It seems to run in cycles - the Ajax backlash - where seasoned developers can no longer bite their tongue on the Ajax issue. Alex Boswell lead the charge with Ajax Mistakes and followed a year later with the more meditative Rocky Shoals of Ajax Development

I think most tech blogs I read have gone there however most recently I caught Neil Mix’s Ajax as an Anti-Usability Pattern

I don’t want to cover old ground, anyone who sees Ajax as more than just another tool in their toolkit is kidding themselves, but I do think its worthwhile discussing what Ajax can actually be used for. Neil is right, it certainly doesn’t make things inherently more usable - in fact there are so many destructive elements of Ajax that have to be accounted for that to use it without the support of one of the major libraries can be a usability don’t or at very least a time-sink.

Ajax is only a usability enhancement insofar as any performance optimisation that improves perceived loading time is a usability enhancement.

I think that the most useful way to think of Ajax is as an optimisation. This will change your approach to web development in a number of ways however take these two tips and see how you go:

• Build an application which can have Ajax layered on unobtrusively. There are plenty of articles on this topic so I won’t expand on this further, but suffice to say it leaves the door open for Ajax and you can stop thinking about it and get down to building your application.
• When you have a functional version of your application and you are evaluating its performance both from the standpoint of raw metrics (total query time, total page load etc.) and percieved page load (ie. does the page or application just feel slow?); consider Ajax alongside all your other optimisation techniques.

My guess is that most times you are likely to opt for solutions other than Ajax. When confronted with a page with a number of distinct elements on it, you may elect to load each individually with Ajax if this decision-making is done at the head of a project. The danger is the buzz behind this technique has pushed it out of sequence, to the front of the decision making process. Ajax is not being evaluated alongside much longer established optimisation techniques because Ajax is being mistaken for an essential usability enhancement.

I find that when you put Ajax and server-side caching head-to-head in your first round of optimisations then you will get more bang-for-buck from the caching. This is because many web-applications are victim to the number of individual requests that make up a page - a problem that Ajax only exacerbates.

Once you’ve got your caching, your query optimisation, your initial client/stakeholder feedback you are now free to consider any further optimisation strategies which will potentially provide a more satisfying user experience. Who knows, you may even use Ajax!

Its the Melbourne International Film Festival and being a bit of a film buff I am quite excited. I am also a little overwhelmed - there are just so many movies. Naturally I hit the web to see what I could find that could influence my decision on which sessions to go see.

I am now three days into my quest, having made the decision last night to see Tideland, Terry Gilliam’s latest (and the description makes it sound like a filmic cousin of Fear and Loathing) so I am excited.

But I am also extremely frustrated. The MIFF site, for which MeccaMedialight take the credit, is, whilst dense in information, rates very poorly on the usability and quality scale.

First it took about 5 minutes of scanning and exploring their menus to find the list of films. Whilst

Navigating the list of movies (which for me was my initial task so I could choose something to go see) was a chore. Not knowing what you want to see is not helped when you are only presented with Title and Country of Origin.

A friend said I should check out Tideland - okay that gets around my navigatory issues but just getting to the page about that film required paging through 4 very long, slow loading pages. The pattern many sites use provides a set of links to important pages; ‘first’, various numbered pages (a subset if the list is long) and last page. It also tends to repeat these at the top and bottom of the table so scrolling isn’t required just to page.

Next was more hunting for the purchase button - make it big for !@#$ sake. A few more clicks and I am ready for purchase. There is a single useful looking button on the page saying purchase now - looks like exactly what I want, the page appears to be telling me about the two tickets I am about to get. Click.

No items in cart

What?! Hit back, tries again. Tries in another browser. IE yields Javascript errors!!  Page renders though;

No items in cart

I wasted about a half an hour on this until I spied that under each ticket listed it says ‘Sold Out’ in a small whimsical typeface. If its sold out make it obvious! And disable the purchase button!

Alright, I’ll fall back to phone order instead. Where is the Contact page? I surf around and notice it appears on some pages in the navigation but not others. And when you do click on it, 404!

Don’t worry, I found another session to go to and in the end got the purchase done online. What we can take away from this, though, is that the MIFF site:

• Failed to address the goals of the user.
• Did not guide me visually.
• Had a broken construct - why did they have a separate listing for each ticket? Is it to handle the case of only having 1 ticket left to a show and me asking for two? If so this broke it severely for the majority of instances of a purchase attempt when the system would be either plentiful in available tickets to satisfy a request or sold out.
• Overloaded the site with too much content and features but failed to deliver on its primary functions very well.

I think you should always identify a key set of goals (like one or two of them!) and then ensure you can satisfy them, regardless of what else the client is requesting. Not satisfying the true need of the end-user and the business need of your client is going to exclude your company for the next contract they may have.