Designing interaction concepts, managing customer expectation and mastering agile development in rich application product development

Abstract

The emergence of rich application implementation frameworks, such as WPF and Silverlight, promoted a new collaboration paradigm between developers and designers where ownership of the user interface code is transferred to the user experience team. The implications of this new paradigm for the user centered design process impact its technical, collaborative, and business dimensions. The traditional design prototype can now demonstrate most of the desired user experience and could be directly integrated with the back-end code, significantly reducing the design revision costs. Creating the rich prototypes demand enhanced technical skills from visual designers, who become a member of both the design and implementation teams. The implementation tools provided by the rich application frameworks aim to simplify the prototype creation task for the designer, but can potentially lead customers to expect a lower effort associated with the user centered design process. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.