Practical .NET

The Psychology of AJAX

If you’ve been poking around the .NET blogs long enough, you’ve seen the word AJAX, perhaps even visited Michael Schwarz’s website, maybe even downloaded his AJAX.Net assembly and poked around in it. I know I have. I see the value in AJAX, and that’s not what this post is about.

I want to ask the audience some questions regarding the psychology of AJAX.

The thing that got me interested in AJAX was a post about the way Sam Goody was incorporating it into their shopping cart system. (Sorry, I can’t find the link now). Using AJAX, a user clicks an “Add to cart” link. Immediately after the click, the image is replaced with an “Updating” message, and after about ½ of a second, an “In Cart” image appears.

As we all know, our computers (particularly our servers) are very fast. It probably doesn’t take about .5 seconds to perform the appropriate action on the server. This “wait” period can be accomplished by putting a system.threading.thread.currentthread.sleep(500) in the AJAX method on the server side, or of course by pausing the execution of the JavaScript. Personally, I prefer just having the server sleep for 500 milliseconds.

So, this isn’t an issue technically. My questions come from a User Experience angle.

Question: We’re all used to waiting for pages (even on a high speed connection). Does the fact that AJAX allows seemingly immediate results affect the user experience negatively? For example, Sam Goody could have done a round trip on their site, and the user would have expected to wait for it. So, when things happen immediately, are they inclined to think something might be wrong? Does the appearance of the server doing “something” (even though it’s “sleeping”) enhance the user experience to the point where that ½ of a second is a significant gain?

Any thoughts?