Luristic Enters the Rich User Experience Market - Revamping the Web
Luristic Corporation, a software startup who has been in stealth mode for about a year, just launched its brand new website that exemplifies the next generation of websites that offer very Rich User Experiences (RUE).
Online, February 19, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Irvine, California, February 19, 2010 - Luristic Corporation, a software startup who has been in stealth mode for about a year, just launched its brand new website that exemplifies the next generation of websites that offer very Rich User Experiences (RUE). The founder and CEO of Luristic is Dr. David Saad who is a serial entrepreneur and a veteran in the software industry. His decision to enter the RUE market was very typical of almost every entrepreneur who starts in a new venture - a need not fulfilled by existing solutions.
As Dr. Saad explained, when technology becomes a commodity that satisfies basic needs, user experience dominates. The web is now about two decades old and it needs to be badly revamped. The web started as a publication platform, became a communication platform, and morphed into an application platform, albeit a very inadequate one. While the web brought tremendous visibility and connectivity, yet usability and navigation suffered a major setback due to the limitation of HTML and the browser. Websites used to be nothing but online brochures. Nowadays, websites are web applications that include a variety of functions such as registering, reserving, ordering, purchasing, tracking, reviewing, rating, tagging, commenting, bookmarking, referring, sharing, annotating, posting, networking, etc. While the information used to flow in just one direction from publishers to consumers, today the web has become highly interactive and collaborative. In fact, the amount of content and the number of transactions generated by users on the web by far exceed what publishers produce.
With the advent of Rich Internet Application (RIA) tools that extend the capabilities of HTML such as Adobe Flex, Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR, and Microsoft Silverlight, flat and mundane websites can turn from online brochures into true applications that are highly interactive, collaborating, immersive, and engaging. Websites with such richness attract and retain users far better than their predecessors. They can turn intrigued visitors into excited users, excited users into paying customers, and paying customers into loyal evangelists. Thus, the Return On the Investment (ROI) from websites with rich user experience is too good to be ignored. For example, visitors who had a good experience with a website are 93% more likely to register, 87% more likely to make a purchase, 85% more likely to make a referral, 67% more likely to post a positive review, 49% more likely to make a donation, and 38% more likely to volunteer. Corollary, among the visitors who had a bad experience with a website, 90% said that they will share their bad experience with their friends, 82% said that they will not make a purchase, 58% said that they will never come back, and 41% said that they will go to a competitor.
RUE, which is still in its infancy, is a very exciting and promising field, but it can actually be quite challenging because it is multi-disciplinary specialty which combines function & form, substance & style, and art & science. Specifically, it requires the organization skills of an architect, the precision of a software engineer, the analytics of a computer scientist, the heuristics of a cognitive behaviorist, the eloquence of a linguist, and the creativity of an artist. Hence, because of its diversity and complexity, RUE is a very demanding discipline that cannot be easily mastered.