So what do adverts, browsing the Web and usability all have in common? Just one thing – Jakob Nielsen, the web’s original usability guru.
Technology Guardian: The hype is everywhere about Web 2.0. How do things like Ajax fit into the guidelines you’ve been espousing?
Jakob Nielsen: It’s always been good usability to make interfaces reactive, to have as fast response times as possible. Many of these Web 2.0 things are tricks to provide it in a faster way. – in that sense it works well … it’s just a programming technique for achieving these goals. I used to say that I don’t like a lot of functionality inside a web browser … but now you can view the browser more like a programming system or a programming language almost, and therefore your browser can become a support platform.
The question then becomes “is that the best way of doing these applications”, or is it still best to download them and use them as a full-featured application which sucks in small amounts of data. But it’s all a continuum: at one end you have pure data and information on the web, and on the other the full applications. Most things exist in the middle. Information-only websites have are still useful, and then something like Microsoft Office has rich interaction styles that are still easier to do on the desktop…. Source: Guardian Unlimited
[tags]applications,technology,guardian,interfaces[/tags]