The Tipping Point for RIAs Rich Internet Applications: Information at the Speed of Life

1. LITMUS
The Tipping Point for RIAs
Rich Internet Applications: Information at the Speed of Life
Even if you’ve missed the hype surrounding these web technologies, you’re
experiencing the effects of a tipping point for RIAs, or rich internet applications,
every day. On major portals, e-commerce sites, social networking sites and web-
based email and instant messaging services, lag time has all but disappeared and
user interfaces are far more dynamic, graphical and participatory than they were
even a year ago.
Seemingly Subtle Changes Have Big Effect
Learning your city’s temperature, movie times or Mexican restaurants just requires
a zip code and, after zero delay—voila! House hunting on sites such as HomePages
and Zillow feels like a legitimate form of FBI surveillance, as you float above aerial
imagery while relevant home values and neighborhood demographics (and crime
stats) attach themselves to what’s in view. You can build your dream car and instantly
Zillow.com
Zillow’s content assigns
accurate market value for
any home and for anyone.
Type in an address and
quickly see street and satel-
lite views, home stats and
market comparisons—
all for free.
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2. price it down to the rims on several automotive sites, or read a film’s plot summary
and order it all at the same time on Netflix. When going through checkout on your
favorite apparel site, you don’t have to abandon your whole consideration set and
brave the one-way shopping cart cul de sac.
What’s going on? Behind the scenes, bit by bit, developers are augmenting and
replacing the web’s HTML backbone with more “rich internet applications,” a
rather generic phrase Macromedia coined in 2002 to describe what developers and
designers were doing with their vector-graphic technology called Flash— essentially,
overcoming its design and interaction constraints. Rich media, rich clients, rich user
interface: all are names used, often inconsistently, to describe roughly the same
concept—web applications that allow a more desktop application-like experience.
Slightly less confusing are the assortments of technologies that can be employed to
develop these applications— DHTML, ActiveX Controls, Flash, Flex, OpenLaszlo—
to name just a few. DHTML (the D stands for dynamic) was perhaps the first, partial
step forward in making the web a pliable, engaging, multimedia tool for myriad
uses—and experiences. Today, AJAX seems to be the poster child for rich internet
applications. AJAX is actually a combination of technologies including DHTML and
Javascript that have quite literally been around for years, but it nevertheless has
everyone talking about the new potential of the web to be more like, well, life.
Enterprises are expected to spend in excess of $500 million on RIAs by 2011,
according to a recent study by research firm Zap Think. To understand what’s
driving this spending, and the potential impact of RIA technology on both users
and enterprises, one must understand the road we’ve traveled. HTML was originally
designed just to present research documents coming from somewhere else (a
remote server) and to link them together via code called hypertext. This was World
Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee’s idea and this was marvelous stuff when
the web wasn’t commercialized. That web was one you could essentially page
through, so to speak, to read and store information, but you couldn’t do much
beyond that. In the course of about a decade we have witnessed the advent and
advances of e-commerce, real-time news and product customization, to name a few
milestones—essentially web applications that require a more sophisticated interface,
similar to what computer users experience with desktop applications such as MS
Office and Mac OS X. HTML’s page-based linearity and page-load waiting time now
seem to belong to another era.
The Benefits of RIAs
Essentially, RIA technology can enable improved and streamlined user experiences.
For e-commerce organizations trying to reduce any and all barriers in the shopping
cart and checkout process, streamlining and simplifying are critical advantages. Sites
more focused on brand building can leverage RIA technologies to increase user
interaction (time spent on the site interacting with the brand) and facilitate data
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3. capture. Here are some specific situations where RIA technology can be employed
to improve the user experience:
Information that requires frequent sorting (and resorting) and filtering is a prime
candidate for an RIA-based interface. The technology allows users’ choices to be
sorted and/or filtered on the fly without a page refresh or even a trip back to the
web server. Generally, this is accomplished by caching some or all of the data on
the user-side and only making calls back to the web server when more or different
information is needed. When a call back to the web server is required, it is done
behind the scenes and does not require a page refresh. This technique not only
improves the user experience, it greatly reduces the amount of data transferred
back and forth between client and server (something both your customers and your
system administrators will love).
Digg.com
Witness real-time filtering
and streaming information
without a page refresh on
user-ranked news web site
Digg.com. It’s a giant
mirror held up to the
masses as they submit
stories or a “digg” or
comment on a story.
The process of gathering information (addresses, payment information, survey
responses, etc.) from the user can also be improved using RIA technologies.
