Streamlining user experience design and development: Roles, tasks and workflow of applying rich application technologies

Abstract

The adoption of Rich Application Technologies (RATs), such as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) or Adobe Flex, not only significantly enriches the user interface (UI) technology, but also can boost the collaborations among user experience (UX) specialists, designers and developers. Many books and plenty of online resources have described and discussed the technical capability and details of various RATs. However, how to effectively incorporate RATs into the process of UX design and development has not been systematically addressed. In this paper, we report our experience of applying RATs to develop several complex enterprise software systems. A new role, integrator, is introduced to support the communications among UX specialists, designers, and developers. We discuss the responsibilities and task assignments for each role, and propose a new workflow to streamline the design and development. We also discuss the challenges and the lessons learned from applying different RATs. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.