing the status is even there). Some of the questions going through my head are if I start clicking, will my mail still send? Will my rant be posted to my blog? Will I lose all the work Ive done? If they just either disabled everything, and put a message prominently on the screen, these questions would be answered.brbrPlease, play with Ajax to your hearts content, push the limits, see what you can do, but do it on a website that isnt directed towards the Internets main users (those who dont know all about whats going on behind the scenes, and dont know why they have to wait until your spinning loading image goes away). And if you are going to deviate away from the norm, then at least clearly outline how the user is to use your new features (of course youll want to be able to hide those tips from people once they know how to use everything)brbrIts an interesting and exciting new world were coming into. We just have to remember that the idea behind the web is to bSELL/b, and to SELL you have to bmake people feel comfortable/b.br