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iRise partner OneSpring has updated their popular “SimDK for iPhones” and graciously allowed us to post the new iDoc as “iRise for iPhone” for download on the iRise site. This iDoc gives iPhone developers the ability to visualize iPhone applications early in the process. Functions simulated include the ability to quickly prototype the look, feel and behavior of iPhone applications, including screen transitions, typing and sliding.
To download the free iRise for iPhones iDoc, click here.
iRise for iPhones is a complete toolkit for the design of custom iPhone applications. It was built using visual elements and artifacts directly from Apple’s SDK, to which only approved Apple developers have access, thus allowing business analysts and interface designers who do not have access to Apple’s SDK to model app behavior early in the process.
iRise for iPhones offers a template guide that matches the form factor of the iPhone to help ensure designs can be accurately reproduced with the Apple SDK. iRise for iPhones includes:
o iPhone iDoc visualization template with guides;
o Menu icons w/ buttons;
o Custom button template;
o Slider and button action behaviors; and,
o Multi-touch actions.
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iRise Web Seminar – Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Accelerating Visualization with Asset Libraries
Join Michael Terrett, Principal & Co-Founder of id8 on February 26, 2009 @ 10am PT as he presents live examples of pre-configured assets that accelerate visualization.
Topics will:
- Discuss the benefits of using iRise asset libraries for packaged & custom projects
- Demonstrate high fidelity rapid prototyping using asset libraries
- Show how the latest features of iRise v7.2 facilitate the use and maintenance of asset libraries
- Discuss best practices for building your own reusable asset libraries
Whether you customize packaged applications or build your own enterprise solutions, you can dramatically reduce the time and cost it takes to get these projects done right—the first time. By using pre-configured asset libraries of iRise visualization elements, many companies are discovering the benefits of reusability to accelerate project outcomes. Libraries of reusable page elements, design patterns and business logic can dramatically speed the creation of high fidelity prototypes for a wide range of projects. As principal and co-founder of id8, Michael Terrett has tremendous experience on the topic of building and deploying reusable definition assets built for packaged solutions and proprietary enterprise application suites.
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iRise Web Seminar : Secret Sauce for Web Site Success
Join Douglas K. van Duyne, Principal & Founder of Naviscent on February 12th @ 10am PT as he keynotes the iRise Web Seminar.
First 50 people to register and attend receive a copy of Design of Sites!
You’ve worked hard to develop Websites and software, investing in product planning and development time. If you didn’t meet all your goals, you’re not alone. Now, imagine you learn the secret sauce to know how to invest your money for maximum benefit, and achieve your business ambitions. Douglas van Duyne, thought-leader, best-selling author, and principal of Naviscent, consulting to clients such as Oracle, eBay, Yahoo, Agilent, Autodesk and others, will take you through some practical exercises from his forthcoming book on mastering interface management.
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Happy Holidays
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iRise recently conducted a national survey of IT professionals around application definition. The survey revealed that 72% of IT professionals are suffering from increased development cost due to rework and scope creep . According to the survey, poor communication is a fundamental problem. Respondents cited “business stakeholders not being fully invested in the definition process’ or ‘having unrealistic expectations of the end result,” as the key problem in application definition communication.
Last week’s blog post by Forrester Research’s Carey Schwaber, “Which Vendors Have Made A Difference In App Dev?” 
acknowledged iRise for “waking up the market to the limitations of textual requirements.” This survey shows that many IT professionals are still in need of “awakening.”
Additional survey findings include:
- Over 60% of companies experienced delays, cost overruns and missing features in an application development project in the past two years;
- IT professionals that are prototyping applications are using MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint and MS Visio to document requirements, and over 60% of these respondents are not fully satisfied with their current method of defining applications;
- 30% of participants said that they are not testing applications before development at all; and,
- Almost 80% of respondents are interested in eliciting customer feedback using a fully functional prototype before coding.
