Ajax is an important development for Web applications, and its importance is only going to grow.

My job involves a lot of different skills now - I'm as much entrepreneur and management consultant as anything else these days - but IA is still my favorite part of the work I do.

User-centered design means understanding what your users need, how they think, and how they behave - and incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process.

Problems with visual design can turn users off so quickly that they never discover all the smart choices you made with navigation or interaction design.

At Adaptive Path, we've been doing our own work with Ajax over the last several months, and we're realizing we've only scratched the surface of the rich interaction and responsiveness that Ajax applications can provide.

I'm not sure that you can say definitively that some roles are better filled by consultants, but I would say that some projects are better handled by consultants.

But despite the universality of URLs, we often forget that they're not just a handy way to address network resources. They're also valuable communication tools.