So, I am at the CFUnited conference here in DC. Sitting in the ‘Flex Coding Kitchen’ presentation, I realized that I am truly hanging out with 1000 of the brightest, most talented inmates in the asylum. It is interesting to hang out and hear them talk, and I am glad I am able to get a better insight as to what makes them tick.

I just got done listening to a guy from Microsoft who was talking to us about “User Experience”. He proceeded to describe some elements of what user experience design is. They included: it works well, it looks good, etc.

I know that we have to consider the audience: mostly Coldfusion developers. But, his ‘elements’ of the user experience were not explained well (let alone NAMED very well), and he did not fully connect how they relate to the product he was featuring: Atlas.

Atlas is Microsoft’s Ajax framework. It is designed to primarily work with .NET technologies, but also interfaces to other platforms as well. I am sure there are probably more bells and whistles when using Microsoft platforms, which is certainly why they are giving it away for free. But, exactly how does Atlas support and improve the user experience?

This is where the danger of using technology blindly can occur. Ajax is fun for developers to use, because it allows them to make user interfaces do things that they could not do before. This is also why interaction designers like it as well. Yet, without implementing user centered design techniques, using Ajax has the potential of creating an equally bad user experience as plain old HTML. The main issue that comes up is breaking the user’s mental model of how web pages normally work by implementing asycrounous data calls to the server and displaying them in the user interface– before the user hits the ‘Submit’ button. So, letting the inmates run loose with the design of these new types of interactions is dangerous.

Now, some of the questions of usable Ajax interaction have been solved since I was made aware of them at User Experience Week 2005. For example, if you have an e-commerce site that allows you to customize a product, and you are using Ajax to dynamically update the product view to reflect these customizations, Atlas creates a simple way to incorporate those attributes into URL variables so you can send a friend a direct link to a page that represents the same state the page is currently in.

Ajax itself is no different than html was in the early ’90s. In the wrong hands, it can cause major frustration for users. Interaction designers applying user centered design techniques can embrace these tools and use them to create great user experiences.

I just hope we can convince the inmates, and get them to trust the designers to create usably pleasant interactions.