ISC

Mapping Solution Provider Uses New Design Tools to Deliver Improved User Experience

ISC, a provider of spatially enabled solutions, had to improve its focus on the user experience. The company acquired a design group and began using Microsoft® Expression Blend™ design software together with the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 Professional Edition software development system. Because both tools support XML Application Markup Language (XAML), designers and developers can more easily work together, sharing projects, code, and user interface designs. The company’s new approach to building software has resulted in improved collaboration between designers and developers, an earlier focus on the user experience, more customer-friendly solutions, and faster development times—all of which have helped the company’s new Interactive Design group become profitable in only two months.

 

Situation

Established in 1990, I.S. Consulting (ISC) is a software products and consulting firm with a focus on geographic information system (GIS) and other spatially enabled solutions. MapDotNet, the company’s flagship product, consists of a server component, a design environment, and custom controls that together enable customers to rapidly build solutions for visualizing geographic data. A Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner since 2001, ISC develops almost exclusively on the Windows® operating system platform, using the Microsoft Visual Studio® development system and the Microsoft .NET Framework as its preferred development environment.

Over the past few years, ISC realized that it had to improve its focus on the user experience—especially for the custom solutions it builds for clients. “Some organizations purchase MapDotNet and use it to do their own software development, while others pay us to do that work for them,” says Mark Alexander, President of ISC. “In the past, we focused on functionality, with usability and visual appeal as secondary concerns. We would build an application that we were proud of and that met all functional requirements, but it wouldn’t be well received from a user experience perspective, and we would have to make significant changes.”

Realizing that its own developers had neither the skills nor the desire to pursue user experience design, ISC began discussing the possibility of a merger with White Dog Design Group. “We saw that ISC was doing some pretty interesting projects,” says Darren Allen, who owned the design company. “A merger was attractive to us because it offered the ability to take on larger projects and play a more active role in user experience design.”

For the two companies to come together smoothly, they had to overcome the gap that traditionally has existed between designer and developer. “If there was any trepidation on my side, it was due to past experience working at Java development shops, where there was a huge disconnect between developer and designer,” says Allen. “The only time the process worked smoothly was when I found that rare developer who could bridge the disciplines.”
 
The main problem was that designer and developer used different tools. “I would use Photoshop to create preliminary designs, cut out the images, and hand them off to a developer, with the onus on the developer to use his or her own set of tools to translate what I had provided into code,” says Allen. “More often than not, I would end up frustrated because my vision wasn’t realized. Or I would get called in at the end of the development process and thought of as a decorator. I would try to make sense of already written JavaServer Pages and make them pretty—with no input into usability or flow.”

The process was just as difficult for developers. “Most developers want to be handed a design that they can just plug in—but it rarely works that way,” says John Farrell, Senior Program Manager at ISC. “Developers spent a lot of time reworking the design assets they were provided, translating the design into Cascading Style Sheets, and so on. In addition, we build a lot of GIS applications that are heavily dependent on Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or AJAX. Although a Web page may look simple graphically, getting it to behave correctly in an AJAX environment can be difficult. Similarly, you can build some really beautiful applications using Adobe Flash, but connecting them to back-end Web services can take a lot of work.”

Solution

ISC, which acquired White Dog Design Group in July 2008, closed the gap between development and design by using the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition software development system together with Microsoft Expression Blend™ design software. Because both tools support XML Application Markup Language (XAML), designers and developers can share projects, code, and user interface (UI) designs to accelerate product development and deliver more user-centric solutions.
 

Interactive design is a new service offering for us, and it’s definitely helping us to win new business.… Overall, we’ve been able to grow our revenue by 20 percent. Mark Alexander President, ISC

The new tool set enables the company to just as easily build Web solutions based on the Microsoft Silverlight™ browser plug-in or desktop applications based on Windows Presentation Foundation, both of which are based on XAML. “Developers and designers now can work together in a friction-free environment,” says Alexander. “We’re now poised to deliver the rich, interactive user experiences that customers are demanding, regardless of whether we’re targeting a Windows-based desktop or the Web.”

The first solution that ISC built using the combination of Visual Studio and Expression Blend was MapDotNet UX Studio, the desktop design tool component for the new version of its flagship product suite. “The entire user interface for MapDotNet UX Studio is based on XAML,” says Farrell. “The UX in the name stands for user experience, so what better place to start than with our own design tools? By taking on this project first, we’re delivering an improved user experience that benefits not only clients who use MapDotNet to build their own solutions, but also our own developers when the client chooses to have us build the solution for them.”

Today, designers at ISC no longer design user interfaces using Photoshop. Instead, they build mockups and prototypes directly in Expression Blend—work that ISC can then build on as a project progresses. “With Expression Blend, I can do things—such as applying gradients to a dialog box—that I can’t do with other tools,” says Allen, who is now Director of Creative Design at ISC. “I no longer have to create a design in Photoshop, cut it into pieces, and have a developer reassemble it. Instead, they can just take what I give them and run with it. As a project progresses, I can continue to work on the design while developers work on the code. It’s great to be able to work in parallel, without constant handoffs.”

ISC’s new “design and build” approach to developing software is proving just as beneficial for Farrell, who, as a program manager, often straddles the line between the two disciplines. “Yesterday, in building a sample GIS application for a customer, I had Visual Studio, Expression Blend, and MapDotNet UX Studio open. They all work together and interact with the same code base, so I can work really quickly. To change the functionality of the application, I use Visual Studio. To change the UI, I use Expression Blend. To relocate a map, I use MapDotNet UX Studio. In eight hours, I was able to take some files from a customer and deliver a working GIS application for their review. A year ago, the same task would have taken days or weeks.”

