The continuing market for Ajax how-tos

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, November 14, 2007 @ 10:41 am

I'm putting the finishing touches on my first piece for IBM developerWorks: installment No. 1 of an ongoing series called "Ajax Overhaul." My pitch for this series was "Ajax tutorials for the rest of us." Instead of merely highlighting what you could do with Ajax, I wanted to show why you should. The latest open-source library or cool Ajax widget is meaningless without a compelling business reason to implement it. And without careful consideration of user experience, Ajax features can hamper usability rather than enhancing it.

Many Ajax tutorials show how to implement a new Ajax feature from the ground up. Mine is going to show how to retrofit an existing site with Ajax in a way that solves old problems instead of creating new ones.

My first installment focuses on a problem familiar to any IA or developer: The conflict between funneling a user down your purchase path and educating her at every step of the way. This was a challenge for us at the now-defunct beauty emporium Reflect.com, where products had to be customized before they could be added to your cart. It was also a challenge at Orbitz Worldwide, where every travel product was infinitely configurable. Amazon has the market cornered on click-to-buy product categories, but many, many shopping experiences require choices at every step of the way.

When you sell clothes, or vacations, or configurable software packages, you need to provide contextual data to help users make decisions: color palettes, photo galleries, user reviews, feature comparisons.... It therefore becomes impossible to funnel users down a straight path from search to purchase. All of the information that can help your users choose and configure their product has to go somewhere. Often, it gets shunted into popups and navigational cul-de-sacs that pull the user out of "the funnel." Luckily, Ajax can untangle these complicated navigational paths and restore a clean throughline to many convoluted processes. That's what I'm going to be sharing with my readers at IBM developerWorks.

I'm really enjoying the challenge of writing for a beginner/intermediate audience. It's hard to remember when you're doing Ajax development on a daily basis, but most of the web is still decidedly 1.0. The technology trends that take root in edgy start-ups and blossom on the servers of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft take years to cross-pollinate their way to your average mom-and-pop ecommerce site. That's why there will continue to be an audience for tutorials like the series I'm writing. I'm looking forward to posting links when they're available - though my techniques may be old hat to a lot of the people who read this feed.

Technorati Tags

• Ajax
• user experience
• ecommerce

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