Impact Computing Corporation

Graphical User Interface (GUI) Design The most powerful and well architected systems are often rendered effectively useless by an ill-designed user interface. As Donald Norman states in his insightful book The Design of Everyday Things, "There is a big difference between the expertise required to be a designer and that required to be a user." Norman goes on to state that, whereas designers become expert with the device they are designing, users become expert at the task they are trying to perform with the device. These two perspectives are unfortunately often worlds apart.

At Impact, our approach to user interface design is therefore highly "user-centric", relying heavily on an iterative cycle of rapid prototyping and user feedback to ensure a solution that is operationally relevant, intuitive and easy-to-use. Visualization The age-old adage that "a picture is worth a thousand words" testifies to the graphic- and visually-centric nature of the human thought process. Relationships, patterns, and commonalities in complex datasets become more apparent to the end user when presented in a graphical visual context.

At Impact, we firmly believe that the simplest approaches to visualization are often the most effective. Our team is expert at analyzing complex, multi-dimensional datasets to design innovative visualization paradigms that help users rapidly extract actionable information. Geographic Information Systems and Mapping Situational awareness and spatio-temporal visualization are essential to applications as diverse as supply chain management, air traffic control, logistics, law enforcement, military combat, and homeland security. The Impact team possesses an extensive background in building effective GIS solutions for users across a wide array of these application domains.

The depth and breadth of our geospatial solutions expertise yields innovative solutions that help extend the applicability and utility of spatio-temporal information. We are experienced in integrating and extending commercial GIS software products and open source technologies, as well as developing custom solutions. Key members of our team have been active participants in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Today's ever-changing technology landscape necessitates system architectures that provide a high degree of modularity, interoperability, extensibility, and flexibility. The Impact Computing team is experienced in developing robust Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) with well-defined web service components and interfaces. We are particularly experienced in architecting plug-and-play frameworks that allow for integrated use of a heterogeneous collection of software components and tools. Database Design and Modeling Our team understands the pivotal importance of an effective data model to facilitating and enabling the operational objectives of a solution. Members of our team possess strong expertise in creating and implementing complex data models, often being able to represent intricate application data structures in surprisingly straightforward ways. Advanced R&D Modeling of spatio-temporal dynamics, adaptive learning technologies, behavioral modeling, and innovative extensions to the wiki paradigm, are but a few examples of the advanced R&D initiatives undertaken by our team.

Whether pioneering the creation of new capabilities, or inventing novel paradigms for the use of existing technologies, our team thrives on the challenge of new frontiers. We strive to employ leading edge technologies and paradigms in ways that provide appreciable, and previously unachievable, operational benefit to the end user.