There are a couple of new articles at A List Apart: Flywheels, Kinetic Energy, and Friction by Nick Usborne and Getting Started with Ajax by Aaron Gustafson.

Flywheels, Kinetic Energy, and Friction

In the first article, Usborne tackles fatal a tipping point in the success or failure of your online business — the problem of shopping cart abandonment. He sees that problem as one of too little energy versus too much friction:

As a formula, it is easy to visualize. In order to maximize the success of your site you need to increase the energy you transfer to your readers, and reduce the friction within the page or pages on which the reader has to do something.

He goes on in to explain his concept of transferring energy to the client, providing a real world example.

Getting Started with Ajax

There has been a great deal of Ajax examples on the web lately that aren’t really Ajax. For those of you looking for detailed examples of what Ajax is, Aaron Gustafson’s introduction (an excerpt from Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition) to the technology is a great place to start. His examples primarily deal with Ajax’s interaction with the DOM so they may not be ideal for novices or beginners.

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