XMLHttpRequest as a Usability Tool

Posted 2005-03-06 @ 13:34:21

There's been a lot of buzz (including the requisite buzzwords) lately about XMLHttpRequest, and its impact on web-based application development. Clearly, this is a Big Deal, and we'll undoubtedly see some really slick innovations in the coming months, but there's one aspect of this new paradigm that I've not seen discussed: its potential use in ongoing usability studies involving live applications.

I was chatting with Steve earlier, and he's reworking client-side form validation for new user signups at his company to use XMLHttpRequest, instead of serving up 16K of rules in a JavaScript file to every user. When I asked for a guesstimate as to how much data transfer that might save, he commented that they really have no idea how many errors get caught by the current system, so there's no way of knowing how much of that 16K gets used.

But it occurs to me that they'll be able to track that number pretty easily now, and analyzing that data might very well give some insight as to what their users are actually doing as they interact with the HTML forms. Needless to say, this information could be a huge benefit in streamlining their process, allowing them to see what real users are doing in their browsers, in real-time. No amount of focus groups or hallway testing can give us this level of understanding as to what actually happens "in the wild", and I think there could be some interesting, unexpected results from something like this.