Reflections - Cognizant

UI Breakthroughs ■Transforming theUser ExperienceAcross the FinancialServices EnterpriseFinancial institutions are leveraging advances in information technology toprovide a richer computing environment for their employees, laying thegroundwork for improvements in productivity, accuracy and customersatisfaction. Here’s a glimpse of what the future will bring.By Siva Visveswaran and Makarand PandeFew aspects of software development have undergone a more thorough transformation than the way usersinteract with applications. In the financial services industry, as elsewhere, user interfaces (UIs) have changedso much, so quickly, that it is difficult to recall that, not long ago, they were anything but graphical or usable.The earliest banking applications that ran on mainframe computers featured UIs based on standaloneterminals (a.k.a. green screens) with cumbersome data entry, unintuitive navigation and deep hierarchicalmenu structures. They were, however, fast, reliable, and suited for very specific tasks. While the client/serverera brought a graphical user interface to enterprise applications, the vast majority of banking applicationsstill ran on mainframes, with Windows-based GUIs.The Internet era made GUI applications available via a browser, and more and more banking applicationswere Internet-enabled. The pace of change, however, has rapidly accelerated over the last few years withWeb 2.0 and rich Internet standards such as HTML 5. The demarcation between desktop, intranet and Internetapplications is slowly dissolving, and mobile and smart phones are beginning to replace desktops. The stageis set for highly advanced UIs.Meanwhile, user interfaces have evolved simultaneously in four dimensions (see Figure 1, next page):■ UI technology■ User experience■ Information architecture■ Content17 REFLECTIONS http://cognizant.com