To download the free executive report of this survey visit:
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At iRise, we have been preaching for many years that words by themselves do a poor job of defining the requirements for software applications. So, it’s refreshing to see someone else – especially a Forrester analyst – pile on to the discussion.
Tom Grant, a senior analyst in the Technology Marketing group at Forrester, published a research document this week titled “Improving Your Product Management Tools”. While the note is targeted at product marketing and management professionals, the roles and tasks performed by these workers have significant if not total overlap with business analyst and usability professions.
The problem is actually double-edged. According to Tom, “most product managers rely on tools – predominantly Microsoft Office – that do not adequately support them.” And while there are tools specifically designed to handle product requirements, the majority of technology companies do not embrace them.
Tom further identifies 6 functions needed to address the requirements challenges for product managers and describes the shortcomings of trying to use Microsoft Office, Web 2.0 tools and CRM systems:
- Collection
- Analysis
- Prediction
- Connection
- Communication
- Updates
By the way, iRise was mentioned as one of the tools for the Communication function which Tom defines as modeling or simulating use cases to communicate to stakeholders.
Tom’s research also pointed out that innovators are more than twice as likely to adopt requirements tools. He examined companies based on their size, company age and product delivery and found that requirements tools were adopted at a much higher rate in companies that were 1-5 years old, smaller than 500 employees and who used software as a service (SaaS) delivery.
The full 16-page report is available from Forrester for $279 and is worth a read for anyone involved in defining and managing requirements. You can also read Tom Grant’s blog at this link and he welcomes feedback.
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What are Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and how can your organization use them?
Maurice Martin, iRise President, COO and Founder, wrote an article recently that answered these questions for Hotel Business Review Executive magazine.
I’ve summarized some key points below and you can get a copy of the article from the iRise Website.
“RIAs represent a real opportunity for companies to improve their online offerings because they are the tools that provide Web designers the greatest flexibility in meeting the needs of your brand. But added richness will not always equate to an improved (or even a good) experience. At every point, you must think about what the best possible experience is for your customers.”
The article also included a discussion of the five pitfalls of adopting RIA:
- Not understanding customer needs
- Implementing for technology’s sake
- Creating a distracting experience
- Reduced web site performance
- Limited metrics tracking and reporting
If you are interested in learning if RIA is right for you and how to avoid the risks, be sure check out the article.
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SOA or service-oriented architecture is a chronically hot topic – and there are as many opinions about it as there are IT vendors. According to Wikipedia, SOA is “is a computer system’s architectural style for creating and using business processes, packaged as services, throughout their lifecycle. SOA also defines and provisions the IT infrastructure to allow different applications to exchange data and participate in business processes.” And for a more humorous definition of SOA overload, check out Greg the Architect in the ”SOA This, SOA That” video from YouTube.
We recently had an interesting internal email discussion on how iRise deals with SOA and I have excerpted the highlights below:
From Sherrick Murdoff, VP of Alliances and Business Development:
- “SOA is most often interpreted as back-end plumbing only, but this is not the case. SOA includes the back-end plumbing, but you don’t start with the back-end plumbing and you don’t start with building web services
- What many CIOs and industry leaders have learned and are promoting is to start with the customer experience – this should drive your SOA implementation more than anything. iRise lets you visualize the customer experience and iterate with both end-users and IT to gain alignment on what needs to be built that drives the “how”
- Visualizing SOA is important to let the customer experience drive the requirements for what infrastructure you need to put in place
- iRise aligns well in any SOA discussion and brings the customer back to what is important – visualizing “what” you need before you begin to think about the “how” you want to implement.”
From Matt Smith, Senior Enterprise Solutions Manager
- “Most people over-think the relationship between SOA and simulating applications. SOA basically means there is a provider (machine) and a consumer (machine or human) of a service.
- The processing of the service is all the back-end wizardry that goes on within the SOA, which iRise doesn’t diagram in the traditional sense of architecture modeling tools, but it does simulate the action.
- The line of business manager and end-user don’t care how the SOA actually processes the service request. iRise simulates the important bit from their perspective of application usability.”
