Responding to Jared Spool on AJAX

 – posted May 19th, 2006 by Laurence Veale     No comments

Jared Spool, usability expert, asked me what my concerns with AJAX were on his blog. I’ll discuss some of them briefly.

Screenshot of personal assistant area from Yahoo's new homepage

Let’s take the “Personal Assistant” area over at the top right of the screen (mail, messenger, weather etc.) Hovering over a tab only to be met with “Loading….” is, in my opinion, no improvement of the user experience.

Why? After the initial action, i.e the mouse over or hover, you have to keep the cursor on target while the content loads. If you stray too far, the preview closes back up. In terms of dexterity, it’s actually much tougher to do than the conventional aim and click, particularly if there’s a delay while it loads.

So, perhaps my concerns are really about accessibility at the end of the day. The visitor who uses a keyboard or the visitor who is not as precise with their mouse is not given the “same” experience (I do accept the argument that offering the same experience to visitors of differing abilities can be idealistic). Bruce Lawson sums accessibility and AJAX issues on his blog - worth a read.

The aim of Yahoo’s redesign is, according to Bill Scott, to get “a lot more content to be easily accessible”, but for whom? They’re trying to get alot more content into the limited screen estate because over the last couple of years (as your excellent screenshots show) their homepage has become increasingly crowded. I would speculate, as with most homepages, it is political. It may appease internal owners of different parts of the site that their content is now above the fold, albeit behind a tab. So politically, content is up “high” on the homepage (in terms of visual priority), so the “politicians” are happy.

And, of course, the one that won’t go away, the back button is “broken”, a much touted problem with AJAX.

Categories Accessibility, Design

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