The cloud changes how people interact with software
March 5, 2010 —
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Software as a service has changed the way applications are deployed from the Web. It also has changed the way developers and business analysts must look at the user interface.
In the days of packaged applications, where ISVs would spend 18 months or more to deliver a fully functional application, the interface had to provide for everything users of that application might require. Today, SaaS applications are more targeted to a specific business need, with fewer features, and the UI development needs to be reflective of that, according to Paul McNamara, entrepreneur-in-residence at Adobe Systems, which makes tools for rich Internet application development and deployment.
Interfaces need to be “more powerful and more engaging,” he said. With AIR, Flash and Flex, Adobe offers developers a broad tool set to create richer interfaces, he pointed out. “There’s the consumerization of the enterprise user experience. At work, you’re confronted with a client-server interface that’s much less engaging than the consumer Internet.”
UI design was “focused on the heads-down user,” said Colleen Smith, SaaS managing director at Progress Software, which has created the OpenEdge development platform. “Now, the UI has to be more flexible. The application itself must be fully functional, but the UI design has to be geared to that user.”
Businesses don’t have the time to train users on new interfaces, so as applications add and remove services, the interfaces must be almost completely intuitive, Smith said. “You have to have simple Web entry, with more AJAX or rich capability, and it must be fully functional for the back end. You want to take the same code with different UI designs.”
It is this separation of the back-end code from the presentation layer “that gives business value to why we wanted that n-tier stack years ago,” she said.
John McRee, author of the book “Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software,” commented that software in most industries is mature and reaching feature saturation, so “the name of the game now is user experience. It’s now a major focus.”
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