Last month I described an an important advantage RIA can bring to your business by providing increased market share through improved brand recognition. In this second part I'll describe how RIA can improve your business's efficiency and effectiveness.
RIA improves efficiency and effectiveness of business
Organizations are turning to RIA to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their business. This is because a successful RIA design can greatly simplify and streamline the user interaction and allow people to get what they need done more quickly. The ability to take complex business operations and turn them into something simple is much more achievable with today's RIA technologies than what was once available.
For example, in sites built with traditional web technologies, a multi-step task often required page flipping to capture information in piecemeal fashion and would have to process and display interim results for steps that affect one another. This created an artificial interruption in the user experience - essentially creating a business process workaround simply due to technology-imposed constraints. The result was often a frustrating and confusing user experience. Now, a highly interactive RIA interface can represent complex, multi-step tasks directly and intuitively on a single screen.
Extending upon the example above, options were often limited in the ability to display complex data in an intuitive and natural way. The information presented was usually static and did not allow much in terms of interactivity. Through RIA, data exploration can be a more interactive experience, allowing users to navigate through large bodies of data by looking at charts and drilling down into sections, and enabling users to visually process increasing levels of detail at their own pace. When users are able to manipulate data through visualization, data that was once complex becomes more understandable, just by making the visual representation simpler, more manageable and more interactive.
RIA improves user productivity by providing features previously unavailable to traditional HTML-based web sites. The types of controls available are much more robust and provide higher interactivity. Most RIA designs that employ these controls enable users to receive timely feedback on their input decisions through real-time tactile responses, which provides information to the user in a very intuitive and natural way. This quickens delivery of the message and helps reduce errors. It also makes working with a sophisticated system much less complicated to operate. Users are better able to visualize the result of their choices in real-time, which reduces time, effort and energy to complete their tasks and leaves the user feeling satisfied.
RIA technologies also lend to a better user experience because of the speed at which these applications operate. This is because the underlying RIA technologies work in more efficient ways to transmit data back and forth. In traditional web sites data is transmitted as text over HTTP where lots of bandwidth is consumed. With RIA there are better options and support for data transmission, including binary data and other remoting protocols, which makes the entire experience better because the application is more responsive.
Next up
Thanks for reading. In my third and final segment in this series I'll describe how RIA decreases the cost of business operations.
