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When a small group of developers at Macromedia set out to create what became
the Pet Market application, they set their sights on a moderate
target. They wanted to create a Rich Internet Application to show
off the key features of the newly-released MX family of products,
including Macromedia Flash MX, ColdFusion MX, Dreamweaver MX and Fireworks
MX. They wanted to demonstrate a best-of-breed user experience
using a rich client – the Macromedia Flash Player.
Finding Macromedia Flash expertise within Macromedia wasn't difficult.
But the fledgling team needed a base of ideas from which they
could work. The front end they wanted to create had to be more
than dressed-up HTML. This application had to break out of the
UI box that web applications have fallen into because of the restraints
of HTML. It had to reveal new territory; it had to be an example
of what was possible for Rich Internet Applications.
So the team brought in a professional design shop called Popular
Front Interactive to help generate UI concepts. Buck Bito,
a Macromedia Flash designer, was one of the earliest team members. "We
were using Popular Front to help us with the user interactions,"
Buck said. "They came up with some great, innovative ways
of handling information and portraying different application states."
Laurence Bricker, co-founder and Creative Director of Popular
Front, remarked, "We have a long history working with Macromedia Flash,
and we were already accustomed to designing these kinds of seamless
user experiences, so we brought a lot of ideas and process know-how
to the project. Our knowledge of back-end integration with Macromedia Flash
allowed us to design a great front end experience for the Pet
Market application."
Concepts in hand, the team rushed to put together a prototype
so that the application could be shopped around. Even though they
were trying to work on an accelerated timeline, the team found
it surprisingly easy to create the prototype. "It was very
simple to set up a prototype application," said Buck Bito.
"There were three designs that we had [from Popular Front],
and we picked the best one and built a fully-functional prototype
based on that."
The process of choosing among the different designs was fairly
involved. The team members created personas, or typical
user profiles, and looked at how each design would serve the needs
of the personas. (Throughout the rest of the development of the
Pet Market application, the team referred back to the personas
in order to make decisions about the UI or functionality of the
program.) After carefully comparing each UI design against the
personas, the team decided on a winning design.
Steve
Peterson, the program manager for the Pet Market project, felt that the team was
able to build a functioning prototype very quickly and easily. Popular Front created
some Macromedia Flash examples that showed how the interactions and on-screen motion would
occur. Then the team dug in. "We were able to use a lot of the pre-built
Macromedia Flash MX components," Steve said, "which essentially gave us a lot of
the interface for free." The component library in Macromedia Flash MX enabled the team
to drop in ready-made items like scrollbars and text windows without having to
worry about testing their basic functionality. | 
