Guiding users from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0
Obviously the selector has been inspired by famous applications like the Vodafone Handy Finder and Flex Store. However, whilst those RIAs have a more ‘flashy’ look and feel over them, Philips clearly has chosen for an experience that is more of a blend of Flash and HTML experiences.

Only time will tell what works out best for the end-user, but I think it’s a very nice example of how a large company can “guide” it’s site visitors from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 without disrupting too much of the ‘old’ experience. I speak to a lot of companies with big, frequently used websites, and somehow they always are afraid that RIA will be so much of a new experience that it becomes disruptive in a negative way. That is incorrect and I keep saying it over and over again; the transaction can be done very fluently and you should never forget to make Experience Designers and user research part of this process, they are there to avoid you making those mistakes. I am happy that Philips, a well recognized international brand, is showing off how you can do it.

Some technical details
The application has got many things that a good RIA should have, including a few which some people think are not possible to achieve within Flex (and which Philips also wasn’t sure of when they contacted my for more information when comparing Flex with AJAX);

• Single engine supporting many products, product categories, many languages and many filtering parameters.
• It supports proper browser interactions like bookmarking specific products and usage of the back button, still many people think this is not possible in RIA. Also notice how browser pages nicely resize when more of less content becomes available.
• The application seems to perform very well on my machine, despite the amount of data that is loaded.
• All product information, filtering settings and language information is pulled from an ecommerce CMS and loaded into the front-end on the fly. So Philips can easily add not only products, but also details, filtering settings, languages and even product categories using their CMS without having to change the Flex application itself.
• If the user doesn’t have Flash Player 9 installed, the CMS system will notice this and automatically fall back to the original HTML design for the website. So no need for Philips to be afraid of ‘only’ 90% Flash Player 9 penetration.

So obviously there will be AJAX supporters stating that this could have been build in AJAX as well, and probably it could. Whilst I can not speak for Philips and their exact reasons, I think they clearly have a long term vision on ‘Sense and Simplicity’ and apparently they felt confident that they could deliver that experience with Flex.

Not there yet
The application is useful and given the time constraints that Philips had to launch it (I can not disclose the exact details, but this was delivered in a record time), I really think they have created a solid foundation for further RIA expansion. There’s still still some things on my wish list though, like improved printing, drag and drop functionality (I am getting so much used to drag and drop on the web these days, is it just me?) and the ability to get a PDF with the comparisons so that I can my selections to my girlfriend for approval

During this session you will see front- and backend (with code samples) of 4 real life Flex cases:

• Belgacomtv.be by DAD
• My Club Vaio by Nascom
• Sony Ericsson by Mediacatalyst
• Schiphol Airport (Nomos) by Mediacatalyst

When? Thursday January 18th 2007
Where? Crowne Plaza hotel Antwerp, Belgium
How much does it cost? Registration is free but required!
Where do I register? www.mmug.be/meetings

The application uses a number of web services to get this data and they’re iterating the web service request to get the actual noise data (this would make a great messaging application in Flex 2).

The map application that shows the noise emissions at different places around Schiphol airport

I think this app is a great example of governmental dashboards, helping the government to better communicate with people. The airport is located very close to several major cities in The Netherlands and many citizens complain about too much noise pollution.

If I followed the politic situation well, the government tried to judge Schiphol based on the number of complaint calls that were received. However, wouldn’t it be better to judge on facts, instead of calls (some people are known to call the complaint phone number dozens of times a day, just to create more work for Schiphol in handling them).

Hence this dashboard, it’s trying to represent more accurate data and I guess they hope to give the citizens better feelings about the noice reduction.

But… the story is not finished yet. It happened to be that there’s also an organisation responsible for registering all the complaints they receive. In the past, this was a manual process. Now, another Adobe partner created a Flex form and management application with dashboard for this process as well. (read more at http://www.joh-enschede.com/?page=media&cid=2 and there is a Dutch study report as well).

So here you go… Flex all over to help the government to handle this ‘issue’. Dashboards for citizens, dashboards for government employees and rich forms for all

Highlights:

• Portal look and feel (nice reference for enterprise customers that consider a next generation customizable portals)
• Drag and drop of pods
• Multi-lingual application
• Rich User Interface
• Nice calendar interface

It’s only the first release (they are planning several) and I am impressed with the speed at which the team created this. However, I know there’s still a lot of things they’d like to implement in future versions. Would be nice to see them move to Flash Video as well.

The clips load very fast and this is a great showcase of how progressive downloads can be used for small video clips. It also shows that Flash allows for much smoother interfaces than many other video players.

This is the first release of a platform that will help Akzo Nobel to maintain over 220 sites used by business units, countries and brands to present themselves to business partners, financial analists and consumers.

Macromedia Alliance Partner and Flex Solution Provider  is responsible for the Flex implementation. You can read more about it in this Dutch InfoWorld article.

Some more Floorplanner demos: Hotel New York, design your own floors and festival planner.