How UI Design Expedites Go-to-Market Time for Clients

When it comes to user interface (UI) work, I like to say consistency is king. Allowing solutions to be quickly, easily, and efficiently developed and implemented from a UI perspective is important.

Early in 2019, the Kingland Text Analytics team performed a decision analysis and resolution process around which UI technology they should select to display the back-end Text Analytics technology Kingland has been investing in since 2010. The UI technology that the team ultimately landed on is called PrimeNG. This is a free, open source technology used throughout the world by 1,000,000+ developers in Fortune 500 companies such as American Express, eBay, Ford, Fox, Verizon, BMW and more.

Historically, some of the UI technology used in Kingland solutions required numerous third party software dependencies. This made it difficult to upgrade when new technologies were released. By choosing PrimeNG, we are able to receive new UI technology upgrades since they are baked into the theme itself. PrimeNG offers a complete set of native widgets featuring over 80 easy-to-use components. These components satisfy most UI requirements of the solution like data tables, dropdowns, multi-selects, notification messages, accordions, breadcrumbs and other input components. This variety of UI components means there would be no need to add different libraries for different UI requirements. This creates a sense of consistency among Kingland solutions developed using PrimeNG.

We also have the ability to leverage professionally designed and highly customizable native Angular CLI application templates that expedite the go-to-market time for our clients. If we need to theme the solution we can choose from a variety of options and apply it with minimal development efforts. Using an engine called Designer API, our teams can create PrimeNG themes easily. Teams can also implement a client's style guide to align with their corporate branding efforts. This technology also supports responsive web design and allows our teams to allocate their time to business logic rather than dealing with complex UI requirements. This has allowed our Kingland Text Analytics team to produce a hardened and very impressive UI design for their solution in a fraction of the time it used to take. The initial UI for the Text Analytics solution was implemented and deployed to production in about 2 months, which was quite fast compared to prior solutions.

In my previous blog I discussed our approach to user feedback; we are currently following that strategy on the Text Analytics team. Our Product Management team has completed more than 100 user feedback sessions this year with some of the largest companies in the world. The feedback from all of these interactions has been meticulously documented and is planned into the Text Analytics roadmap. Moving into Q4 of 2019 and throughout 2020, our Text Analytics team will focus on these feedback and enhancement items instead of having to continue to build out the UI. Having solid UI componentry and ease of reusability for future solutions is setting Kingland up to focus on the technology and business requirements instead of legacy UI technology in the years to come. This will benefit our current and future clients in terms of faster go-to-market time with our solutions, which will result in cost benefits and higher quality solutions overall.