the anatomy of rich user experience
DESCRIPTION
Now that software is an integral part of our lives, user experience is everything because “when technology becomes a commodity by satisfying basic needs, user experience dominates”.TRANSCRIPT
The Anatomy of Rich User Experience
White Paper
01-04-2010
Dr. David Saad - Chairman & CEO
Table of Content 1. Summary ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 3
2. Needs for Rich User Experience ……………………………………………………………………… 4
3. Definitions of Rich User Experience ………………………………………………………………….. 5
4. Properties of Rich User Experience ………………………………………………………………….. 7
5. Disciplines of Rich User Experience …………………………………………………………………. 8
6. Applications of Rich User Experience ……………………………………………………………….. 10
7. Benefits of Rich User Experience …………………………………………………………………….. 11
8. Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 14
9. Biographies ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 15
10. References ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 17
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1. Summary Now that software is an integral part of our lives, user experience is everything because ―when technology becomes a commodity by satisfying basic needs, user experience dominates”. Making software useful or even usable are necessary conditions but not sufficient enough to succeed. Making software desirable is a pedestal to aim for. Desktop applications, from personal to enterprise ones, are rusting. The web proved Peter’s Principle – it started as a communication platform, morphed into a publishing platform, and then promoted itself to an application platform, which is its current level of incompetency. Mobile devices are fairing better but they are lacking some luster, especially in the US market which is lagging behind the rest of the world. Games on the other hand have demonstrated their willingness to push the envelope. With Rich User Experience (RUE), the best of all four worlds (desktop, web, mobiles, and games) is converging to provide some truly impressive features – some unique for each platform while others common across platforms. RUE goes beyond the conventional point & click interfaces, beyond the aesthetics of the fancy Flash applications of the yesteryears, and beyond the interactivity and portability of Rich Internet Applications (RIA). RUE combines function & form, substance & style, and art & science. RUE applications are incredible, extraordinary, and sophisticated applications. They are solid on the back-end and shine on the front-end. RUE applications are useful, functional, usable, desirable, perusable, searchable, accessible, dependable, comfortable, trustable, credible, and valuable. However, RUE is quite complex. Following industrial design’s footsteps, experience design will soon become a formal discipline - actually, a multi-disciplinary field that combines computer science, software engineering, information architecture, flow architecture, cognitive behavior, and art. Thus, leaving RUE in novice hands, or worse to Beaver, is done with peril. Even though RUE has already recorded some impressive successes in certain niches such as configurators, dashboards, business analytics, diagnostic systems, reservation systems, weather systems, and the likes, it has not yet entered the mainstream. So far, the obstacles have been its complexity, availability of experts, lack of standards, and difficulty in measuring success. Those stumbling blocks will soon be surmounted to pave the way for RUE to not just enter the mainstream but become a commodity itself. In the meantime, there is indeed some catching up to do, and companies ought to embrace RUE sooner rather than later.
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2. Needs for Rich User Experience Before the iPhone was introduced, almost all mobile phones offered more or less the same functionality and utility. Aside Apple’s marketing prowess that ignited a huge demand, what distinguished the iPhone from the pack was its rich user experience. Similarly, in order to be competitive, applications, of all kinds, must nowadays go beyond their mere functionality, utility, usability, and efficiency. They must become brandable and desirable. Starting with trust, desire turns into loyalty, which can quickly morph into advocacy which is a key indicator of long term customer value and retention. For the longest time, the usability world was divided into two extremist camps – those who think with their left brain (developers from Mars) who produce efficient but unusable and ugly applications, and those who think with their right brain (designers from Venus) who thought that the web was created to showcase their artwork. Currently, users are demanding new computing paradigms and expecting that their applications mimic their world by adapting to their needs instead of them tolerating the idiosyncrasies of an application. The World Wide Web started as a communication platform, morphed into a publishing platform, and evolved to become an application platform. The reasons for the success of the browser are obvious: standard interface, global access from anywhere, easy deployment, easy maintenance, easy to use, and no training required. The biggest disadvantage of the browser is the limitations of HTML and its inability to offer the richness of desktop applications. Desktops, mobile phones, and the web (not to mention games for some) have become an integral part of our lives. The value of all such devices is mainly in their software. Because of such ubiquity, we are entering an era where software is no longer geeky but trendy. Software is no longer restricted to improving corporate productivity, but is entrenched in consumer social behavior - from informing to entertaining, and from socializing to dating, software touches almost every aspect of our lives. Software defines personas, positions brands, creates communities, democratizes markets, etc. In addition, there is a need for standardization and portability of applications across all platforms from desktops, to the web, to hand-held devices, to embedded systems, and even to games. There is a need for software applications, of any kind and on any platform, to incorporate best-practices and best-of-all-worlds, specifically:
Functionality, navigation, customization, and responsiveness found in desktop applications; Security, scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance found in enterprise mission critical applications; Connectivity, collaboration, and personalization found in web applications; Interactivity found in Rich Internet Applications (RIA); Beauty, elegance, and WOW factor found in Flash applications; Efficiency found in embedded applications; Simplicity, locality, and convenience found in mobile applications; and Engagement and entertainment found in games.
