By - Jason Valalik
With the advent of AJAX and real time calls to the server there have been some really slick user interfaces developed that enhance the customer experience. Not all of these are real time calls, but they do support a better user experience giving the user either feedback or system features when they need it. This is a usability principle called progressive disclosure. There is a lot of talk about Web 2.0, but I have seen very few real examples beside drag-and-drop. This should provide readers with some true life Web 2.0 application functionality that demonstrates what pundits are talking about. Videos of these applications after the jump.


The first video is from Alibaba.com. This company is the worlds largest exporting marketplace. You will see in the video as soon as the user types in their user name when trying to create their account the user doesn’t have to hit submit to see that their username is already taken. The system gives the user that feedback after moving on to the next field.

The second video is from Remember the Milk. This takes the user name validation a little bit further. Instead of the user needing to tab to the next field to validate their password this does it on-the-fly, as the user types. Remember The Milk was created so that you no longer have to write your to-do lists on sticky notes, whiteboards, random scraps of paper, or the back of your hand. Remember The Milk makes managing tasks an enjoyable experience.

This third video from Google Accounts doesn’t make real-time calls to a server, but gives the user feedback on the strength/weakness of their password. I like this treatment because it allows the user to determine if they want to use a strong or weak password instead of the back-end systems forcing their requirements onto the user. The only requirement is that it have 6 characters.



The fourth video is from Simply Hired a job aggregating web site. This snippet shows basically the same thing as the username validation, but with zip codes.



The next video comes from the Basecamp application by 37signals. This experience shows the deletion of items in context without a page refresh. The experience shows the item the user selects deleting out in a fade fashion instead of completely refreshing the page. In this context it is less abrupt than a traditional page refresh.

Another major usability issue on web sites are anchor tags. The reason this is a poor experience is that the web ,until fairly recently acted that when you clicked a link that it would take the user to a new page. However on FAQ pages and similar pages of that style were developed with anchor tags that took the user down the page. The issue with this was that the user had no idea they were being taken down the page. All of the navigation disappeared and some sites even implemented certain tags like “top, back” that didn’t really help. Recently I viewed a different treatment of these “anchor” tags at Joomlaworks.gr that actually gives the user context to what is occurring on the page. Though this is not a real Web 2.0 function this is a much better experience than the older anchor tag treatment. It looks a little wonky in the video, but when its live its pretty smooth.