AJAX User Interface in HR
Much commotion was made about AJAX last year when it took hold in the web marketplace. Certainly the web applications of it are marvelous and bloggers like myself spent much time wondering where it would go and what forms it might take shape in. I personally held my opinion until I saw more of it and could really have a clear vision in how I thought it might impact HR.
+ c8 N q) ]7 l* O7 J, KFirst however, perhaps not everyone is familiar with AJAX as a technology. Basically, it’s asynchronous java script something or other… What all that really means is that when you load a webpage, a java script is loaded with the HTML calling additional data from the server. AJAX is asynchronous (meaning not real time) because the server side data is requested only once during the page load. What this data does is rather dynamic, but the possibilities are endless.( u7 u4 f3 }, a& c! @8 C( Y! |
One of the best examples is on the Google maps page. If you search for an address and then click the link for nearby businesses, each of those businesses will dynamically display over the map with pertinent information such as web links, reviews, and images. This is all done without calling for a data refresh because the data was prepared and made available when you originally loaded the page.
$ W- r6 `4 }( U ]( m3 gLooking forward to seeing how AJAX can make HR pages more rich, the easiest place to start is employee and manager self service portal applications. Imagine loading your performance reviews and immediately being able to POP up new overlays of reports, prior review history, and workflow without having to wait the extra two or three seconds. All of this is possible because AJAX would keep loading data even after you’ve finished loading the current page. Saving 2-3 seconds may not seem like a whole lot, but when you have 5 employees to review, and 10 pages to look at for each to gather data, it adds up. From an employee view, you might be able to provide better help and navigation assistance with AJAX, or simply more convenient pages rather than re-navigating through the menu tree.- g6 S. D f$ H' L5 _
Certainly AJAX also holds much promise is HR applications as well. Consider an employee profile screen in your HRMS. This might have elements such as job, department, personal data, etc, but imagine if the detail of each of these continued to load and a simple click expanded the specific data you wanted to drill down into?
8 b8 |0 D: J3 ?& G! d* AI’m fairly sure that my fellow bloggers will thing I missed the boat on this one, but I think that understanding where Google and Yahoo have taken AJAX give us much better insight into how our HR vendors might shape their development futures. Needless to say, AJAX is cool stuff and I look forward to seeing it in HR, hoping of course that I never realize it’s there working in the background.
