Beyond | IT : consumer experience

How WPF can help your golf game, or PING’s new beginning

john.mullinax — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:18:15 GMT

This app from PING, called nFlight, is extremely cool. Beautiful, sophisticated, and fun. nFlight analyzes your golf swing to develop specifications for custom fit golf clubs. The app performs complex simulations and renders beautiful displays that show actual ball flight with different club parameters, humidity levels, wind conditions, etc. It even shows the leaves blowing and water rippling.

For the richest experience and highest app performance, the PING team built this app in WPF. Orders are sent from the retail locations where people get custom fit for their clubs off to PING for manufacturing, and PING manages updates with Synchronization Services. A simple, but compelling example showing the best of software and services together. :)

PING originally planned this as an 18-month project, but a year into it they were struggling. Developing an app that was both beautiful and also computationally sophisticated proved a real challenge. With 6 months to go before the project was due, they basically started over.

Fortunately, they were able salvage some graphic design concepts. Those were created in Expression Blend and handed off to developers working in Visual Studio. You might guess how the story goes from here on out:

Controls that took weeks to build in their old environment were now getting done in a day
The new workflow for developers and designers had a huge impact on the teams productivity and agility
The nFlight app maintained high fidelity to design intent
The PING team re-worked their original efforts in less than 3 months, and had a production version of the app 2 months after that
By early 2009, over 400 PING dealers around the world were using the app

For PING, the benefits of their WPF nFlight app go beyond developer and designer productivity… they make better consumer experiences practical and reinforce the innovation leadership credentials for which the PING brand is known.

I’m a terrible golfer, but with custom-fit clubs maybe there’s hope for me? Well, I probably still won’t be able to golf, but getting custom-fit clubs sure looks like fun!

Like to learn more?

Learn more about what PING did and their nFlight app here.
See a cool video that shows folks from PING talking through the app and showing demos here.
Find an nFlight fitting location near you here!

Technorati Tags: Software-plus-services,WPF,User Experience,golf

View MIX09 sessions all online!

john.mullinax — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 03:10:51 GMT

Thanks to the MIX team for getting a nice, organized list of all the MIX09 session videos up – complete with multiple video formats, as well as slides!

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/All

Not as good as being there, but essentially great, free training!

Naturally, the keynotes are definitely worth seeing, and also, I like this session on the Windows Live Messenger Toolkit. It does a nice job showing examples of how Live Services can make your site more social and engaging, and also how easy it is to get started.

Unlike the Live Framework/Mesh part of Live Services – which is extremely cool in its own right, but still in CTP and not yet ready for production use -- everything Chris Parker from the Windows Live team shows in this session is ready to go into production on your site today.

The screen shot above is from the last demo in the video – it shows Chris picking an item from a list, dragging it over and dropping it on one of his Windows Live Messenger contacts, and that kicking of an IM to the user with a link to the item he picked from the list. Basically, a free and easy way to add real time collaboration to your web site! Very cool.

Equally cool, Live Services lets people leverage their existing social network and social capabilities (via Windows Live infrastructure) on your site instead of asking them to invest in creating yet another collection of friends. I believe this is important because, frankly, I’m sensing some “social networking fatigue” – users like social capabilities, but they don’t especially like the proliferation of their data and fragmentation of their social experiences online. In other words, allowing users to leverage their existing social networks contributes to a thoughtful consumer experience.

As a bonus for site owners, helping people connect with their networks on your site makes it easier for them to share your site with their friends – which helps drive both more traffic and more time on site.

Learn more about Live Services in general at dev.live.com, and more specifically about leveraging Messenger in your site here.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: MIX,Free Learning,Live Services,Messenger,Windows Live,Social

The consumer value stream mind set

john.mullinax — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 22:47:00 GMT

I saw this today, and it cracked me up. It's an insightful (and funny!) one-panel exposition on the importance of understanding consumer motivations -- the things that are important to them, what they are trying to accomplish. In microeconomic terms --...(read more)

Optimizing the consumer value stream

john.mullinax — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 01:33:45 GMT

Technorati Tags: systems thinking , lean , consumer experience , web 2.0 , next web , loyalty Are you thinking about your consumers' personal value stream? The businesses I generally work with are familiar with the notion of a value chain or a value...(read more)

What is Surface?

john.mullinax — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:30:00 GMT

Well, by now I imagine many folks may have heard a little bit about Surface -- Microsoft's latest computing innovation. There's a reason Surface is getting a lot of buzz: it really is ground breaking! For those who haven't seen it yet, you owe it to yourself...(read more)

Want more info on Popfly?

john.mullinax — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 19:46:44 GMT

I recently got into the Popfly alpha, and have been playing around with it off and on for the last week or two. Here's a screenshot of a simple, compact News Reader that pulls in RSS feeds from the blogs of the members of the Microsoft's DPE team that...(read more)

Empowered Consumer Experiences Drive Loyalty, Profits

john.mullinax — Tue, 08 May 2007 23:00:00 GMT

We don’t get a physical newspaper at our house, but sometimes my wife will go buy one – and then throw it away (!) – to get the coupons inside. It’s not just my family abandoning newspapers -- newspaper circulations have been declining for over 15 years...(read more)