Jesse James Garrett is director of user experience at Adaptive Path, a clued-in user experience company that's well-represented and much-referenced at Web 2.0. Jesse positioned himself, purposefully or not, in the middle of Web 2.0 by coining the term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Associate editor Stephen Bryant spoke to him about the hype surrounding Web 2.0, the advances in user experience, and the future of AJAX.

What the biggest news for you as a user experience guy?

For me, as a user experience expert, it's really great to hear so many people talk about how critical user experience is on the Web, both in terms of delivering quality products and the business advantages. And to hear somebody like Mary Meeker get up on stage and say that user experience is going to be the critical factor in growth is just amazing.

You said yesterday that one of the primary challenges ahead for adoption of AJAX is the lack of development tools. When are we going to rectify this?

I think that there are opportunities here for both commercial vendors and non-commercial products. Morfik is launching their AJAX product, and Eclipse just announced JavaScript support. So I think it's a huge opportunity, and there's going to be a lot of growth here, and soon.

You were at the Launch Pad session yesterday. Did you see a lot of advances in the area of user experience there?

I'm not sure there was a lot going on. I'm sure you noticed that Zimbra got a big reaction from the crowd. And I think what they've done with the user experience of that product really depends on the presence of AJAX. And it's the kind of thing that seemed like it was just out of reach last week, and now it's here.

Rollyo is an interesting idea, and the polish on it is really nice. Flock looked like it would be really cool, but I had a hard time understanding the demo. They sort of mumbled through the whole thing, and I think they tried to show too much in the time they were given.

So everyone here is breathlessly bloviating about all the amazing things to happen with Web 2.0. If you could take the collective audience by the lapels and say "you just don't get X," what would "X" be?

That's a good question. It's really gratifying to hear everyone talking about how important user experience is, but they're not talking about it enough. The tagline for Web 2.0 is "Web 2.0 is people," but all we're hearing is technology.

Last question. Web 2.0, hype or no?

Something is really happening here. I think we are coming out of the long dark night of the post-boom era. But you know, the big thing for me is not only that something is happening, but that something will continue to happen. There's a clear sense of possibility that's going to go for years and years.

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