Drag and drop. PLEASE STOP!

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day, give him a jQuery UI toolkit, and he’ll try to use every bl@*dy effect in every bl@*dy web page. I’ve seen it happen. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of jQuery, and I think some of the jQuery UI widgets, and effects, can really enhance the look and usability of a website. My issue is that whilst its appropriate use can enhance looks and usability, inappropriate and excessive use, can have the exact opposite affect. I should make it clear that I used jQuery merely as an example here and could have used any other toolkit, in any technology, to illustrate my point.

A common mistake web developer’s make, once they’ve discovered a new technology, is to attempt to design their user interface around that technology, instead of designing the interface based on the users needs. You will, of course, need to understand what you can achieve with the technologies available to you, but you should strive to design the interface first and then select the best technologies to implement it. Starting with the technology first, may blind your view of what the user really needs. In my experience, developers like to use the ‘coolest’ and ‘latest’ technologies regardless of whether they really need to. To guard against this, I suggest you include time in the development schedule for experimenting with the latest innovations. During this time, developers can work on a ‘practice’ project that has no delivery expectations or associated timescales. This approach will not improve a developer’s requirements gathering or interface design skills but it will as least satisfy their desire for using a specific technology.

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