Meeting such high standards will not be easy, especially with the lack of standards and skills necessary, but it is indeed a goal that we should aim for, and it is surely very exciting. Finally, inventions and innovations don’t stem out of market surveys. When it comes down to needs, classic marketing principles taught us how to establish needs: ―ask what the market needs, then provide it‖. Such conventional wisdom is applicable to defining existing needs in well-established markets but not creating new needs in emerging markets in which buyers don’t know what they need. For example, if few decades ago a market researcher would have asked consumers if they need a personal computer, 99.99% of the respondents would have said ―no‖. When Henry Ford built his first car, he was quoted as saying ―If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.‖ Users don’t necessarily know what they need or want relative to their experience with software. It is up to the players in the industry to create the need through their inventions or innovations, and then refine their solution based on specific usability testing.
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3. Definitions of Rich User Experience The term ―User Experience‖ was originally coned by Donald A. Norman who introduced it to Apple back in 1993. He eloquently said then: ―when technology satisfies basic needs, user experience dominates”. Sure enough, we are now entering a phase where the unique value proposition and the main distinguishing factor between competing products are indeed their respective user experience. User experience is everything because users and customers are still kings, and will forever remain so. Users rule the experience, advertisers pay for it, and competitors fear it. After all the marketing, promoting, packaging, and spinning, what sticks in users’ mind is indeed their experience with your product, application, website, or game. Their experience determines their selection, their purchase, their loyalty, their referral, and their enthusiasm to your brand (or lack thereof). User experience is very encompassing – its wings spans over anything and everything that a user or a customer touches from the packaging to shipping, from functions to features, from sales to support, and anything in between. For the purpose of this white paper, our definition of user experience is limited to software and not any other product or service. Furthermore, our coverage of user experience is strictly limited to issues related to the actual software and ignores peripheral issues such as packaging, sales, branding, customer support, etc. Rich User Experience (RUE) invokes the wow! factor. It ignites emotions in users by first impressing them and then making them addicted, loyal, and contagious. RUE goes beyond the conventional point & click interface by incorporating a gesture interface and speech recognition making the user experience truly immersive. RUE goes beyond the aesthetics of the fancy Flash applications of the yesteryears which offered pretty screens, captivating layouts, fashionable backgrounds, trendy skins, stylish themes, cute buttons, colorful icons, cool illustrations, dazzling animations, entertaining sounds, amazing effects, smooth transitions, handy zooming, convenient sizing, and easy dragging & dropping, but with limited functionality, no search capability, and poor performance. RUE goes beyond the interactivity and portability of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) which bridged the gap between desktop applications and web applications. RIA is maturing at dizzying speed yet its horizon is ever expanding. It has entered the mainstream with companies like AOL, eBay, eTrade, IBM, MTV, NASDAQ, Wilson, and many others who have already adopted it and benefited from it. Because of their portability across devices, platforms, operating systems, and browsers, Rich Internet Applications started to be referred to as Rich Interactive Applications.
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This evolution was feasible because the digital world has been morphing from a world of scarcity (classic Adam Smith economic model) to a world of abundance (Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory) of resources resulting into lower prices and higher availability of chips, servers, computers, bandwidth, software, etc. However, the advantages that RIA offers do not come without some inherit risks such as security compromises, poor indexing for searching, inefficiency, complexity, and high development costs in certain instances. Below are few good definitions of user experience:
User Experience (UX or UE) is a term used to describe the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system. It most commonly refers to a combination of software and business topics, such as selling over the web, but it applies to any result of interaction design.
