Conclusion

Software is everywhere, and with Rich User Experience (RUE), software will finally be somewhere.

With their hay days in the rear view mirror, back-ends have become a commodity, leaving the door wide open for front-ends to dominate the landscape.

With such market conditions, user experiences dominate. What distinguishes one product, one application, one website, or one game from another, is indeed the user experience.

Considering the cost of attracting, let alone retaining, customers when competition is only a click away, user experience is not something but everything. It is the product not just a feature. It is not a nice thing to have but a must have. It is not a vitamin but a medicine.

RUE applications are incredible, extraordinary, and sophisticated applications that are not just useful and usable, but desirable. They are solid on the back-end and stunning on the front-end.

However, designing and incorporating RUE in a product is not an easy task to be left in novice hands. RUE is a complex multi-disciplinary field that combines computer science, software engineering, information architecture, flow architecture, cognitive behavior, and art.

While so far, RUE applications have found their way into some niches where they are most needed such as configurators, dashboards, business analytics, weather systems, and the likes, they are quickly entering the mainstream. The stumbling blocks have been the complexity, availability of experts, lack of standards, and difficulty in measuring success because the intangible overwhelm the tangibles.

Despite such obstacles, which are being surmounted, the benefits derived from RUE are obvious. Whether it is an increase in customer satisfaction, an increase in loyalty, an increase in market share, an increase in productivity, a decrease in cost of development and maintenance, or an increase on ROI, all constituents benefit from RUE from users to marketers, and from engineers to investors.

In conclusion, the time for RUE is now…