Last week I gave a talk at the UK ColdFusion User Group on the subject of Enhancing User Interfaces With Ajax and Coldfusion.

In fact, the talk was sufficiently general for the "..and Coldfusion" bit to be dropped - there's virtually no CF in it. Hopefully it will be of interest to any developer currently using Ajax or thinking of doing so, regardless of programming language.

The main point I wanted to get across was this -

although the recent explosion of interest in all things Ajax has indeed enabled developers to approach user interface design in a new way - or, as the marketroids would have it, Re-think the User Experience Paradigm ™" - there are still sound reasons for approaching this in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary way.

In other words:

• DON'T design an interface that's completely dependent on Ajax, and then try to reverse-engineer accessibility
• DO start with an interface that already works for your lowest common denominator, then look at how Ajax can enhance it.

I also looked at how we've used it to enhance interfaces in an application that is yet to go live but has been giving us warm fuzzy feelings for weeks, plus I went into some detail about usability and accessibility considerations when using Ajax.

You can download the presentation slides here:

Enhancing User Interfaces With Ajax - presentation

I also went through the process of adding Google Suggest-esque functionality to a simple search form. You can download the example code (ColdFusion + HTML + JS + CSS) here:

Ajax Demo Code - Search Suggest