Storyboard your DHTML interactions

Bill Scott gave an interesting lecture today at Yahoo! about AJAX design patterns. He explained how good AJAX designs keep the user’s attention on the page, remove roadblocks, and increase stickiness to a site.

Patterns of successful AJAX behaviors are beginning to appear (Netflix, 37Signals, Yahoo!). There are subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, changes that can occur to let a user know that an action has happened.

Download the drag and drop storyboard design package

For instance, he pointed out an interaction on the recently departed Yahoo! Photos site. A user could select multiple photos and then drag them to special collection folders. The page generated several panels to let the user know that the move would go to the preferred folder (hit yes), wait for the action to finish, and then a final congratulations panel (hit yes). These panels and the two required clicks could have been avoided if the folder changed when the photos were dropped into it. This could be a simple glow and maybe the number of photos in the folder is increased.

Plan your entire sequence in advance

Eric Miraglia coined the phrase Interesting Moments to describe the multiple changes that occur during an AJAX/DHTML action.

In most cases, Drag and Drop requires that you write code to respond to the interesting moments in the interaction: when the drag event starts, when the dragged object enters another object, and so on.
Yahoo! UI Library: Drag & Drop – Interesting Moments

Your user will have a much more pleasant experience if these are considered in the beginning of production. The Yahoo User Interface library includes a storyboard template (.zip) for planning these interactions effectively. This story board concept also works well for forms (especially form validation actions) and Flash components.

Update

The YUI blog has posted a video of Bill’s lecture: YUI Theater — Bill Scott: “Designing the Rich Web Experience: Principals and Patterns for Rich Interaction Design on the Web”. This is a great opportunity to learn from one of the finest developers around.

Related articles

• YUI 2.5.2 Released, Big Focus on Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 Support [via Zemanta]
• Pingdom checks on JavaScript usage on top sites [via Zemanta]
• A Need for Information and Interface Design Pattern Websites [via Zemanta]
• Social Design Patterns for Reputation Systems: An Interview with Yahoo’s Bryce Glass (Part II) [via Zemanta]