Wikipedia
User Experience (UX or UE) encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products. The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company's offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.
Nielsen Norman Group
User Experience (UX or UE) encompasses all aspects of a digital product that users experience directly—and perceive, learn, and use—including its form, behavior, and content. Learnability, usability, usefulness, and aesthetic appeal are key factors in users’ experience of a product.
Pabini Gabriel-Petit
User Experience (UX or UE) encompasses the visual appearance, interactive behavior, and assistive capabilities of software. From an application's graphical user interface to its use of additional technologies such as speech recognition and speech synthesis, a cohesive and professional user experience is what Mac users have come to expect.
Apple Leopard Reference Library
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4. Properties of Rich User Experience RUE combines function & form, substance & style, and art & science. RUE applications are incredible, extraordinary, and sophisticated applications that are highly useful and usable. They show off their industrial robustness while making no apologies for their striking elegance. They cleverly address both the front-end and the back-end. On the front-end, RUE applications are stunning, compelling, engaging, enticing, entertaining, exciting, connected, dynamic, alive, immersive, interactive, collaborative, intuitive, customizable, personable, and beautiful. On the back-end, RUE applications are scalable, reliable, portable, flexible, extensible, expandable, adaptable, maintainable, manageable, reusable, accessible, searchable, available, resilient, robust, agile, unobtrusive, responsive, efficient, secure, and private. RUE applications include user-centric or task-centric taxonomies or folksonomies, social features, intelligence, remembrance, self-learning, and self-diagnosis with the capability of making recommendations based on users’ preferences, behaviors, and attitudes. User Experience is defined by Peter Morville as a honeycomb which is an extension of Jesse James Garrett’s UX diagram.
Useful. As practitioners, we can't be content to paint within the lines drawn by managers. We must have the courage and creativity to ask whether our products and systems are useful, and to apply our deep knowledge of craft and medium to define innovative solutions that are more useful.
Usable. Ease of use remains vital, and yet the interface-centered methods and perspectives of human-computer interaction do not address all dimensions of web design. In short, usability is necessary but not sufficient.
Desirable. Our quest for efficiency must be
tempered by an appreciation for the power and value of image, identity, brand, and other elements of emotional design.
Findable. We must strive to design navigable
web sites and locatable objects, so users can find what they need.
Accessible. Just as our buildings have elevators and ramps, our web sites should be accessible to people with disabilities (more than 10% of the population). Today, it's good business and the ethical thing to do. Eventually, it will become the law.
Credible. Thanks to the Web Credibility Project, we're beginning to understand the design elements that influence whether users trust and believe what we tell them.
Valuable. Our sites must deliver value to our sponsors. For non-profits, the user experience must advance the mission. With for-profits, it must contribute to the bottom line and improve customer satisfaction.
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5. Disciplines of Rich User Experience RUE is not magic. First, if an application is useless to begin with, RUE can make it functional, usable, and beautiful, but not useful. Second, RUE is still software – a hazardous exercise to novices. Frankly, RUE could be a double-edge sword – its own strengths can also be its weaknesses, if not built correctly by experienced and trained hands. Furthermore, RUE requires expertise in several disciplines including:
Computer Science: capability of solving problems algorithmically with emphasis on conceptuality followed by functionality.
Software Engineering: capability of implementing algorithms using the appropriate technologies with emphasis on standards, best-practices, and industrial robustness features such as scalability, efficiency, reliability, maintainability, reusability, flexibility, expandability, adaptability, accessibility, searchability, resiliency, agility, portability, security, and privacy.
Information Architecture: capability of organizing information with emphasis on logical taxonomy, user-generated folksonomy, and self-explanatory naming conventions, all centered on tasks, personas, or behaviors.
Flow Architecture: capability of designing workflows with emphasis on intuitive navigation and connectivity.
Cognitive Behavior: capability of understanding behavioral sciences, human factors, human-computer interfaces, applied experimental psychology, and user-based system design principles.
Art: capability of designing artwork such as illustrations, icons, logos, fonts, backgrounds, textures, themes, skins, layouts, special effects, animations, sounds, gadgets, and widgets such as tabs, buttons, radio buttons, check boxes, data entry boxes, drop down lists, scrollable bars, toolbars, progress bars, windows, panels, sliders, carousels, docks, accordions, tables, etc.
