What is the Vision?

The vision is to create an interactive product discovery experience, combining innovative technology with design. The publishing industry has long perfected information architecture on paper, a non-interactive material. Humans were not meant to consume information in the manner we do with computers. This is the reason we have so much difficulty improving computer usability. The technology to adapt publishing know-how into a computerized experience was difficult and took a very long time, over 25 years. The technology is now ready and available. Combining publishing information architecture and computerized interaction is the new computing paradigm (see the video below).

This approach has been marvelously adopted by Apple. "The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad it's because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. To be able to get the best of both. To make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy-to-use, fun-to-use, so that they really fit the users. The users don't have to come to them, they come to the user. And it's the combination of these two things that I think let us make the kind of creative products like the iPad." - Steve Jobs, WWDC 2010 Keynote.

Even without drastically changing the current experience available on platforms today, the UI design study below highlights how we still could enhance the information with available skills in development teams. The design study places focus on product and service discovery, using most of the available space on the screen for this purpose. The branding of the platform itself is very minimal with emphasis to stay out of the way. Many applications can easily be adopted to this simple design.

But farexam wishes to go much more further than the design study illustrates. We will invest in HTML5 as the technology powering farexam. The video below shows the direction we also intend to take in the design of an immersive farexam's UI. There is going to be a very deep integration of our commercial partners into farexam to maximize marketing potential.

Roadmap

Farexam backend is networked with web services technology. Much of this work is ongoing. The current version is designed to understand the best interaction between the system backend and clients like the browser, mobile devices and tablets. The Granas Iceberg Model is used in this design. Farexam's API will be made public for developers to build exciting applications using farexam data. (api.farexam.com)

• 2010 - 2011
  Version 1: Development of the backend system architecture. 3-4 feature applications (theory training, driving schools, leasing) will be developed for this purpose. The platform will be free for use by all partners and users.
  
  Farexam Countries
  2010: Switzerland, Germany
  2011: Austria, France, Italy, Spain, UK
  
  
• 2012 - 2013
  Version 2: A brand new UI will be developed to use the existing backend. The main characteristics of this UI will be the rich and immersive experience. The platform will be free for users with major integration and commercial collaboration with partners.
  

Collaboration

Granas is looking to collaborate with partners to create this platform and realize this vision. We are offering a very attractive proposal to help us launch this exciting project. Would you like to have some more information? Please contact Robert Mwangi at +41 (0)76 55 80 800 or by e-mail at mwr (at) granas.ch.

Videos

Google/IO 2010 - Interactive Web Content
Publishing meets computer interactivity in HTML5. A presentation by Terry McDonell, Editor, Sports Illustrated Group