Understanding the Macromedia Flex Experience Model

What Is "Experience" and Why Do I Care?

Experience is a well-used term but we use it to mean something very specific. It's not just about making an interface look pretty and it's not about gratuitous, animated flying things that zoom across your screen. Experience is about using expressive visual language and good usability practices to surface capability and improve the successful completion of user tasks (see Figure 1). I'll give some examples later but the bottom line is that MXML and ActionScript 2.0 give you more tools to work with than HTML—although HTML is still great for many things!

Figure 1. "Experience" means the experience received by the user

Aesthetics are equally important to experience. Humans are wired with a desire for sensory stimulation and aesthetic appeal, and research shows that attractiveness keeps our focus and improves our completion of tasks. Although most research and thinking to date concentrates on how to create usable software—which is still critical—we believe that software should move beyond that to become truly useful and fun or engaging in some way, thereby appealing to you on multiple levels. Therefore we say that a really great experience combines elements that are useful, usable, and desirable .

Note: The concept of "useful, usable, desirable" came from the excellent book Creating Breakthrough Products: Innovation from Product Planning to Program Approval by Jonathan Cagan and Craig M. Vogel (Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2002). See the last page of this article for links to more resources.

The main reason why it's worth focusing on experience now more than ever is that, increasingly, the most important face-to-face relationship you have with your customers is being replaced with software—and you need that software to give users a great experience. Creating a frustrating online experience is like keeping a rude, uncooperative, inattentive salesperson on the showroom floor.

Here's an example. I do all my banking with Bank of America but haven't walked inside a branch office for several years. All of my interaction for paying bills, investing, balancing my checkbook, and so on is through the Bank of America website and ATMs. Bank of America is betting their most important relationship with me, their customer, on this buggy piece of software and hardware running on my computer. My experience with this software—how useful, usable, and desirable it is—shapes the value I place on my business relationship with them. Furthermore, my switching costs are low: With one click I can explore Wells Fargo's services and see if they are better, more useful, or more compelling.

There is much more to say about why experience matters. If you are interested, check out the last page of this article for links to a white paper we wrote on the topic, The Essence of Effective Rich Internet Applications (PDF, 2.57 MB), a report by IDC, and other resources.

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