How to Evaluate UI Technologies

Selecting a User Interface(UI) technology for developing rich and interactive web-based software products is challenging job these days. The UI technologies have to be studied and evaluated before choosing the one. This is because, the cost of changing the UI technology later in the project is more. As I have seen the user interface never satisfies the customers 100% because there is always a scope for improvement in the UI and different customers would have different opinions on the UI screens. Another key fact is that we have got lots of choices in UI technologies to select from and these UI technologies keep evolving time to time with more and more features.

Before selecting and finalizing  an UI technology for your software product, it’s very much essential that we need to evaluate all the available UI technologies based on certain parameters such as ease of use, performance, richness of UI, Security, Browsers supported, Learning Curve, Debugging Ease etc and more importantly how well a particular UI technology fits into your product lines and meets the product user interface requirements.

Parameters to consider while evaluating the UI technologies

The parameters differ based on the kind of the product and kind of customers you are dealing with. There are no thumb rules and fixed parameters to consider while evaluating UI technologies. To measure each of the parameters that you have defined on a particular UI technology, the prototypes need to be tried out if the documentation of a UI technology is not adequate or not much informative enough to understand the technology.  The following evaluation matrix is the result of trying out prototypes on different UI technologies Flex, SilverLight2.0, LWUT , JavaFX, GWT and SWT.

UI Technology Evaluation Matrix Example

S.No	Parameters/Technologies	Flex	SilverLight2.0	LWUIT	JavaFX	GWT	SWT
1	Security	9	9	9	9	9	9
2	Browsers supported	9	7	7	7	9	9
3	Tool/IDE Support	9	5	5	7	5	5
4	Licensing/Cost	5	7	9	7	9	9
5	Platforms supported	7	7	7	7	9	9
6	Learning Curve	9	7	7	5	5	5
7	UI Richness	9	9	7	7	9	7
8	Performance	9	7	9	7	7	9
9	Debugging Ease	7	7	7	5	7	7
10	Extendible	9	9	9	9	7	5
11	Design Flexibility	7	9	9	9	9	5
	Total	89	83	85	79	80	79

  
The above table can be taken as an example as to how to define parameters and evaluate UI technologies for your product and product deployment requirements. User interface parameters are very much customized. If certain parameters get high importance for some products, the same parameters can get low importance for another product depending on the type of the product and customers. And hence it makes sense to define an "importance" column also for each identified parameters.

References

Flex - http://www.adobe.com/products/flex.html
SilverLight2.0 - http://www.infoq.com/articles/silverlight-java-interop
LWUIT - http://lwuit.java.net/
JavaFX - http://javafx.com/
GWT - http://technoladder.blogspot.in/2012/01/ajax-and-gwt.html
SWT - http://www.eclipse.org/swt/