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Curt Monash

Graphically richer apps

6 comments

IT TOPICS:Business Intelligence, Development, Enterprise Software & Services, Software

Microsoft is adding graphical pizzazz to the target apps for its development suites. AJAX/RIA (Rich Internet Application) is picking up some buzz and momentum, as per TIBCO's release of a dev tool it acquired 10 months or so ago. What does this all portend?

It's best to think about this from the standpoint of three different groups of applications.

1. Analytic applications. Dashboards obviously require richer interfaces than data entry apps. I'll write about this area more soon, perhaps next week when Computerworld wants me to blog my heart out about BI.

2. Customer-facing apps. It's VERY easy to put too much graphical sizzle into your apps, irritating customers by wasting their time. And none of Google, Yahoo, or Amazon does much with fancy graphics. But you knew that. When used carefully, graphical capability is basically a good thing.

3. Internal transactional apps. A decade ago, I was still fighting the battle that GUI apps were better than character-based ones. A lot of people thought that, if one was just filling in a form anyway, GUIs didn't add much.

Well, expert users may be fine with character-based apps, but learning a GUI app is usually easier than learning a character-based one. And so is relearning one. So better navigation, better visual design, and so on clearly make for better apps. Besides, users expect these things.

So should your browser-based apps function on a par with client/server ones? Sure, if the technology to make them do so is available. (But beware of the lesser screen real estate per app if you're sticking multiple apps into a single portal window.) Should they have singing, dancing animations, showing the best in creative visual design? Uh, I'm not aware of any reasons why.

Does anybody have some great examples of why transactional apps need to be graphically fancier than in the client/server era? If so, please share!

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Kevin, Thanks for showing up

Submitted by Curt Monash on September 15, 2005 - 2:32 P.M.

Kevin,

Thanks for showing up here! (Kevin is one of the original techies on the TIBCO product -- right? -- and now is the marketing/spokesman guy.)

Yes, your experience is indeed pretty much what I would have expected. My goal in so aggressively soliciting comment in this thread is to find out whether other products are being used in ways I was NOT thinking of. :)

Best regards,

CAM

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Brett, Thanks!Â Is there

Submitted by Curt Monash on September 15, 2005 - 2:27 P.M.

Brett,

Thanks!

Is there any way you can be more specific about the kind of functionality? Are we talking specialized calculators and stuff like that?

My guess is that you're not talking about hardcore OLTP, but I could be wrong.

This is interesting stuff!

CAM

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It's not really so much

Submitted by Kevin Hakman on September 15, 2005 - 2:23 P.M.

It's not really so much about fancier graphics and pizzaz. The reality is that many rather utilitarian applicaions at businesses never made the transition to the web becuaes the funcationality was not achievable or not achievable at a cost of ownership that made sense. Or the applications that did get transitionsed to the lower cost web inftastructure then suffered from productivity losses as what could have been done in one screen before all of a sudden took 6 to 12 web pages to do. TIBCO customers are essentially doing two things with the General Interface product: 1) they are supplanting the thick-client applications they've had so as to sustain the rich, high productivity functionality they had before, and at the same time, reduce the cost of ownership by eliminating desktop installs, updates, and conflicts while not needing to retrain users on those applications; 2) they are enchanging existing web applications and portal deployments with rich richer functionality embedding rich GUI functionality into those pages. Because TIBCO is based on the AJAX set of technologes, you can do things like drag and drop between portlets, have foreground dialogs and windows float above portlets and all the elements of the page (including the non-TIBCO ones) be able to easily access each other.

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AJAX providng real value in

Submitted by Brett Roeder on September 15, 2005 - 11:26 A.M.

AJAX providng real value in Financial Services
I've been working a lot with large financial institutions lately looking at AJAX apps. Why? Because their desktops are locked down. Users are not only prohibited from installing traditional apps, but are also restricted from installing plug-ins.

The business problem this presents is the inability to roll out new business tools to users in a timely fashion. While IT could develop the new tool in short order, the fact that users cannot install the new app or updated plug-in required could delay its use and have significant negative impact on the organization's business.

Therefore, any rich client solution that requires any type of plug-in OR application is not a viable solution.

For these highly secured, locked-down environments AJAX-based UIs are allowing organizations to rapidly roll out new tools thereby positively impacting the bottom-line.

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I think transational apps

Submitted by James Taylor on September 15, 2005 - 10:32 A.M.

I think transational apps only need to be graphical enough to meet users' expectations in the eBay/Amazon era e.g. not much. I think the promise of things like Ajax, especially combined with business rules, is to allow complex conversations to be had online to gather complex data sets right the first time.

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