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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…

I think with something like gmail the problem was obvious.  A web based email system has to compete with desktop applications.  If you look at the two best desktop mail applications, Apple’s Mail.app and Mozilla’s Thunderbird, they have a few things going for them.  Firstly, they are quick and responsive.  Secondly, you can hook up multiple accounts.  Thirdly, they appear simple on the face of it but allow for complicates rules and behaviours to be set up.  These aren’t traditional “it won’t work guvnor” problems, they are simply factors that need to be addressed in order to complete.  The last two features which I identified in the desktop clients is fairly easy to reproduce, the first, however, isn’t.  And this really is crucial when it comes to email.  If you have to wait around for page loads, checking your email every day can be a real chore.  This is where gmail decided AJAX can be used to speed up the process.  For me at least it has changed the way I use webmail.  Its become usable.  Going back to the issue at hand, you can almost see the conversation where a designer says “this webmail thing, its just too slow” and then a developer chimes in with the AJAX suggestion.

That’s a very nice story, and probably didn’t happen.  But really, we need it to happen so the industry can move forward with interface design.  This really comes down to the entire software development lifecycle when it comes to web applications.  This is a challenge for all those small development houses out there looking at developing web applications to create a challenging atmosphere between your designers and developers.  And yes, there  really is a need for a separation of those two roles.  In my perfect world the designers would go crazy, absolutely nuts.  They would then challenge the developers to match that insanity and make the design a reality.  In the initial stages, it simply should not be allowed to say that something isn’t possible.  The thought should not even enter ones head.  What should be driving this process is innovation, both with the designers and the developers.  The whole experience shouldn’t be stifled by the constraints developers and designers traditionally bind themselves with.

The outcome of this may not be pretty.  This is why it takes some careful management, fostering a healthy working environment and all that.  No doubt ideas will come out that aren’t possible, and that’s fine, its life.  But more important is what is possible, and more to the point, what you discovered was possible.  It is this challenge that always drives innovation.  The designer challenging the developer, and then the developer, by meeting that challenge, pushes the designer even harder.  Its really all about stepping in to stop the “by numbers” approach you can end up with when suing traditional software development methodologies.

The ultimate aim of this, surely, is to move away from the web apps we currently have.  And not in the way you might expect.  There seems to be a movement towards web apps that behave like desktop apps.  Now you may have noticed that I’m not a fan of this approach.  Web apps should be built from the ground up as web apps and should really leverage the advantage of the platform it resides upon.  The only problem is, I’m yet to see a web application that really ups the ante for all the others.  In the same way WIMPs changed the way we thought about computers for ever, I think we need a web app that does the same.

This post was written on Monday, November 20th 2006 by Simon T and has been categorised under Development , Opinion , Technology , Usability , Web 2.0. The trackback URL is here or you could add a response. If you really want to you can Digg Story or add it to del.icio.us, Technorati Cosmos, Blinklist, furl or Reddit.

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