Design› Miscellany
Deeper design = a better product
Beyond Ajax, Jesse James Garrett, Adaptive Path
It’s great to hear another practioner calling for more in-depth methodology. Especially when it means reading on, past last year’s hot phrases like Ajax and Web 2.0. Even better when it is someone like Jesse James Garrett, credited with coining Ajax itself.
One particular point which seemed to sharpen the mind, is that Ajax forces us away from the page model. Information is called up, manipulated and instructions given in smaller groupings than the page. When we realise that the user journey is in fact made up of connections to nodes which are at times smaller than pages, designers and clients might actually wake up to the challenge. Making sense of this mix of application-like behaviour and the classic static page is a big challenge to designers, producers and usability experts who have become traditionalists without realising.
It’s nothing new for applications. However, for websites that primarily serve content, this will be a challenge to the current business model. Take large volume content sites that depend on page impressions as a metric for success: the whole business model will need to change before we can really take advantage. For high traffic sites, a page impression = a revenue unit. And that’s a slowing revenue stream as market share decreases. Until we have alternative revenue streams as robust as the ad unit on page load, designers for large content sites and media owners will not be able to change even if they want to.
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