A few months ago I had Bill Scott from Yahoo come talk to people here at CNET about Designing for Ajax. One of the things that he and I talked about before his talk was how the competative landscape for Yahoo has changed dramatically in the last year or two. Take Yahoo Maps. This application was pretty much unchanged for several years and it’s only competitor was Map Quest who had, in most ways, the same application. Along comes Google and makes a killer map application, but what changed here? The maps are still the same, right? The interface is the new battlefield.

Case in point. I use Google’s image search all the time. When doing mockups or needing some icon or whatever, I just do a quick google image search and I’ve got it. Now Microsoft, on it’s Live.com site, just rolled out a better image search by FAR, but what makes it better? The image results are the same, but the interface is spectacular.

Via ajaxian:

Microsoft recently released a major upgrade to Live Search on Live. com. Here’s an overview of the Ajax-powered image search. The service is pretty snappy, a great leap in usability over ‘Image Search 1.0′. It’s exciting to see some bleeding-edge patterns used in a service like this.

Features include:

• ‘Smart Scroll’. This is the Virtual Workspace pattern applied to a long list/table, or what Bill Scott calls ‘Death To Paging’. There’s no ‘Next/Previous 20 results’ - you simply browse all the results by scrolling, and the page loads new images as you scroll, as well as updating the result count. There have been some nice demos along these lines, but this is the first major site to drop pagination in this way (any other examples?)
• Bookmarkable URLs. Excellent! A major site finally adjusts the URL to reflect Javascript state, so you can bookmark it and send it to your friends. The technique involves setting the # property in the URL (the ‘fragment identifer’), so you get a bookmarkable URL like http://search.msn.com/images/results.aspx#imagesize=all&q=pac-man.
  But we all know Ajax breaks REST/bookmarks/history ;).
• Scratchpad. An optional scratchpad lets you build a collection of images together for later use. You can drag images into the scratchpad, drag to rearrange them, and drag them between different collections.
• Embedded web page. Using an embedded IFrame, the original web page containing the image is shown inside the results area.
• Adjustable image size. Pull a Slider back and forth to quickly zoom the images in and out.

Happily conspicuous by its absence is the Live Search. pattern. The interface requires you to explicitly click the search button rather than continuously updating, which would have been inappropriate for this app.

All in all, a great effort and a chance to see some experimental Ajax features running on a high-profile site.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 9:48 am and is filed under 'Industry' News, Examples. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.