In the last decade or so, we saw the back-end (i.e., database management systems, operating systems, networking systems, compilers, interpreters, etc.) stabilized and became a commodity. Arguably, in the next decade, most of the new inventions and innovations will be focused on the front-end on all platforms including the web, desktop, mobile, and games. Those four worlds will converge into universal standards that provide uniqueness to each platform yet communality across platforms.
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We are at the crest of a new era in software – the first phase was about data which included data types, data storage, data modeling, data base management, and the like. The second phase was about process which included graphical user interfaces, navigations, usability, and the like. The third and upcoming era is about user experience whose wings spans over every aspect and every touchpoint between a user and an application. User Experience is a multi-disciplinary field that includes usability, interaction design, navigation design, information design (information architecture, content design, and media design), visual design (graphical design, animation design, and layout design), and sound design. The ―rich‖ in “Rich User Experience‖ spans its wings on all aspects of a graphical interface from functions to forms. For a user experience to be rich, it has to be stunning, compelling, engaging, enticing, entertaining, exciting, connected, dynamic, alive, immersive, interactive, collaborative, responsive, intuitive, unobtrusive, portable, customizable, delightful, and personable, with self-explanatory labels, logical taxonomy, flexible ontology, intuitive navigation, social features, remembrance, intelligence, elegance, and multi-lingual capabilities. With wider adoption of broadband, more computer power, advanced graphic monitors of all sizes, along with standards will help diffuse RUE into the mainstream. Such wide spread adoption will force RUE to eventually command a formal new discipline in experience design, similar to how industrial design started in the late 1920’s as a melting pot of different specialties with no standards, but subsequently evolved into a formal discipline.
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6. Applications of Rich User Experience We now live in a digital world. We are deluged by electronic gadgets and we are drowning in the World Wide Web. Software is everywhere – in computers, cameras, phones, printers, stereos, fridges, cars, airplanes, cash registers, and kiosks. Software is very pervasive, and every piece of software that interacts with users requires a graphical user interface. Few interfaces are great, yet the great majority are, not just bad, but terrible!!! For instance, when was the last time you tried, and succeeded, to configure your computer, program your cable box, adjust the clock on your portable radio, or reset some gages in your car dashboard. Of course, not all applications are created equal – some require a higher degree of richness compared to others. Currently, web applications and websites suffer the most due to poor usability, lack of intuitive navigation, improper information architecture, and awful aesthetics. The web is getting old and in desperate need for renovation. After all, the web started as a communication tool, became a publication platform, and recently morphed into an application platform even though it remains ill suited for the latter despite the advent of new technologies such as DHTML, XHTML, AJAX, JavaFX, and RIA. With the advent of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) along with higher users’ expectations, almost all software applications or websites, even the most mundane ones, can use a bit of enhancements in their graphical user interface. However, those applications or websites which need a Rich User Experience (RUE) the most are the following:
Applications that require a substantial amount of interaction with users such as registration, configuration, conversion, reservation, diagnosis, selection, etc.
Applications that require grabbing the attention of viewers such as presentations, demonstrations, tutorials, wizards, etc.
Applications that require some of the typical features found in desktop applications such as dragging & dropping, instant data refreshing, etc.
Applications that require decision support capabilities such as dashboards, navigation, modeling, prototyping, simulation, what-if analysis, etc.
Applications that require ad hoc input from users such as annotations, collaboration, comments, mashups, wikis, etc.
Application that require sophisticated and dynamic data visualization such as maps, weather systems, statistical analysis, decision support, etc.
Applications that require extensive calculation and validation on the client-side.
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7. Benefits of Rich User Experience Rich User Experiences (RUE) ignite a wow! factor that invokes instant and lasting emotions on users. Those emotions perpetuate in a domino effect that starts with a very good first impression on users that makes them receptive instead of being defensive as it is generally the case when confronted with something new or unknown. As they become receptive, they get curious, then informed, and then probably even entertained, which makes users addicted and obviously loyal. It is when they start becoming contagious by telling their friends about it, that the buzz breaks lose. Users, visitors, and consumers enjoy the following benefits from RUE:
Higher conversion – visitors to a website who get a good experience
are 87% more likely to make a purchase.
