This article explores the importance of flexibility in product design and how to achieve it through 10 product design cases from major manufacturers, aiming to help product managers improve their design capabilities.
"Flexibility" is a point that must be paid attention to in product design, a product is very flexible in use, the user experience is very good, and the later adjustment of the product development team is very low, and there is no need to encounter some problems to change the code, this cost performance is very high, and it can also reflect the design ability of a product manager.
Today, we have selected 10 product design cases from major manufacturers to tell you how to deal with the flexibility of product design.
1. Why should we focus on "flexibility"?
Product design focuses on flexibility, I believe that all partners know this truth, we summarize a few points:
- The scalability of product iteration optimization will be stronger, and it will be easy to adjust in the later stage, saving development costs.
- The user experience will be better, and if it is comfortable to use, it will enhance the user's satisfaction.
- There will be better adaptability to different scenarios and the needs and preferences of different users, which can ensure that the product can provide a good experience at different times.
- Extending the product life cycle, if it is not flexible enough, the more the product is developed, the more bloated the code becomes, the product life cycle will be reduced, and the only way to refactor it will be.
2. 10 product design cases of large manufacturers
1) Role permission design
Role permission design, is the most basic of a product, there must be flexibility here, there are many users of the product, if the permission design is not done well, your users will be very uncomfortable, especially B-end products.
From the company, to the department, to the position, and even to the individual, there may be different functional permission requirements, if the turnover is frequent, or the company has a large number of people, your product permission allocation is very tested.
Here we recommend the most used role-user-function permission system. We can first build a role system, according to the form of the company-department-position, each role corresponds to the functional authority, and the roles in the department are divided into subordinate and subordinate relationships depending on the situation.
The second step is to map the role to the user and form a user-role association.
There are two ways to deal with this:
First, you can add users to roles in [User Management].
Second, you can assign corresponding users to this role in [Role Management].
This kind of role permission design is very flexible, and if you have a new colleague, you can directly assign roles, and then create new roles for new positions.
2) Data permission design
Many people will fall into the trap of data permission design, such as fixing some fields used to distinguish data permissions, users, departments, or some product information, store names, etc.
If you want to delete or add some fields of data permissions, you need to change the user's configuration permissions, and at the same time update the view on the business menu, which is very malleable and has a high cost of later development.
We recommend using a [data permission configuration] menu, accurate to the fields of the menu, according to the system of user + system + menu + field + field content, maintain it here, check the data permissions of each menu, and match the relevant information here according to the visiting user. This is very flexible, firstly, the dimensions that can be used for data permissions are the most detailed, and secondly, it will be very convenient to make subsequent adjustments.
3) Data Dictionary
The data dictionary should be known to many partners, for some fields used in the whole product, it is maintained here, which is equivalent to a standard, and all menus that need to be valued can be dynamically taken from here.
There are two main areas of flexibility:
The first is to ensure a unified standard for fields, such as a contract type, which must be maintained here, and cannot be defined by yourself. The second is the flexibility of data acquisition, if the code is fixed, every time the content is added, the code has to be adjusted, this form of dynamic value, we only need to maintain it in the [data dictionary], which will be automatically associated with the past.
4) Associate person design
For example, we want to remind some related people in some menus, which may be DingTalk or email, and notify them of some changes in the data of these menus.
At this time, we can create a new menu, which belongs to the menu associated personnel of the entire system, which can be maintained by menu + department + name, and if it is a more detailed dimension, you can also add some product information, such as brand, category, series, etc. After the business data of the menu is generated, it will associate the associated people here according to some rules, and then make the reminder you want.
5) Review the flow design
The design of the audit flow should be the most flexible for some OA products, such as DingTalk.
DingTalk's review flow can be configured by itself, which is equivalent to us directly initiating a review flow, what kind of process, how many levels of approval, which approval needs which people, you can set it yourself, which experience is very good.
For a company, there are too many audit streams, and DingTalk's suite of features provides a good choice.