Well, here we are at Max 2010 to hear about some people doing enterprise RIA and engagement, and exciting stuff in the business world that doesn't involve just streaming videos. Why don't you introduce yourself real quick? We'll do that. I'm Chris Rogers. I work with Universal Mind. I'm our VP of consulting, which means I manage our core business, which is working with customers primarily in the enterprise and in the innovation space around RIA. We were talking with Adobe's Ben Watson about what it means to sort of be an enterprise RIA or to fit kind of the Adobe experience into a business context. And what's interesting about you guys is you actually go out and do the hard work of doing that with the tools they provide and others. What's interesting in that aspect is that people seem, a lot of software projects are kind of dismissive of actually, this is going to sound corny, but studying what their users actually want and how they interact with their software. And how do you sort of convince people that they should take the time to actually figure out how their users are using the software versus just kind of satisfy a list of features that they should put into the software? Yeah, so I'll give you an equally geeky response, which is, you know, we used to begin our user experience exercises with a discrete research phase. And if customers aren't sort of convinced that that's needed, often they, or clients I should say, clients feel like they know their customers really well. We've baked into more of an iterative design approach. So in short sprints we go all the way through concepts of user research through prototyping, which is something a customer does understand in the user experience design sort of world. So we sort of snuck it in by making sure that we do it in an iterative fashion. And we can go from user research, understanding users, to wire framing and prototyping up those experiences. So very often customers get to see what's happening and why that's important. So it's a bit of an education process, but as long as they're getting out of it at the end of these brief sprints, what they're looking for, they seem to get more bought in and it becomes more part of the process with that client.
2:00So there's a couple of different ways that this works. In some senses an enterprise RIA can refer to something that's, you know, within the four walls of an enterprise and is used for a customer to, you know, interact in business transactions. So there's a finite user group. And for us that's an easier way to interview folks, understand personas, and understand their sort of interactions and workflows. Enterprise might also refer to applications that are business focused, like something like a banking application, even though the target user is a consumer. That's sort of an undefinable user group because it could be anyone who banks and that's sort of all of us. And again, a lot of what you're getting at is figuring out the touch points the user's having with the software and then really polishing the crap out of those touch points. Well, there may be software and there may not be. There will be software once we're done with them. But in some cases it might be a process that already exists in another fashion. So it might be interacting with multiple applications or physical things like calculators and calendars that are hanging on their wall. There's one example where we worked with a financial services company where we went into a user's cubicle and found post-it notes and calculators and calendars hanging around on the wall. And we found out that those were just crutches that they were using in addition to the technology that they had in-house that they thought was just fine. By integrating a lot of sort of the crutches that they use in their day-to-day process into the application, we sort of made a much more relevant and usable application for that customer. So a great user experience doesn't have to be flashy and full of animation and sexy choreography. A great user experience means that the process is accomplished in as few steps and as elegantly and obviously as possible in most cases. So where a visual metaphor is more important with something like potentially like a mapping application or something where you want to see the where and the when of the information and the data,
4:02I think we can go down that path. But user experience for the sake of Sizzle is really not the end game in enterprise software. I think the Adobe toolset, things like Flex and Lifecycle Data Services, etc., these are enterprise-grade platforms that not only foster that user experience, but the IT professional on the back end understands and is not afraid of and can tie into existing data services. When you sort of deliver this project or these kind of projects, what's the sort of leave behind you leave for management or whoever to kind of rate the success of it? How do you get the project done and know to be happy with it? There's kind of a couple answers here. One is if a customer is getting into sort of a crowded space and wants to enter that space and differentiate by innovating, then the answer to that is, you know, have we built something that takes them one step ahead of where their competitors are? So an example of that is working with, for instance, Kodak Gallery, who self-admittedly kind of got behind the shutter flies and snap fishes of the world. When we help them to build in innovative features and an innovative experience into the new website, you know, they can go off and then measure, you know, are they having, you know, greater use of the features that are featured on the website and are they getting better adoption, things like that. On the other hand, if it's more of an enterprise focused application where market share and things like that aren't as important, you know, we sort of leave it to are the customers using our customers' users getting more out of the data and using the existing enterprise applications in ways that they probably were afraid of doing before. Admittedly, we don't do so much of that measurement. You know, there's been a lot of discussion here around Omniture and some of the analytics tools that Adobe offers. And it's probably something we could do, but really we're in the business of making sure that we translate what a customer is, either a problem that they're trying to fix or a strategic objective that they're trying to realize and making sure that at the end of the project we've done that.
6:04Well, thanks for being on. Thank you for having me.