Andre’s Blog

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.

| Del.icio.us

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Technology, Software Development, AJAX, Web 2.0, Business, Usability – HCI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.