Higher referral – visitors to a website who get a good experience are 3 times more likely to refer the website to others.
Higher usability – users will find applications or websites much more pleasant and friendly to use making them happier.
Higher usage – users will use applications or websites longer and more often increasing their
stickiness. Higher productivity – users will become more productive, effective, and efficient. They also
tend to make fewer mistakes when they have a good experience.
Higher satisfaction – users can find what they want and they experience a good feeling when visiting. Research by User Interface Engineering (UIE) shows that, about 60% of the time, visitors to websites cannot find what they seek. Studies by Forrester Research estimate that approximately 50% percent of potential sales are lost because users cannot find information and that 40% of users do not return to a website when their first visit is a negative experience. A study by Zona Research found that 62% of online shoppers give up looking for the item they want to buy. According to Elizabeth Millard, only 42% of the websites evaluated were actually usable.
Lower rejection – users who have a good experience when visiting a website tend to be more tolerant when they encounter obstacles. Corollary, when they have a bad experience, they become agitated and much less forgiving. 58% of first time visitors who encounter a bad user experience at a website indicate that they will never come back again to that site, and 41% who experience problems transacting would switch to a competitor or abandon a transaction entirely. This percentage has increased by 12% in 2007 indicating that users are becoming increasingly less tolerant and less patient with applications and websites with poor user experiences. Furthermore, a bad user experience tends to make users feel stupid, which in itself could be a fatal blow. So providing a good user experience is absolutely critical more than ever before.
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Lower need for support – users don’t need hand-holding because of the user-friendliness of the
application or the website.
Lower need for training – users don’t need much training because of the intuitiveness of the application or the website.
Developers enjoy the following benefits from RUE:
Shorter cycle – because of the new tools available, developing RIA applications is faster than conventional applications.
Lower costs – RIA reduces the cost of development, deployment, maintenance, training, and
support, especially when applications are required to run on different platforms. Thus, the portability of RIA offers substantial benefits to IT departments.
Longer shelve life – applications with rich user experience typically have a longer shelve life
than their counterparts. Higher satisfaction – software engineers are more likely to satisfy users because of the iterative
process, the collaboration, and the early visibility and visualization of the application by users.
With RUE, users can be lured, engaged, converted, and retained. Undeniably, user experience is not just what would forge first impressions, but lasting ones too. A good user experience can turn users into evangelists, and a bad one can turn them over to competitors.
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Marketers enjoy the following benefits from RUE:
Faster time to market – RIA development can substantially speed the development and deployment cycle of applications.
Higher loyalty – users become loyal and turn into evangelists by spreading the word around to their friends and colleagues.
Higher adoption – applications earn wider market penetration, bigger market share, and stronger mind share at a faster rate.
Higher competitiveness – applications distinguish themselves from their competitors because of their graphical user interface. As an analogy, unless you are a car freak, the great majority of people don’t look under the hood when they buy a car. Similarly, the great majority of software applications, except system software, are used by users who don’t look, notice, or care about the back-end. All they see and judge is the front-end. As users become less tolerant of poorly designed applications, only those with a functional, useful, usable, beautiful, rich, elegant, intuitive, effective, and efficient graphical user interface will survive.
Deeper trust – a good user experience that looks professional, secure, and consistent generates trust and credibility, which is the single most important criteria for consumers.
Stronger brand – a good user experience attracts consumers to a brand and reminds them of the values that the brand offers by allowing them to interact with the brand.
Higher profits – better engagement translates into higher conversion and higher loyalty which translate into higher revenues which result in higher profits.
Lower costs – a good user experience reduces costs by lowering the number of call center calls and the duration of each call. Furthermore, the average call center cost per call is $5.50 while a web self-service is $0.10 (Need to Cut Costs? Improve the Web Site Experience – Forrester Research Report).
