In the process of developing or refining software and services, we always pay attention to scalability to ensure that transactions, searches and other database-intensive or high-volume actions do not decrease the responsiveness of the service overall. You, as the user, rightly expect that most actions you perform with a business system will occur in real time or near real time rather than coffee break time.

In addition to making the underlying plumbing of the system robust, good engineering is necessary to make the user interface (e.g. desktop or web application) continue to respond to your input and your directions as fast as you can issue such commands. We think of this as a scalable user interface or UI. The web server needs good resources, caching should be used when appropriate and these days we can even use techniques like AJAX to perform some operations within the page rather than requiring a costly trip to and from the server and a full re-draw of your browser page.

Designers and developers have gotten noticeably better at scalable UI and UI in general. That’s a blanket statement, so it’s guaranteed to be false somewhere. The “Web 2.0″ mindset has, however, improved the attention to more than just visual design–to making screen layouts and workflow facilitate the user rather than make them spend lots of time reading, peering around and not using the product efficiently. In Trading Grid Online, for example, we sequence some sections of the portal to go from overview/scorecard mode to deep-dive detail in a logical manner on-demand. Detailed status reports may not be necessary if everything is in happy working order for a given time period.

This type of scalable UI design, however, focuses on a single customer workflow in the service. Let’s make this search faster. Let’s re-design this input form. I think web application designers in particular need to spend more time focusing on scalable *User Experience* which takes a broader view of the customer’s interaction with the product.

Consider this: after we’ve optimized a custom search form and made the form faster, what’s next? We’re not done. Trading Grid Online users, more than anything else, access and run reports. Your trading partnerships might not change every day. You don’t necessarily need to review your online invoice three times a week if you’re invoiced monthly. But your transactions flow all the time and sometimes they fail (not yours of course, but just for the sake of the argument). You need to monitor for errors, you need to research errors and you need to validate new types of transactions or new processes with partners that have not been as time-tested as some of your core historical transactions.

Scalable UE looks at your common behavior and says: “The form is optimal and the search is fast, but this guy does a core set of searches or reports five times a day, six days a week. Let’s figure out a way to help him not have to use the form at all.” The helpfulness and efficiency of the service scales with the amount of time you spend using it. This doesn’t require artificial intelligence. I want to, for example, note that you have run an identical query against your inbound transactions each day this week and simply offer to save it in a one-click list or automatically present it each time you log in. I want the service to reward you the more time you use it–I want your experience to scale with how often you touch the interface. Here are a few examples I have seen to illustrate this point:

Good: Microsoft Word Auto-Correct - this feature learns over time commonly transposed letters and other unique mistakes that you make and helps automatically correct them (if you want it to). Although I find Word formatting very aggravating, I do appreciate this feature. After using it for a while, it gets better at correcting “my” typing.

Bad: Windows Desktop Cleanup Wizard - this component makes the assumption that you do not put things on your desktop as part of an organizational strategy, but just put things there an occassionally need the system to help you hide some of them to make more room for others. While that may be how some people use the desktop (I know many of them), it generally causes disruption instead of benefit. If you watch people, they get very attached to the location of icons and a slight change can make for some confusing moments.

There’s a fine line to draw between being invasive and disruptive and being generally helpful. I’d love to see more examples of this. Leave a comment. I will continue to pay attention.