Andre’s Blog

February 9th, 2006

Here’s my slide deck from my AJAX usability talk at the OS CMS Summit.

One of the more interesting points for the audience (Boris at least) was the easy usability wins for CMS tools:

1. Inline Editing

2. Drag and Drop

3. Real-Time Validation

4. Fewer Pages

5. Better Menus

6. Collapsible Screen

I think I’ll expand on this later.  But would like to hear some feedback from CMS developers and usability nuts out there.

Posted in Software Development, AJAX, Web 2.0, Usability – HCI | 1 Comment »

February 8th, 2006

Jesper put together a great mini AJAX case study that looks at data entry for a financial application.  It looks at some granular UI decisions where he used AJAX to improve usability.  Here are the cited benefits:

• Lower development costs: Only server-side validations had to be coded. These validations can then be executed client-side via the AJAX framework. Depending on browser compatibility, we have probably saved 20-40% of the time it took writing the server-side validations.
• Faster user interface: No unnessecary navigation back-and-forth to fill out data on multiple objects.
• Unobtrusive error handling: Errors can be corrected immediately and in an un-obtrusive way: The user can continue typing in other fields or correct errors as they happen. Compare this to the old variant, where an alertbox is triggered. Alertboxes say “correct me NOW before you do anything else”.

This is some good stuff and worth a read.  Too bad he can’t disclose all the details and actual screens.  It’s often like that with our interesting AJAX implementations and clients as well.  Come on guys open up your kimonos (slightly out of context), we need to those cool AJAX case studies!!

I think Jesper and many other developers will be excited about our AJAX spreadsheet that we’ll be releasing later in 2Q06.  You won’t need the “Excel  Metaphor” anymore:-)  I’ll have more information to disclose on this when our Nitobi Labs section goes live.

Posted in Technology, Software Development, AJAX, Web 2.0, Business, Usability – HCI | No Comments »

February 7th, 2006

Like so many other situations in life we want what can’t or don’t have…

Via Paul Kedrosky

Posted in Ethics and Sustainability, Random, Business | No Comments »

February 6th, 2006

Hey Hugh, if you’re selling anything for any amount of money and your business triples that’s a good thing and you pay attention whether it sells for $4000, $4 or $4 Million.  Well I would anyway:)  Hugh of Gaping Void gave a good presentation at LIFT about blogging, marketing and businesses should be at engaging with their customers.  I just couldn’t figure why it was so important that the suits he was blogging about were worth $4000…

Posted in Web 2.0, Business | 5 Comments »

February 6th, 2006

Hey all you RIA fans out there!  I got word from Christian last week, but only got around to blogging about this releae today.  This is really great news for the RIA and Flash developers everywhere.  I also think more “true” programmers will start paying attention to the Flex platform since it’s moving away from the animation centric model of the past.  Also, a free SDK and IDE based on Eclipse will be very attractive to web developers and enterprise software developers alike.  The Ajaxian boys have a post on it with some more links; as does Duane “SOA super guru” Nickull from the perspective of webservice expert.  We’re excited about this, and are looking at incoporating and porting to Flex in many of our rich web client components.

Posted in Technology, Software Development, AJAX, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

February 3rd, 2006

I’m leading a discussion next week at the OS CMS Summit here in Vacnouver on thoughtful applications of AJAX to enhance usability in open source content management systems.  It should be a lot of fun and I hope we all learn from each other and come up with some interesting ways to really improve the user experience of OS CMS tools like Drupal and Plone.  Hope to see you there! 

PS.  I’ll have some nice shiny cards that will get you FREE Nitobi AJAX components if you see me, ask for one!

Posted in Technology, Software Development, AJAX, Web 2.0, Usability – HCI | 2 Comments »

February 3rd, 2006

This Eye Track stuff is great!  I found about it through this neat book, Mind Hacks, I got from the Web2.0 Conference last fall.  Basically they track where peoples attention is placed on a web page, which goes beyond standard web analytics which only help you determine where people click.  I think they have a very interesting service that is quite affordable and mandatory for anyone who places any importance on their website.  We’ll definitely be using their services later this year when we re-design our site later this year year.  Some really interesting that would be hard to know intuitively, one of the most interesting observations is about how a website can have dead space that doesn’t really get read at all. 

Posted in Business, Usability – HCI | 1 Comment »