I have been working on making the user experience of PocketSmith as seamless as possible, with feedback being provided to people whenever some processing is going on behind the scenes. The reason for this is that we are taking a particular user experience philosophy when building the application – never leave the user guessing what is going on.
We believe that this goes a long way to bridge the gap between desktop applications and web application. Good desktop apps provide the user with information about what is happening, what is being processed, where they being taken to, and why it is taking a few seconds to get there.
On the other hand, web applications often do not provide people with this level of feedback on the processes that are currently being undertaken – sometimes you are provided with “Loading…” and maybe a pretty animated image, but are only sporadically provided actual information about what is going down behind the scenes.
“Never leave people guessing” is a fairly simple paradigm in theory, however the execution of such a strategy can make up a large portion of how a user perceives and uses a web application, and is actually something that requires a fair bit of thought. What do you tell the user? How do you tell the user? What sort of detail, if any, is the user actually looking for?
So with this theory in mind I started to apply it to the application. All very smooth, intuitive and informative for the user. Unfortunately much of this “magic” involves Javascript, and I really didn’t want the website to be completely crippled for those that choose to switch client-side scripting off – slightly different perhaps, but not crippled. So I turned off Javascript and used the application, and as I expected there was a reasonable number of gaping holes in the usability of the site
Fortunately, fixing it so this functionality degraded gracefully was relatively easy to do, by simply defining the href html attribute in the remote link code. So now all links and actions work without Javascript. People that have Javascript turned off when using the application will however have to guess what is going on – although there are probably work-arounds for this, chances are they would take a fair amount of time and effort for a relatively small proportion of the overall market.
We are also letting people with Javascript disabled in their browser know that they will not be experiencing Pocketsmith the way that we had intended, although it will continue working. Kinda feels like the obligatory ESRB statement for online multiplayer games – “Experience may change during online play”. Except in this case it would be “Experience will not be as cool without Javascript.”
Tags: development, javascript, user interface
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