Using Web 2.0 to Improve the User Experience

Some of the things that I really like about the heightened interactivity and dynamism of the web are all the cool things it affords us in the ongoing quest to provide the ultra user experience (UX). And I don't mean having things flashing and moving all over the page but sophisticated, appropriate, and meaningful usage to provide a more responsive, engaging, and interactive experience. Surfing the web is not a passive activity and lets face it, most of us are mostly online....even when we are channel surfing, we are probably web surfing. And we can also get a lot of our TV content online as well. So, our online activities are getting richer and richer in experience by virtue of the content and interaction new technologies such as AJAX and the like enable.

There are many examples I can point to but some practical ones involve form elements such as:
- dynamic form field hints (see Yahoo example to the right.)
- inline text editing (Flickr is an example of where this is used for editing photo captions and tags.)
- rich text formatting for text area boxes (bolding, bulleting, etc.)
- dynamic form field limiter notification (informs users how many characters are remaining for a password field, for example.)
- inline or in-page windows/panes for functionality such as for displaying live and external content such as rss feeds or search results. (see Google example to the right.)
- in-place login windows (the Blogger sign in is an example of this.)
- adding other visual elements such as customizing your cursor to include a question mark,"?", can be useful for a help section of a web app.

The downside of all of this is that more interactivity and dynamic functionality can mean more code and heavier pages. So, we need to all use these technologies judiciously and sparingly so as to enhance the UX, not encumber it!