AJAX Ideas
I have been playing with Javascript a lot lately in my spare time, and I thought I would put a post here about some of the ideas that I have been having. Most people are already familiar with most of these things, as big ecommerce sites like Apple, Amazon and others have already been doing this on their sites for a while. What I am talking about is interfaces that load information without reloading the web page itself, which is made possible via AJAX. AJAX essentially means using Javascript to talk to the server in the background, and updating a web page to display the response. This all happens asynchronously, so that the user doesn';t need to wait for a page reload.
So here are the ideas for our website that I would like to plan on putting into the next incarnation. Or if I get a moment, maybe try and get them in. Either way, I welcome comments to this post about what other people think, and how we can make this site more friendly to users. So here goes:
Integrated Search Function: Currently the search function on our site searches the database of articles and brings back the results according to relevance. While an "advanced search" page would need to be created (especially as time goes on and our article archive grows), I would like to see the search box on the right side perform the search in the background. You would enter a search, and when submitted a "loading circle" or something would inform the user that the server is being queried. Once the results come back, the top ten or so would be displayed in a scrolling box, which would appear in the search form. Of course, you would need an option to click to a full results display, but I think that it would be an interesting feature.
One common AJAX implementation lately is the live search, which send a search request to the server every time a character is typed into the search field, and relevant search suggestions are displayed. Not going there, since they bother me. But I thought it was worth mentioning.
The Subscriber Login: When a subscriber logs into the site, I would like to see that happen in the background as well. Rather than the current method, which logs them in and re-directs, AJAX would allow us to send the login information in the background. Again a "loading circle"; or something would display while communication is happening, and then the response would trigger a change in the page. A successful login would display a greeting and account links, and a failed login would explain the failure and show login form again.
The Newsletter Signup: This is another spot where there is user interaction, and the page is reloaded to show the results. I think that we could get this one to be the same as above, with the signup form being greatly simplified and the interaction not disrupting the user experience of the site.
RSS Feeds: Another fun little AJAX trick is to pull RSS feeds from various places and display them. This can be done all the time, or started when the users clicks a button. In this case, I think it would be cool to have the latest blog entries from each of our blogs show on the main blogs page, or even the home page. This would be a "ticker"; of sorts, that accesses the feed and simpy scrolls through the RSS feed, displaying a summary of each entry for about 30 seconds or so. Again, nothing too crazy, but fun.
The Subscription Form: Don't get me started. This thing could be made much more intuitive using AJAX, but that will require an overhaul on the subscription system that we use. I haven;t gotten there yet with it, but know that I am looking into this one, and I'll post about it again soon.
So these are simple little things, which we could use AJAX to make a little easier. However, in the end they make the website more user friendly, and they afford us options in displaying various content should we ever decide to take advantage of that.
Again, I would love to hear comments from readers about where they would look at streamlining the site, whether these improvements would be worth it, and what other people have to say about these ideas.
