I have recently started building some ajaxy interfaces for one /two hobby projects. Now there is a difference in hobby project and live application which would be used by may be thousands of users online. Application more or less remains same but suddenly there is a shift in the goal. You are building it for people and they are going to assess it and will either admire it or just give pass over it. There are so many things to make real world good web application. I guess you need to start with the goal of your application. Thats the starting point. Some good vision statement for your application. Lets say wufoo. It says “Free HTML form builder“. My another favorite application “weebly” says Create your website “Fast,Free,Easy,Now“. They have vision and hence the road map to follow and keep on revising the vision statement if needed as it is obvious; farther you go you know something more and that adds value to you.

I love User Interface and things around it. There is so much to learn and it gives you the one and only chance to present your application to your application user. So you can hardly afford to screw it.Because of the recent assignments and new found interest I mulled over this topic for couple of days. I have put down some “must have” points for good web applications. These are some cursory things; I will add some more things later on.

• UI should be so intuitive that we need not have help pages for that.(i.e. minimal).
• This further extends to design consistency over the flow of the application.
• Avoid giving any surprises to the end user.
• It should load as fast as possible.
• Delay part of the application which can be loaded later i.e. lazy loading.

One example could be loading of updates from friends in Orkut after page is fully loaded. These updates can be fetched once the page is loaded. Your application is FOR the end user so it needs to help him/her in some way. If you have provided engaging experience then you will have loyal users. Converting them to customer is next BIG step though. Shelfari is very good example for the same. Same is applicable for the iRead application on facebook.

New applications work in tandem with the user. They obey what the user wants from the application. Twitter is one example for the same. Some of the applications then work in background for the users and provide them data that can be used by them. Feedburner/statcounter/google analytics and so many other such applications are examples for the same. Now the catch is how users perceive the data. Is it just a notification?;then you should not follow the path facebook had taken. Look at the same thing which orkut has managed so well that “User is the ultimate king” and application still says Sir/Madam here are the new updates/friend requests/community updates. Do you want to have them on your loading page? So that is serving the user. I know Facebook is doing same thing but it has taken end users so much for ride that People are loosing hope in it.It looks like 2 party deal for end users and as soon as ypu login there you have lot of surprises every day.So remember notifications do play big part in web applications and you must manage it well as it affects the loyalty of the end user. I particularly remember mails from the 43things ; it used to send me mail with the content that I had planned for so and such thing with the end line “your future self”. Plays big part to win over the user. Once the humility to user lost you no longer have good application. But if it is there people forgive you. Good example is “No donut for you” message on Orkut.

But understanding what users want is not really easy once you have rolled out the application. There is subtle demand from the end users for some things that you can build and then build the loyal user base. In order to have this you need some dialog with the users. Now how to have that is real tough question; I need to surf a lot and collect some examples about this. But if you have loyal users they can give you valuable feedback and in that they are actually paying you back indirectly which would help you to monetize it later. This is the reason so many startups have private beta and they choose the users because they already have “somewhat” clear idea about the end users.

There are many more things that I need to put down on this topic but if you analyze the web applications; it is SMART as well HARD task to build useful (to end user) web application. It took so many lines to put that but here is the master piece from paul graham

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

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