User eXperience – Essence of Rich internet Apps
With close to 10 years of my association with software industry and around last three years having spent with User eXperince Design group in the role of Technical lead for Rich Internet Applications (RIA)development team, I have experienced that in todays consumer markets, focus is rapidly progressing beyond the mere delivery of products and services to addressing the quality of the complete customer experience. Protagonists at companies today agree and appreciate the fact that businesses that provide a better customer experience can boost revenues and increase margins through their ability to acquire and retain customers, without resorting to price competition.
The reason is subtle – The earliest software users were programmers. Their deep knowledge of the technology made them highly tolerant of complex interactive models and primitive visual displays. But today’s users are very different. Virtually everyone in modern society interacts with software on a daily basis—from desktop applications to ATM’s to security systems —but few have any technical backgrounds or a desire to understand how things really work. Interactive software is now considered useful only to the extent that ordinary users can understand and take advantage of the functionality it provides. Pine, B. Joseph II and James H. Gilmore in their article “The Experience Economy; Work is Theater & Every Business a Stage” have truly written that “We are well into the transition from a service- to an experience based economy in which sensation becomes a conscious source of consumer demand”. Technology is not driving this transition, but the impact of new technologies which accelerate the emergence of rich, expressive, client-side platforms that deliver a more compelling sensory experience as well as a richer, more satisfying level of interactive control to the software user. This is Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Software that fails to embrace these enabling technologies will compete at a disadvantage in the experience economy.
Today, the rules of the game have changed. Online experiences are replacing personal interaction with customers. Customer switching costs are lower than ever before as on the web your competition is never more than a few clicks away. Customers today flow towards the online experience that lets them accomplish their goals as efficiently, reliably, and predictably as possible. Anyone dissatisfied with a product can easily sample a competitor’s offering to see how it compares. Satisfied customers, in contrast, produce a chain reaction of repeat business, both personally and through recommendations to others, who in turn generate additional business to the extent they, too, are satisfied with the experience. The economic leverage that results from this positive feedback effect is the key to dominating your market. Compelling customer experiences raise returns across the entire business by gaining new customers and retaining existing ones.
For all these reasons, it is critical to provide a competitive experience—not just a better product or service—to the growing body of online customers. Experience matters to the customers and it should matter to product owners as well.
But what makes an experience great and how will you know whether you’re providing a good experience or not? Great experience from a product comes from three things: Ability to generate desired emotional response, Usability and fitness to purpose.
All other things being equal, we want our experiences to be as vivid–as immediate, direct, and engaging to our senses–as possible. Real-time connection to the actual cricket game data provides a sense of immediacy, even when the accompanying imagery does not. The vividness of live experience arises from the direct engagement of our senses and the subconscious triggering of emotions by unfolding events. The experience of using a product follows the same course. Designers manipulate sensory inputs to trigger a desired emotional response. Products become useful only when we balance technical and marketing objectives to produce a solution that can actually fulfil the intended function in the hands of a knowledgeable user and products become desirable when their surface qualities match the tastes and values of the target market at a deep, emotional level.
Usability has become a central concern in software development. Its focus is increasingly being broadened to recognize the importance of delivering a good user experience that encompasses all aspects of the product. Understanding the utility always depends on users and tasks. The usability of a design determines how well the users will be able to perform the supported tasks. The best designs support the task in a way that is simple and natural for the intended user.
In software design, the complexities of interactive control remain the greatest impediment to a satisfying user experience. The softwares of today tend to be seamless, focused, connected, and aware and these are the four essential qualities that extend familiar user-centric design criteria to define a new benchmark for experiences that are ideal for interactive software.
Very well written thought’s Preety.
The competition among internet business is getting stiffer, with each passing day RIA development has taken a center-stage. The client layer developer today are more focused on creating appealing applications that hypnotize the end users and engage them for longer period of time in the website. The “Rich” in Rich Internet Applications means User eXperience.
Highly responsive RIA encourages greater participation from the end users and brightens the chances of converting them into actual consumer of the products or services offered by the online business. This increases the revenues of the online venture and serves the purpose of investing in a RIA.
Rich User eXperience requires not only that the user interface be intuitive, smooth and dynamic, but also that it be functionally rich.