Web applications and sites tend to illustrate an insensitivity to human experience. Technologists fascination with technology as something outside of and distinct from humanity points to this lack of sensitivity in the conceptualization and formation of the web technologies. Such a fascination with technology becomes part of the weave of the technology itself. Rather than invisibly serving the needs of people, the technology becomes the subject, and the web serves as a technology “showcase.” I used to think that we were at a place to incorporate an appreciation of personhood into the design of web software. By adapting to individual Users, software could then point each User to information and other Users without being specifically requested to do so by a User. I’m now of the opinion that in order to bring about what I refer to as Web2.U technologists will first have to learn more about human nature. Note that ‘human nature‘ is a misnomer!

Until then, because it’s so darn much to effectuate even small change, I’ve put off the ideas for web2.U and have been focusing on the interactive web, developing interactions that occur at a rate that affords the natural flow of emotions for the given interaction. One example is in the form of a posting at my weblog, On Valuing Creative Thinking. Another instantiation is in the form of a game I’m developing with a partner for Facebook.

Additionally, I’ve coded up my site plexAV to serve as a testbed for a technology that I’ve been developing. My goal, “to make apparent to others opportunities they would otherwise have failed to note.”

Jesse James Garrett, author of The Elements of User Experience, has been touting a Microsoft developed technology as the next big thing. Garrett says, “The gap between the experiences we can provide on the desktop and the experiences users can get online is closing, thanks to a new Web application framework we call Ajax.” For those interested, you can find the quote in this article. Ajax, which stands for ‘asynchronous Java and XML’, enables the development of better web applications. Using Ajax, communication between the server & client is no longer dependant upon the User. Information is updated without the generally required User mouse-click. The cost associated with implementing AJAX is relatively small when there is relatively little data-flow between client and server. As the amount of data-flow increases, the complexity increases disproportionately.

While the word ‘Ajax’ might carry with it a sense of shiny sparkly cleanliness, one finds that it’s been around for a while. Ajax will not result in vastly improved web applications. When compared with HTML, Ajax’s advantage can be distilled to a single trait, resolution. Because information can be transmitted asynchronously, software designers may develop and implement more complex models of various processes and objects. In essence however, such an approach saddles designers and coders with complexity that quickly demonstrates the law of diminishing returns. One will find that developers use Ajax to improve data transfer or aggregation and to provide flourishes to websites.