Today, at that Avenue A | Razorfish event (A A|R is owned by Microsoft, it turns out) there was a presentation from the people who built two different sites for XM Radio. The Online Store was built with Flex, the XM Program Guide with Ajax. They both look pretty good. I guess it means you can’t sign up for XM with an iPhone. I remain unconvinced that the extra sizzle and flash you get with RIA technology is enough better than Ajax to make it worthwhile—but then XM reported increased conversion rates when they rolled in the new site. Interestingly, they said that Ajax was a particularly good fit for the channel guide because HTML naturally handles grid-like structures well. True when you think of it, but I never had.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: shawn (Jan 26 2008, at 09:45)
I wonder if there is truly significant correlation between the use of an RIA approach and the increase in traffic. The spike could be due to any number of factors ranging from launch publicity to a wide gap in quality between the old design (not necessarily implementation) and the new one.
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From: jeff carroll (Jan 29 2008, at 11:02)
not sure where the can't-sign-up-for-XM-with-an-iPhone is coming from, but as of right now, the (stock) iPhone won't do any kind of continuous streams, no?
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