Higher ROI – with all the above benefits, RUE increases the return on the investment in applications or websites. Below are few examples of ROI achieved from good user experiences:
Dell 3400% increase in sales over 1.5 years IBM 400% increase in sales Standard Life 75% above target in the first year Staples 75% increase in sales representing $430 million United Airlines 200% increase in online ticketing
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8. Conclusion Software is everywhere, and with Rich User Experience (RUE), software will finally be somewhere. With their hay days in the rear view mirror, back-ends have become a commodity, leaving the door wide open for front-ends to dominate the landscape. With such market conditions, user experiences dominate. What distinguishes one product, one application, one website, or one game from another, is indeed the user experience. Considering the cost of attracting, let alone retaining, customers when competition is only a click away, user experience is not something but everything. It is the product not just a feature. It is not a nice thing to have but a must have. It is not a vitamin but a medicine. RUE applications are incredible, extraordinary, and sophisticated applications that are not just useful and usable, but desirable. They are solid on the back-end and stunning on the front-end. However, designing and incorporating RUE in a product is not an easy task to be left in novice hands. RUE is a complex multi-disciplinary field that combines computer science, software engineering, information architecture, flow architecture, cognitive behavior, and art. While so far, RUE applications have found their way into some niches where they are most needed such as configurators, dashboards, business analytics, weather systems, and the likes, they are quickly entering the mainstream. The stumbling blocks have been the complexity, availability of experts, lack of standards, and difficulty in measuring success because the intangible overwhelm the tangibles. Despite such obstacles, which are being surmounted, the benefits derived from RUE are obvious. Whether it is an increase in customer satisfaction, an increase in loyalty, an increase in market share, an increase in productivity, a decrease in cost of development and maintenance, or an increase on ROI, all constituents benefit from RUE from users to marketers, and from engineers to investors. In conclusion, the time for RUE is now…
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9. Biographies Author’s Biography: Dr. David Saad Dr. David Saad is the founder, Chairman & CEO of Luristic. He is responsible for the overall direction and management of the company. He is a seasoned veteran in the software industry with over 27 years of experience in sales, marketing, engineering, and funding making him uniquely positioned to lead Luristic. Dr. Saad started his career as a system programmer, became a data base consultant, a public speaker, an entrepreneur, and an angel investor. Prior to Luristic, Dr. Saad was the founder, Chairman & CEO of Clupedia - a social media company that offered clues from crowds. Clupedia was the Wikipedia of opinions. The company won several industry awards for its innovation including the AlwaysOn Media 100 award. During his tenure with Clupedia, Dr. Saad won the Most Promising Investment Award during the 2006 Fast Pitch competition sponsored by Tech Coast Angels (TCA) from whom he raised a Series A round of funding. Prior to Clupedia, Dr. Saad was the founder, Chairman & CEO of Calibra - a software company that offered a viral marketing tool that used Social Network Analysis (SNA) in order to identify influencers within a social network for the purpose of launching, managing, and measuring viral campaigns. Calibra was nominated for the Innovative Product of the Year Award by the American Electronics Association (AeA). Prior to Calibra, Dr. Saad was the founder, Chairman & CEO of Braintec - a software company specialized in Unix kernel development, compilers, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Braintec became the largest Unix engineering firm in Southern California with customers such as AT&T, IBM, Sun, NCR, and Teradata. Braintec was sold to Technisource – an IT firm listed on NASDAQ which was taken private by IntelliMark Holdings. During his tenure with Braintec, Dr. Saad was also the founder, Chairman & CEO of In-D-Pocket - a label company specialized in R&B, Hip Hop, and rap music. One of the company’s acts was a female group called Foxx Empire whose debut album included couple of hits such as ―Do You Want Me‖, ―Can’t Let Go‖, and a remix of ―Walkin’ in Rhythm‖. Prior to Braintec, Dr. Saad worked for Mathematica Products Group (MPG) – a software division of Martin Marietta where he was instrumental in establishing the Canadian division. During his stint at MPG, Dr. Saad won several awards for his software sales achievements including the ICP award. Prior to Mathematica, Dr. Saad worked as a programmer and data base consultant for IST - a consulting and service bureau based in Montreal, Canada. Dr. Saad earned a PhD in Computer Science with high honors from University of Paris, an M.Sc.A. Cum Laude in Computer Science from McGill University, a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Concordia University, and a D.E.U.G. in Mathematics & Economics from University of Paris. He speaks four languages. He had a very successful athletic career in Judo during which he participated in the European Championships, World Championships, Pan American Games, and the Olympic games. Dr. Saad is a USTA member and regularly participates in league and national tennis championships.
