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Cleaning with AJAX

As someone who has a real ‘thing’ for usability I’m cosntantly astonished that AJAX is used to complicate and baffle users. As if the non-standard navigation on websites wasn’t enough we’ve now got these new behaviours that don’t follow HTML rules to consider as well. What we really need is to clean up the use of AJAX and make sure that when the word is mentioned as part of site development, its the designers and user interface specialists that suggest it, not the developers.

In fact, AJAX should only be used to solve a problem that can’t be solved with regular static pages. I would add a very loud caveat to that though, and that is a problem doesn’t necessary have to be a bad thing, but, more likely, is an internal design problem. We can apply this fairly simply to some popular Web 2 applications. How about gmail, what ‘problem’ did they solve by using AJAX?  See after the jump…

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Positive Side Effects Of Web 2.0 Applications

Whilst looking for some resources earlier I discovered a fantastic way of using Web 2.0 services to my own end, and not in the way they were intended to be used. I was looking for some free fonts for a projects and the usual avenues of investigation weren’t really fulfilling my needs. So where do I go? What do I do? The answer was to utilise the Web 2.0. So I headed over the delicious and digg and searched for free fonts. Through utilising these tools I found exactly what I was after, and much more. The simple fact is that by leveraging some of the social aspects of the Web 2.0 you can really enhance your browsing experience. The idea is, however, to think a bot outside the box.

What I mean by this is putting a slightly different slant on some of the popular Web 2.0 services. The example I used above was Digg as a search engine. And it really works. The results you get from Digg are better than the results you get from Google. You can further filter the results by the number of Diggs the entry received, or if your really clever, by the people who Dugg it. For more general searches, delicious works just as well, just watch for entries with few bookmarks, they may be adverts.

So what other information can we garner from Web Applications by slightly changing our approach? Bear in mind that you will have to use some common sense and maybe exert a bit of effort to get the most out of Web Apps, especially when your not using them for their intended purpose. Take ebay for instance. If your looking to buy something, say a TV, when why not check out ebay first. Not to find a cheaper price (remember to factor in warranties and buyer protection etc) but to see how many are up for sale, by ordinary people. If there’s a large number of the model your after showing up then the chances are people have bought it, but aren’t very satisfied. Of course you’ll have to do a bit of legwork to make sure the sellers aren’t high volume sellers of that sort of product, like I said, a bit of legwork. Another good way of getting some information about a product or service you’re considering is to take a look at forums associated with it. Should it be official forums, you may get a chance to see the customer service in action. Another possibility is using flickr to check out your next holiday location, sometimes including the hotel!

So in what other ways can we use Web 2 services in new and inventive ways? I’ve heard people using blogs as diaries and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of interesting uses of the Google Maps API out there. Open your mind, and think outside the box.

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