Choosing the Right Platform for User Experience

Rich Application or Web Application?  ASP.NET or Sharepoint?  Regular ASPX controls or AJAX?

In sessions at conferences (most recently TechEd in Barcelona), I've been discussing the many choices that architects and developers face every day, especially when it comes to user experience.  To help get across the point, I put together a tool that helps you think about platform selection, called UXIQ.  It’s a small WPF app with a set of slider controls that you can set various criteria for user experience, and in turn be presented with recommendations for the technology or platform that is the closest fit.

The decision criteria in the tool is as follows:

Persona – Location of the user, how mobile the user is, whether the user can be trained, and how personalized the experience should be.

Application – The connectivity requirements for the application, the look and feel of the application, graphics needs, and interaction requirements.

Environment – If installation is possible on the local device/machine, integration with other software, integration with other hardware, and developer knowledge.

The tool matches this criteria to a set of data (stored in an XML file) and presents the closest three technologies that match.  You can then hover over the options to see how far off they are, and also see some more information/links about the technology.  Do remember that the values represented in this tool are my opinion, based on my personal experience - if you want change the values or add/remove technologies, feel free to edit the XML data file as appropriate. 

You can find the tool here - to run, you'll require .NET 3.5 runtime which can be downloaded here.  If you are interested how the tool works, the source code for the application can be found here.