With HTML, data capture is accomplished in one of two ways:
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4. 1. by using a very long scrolling—and sometimes overwhelming—form that tries to
capture all of the information in one step, or
2. by spreading the form across multiple pages that require the user to progress
through several page refreshes to accomplish a single task.
Neither option presents an efficient or ideal user experience and often can lead
to abandonment of the whole process. With RIA technologies, developers have
additional options to improve upon this situation. Input areas can expand and
contract on a single page as needed. For example, the developer can design the
web page to expand one section of input—say, billing address information—and
then contract it to a smaller size once data entry is complete. In this fashion, the
page’s real estate is maximized to allow the user to enter information sans page
refreshes and scrolling.
Gap.com
Everyone, it seems,
talked about Gap.com’s
QuickLook consumer
preference-based pop-ups
and the ‘My Bag’ drop-
down windows when the
AJAX-revamped retailer
site launched last year.
Checking out was never
so much fun.
Related to gathering information, RIA technologies enable a business to
take advantage of a broader set of input types, far beyond the basic HTML
input types like text boxes, drop downs and radio buttons. This becomes very
important when businesses have more specialized data input needs. For example,
it might be advantageous (and intuitive for the user) to be able to drag-and-drop
items from one section on the page to a specialized input field or select a date
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5. from a calendar view instead of typing out the date itself. These input types are
consistent and expected in desktop applications (Excel, Outlook, Quicken, etc.)
and now can be enabled on the web via RIA technologies. Similarly, developers are
also able to create the web application to handle more of the data validation on the
client-side—checking data without going back to the web server—and providing
instant feedback about data entry errors to users as they input information. This is
especially helpful when businesses are either capturing large amounts of information
or there are interdependencies between the information being entered.
rbkrunning.com
On rbkrunning.com,
a Resource Interactive-
designed 100% Flash-
based microsite inspired
by the velocity and enthusi-
asm of the running lifestyle,
the “Customize Your Run”
section uses sliders as
inputs to accommodate
user-provided preferences.
Employing RIA technologies can shorten or simplify multi-step processes.
Some of the best examples of this can be seen in various product configurators.
Products with many options (colors, sizes, styles, finishes, etc.) can be configured
without page refreshes or without stepping through multiple pages normally
required by HTML-only sites. This is accomplished with RIA technology by not
only caching the options required by the configurator but also caching the inter-
dependencies between the options. For example, some styles of your product
might have colors that are unavailable in other styles, so the colors can be suppressed
or displayed based on this logic without requiring a trip back to the web server to
look up this information.
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6. VWfeatures.com
Shopping for a new
VW GTI is almost as fun
as driving one, with a
configurator that locks and
loads a consumer’s choice
of parts and accessories,
then takes the resulting car
for a joyride with a blonde
bombshell.
When Not To Employ RIA Technologies
While there are many advantages to employing RIA technologies, there
are situations when this is not appropriate for your organization or project.
Organizational constraints, the purpose of your web site and the needs of your
particular audience/customer should influence your decision about whether to
develop your web site using RIA technologies and techniques, and, if so, just how
expansive their usage should be. Some of the considerations to take into account:
HTML is still the best choice when presenting non-interactive text. There is little
or no advantage in leveraging RIA technologies to do what HTML does best. Static
pages, including press releases, reports and news articles, can be best served by
sticking with HTML.
SEO and Analytics. HTML-based web pages remain the best option for search
engine optimization and analytics; consider what more fluid applications (i.e.,
no page refreshes) enabled by RIA technologies have done to our practice of
measuring ad impressions by attempting to count page views! When we do away
with page-flipping—as we weave together video, audio, images and text—and offer
single-screen tools for doing everything from selecting a product to configuring
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7. one, it is notoriously difficult for search engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) to effectively
traverse and index your site. The likelihood of getting a high ranking in their
search results is greatly reduced. Fortunately on the analytics front, vendors such
as Omniture and Coremetrics provide tracking tools to help measure macro-level
RIA actions as page views. So we can embrace RIAs as site design and architecture
that are as accountable as their more static alternatives. Even better, the major
search engines as well as the RIA technologies themselves are beginning to enable
searching of RIA-enabled web content.
No more page refreshes. So far we have portrayed page refreshes, the necessary
side-effect of all HTML web sites, as having a negative impact on the user
experience. However, breaking the “page-refresh” paradigm using RIA technologies
can interrupt the step-by-step flow to which most internet users have become
accustomed. Most users perceive the page refresh and subsequent pause in their
experience as indicative of something happening—e.g., the order was placed,
the search is completed, or the information is re-sorted. Poorly designed RIA
applications that don’t provide obvious user feedback for these activities tend to
confuse and frustrate users. Similarly, since mouse clicks within an RIA-based user
interface don’t automatically register as web page navigation within the browser (as
HTML page clicks do), the forward and back buttons users rely on when they need
to regroup, step back, or advance in the simplest fashion don’t always work.
