A lot of people ask us why we chose to build the product utilising Microsoft’s Silverlight Platform. We understand that there is a reticence in the marketplace toward installing plugins and proprietary technology, particularly Microsoft technology. There are also issues with the cross platform availability of Silverlight, on Linux for instance. But there are couple of reasons we chose to develop in Silverlight.
The first and major reason is the ability to deliver a unique and comprehensive user experience. This, combined with the somewhat unique nature of the use of Paycycle lead us to such a decision. Let me explain. In a small business, of say between 5 and 20 employees, there is usually only going to be one maybe two people using the actual product interface. Not everybody in the company is going to access Paycycle. So, with the knowledge that the "install base" is not as broad as other products, we wanted to deliver the best user experience that we possibly could without necessarily the hassle of dealing with changing HTML standards and the difficulties of browser incompatibility.
Internet Explorer issues are well documented and who is to say that that similar disasters aren’t going to occur in the future. The other thing with Silverlight is it really enables us to deliver a feature rich and relatively speedy user experience. Once the user has downloaded the initial application (XAP), the only round trips involved is a small amount of data from the database to the client. So compared to HTML-based web interfaces combined with AJAX and JavaScript, I think there is a case to arge that a Silverlight application performs better in this scenario.
The other reason we chose Silverlight was our ability to get to the market in the quickest fashion we could. Silverlight happens to suit our skills as a development team down to the ground. Initially, we had the help of Scott Barnes from Readify who developed our generic skin or theme. We've been able to take that and add elements and keep them within the generics of what was provided originally.
While my coding skills are of a basic level at best, my co-founder, John is an extremely experienced architect and .NET developer. But he's no designer and no matter how hard you try in HTML to get everything pixel perfect, it's extremely difficult. So I design any new screens or components or elements in Photoshop and hand them to our developers. I have deliberately not participated in the development of the actual application. This has allowed me to focus on just the design, ultimately bringing about a better result.
So while we understand that some people are reticent to install Silverlight plugin, I think the benefits outweigh that reluctance and we hope that users appreciate the interface and the efforts that have gone into developing a superior user experience.