Andre’s Blog

So CBS Marketwatch uses AJAX to update stock prices in-line in the article, and there’s a bunch of people who don’t like it and find it distracting.  I can see their point…having text in an article change as your reading it does make it hard to focus.  Mind you reading and article with stock prices that are wrong probably isn’t that helpful either, and in a site that’s called Marketwatch chances are people would like to know what the market is currently at. (I think…admitedly most of the stock I’ve ever owned was given to be my tech companies I consulted for so I didn’t have stock quotes streamed to cell phone) 

 

 

Jason Fried from 37Signals doesn’t like this and thinks it’s AJAX overkill.  Paul Kedrosky doesn’t think much of it either.  I think that’s kind of funny because I almost used this as example of AJAX in a Web2.0 panel I presented at with Paul earlier this year.  Paul’s point about real-time quotes that are actually delayed is well taken.

 

However, they also has a neat hover feature on the ticker symbol that gives you a real time graph view of the stocks performance.  I think it’s very handy because you don’t have to do to a new page to get this small, but pertinent, bit of data.

 

I think they could combine these features in a Tufte like manner and really help users absorb information faster with animated / real-time sparklines graphs.  That could also be viewed as distracting though I suppose. 

 

Interesting to see AJAX adoption in new places and the debate around it’s merits and pit falls.  This type of discussion is much more interesting than just listening to people whine about broken back-buttons (which are broken in most web applications, NOT just AJAX apps!), etc…

 

Technorati Tags : AJAX, Usability, Sparklines

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 31st, 2005 at 12:07 am and is filed under AJAX, 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.