Simon Perry demonstrates how adding some AJAX functionality into an existing system can bring huge improvements to the user experience.
4th June 2007
I can hardly believe that it’s over a year ago since I first told you about the incredible speed benefits of developing with AJAX. Since then many customers have asked for AJAX elements to be added to their new web systems, with impressive results.
But its use is not restricted to new systems, so I have been puzzled why more customers have not been adding AJAX elements to their existing systems. After all, by re-developing some of your existing system functionality using AJAX, you can speed up the customer experience, helping to minimise time delays.
My assumption has to be that I have not explained the true benefits of AJAX well enough. I plan to correct that now by talking through a few examples of how some AJAX additions to simple web sites can make all the difference to your customers.
However, I certainly don’t want to repeat myself too much, so for an explanation of AJAX, how it works and what it can do, visit our AJAX technology page and the “High speed AJAX” news item from March 2006.
Shopping cart instant “update”
One great example can be seen in the Blockbuster DVD rental website. While this site is not AJAX-driven, certain elements have been specifically built in AJAX to speed things up. The most useful example of this is where you wish to add DVDs to your list. When each DVD is displayed, an “Add to List” button is shown next to it. By clicking on this button, the DVD is added to your list, and the button changes into an icon to indicate that this has been done. The effect is instantaneous as there is no page refresh to wait for.
On the surface it may not seem like much but this sort of simple AJAX functionality can make an e-commerce site significantly faster to use and could result in more orders and a higher average order value. With an AJAX-driven “Add to Cart” button, the selected products can be added and the cart information updated within the page, without delay. This enables the customer to get on with the business of selecting more products to buy, and to get to the check-out more quickly, helping to eliminate “dead” time in which the customer could change their mind.
Product comparison made easy
When browsing e-commerce sites, customers will often have to individually visit each product in a search results list, in order to compare them. This can be quite time consuming, going back and forth to load new pages and returning to the search results in-between. A few tweaks using AJAX can really speed this process up. A simple “Info” icon could be added to the listing. By hovering the mouse over this icon, further information on the product would automatically be loaded and displayed on the list page, eliminating the need to go back and forth.
This could easily be done with the images too. With a series of thumbnail product images on the listings page, functionality can easily be added so that when you hover over each one, an expanded image box is displayed containing the higher resolution picture. Each one can then be easily viewed in turn. Image library sites could also greatly benefit from such functionality.
Time-wasting Intranets and Extranets
AJAX has an important part to play in Intranets and Extranets. Many businesses find that their staff spend a lot of time throughout the day waiting for pages to refresh on the extranet. There’s a good chance we could reduce this time-lag using AJAX. You would just need to identify which areas are taking the longest time to load, and then we could work out exactly how the interface should be converted, to speed things up with AJAX.
These are just a few examples where we can speed things up for you with AJAX. Just contact us to talk through your ideas, or to get our ideas on how we can help.