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I want to share some ideas about using AJAX in web interface development. Working with Dojo, jQuery or any other JavaScript framework any web developer is able to offer a higher level of usability. In my projects I try to implement the following:

Error checking in forms:
Detecting duplicates of username, e-mail, security number etc requires additional hits in the database without reloading the entire page. Build small AJAX calls to retrieve data from the database and to establish if the user input is correct or not.

Submit user comments:
User should never leave the page of a product to post a comment or to rate a product. Continue Reading »

I found a very interesting tool to write articles on Ideaticus.com : Windows Live Writer. I have to admit that I’m rarely impressed by Microsoft software and in this case I really am.

First of all it was extremely easy to connect this software to my WordPress and if someone has more then one site it’s very easy to manage multiple WordPress instances. 

Continue Reading »

I managed to finish another article about Human Computer Interaction. In the previous episode we covered some rules about search results. Maybe some of you found them useful and I decided to write about Graphical User Interface (GUI).

The most used paradigm in Graphical User Interfaces is “window, icon, menu, pointing device” (WIMP). First approaches on web documents were mostly linear documents with some embedded graphics. In 21 century we have modal windows, tabbed browsing, interactive interfaces and many others that make our life easier. Continue Reading »

As I promise, I’ll write a series of articles about Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The prologue of this series had defined some terms from HCI theory. This article is focused on web interfaces, especially website search interfaces.

First rule: do not return “No results” on any search. Try to find some answers for the user even the keyword is something like “asdsad dfdsf sdf”. If your site sells something, user should always have the opportunity to buy.

Second rule: suggest keywords. There are two ways of suggesting keywords: in the search box and on the site as links.

In the search box: Using javascript you can make your search box smarter by suggesting keywords in the same manner as Apple does on their website.

On the site as links: We found many implementations for this kind of keyword suggestion. One of them is called “tag cloud”. I prefer this implementation because of simplicity. Users easily see a list of keywords: “cat, dog, animal, bird” without any action (click in a search box, type a letter etc.)

Third rule: Do not return too many answers. Messages like “We found 123231 results for your search” are not welcome on sites other then search engines. People rarely browse more the 50 results and it doesn’t make sense to show 1000.

Forth rule: Organize results by importance. If you sell books, for example, you will prefer to return the results ordered by book popularity and not alphabetically or price ascending.

Fifth rule: Offer different sorting and filtering criteria. Allow user to sort books by price, by author or by year, for example.

All those rules will make user’s life much easier and most probably will come back happily.

I try to find different kind of approaches when I have to design web interfaces even I am a developer and not a designer. Reading about how to design an interface, I found the “Human Computer Interaction” (HCI) term. My first research on this subject was about 2 years ago and I found a lot of useful informations since then, but I am very far away of having a clear and complete vision about the subject.

I don’t want to spend more time on talking about iteration styles and paradigms, but the following piece of theory is very useful. Basically, the HCI goal is to improve the interaction between humans and computers by increasing usability and receptiveness to the user’s needs. Another important field related to HCI is User Experience (UX). User Experience talks about user’s perception of a device or system and tries to improve the interaction between the user and the device or the system.

Next articles about Human-Computer Interaction will focus on web and software interfaces with good or bad examples, evolution of software development process and I will try to find the answer for the following question: “How to improve an interface design?” .