Communicating with users on other web pages

Question

This question is part user experience, part engineering.

I am trying to find a nice, clean way to have a user communicate with my web page while they are on another web page. I have web services that will accept HTTP POST/GET, so AJAX and other asynchronous niceties are welcome - don't worry about the details of their communication, they can easily be modified to fit a solution.

The problem I'm running into lies within the user interaction. Ex., say the user is viewing a web page and they want to send my system the web site's URL. I would like it if they could do it while still looking at that page, and without too many "crazy clicks" - currently they have to go back over to my page and enter the information (as you can imagine this has tested horribly).

I have ruled out browser tool bars (easy to do in FF, but a lot of my users use IE) and local applications (they won't want to install Java or Adobe Air apps).

Have you ever solved a problem like this before, or do you have an idea of how I could solve it? Should I be looking at separate solutions for FF and IE (ex., a tool bar for FF and something else for IE)? Don't worry about Safari and Chrome, though a solution that supports them too would be nifty.

Thanks.

p.s. The user would have an account on my system already.

Answer 1

Have you thought about something like the Digg Bar?

Users can access it through a bookmarklet, or you can do a url prefix like http://yoursite.com/<other_site_url>. When users click links, the bar stays active.

Answer 2

What if you wrote a system tray application. Something similar to Pixel Ruler

This could sit in their tray, and it would know you're website. That would eliminate browser toolbars, and could conceivably work on several browsers. You could probably even set it up as an install if they visit your website.

Then you could expose a webservice on your site that this control would pass back info to (like the user's name, current website, etc)

Answer 3

I don't know about the details of your application, but the only solution I can imagine is that you have a page split into two frames, with your toolbar at the top. stumbleupon.com does this, but it makes sense because they're providing the web content.

Simply, your users would have to visit your site before they could do their own browsing. Is that reasonable for your project? That sounds like it could be a user experience disaster of its own. Also, if most of your users are using IE, I'm going to assume that they're not the most web savvy users out there.