Another new category for 2012, “user experience” has become the latest buzzword to become top of mind. Whether the user of your application is accessing it on his or her desktop, via a browser on a tablet, or as a smartphone application, he or she comes to the app with expectations of how it will work. It’s not just about mouse clicks anymore; now it’s slide bars and haptic technologies, and leveraging the new underlying hardware. Here are the companies on the leading edge of user experience.

Adobe Systems
ComponentOne
EffectiveUI
Infragistics
LEAD
Syncfusion
Telerik
TX Text Control
Xceed