Rich-IDM: Transforming the user experience of legacy applications

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) can be used as a way to modernize Legacy Applications (LAs), in particular to provide users with an innovative, state-of-the-art interactive experience. RIAs have the same richness in term of interaction grammar as Client-Server Applications (CSAs) and Desktop Applications (DAs), giving designers the opportunity to exploit the Web infrastructure also in domains where the communication between the user and the application is more complex of a sequence of page requests. In the transition from LAs to RIAs, however, several challenges need to be faced, including fundamental issues affecting user requirements and usability. In this paper we present the preliminary results of a large-scale industrial project, which focused on migrating a complex LA (VB6 + Cobol) to a RIA (JSF + SOA). In this context, we introduce a novel method (Rich-IDM) to transform the design of the User Experience (UX) and the strategy for interactive communication from LAs to RIAs in a graceful and disciplined manner, thus preventing the many flaws that typically are manifested in similar projects. We also show how Rich-IDM originally extends and well integrates into other well-known conceptual tools — the Conallen's UX model and the RUX model — within the OMG's ADM framework.