It is interesting to see how big companies choose Flex to interact with costumer on their websites. We are used to see lots of nice widgets created with this kind of technologies but maybe a little bit less used to find useful and funny applications in the Net. Let’s give some example!
On Harley Davidson website there is a really nice application where you can customize a bike with all the accessories and even get an estimation of the price and of a monthly payment solution. The interface is really easy to use, it has a clean design with few icon, some boxes to show images and contents, they have used some of the classical Flex elements as accordion and tab menu.
You can see accessories in details and add them on the bike in order to see in real time how it will be the final result, for every pieces you can read detailed information and if you change your mind about one of them you can always take it away from the bike and start looking for something different.
This is a different approach to interact with costumer, you can tell that it’s not a game because of the professional interface concept, all the information are detailed and you can really buy a 14.000$ bike but at the same time you can just create your own perfect model dreaming to have it maybe one day:)
http://customizer.harley-davidson.com/GMA_customizer.jsp
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Another nice Flex application is the HP Print Studio, it’s free and you can use it to create customized calendar, greeting cards, invitations and even business identities.
The interface is user friendly and it is easy to follow every necessary step to print you project. In this case HP designed an interface with more interaction than the HD’ s one using elements as lighting menus, pictures floating, horizontal navigation and pop-up window to show the selected item and to see some advice from the company about the right paper to use in order to print the project. The zoom system is very useful.
That’s a good example of promoting products letting people have fun with a nice tool.
http://h30393.www3.hp.com/printing/app/us/en/launch.aspx
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Speaking about widgets there is a nice one created by AOL that shows music videos using main categories as pop, country, latin, hip hop, most watched etc.
It has a plain interface but very effective and easy to use, it gives you information about the artist and the song and the chance to create your list of favorites and share it with friends sending an email directly inside the application or even copy the code to post it on a website. It has some nice features to customize videos views and even the interface views as full screen mode or as side widget.
You can download it here http://music.aol.com/help/syndication/desktop-widgets
Have fun with all these applications!