Touch Screen Product Catalog for Retail Store

Question

I am a UI/UX designer and I would like to create kiosk type of app that would be a product catalog (help/suggestor) for customers in a retail store using a touch screen monitor (and computer).

Something as simple as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoH0u6YTTK4

This is what I would like it to do: 1st Screen (Main Menu): Pick a type of category (For example: Dog, Cat, Small Animal) 2nd Screen pick a sub-category of a main category (For example: Puppy, Adult, Senior - DOG) 3rd Screen pick a sub-category of previous sub-category (For example: Food, Healthy, Toys) Then it will display a list of all products with a picture, small description, and price.

Thats it.

So the point of the kiosk is to help customers find certain products that match their pet criteria. (Dog > Puppy > Healthy Dog Food)

I am wondering what is the best solution: RIA (Flex/Air or Silveright) or flash/action script. I am not sure what is the best technology to use for the following benefits: user-experience (smoothness of touch screen actions) and fast development.

Answer 1

First of all to clear some confusion, RIA is just a term for applications employing "rich" interactions and they can be built in a wide variety of languages. Both Flex and Air are based on the Flash Player platform and are programmed in ActionScript. Flex is a component based framework for application development and AIR is the Adobe Integrated Runtime which will let you run Flash Apps as native desktop applications and let them acces some of the system's lower level functionality.

To get back to your question, I think Flex and Air are a good basis. I have to admit that I haven't done any development for Silverlight but the prospect of being able to develop on Windows is scaring me. In terms of user experience Flex offers you a lot, including various effects, easings and even low level pixel manipulation and drawing APIs. I'm sure Silverlight offers many of these things as well, but I cannot really comment on that.