Dont make me think

Interaction design is such an important craft when designing a professional looking website. The interaction designer not only has to get his/her head around the concepts around the product but also designing a look and feel that would help potential customers to use it efficiently and also would want to come back and use it again.

This is much harder that some people tend to think. It usually takes only a few seconds to decide whether you like a site/UI or not. What are the factors?


Look (colors, fonts, size, and layout) and Feel (does it do what I expect it to do)

The Look and Feel should be covered by the interaction/graphical designer.

Speed (it should load fast, its that simple)

Ajax has helped tremendously to speed up various aspects of a web site. There is usually no need to refresh the whole page as we only work with smaller areas of a page such as:

• updating a table and showing a summary
  
• loading and hiding/showing an article
  
• store a poll result and then displaying a result in a tooltip window
  

There is surprisingly little that is needed to add Ajax to a site:

• Knowledge of some kind of Ajax framework (there are quite a few out there)

or

• Javascript and the IFrame tag (if you want to do it yourself)

I would recommend to use an already existing Ajax framework as it usually handles browser incompatibility issues pretty nicely.

A comparison of some of the good ones out there can be found here - http://www.devx.com/AJAXRoundup/Article/33209