Using its new tool set, ISC is now developing two custom solutions for customers: a parcel viewer based on Silverlight, and a Silverlight-based application for configuring floor space in convention centers. “A client came to us with a problem that, in the past, we had no good way to solve,” explains Allen. “They manage one conference every year and had a Web-based application that let exhibitors choose a booth and pay. The conference is always held at a different location, and the client was getting tired of going back to a Web development company each year to modify the application for a different floor layout. We used Expression Blend to design a Silverlight-based application that lets business users drag graphic elements to configure the floor space. The combination of Expression Blend and Silverlight made development of that functionality easy and enabled us to deliver a very rich user experience.”

Benefits

By adopting Expression Blend design software, ISC was able to close the gap between user experience design and software development. The company’s new approach to building software has resulted in improved collaboration between designers and developers, an earlier focus on the user experience, solutions that are more customer friendly, and faster development times—all of which are helping ISC to get the most out of its merger with White Dog Design Group.

Improved Collaboration Between Designers and Developers

By using tools that are designed to work together, designers and developers at ISC are able to collaborate more closely, leading to what Allen estimates as a one-third increase in productivity. “Microsoft has really brought together the design and development sides of building software,” says Allen. “A designer can quickly create the desired user experience and hand it off to a developer to start implementing a solution, without all the translation or guesswork that we had to deal with in the past. And thanks to the clean separation between the look and feel of the user interface and the code behind it, a designer and a developer can continue to work together side by side over the course of a project, without one person having to stop and wait for the other.”

Earlier Focus on the User Experience

Because of its new approach to software design and development, ISC is able to focus on the user experience at an earlier stage of a new project’s development. “The user experience was lacking before or, at best, was an afterthought,” says Farrell. “Today, with designers using Expression Blend to design the UI, we’re able to present designs for the customer to look at much more quickly—and start to get their approval on the solution’s look and feel. Before, two months into a project, what we would show the customer was functionally correct but had very little in the way of a UI focus. Today, we can have a heavy UI focus two weeks into the project—and can change that UI as much as we want as development progresses. As a result, customer satisfaction at the critical point of solution delivery has increased noticeably.”

Richer, More Productive Customer Experience

The company’s new tool set and approach for UI design also has encouraged ISC designers to “push the envelope” when it comes to defining the user experience. “Without a doubt, there’s an increased level of excitement and satisfaction among designers,” says Allen. “Anything we can dream, we can do—without being limited by the tools. If I can get a user interface laid out on the design side, I know that it’s ready to go to development and that our developers can make it work.”

We’re heavily promoting our experience with Expression Blend, Windows Presentation Foundation, and Silverlight—capabilities that have enabled our new design unit to become profitable in only two months. Mark Alexander President, ISC

For example, ISC is taking advantage of new capabilities provided by Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Silverlight to deliver a richer, more productive user experience. “ISC is a provider of spatially enabled solutions, so strong graphics performance and an engaging user interface are both critical for our products,” says Alexander. “A key enabler of the improved graphics performance provided by the new version of our product is the vector-based graphics engine within Windows Presentation Foundation, which provides significant performance advantages over the raster-based approach we used in the past. For a visualization solution such as ours, Windows Presentation Foundation is the only logical choice for desktop application support. Similarly, for the Web, there’s nothing that compares to Microsoft Silverlight.”

Allen agrees wholeheartedly with Alexander’s assessment, especially regarding Silverlight. “Improved graphics performance is a given with Silverlight, which has enabled us to significantly increase UI responsiveness as users zoom in or zoom out on a map,” he says. “However, Silverlight provides many other capabilities that help us deliver a richer user experience. For example, it’s a lot easier to make an application scale to fill the screen in Silverlight than it is in Flash. Similarly, it’s easy to add shimmer, glow, and other behaviors to UI controls to show their responsiveness to user input. As designers, we’ve talked for years about wanting to build rich Internet applications. With Expression Blend and Silverlight, now we can.”

Reduced Development Times

Just as Allen attributes an estimated one-third increase in productivity to improved collaboration, Farrell estimates that ISC’s new approach to building software has enabled the company to cut delivery times for new projects by one-third. “Delivery times are improved in several ways,” says Farrell. “First, developers don’t need to wait as long to get something from the designer. Second, developers don’t need to reimplement, using their own tools, what the designer hands them. Third, as the project progresses, developers and designers don’t need to constantly stop and wait for each other. Finally, by being able to get the application’s user interface in front of the customer much faster and iterate on it more easily and quickly, we can virtually eliminate the UI rework that used to be required at the end of a project. ISC’s developers are now relieved of the need to work on user interface improvements that they simply don’t have the experience to make but would spend a lot of time attempting to complete. Now, projects are being wrapped up more smoothly without the usability issues our customers experienced in the past.”

Increased Revenue

ISC recently launched a new business unit—called ISC Interactive—to capitalize on its improved ability to deliver compel¬ling user experiences. “Interactive design is a new service offering for us, and it’s definitely helping us to win new business,” says Alexander. “More than ever before, customers are looking past just functionality and choosing solutions—and solution providers—that can also deliver on the user experience. When talking to a potential customer, it’s great to be able to say that we can deliver everything they need in terms of both functionality and the user experience.

“Not only do we have compelling new services to offer, but those same services help us sell our MapDotNet product suite as well,” Alexander continues. “We’re heavily promoting our experience with Expression Blend, Windows Presentation Foundation, and Silverlight—capabilities that have enabled our new design unit to become profitable in only two months. Overall, we’ve been able to grow our revenue by 20 percent.”

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is the world’s most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2008 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. Interaction between developers and designers is enhanced through the use of Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Expression® Studio. With Visual Studio 2008, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.

For more information about Visual Studio 2008, go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio

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For more information about ISC products and services, visit the Web site at:
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