As Railinc illustrates, tools are important, but they’re far from the only determiner of RIA success. Good design skills are more important than ever to create RIAs that produce value for their organizations. Designers must understand the business process context and ensure that they select the right RIA platform for the job. In fact, Railinc, Home&Abroad, and a majority of the respondents to our poll cited the challenge of creating a good design as a leading RIA adoption problem.
Take Home&Abroad’s key demographic, which is Web-savvy but doesn’t have much spare time and needs an intuitive interface. “Our challenge was to create a compelling user experience for the heart of our target audience: 40-year-old moms who want to be able to quickly and easily plan a trip for their families,” says Thompson.
A Web design company hired to help with the user interface didn’t deliver, and Thompson’s team concluded the firm’s Web 1.0 skills weren’t ready for RIAs. In-house developers took over and struck a balance between making the travel planner familiar as a standard Web app, novel enough to foster a “wow” factor without confusing the user, efficient in getting the job of travel planning done, and effective at creating a workable travel plan.
For Railinc, the design challenges extended even beyond the end-user experience. “We recognized that excellence in UI design was critical, but we also knew that about 80 percent of success with RIAs was at the back end of the application,” Webb says. The team focused on modeling underlying business processes, creating a good data model, and designing reusable location services.
Railinc also dealt with technical decisions. Webb’s team wrestled with the tradeoffs between REST- and SOAP-based services, going with the former for greater simplicity. REST, short for Representational State Transfer, is an architectural style that doesn’t require header messages and other types of XML overhead. But it has no mechanism for establishing contracts between consumers and providers.
RIA's are certainly excellent for delivering much more responsive and useful Web applications out to customers, remote salespeople, and suppliers.
But, right now most identity and security for RIA's is a case of "Roll Your Own". If an organization wants to control the usage of RIA's so that only known users can use them, or to protect them against content-level attack (of which there are many for Web 2.0), they generally try to figure this out themselves.This is a recipe for disaster.
The key example of this interesting article is Home & Abroad. I played around with the site for a while, and I was't impressed by their Itinerary editing tool. It uses faceted search, but it didn't work very well. Based on industry best practices I distilled the top 10 rules for good faceted search, and wrote about this on the customer engagement weblog. I hope this is a useful addition to this article.
I read the story first here at IE, then saw it on the ('Big Screen') cover of Information Week. I get IW on Tuesday versus Mondays now so..I didn't realize how big of a report the BIG REPORT was.
Is the new on-demand web platform with the desktop-like environment enabling travel companies of all sizes to build company sites and have location-specific content currently available for a demo?
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Forget about Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL)’s announcements of the new Apple TV, iPods, and Ping. It's kid stuff compared to what Apple has in store for you.
At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York later this month, Complex Spiral Consulting founder Eric Meyer plans to discuss the potential for HTML5 to become the “Flash killer” that Apple and others believe it to be.
A little taste of an apocalyptic scenario occurred last Friday when a large chunk of the Internet was unreachable for up to an hour. Similar to the plot of a Hollywood horror movie, this was an experiment that went wrong -- on one of the most important protocols of the Internet system.
The Internet in all its forms has become a core part of how we communicate, socialize, and handle very personal business every day. But protection of individual privacy is spotty at best, and it seems to be getting worse every day. As we become an increasingly digital nation, do access to, and privacy on, the Internet become civil rights?
At Apple’s announcement fest Wednesday, among the launch of the new iPods and the $99 Apple TV box, was the announcement about Ping, a music-based social network that out-of-the-gate has more than 160 million users, all with credit cards. Of course, it’s only about music today, but there’s nothing to stop Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) from expanding it if it suits its purposes down the road.
Getting to Work on Smart Work: How IT Is Transforming the Implementation of the 'Internet of Things' Organizations in all industry sectors are becoming more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent -- and that's changing the way they approach virtually every facet of their operations. It's up to IT to help organizations adopt a "Three I's" approach that leverages the emerging Internet of Things and enables them to work smarter. READ THIS eBOOK
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RIM is giving in to demands by India to snoop on encrypted BlackBerry data. It's time to develop cheap or free encryption software for BlackBerrys and other cellular phones.
Nielsen’s recent numbers on the increasing use of texting bode well for enterprise networks. Shunning the phone in favor of text messaging could mean reducing bandwidth.
Two studios have filed suit against an ad broker for placing ads to help monetize P2P sites suspected of copyright infringement. That's taking a dangerous step toward what might be a worthy goal.
By 2014, mobile devices will overtake laptops as the appliance of choice for consumers. But device makers still have some wishes to fulfill, including mobile app simplification and the ability to better perform word processing/spreadsheet functions.
Google's foray into pay-for-view movies may be an indicator that the days of free ad-sponsored content are numbered, or at least that ad sponsorship won't fund nearly enough content.
Online education, improving to better replicate the interactions that occur between teachers and students face-to-face, grew in double digits during the recession. Still, there’s more work to be done.
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