A Better Experience
AJAX-enabled apps are springing up on intranets as businesses look to leverage the technologies
By Darryl K. Taft
February 15, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 9)
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) has not only helped revolutionize the look of Web applications, but also enhanced the usability of such applications, experts say.
As proof of the improvements in usability brought on by AJAX-influenced Web sites, usability guru Jakob Nielsen, a principal at the San Francisco-based Nielsen Norman Group, recently announced the winners of his company’s seventh annual intranet design contest, and AJAX played a role in making the sites more usable, he said.
According to Nielsen, as opposed to previous years, intranet design teams this year applied such new Internet technologies as social networking and wikis in “restrained ways” that emphasized useful information. The result was the addition of sophisticated intranet features that expressed each company’s culture and served the needs of individual employees better than ever before, he said.
“This year, our intranet contest winners used the same trendy technologies, but they aimed instead for utility and pragmatism, and achieved them without any sacrifice to the coolness factor associated, for example, with an AJAX map that helps an employee find another employee with whom to carpool,” Nielsen said in a statement.
Moreover, AJAX is “definitely catching on,” Nielsen said in an interview. “Intranets are embracing it, although you have some overhyped cases.”
Yet, the usability benefits are best implemented as “modest things like updating a small part of the screen when the user does a query,” or updating stock quotes, Nielsen said.
AJAX enables developers to build Web applications that can refresh a screen with new data without requiring numerous trips to the server, which makes for a more interactive and smooth experience.
Essentially, AJAX transforms static HTML pages into rich and responsive Web applications. Jouk Pleiter, CEO of Backbase, said with AJAX, there is a real paradigm shift, where you move presentation logic from the server to the client, creating a powerful client-side presentation platform that enables applications that offer a real-time, interactive user experience. This paradigm shift eliminates the need for multiple roundtrips to the server and enables applications to start using client-side CPU power to directly interact with the end user, he explained.
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