I often talk about how mission critical applications have unique requirements when it comes to RIA and user experience design. Broadly speaking mission critical applications require a combination high-performance, at-a-glance clarity, security, redundancy, scheduling, reporting and scalability.
I was explaining these characteristics to a client looking for an RIA front-end design for their green energy production system. I found that the easiest way to explain some of the real-time design requirements was to give examples from our own client work. I thought I would share a few of these from that conversation.
Example requirements for mission critical UI and application design
Scheduling - Trading systems
With most application, when you make a change to a preference of function, you save the change and the change is applied then and there. With international trading systems affecting large $$ trades/data, you need to be able to make changes and then precisely define triggers or schedule when these changes are applied.
Reporting and Tracking - Financial transaction processing
With mission critical applications there often needs to be an audit trail for changes to data, system settings and transactions. For example when changes are made to the interest rate on credit card there needs to be a non-alterable record that tracks who did it, when, and why.
Clear Conceptual Models - Flight planning
Complex or mission critical systems needs to designed it so that the user knows exactly what they're interacting with. In flight planning, the FAA uses a very particular type of document which is drilled into to every pilot or controller. The RIA interface for a flight planning application had to be modeled tightly around this existing model so it was immediately interpretable.
At-a-Glance Clarity - Telecommunications processing
Imagine a system with 200,000,000 transactions a day. The visualization and reporting system needs to be designed to represent mass volumes of things happening with automatic callouts and quick ways to drill down.
Privacy and Security - Medical diagnostic collaboration
While security is vital in every enterprise, security in medical records is a hot button item right now. Web-based medical records and collaboration applications need to have clear options to define roles, access levels, recurring re-validation requirements, and multiple layers of protection.
Redundancy and Validation - Emergency notification
For most web applications, it is standard to have simple error checking for things like entering an invalid email address. But advanced validation and redundancy become vital in mission critical applications. For emergency notification systems that trigger emergency first responders and can impact the physical well-being of many individuals, any alert messages need to have built in redundancy (i.e. you can't accidentally send out a notification without confirmation) and geospatial validation (you can't inadvertently send out a notice to residents in San Francisco about a threat occurring in Seattle).
Scalability - Insurance M&A
Scalability is desirable for any enterprise where there is an expectation for growth and change. But this was critical for an insurance carrier that grew rapidly due to acquisitions. The user base was to expand several orders of magnitude in the course of a very short time and the application would need to scale to accommodate the increased demands without requiring rework.
High Performance - Fuel management
Real-time reporting and high performance applies to virtually all mission critical applications. But when I was discussing this with the green energy company, rather than discussing our work in financial systems (i.e. where it is easy to see how even seconds of delay can translate to millions of dollars in impct), I instead referenced real-time remote monitoring, management and incident reporting of critical fuel supplies - such as in power plants, backup power systems, emergency fleets vehicles. As inventory drops or there is a change in the status of a critical fuel system, many actions need to quickly and automatically come into play to avert catastrophic failures.
Designing RIAs that address these mission critical requirements is not simple. In addition to the technical demands, it requires extensive user validation and testing as well as an understanding of the inner workings and organizational structures of large enterprises. Needless to say, it makes for very interesting and challenging work.
Categories: Biotech & Healthcare, RIA