From James McWethy, Enterprise Solutions Director
- “SOA…three loaded letters. I’ve seen companies spend years talking about defining and implementing an SOA strategy.
- Why not simulate the end-user experience that will result from the tiresome SOA planning process to: (1) Verify that the information being delivered via the service (informational or transactional) will be of value to the end user, and (2) simulate a set of components (portlets, widgets, gadgets, web parts, etc.) that will show the end result of a system comprised of multiple services.
iRise Customer Success Story - At Fusion ‘07, the Customer Experience team from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan gave a presentation on how they used iRise to simulate a technical proof of concept for their new member portal. The presentation is available here and can be viewed here.
So, why risk building your SOA infrastructure without using iRise to engaging your end-users? By simulating the end-user experience with iRise first, both business stakeholders and IT will win.
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We announced the immediate availability of the iRise simulation template for the iPhone at the Interop and Software 2008 conferences yesterday.
“iRise for iPhone”™ gives business analysts, user experience (UX) professionals and others a way to quickly prototype the look, feel and behavior of iPhone applications by making available pre-defined visualization widgets and templates that can be quickly assembled into a high definition mobile applications.
The template can simulate all of the iPhone’s standard menu icons and user actions, such as using sliders and zooming in and out of screens by “pinching” and “unpinching.” Application designers can use it to create custom buttons, manipulate the menu icons and define the effects of actions such as double-tapping a button.
Our alliance partner, OneSpring, developed the capability and is also providing the “OneSpring iPhone SimDK for iRise”.
Chuck Converse, a senior user experience architect at OneSpring noted, “Most applications, if you design them for mobile devices, are very text-heavy. The iPhone’s display capabilities give designers more freedom and a whole new set of choices.”
The full story is available from these related links:
And here is the YouTube video produced by OneSpring which demos the iRise iPhone capability:
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We are very pleased to announce that the first annual iRise “Visualize the Prize” Commercial Contest starts today and has a total cash prize of $20,000.
Why are we doing this? According to chief marketing officer, Mitch Bishop, “We know we have passionate and creative users, and we want to let them share their passion with us and the broader iRise User community”.
So, what does it take to win? Are you passionate about iRise? Has iRise changed your life or the way you do business? Are you creative? Do you have a great idea for telling the world about the power of visualization? Do you have a great way to motivate others to buy iRise? Help us tell the world by creating a 30 to 60 second commercial about iRise and you could win $15,000.
Make us laugh, make us cry, make us think, make us say “wow, we didn’t think of that!” or “whoa, we didn’t think of that”. You have total creative control to write, cast, direct and shoot your commercial.
We encourage you to tell us how you have used visualization and iRise to create something special. Did you speed time to market, increase innovation, improve user experience or reduce costs? Note that 30% of the judging criteria will be based on the likelihood to motivate people to buy or try iRise.
What are the contest details? A summary of the contest information has been copied below and is available from the contest website at www.irisevideo.com. Please bookmark the website so you can check back frequently for new video submissions – and don’t forget to vote for your favorites during the voting period in June.
Prizes:
- The 1st place winner will receive $15,000
- Two Runner-up winners will receive $2,500 each
Dates:
- Contest starts Tuesday April 8, 2008
- Contest ends Wednesday June 4, 2008
- Top 10 semifinalists selected on June 6, 2008
- Voting period runs from Friday June 6, 2008 to Friday June 20, 2008
Contest Process:
- Create a completely original commercial – 30 to 60 seconds long
- Upload your video to YouTube by June 4, 2008
- Register on the iRise Commercial website and submit the URL for your video
- Wait for iRise to approve and post your commercial on this iRise Commercial website
- Promote your iRise commercial video and watch all of the accepted videos on the iRise Commercial website
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Vote for your favorite videos from June 6, 2008 to June 20, 2008
- Complete rules are available here
In order to prime your creative pumps, here is an example iRise Commercial that I pulled together last week…and don’t worry, I’m not eligible to win:
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