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Company’s Biography: Luristic Luristic is a new breed of firm that combines the technical skills of an innovative software company along with the creativity of an avant-garde agency. Luristic is specialized in Rich User Experience (RUE) for websites, web applications, desktop applications, mobile applications, embedded applications, and games. Luristic is a leader and a pioneer in RUE – a very exciting yet quite complex multi-disciplinary field which combines function & form, substance & style, and art & science. It requires the precision of a software engineer, the analytics of a computer scientist, the heuristics of a cognitive behaviorist, and the creativity of an artist. Luristic takes a holistic approach by offering a comprehensive set of products and services that deliver world-class, award-winning, and state-of-the-art applications and websites with very rich user experiences that lure, attract, engage, interact, convert, and retain users with extensive features, robust architecture, logical taxonomy, flexible workflow, intuitive navigation, and stunning graphical user interface. Luristic’s products complement the two most popular Rich Interactive Applications (RIA) platforms, namely Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight. The products are highly customizable with a very flexible skin which can match the branding of a company. Those products consist of an integrated suite called Lure which includes the following Rich Interactive Components (RIC):
LureBar allows users to select a webpage with Genie effect, to preview the selected webpage in a thumbnail, and to navigate to the selected webpage as shown below.
LureDoc allows users to navigate, browse, search, and annotate through a document which could
be a brochure, a catalogue, a paper, a report, an article, a manual, a book, a slide presentation, or a photo album in many different ways including flipping, sliding, panning, or scrolling. It also allows users to refer, rate, review, share, tag, bookmark, favorite, embed, and download a document.
LureList allows users to manipulate a list of items by selecting a particular view of the list, sorting
the list in ascending or descending order, define the columns to be sorted on, arrange the order of columns, and drill down on a particular item in a list.
LureMap allows users to navigate through the website by choosing different navigation paradigms
such as the accordion, drop down menus, tree, or thumbnails. In addition to some very useful shortcuts, LureMap offers some suggestions for webpages to visit such as similar webpages, top rated webpages, and recommended webpages.
LureMedia allows user to view a video or a slide presentation. It also allows users to refer, rate,
review, share, tag, bookmark, favorite, embed, and download the content. LureSurf allows users to navigate through a document with multiple webpages.
Luristic is particularly apt at turning the complex simple, and the simple powerful. We get motivated by demanding customers who want it all – from functionality to efficiency, from reliability to scalability, from flexibility to security, from usability to beauty, from function to form, from art to science, from intuition to analytics, from quantitative to qualitative, and everything in between.
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10. References
Ajax, RIAs, and the Future of Web Development, by Todd Anglin at Telerik, Dr. Dobb’s, October 2009.
Building Rich Internet Applications with Macromedia Flash MX and ColdFusion MX, by Andrew Guldman at Macromedia, May 2002. Enhancing eCommerce ROI through Rich Internet Applications (RIA), by Andrea Simmons at Integration New Media, 2007. Macromedia Flash MX – a Next Generation Rich Client, by Jeremy Allaire at Macromedia, March 2002. JavaServer Faces AJAX and Flash: Next Generation User Interfaces, Ric Smith at Oracle, October 2006. Need to Cut Costs? Improve the Web Site Experience, by Megan Burns with Moira Dorsey & Angela Beckers at Forrester Research, December 2008. Rich Internet Applications, by Joshua Duhl at IDC, November 2003. Rich Internet Applications: Design, Measurement, and Management Challenges, by Keynote. Rich Internet Applications (RIA): A Convergence of User Interface Paradigms of Web and Desktop Exemplified by JavaFX, by Florian Moritz at University of Applied Science Kaiserslautern, January 2008. Rich Internet Applications that Build Brands, by Ron Rogowski at Forrester Research, March 2008. Rich Internet Applications 101: A Primer for Marketing Agencies, by Andrea Simmons at Integration New Media, 2007. Setting Priorities for Next-Generation Web Apps, by Roger Smith at InformationWeek, December 2008. The Business Benefits of Rich Internet Applications for Enterprises, by Adobe, 2008. The Business Case For Rich Internet Applications, by Ron Rogowski at Forrester Research, March 2007. The Essence of Effective Rich Internet Applications, by Kevin Mullet at Macromedia, November 2003. The Rise of Rich Internet Applications, by Carl Zetie at Forrester Research, April 2006. For additional references, please visit the Articles sub-section in Luristic’s website.
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