Costs. RIA technologies enable website designers and developers to do more
than they ever could with HTML to improve the customer experience. However,
“more” often means increased development time and expense because as the
scope of requested functionality increases, so must the capabilities of the underlying
technology. This is a major issue for organizations that have developed predictable
cost models based on the simplicity of executing with HTML and don’t understand
the complexity of the options made available by RIA technology.
Organizational readiness. RIA technology not only can make existing HTML
experiences better, it enables you to create things that you were never able to
create on the web. As RIA technologies enable organizations to create new and
more interactive user experiences, the skills and knowledge of your extended web
team need to evolve with the technology. Creative designers, information architects,
usability specialists, metrics analysts and others—in addition to your technology
staff—will face new opportunities and challenges that come with switching from
a page-based view of web experiences to a more fluid and interactive paradigm.
Thinking beyond the constraints of HTML technology is one challenge. Increased
rigor and focus on usability is also critical in order to develop experiences that do
not burden the user with unnecessary graphical elements or motion that distracts
them from the task at hand. Early examples of sites built with RIA technologies were
littered with overly complex and obtrusive design elements that rendered the site
experience nearly unusable—or just plain annoying.
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8. Coming to an Interface Near You
After weighing the pros and cons, if you’re still on the fence about investing
resources in a rich internet application, consider a few milestones, predictions
and statistics. Major portals such as Ask and Google have a wide enough reach to
profoundly alter user expectations of a graphical user interface—in time. Ask.com
has added preview panels to your search results, so you can determine whether it’s
worth heading to that home page. AJAX-powered Google Maps’ panning magic is
turning everyone into latter-day Ferdinand Magellans.
As for predictions, the technology and business research firm Gartner announced at
a recent conference that there is an 80 percent chance that...
“By 2008, Ajax-style (sites) will be the dominant style
for rich internet application interfaces.
”
Finally, there are academic findings in favor of RIA’s: in an often-referenced 2002
Stanford-Makovsky Web Credibility Study evaluating web site credibility as sensed
by 1,481 participants, there was a significant correlation between slowness and
lessened credibility and between good visual design (more so than content) and
heightened credibility. And in The Essence of Effective Rich Internet Applications by
Kevin Mullett and The Business Impact of Rich Internet Applications by Joshua Duhl,
in the web sites studied, RIAs led to:
O An 84% increase in online hotel reservations
O A 25% increase in size of online retail orders
O A 70% decrease in support center calls.
Is it time for a RIA? Is this your tipping point?
About Resource Interactive
Resource Interactive is one of the nation’s preeminent digital marketing agencies,
helping Fortune 500 companies thrive in the evolving internet economy with
award-winning digital strategy, creative and technology solutions. Known for
its revolutionizing consumer insights, leading edge interactive design and
technological innovation, Resource Interactive is ranked among the top ten
independent interactive agencies in the nation.
Unique in the industry as female-founded, owned and operated, Resource
Interactive has grown over its 28-year history from its first marketing relationship
with Apple to ongoing partnerships with clients such as Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-
Packard, The Coca-Cola Company, Victoria’s Secret, Sherwin-Williams and L.L.
Bean, among others. For more information, visit www.resource.com.
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9. Litmus Test
Try our Litmus test to determine whether or not you should make a rich internet
application your next web site priority.
3 – Definitely 2 – For the most part 1 – Not at all
1. Does my site include multi-step processes that could be shortened or 3 2 1
streamlined by utilizing RIAs?
2. Are my products and services highly configurable or customizable? 3 2 1
3. Are my products or services a high-consideration purchase? 3 2 1
4. Are my competitors implementing RIAs? 3 2 1
5. Can men make product comparisons, read reviews and shipping information
3 2 1
easily, then be reassured about their choices through prominent branding?
6. Is my industry sector adopting RIAs at a pace that is impacting consumer
3 2 1
expectations?
7. Can my developers, designers, information architects and content creators take
3 2 1
advantage of what RIAs enable? Do we have the requisite skill sets?
TOTAL
How Did You Score
Over 15? It’s your business’s tipping point for an RIA.
Between 9-14? You should use this interval to prepare your IT staff and to research agency
partners for RIA expertise.
9 or less? Educate yourself further, but spend your IT and marketing dollars on
other initiatives.
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