Design Pattern: Read/Write Div: "
Jonathan Boutelle has written about, what he calls, the Read/Write Div pattern.
What is the Read/Write Div pattern? A new AJAX convention cropping up in a few places, one that is easy to implement and has real benefit to end users. I haven’t found a description of it anywhere, so I thought I’d write it up here.
The basic idea is that user controls (typically for editing the displayed data) should be hidden from the user until needed. At ‘rest’, an area of the screen displays information in read-only fashion.
Why the Read/Write Div Works Fewer controls means that the user has to make fewer choices before taking an action, and therefore it takes less time for the user to choose which item to click on. The technical term for this effect is ‘Hicks Law’.
Also, the ‘read-only’ view of the data takes up much less space than the ‘read-write’ view does, so much more information can be packed into a given page, which means that the user doesn’t have to scroll down to read content. Avoiding the scrolling saves the user a measureable amount of time while browsing (3.05 seconds, according to my back-of-the-envelope GOMS keystroke analysis).
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(Via Ajaxian Blog.)