You may wonder: What exactly is a rich Internet application (RIA), anyway? What distinguishes a RIA from, say, a slick web site that offers rich visual content and a high degree of interactivity?

Technically speaking, a RIA is a web application that behaves much like desktop software, tying into your backend business systems, and delivered to users via a browser, a proprietary player, or a standalone client …in contrast to traditional page-based interactions. The most important thing to know about RIAs, however, is that they offer a powerful way for your business to strengthen its relationships with customers and drive bottom-line results.

You can use RIAs to provide customers with personalized, contextually relevant content; convey messages through compelling video, animation, and data feeds; streamline purchasing processes; and facilitate social interactions. In fact, within a single RIA interface you can enable all of these options at once. Because RIAs can effectively deliver multilayered digital experiences, they have the potential to engage your customers in ways that static web pages can’t—and to inspire customer loyalty as well as evangelism on behalf of your brand.

In fact, RIAs are becoming so ubiquitous that users have come to expect these sophisticated modes of online interactions, particularly with the advent of mobile device “apps” which employ the same concepts and experiences as desktop RIAs.

At Universal Mind, we’ve been designing and building cutting-edge RIAs for our clients since we opened our doors in 2003. We are acknowledged industry experts in the use of core RIA tools and technologies, including HTML5, Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR, and Silverlight, but we bring much more to the table.

We take a holistic approach to every client project, starting with a thorough understanding of your business objectives. Next, we profile your target customers to get to the heart of their needs and motivations. We determine the types of content they will respond to, how they will want to experience and interact with it, and the devices and platforms they are most likely to use.

With that information, we use storyboards and wireframes to map out the entire application — every possible workflow and interaction — with the goal of creating a fluid experience that serves up relevant content and options based on who is interacting with the application and what they are trying to accomplish.

Then we create the visual design and develop the underlying code, including the hooks into your enterprise systems that will bring deep, useful content into the customer experience. And finally, we work with you to conduct user testing and analyze performance to ensure that the resulting digital solution helps you achieve what you set out to do: delight customers and lead markets.