As we worked on our own control systems, even at the dawn of our activities, what to hide, one of the first thoughts was to create a website designer who will certainly have special, infinitely attractive characteristics for the consumer.
This and data block management, visual structuring of data, the formation of pages for list data, such as catalogs, news, ultimately, we recognize a unified approach to data structures a la Bitrix and offer users a little customization of the output itself.
At the same time, we would definitely like to provide a “One Button Interface” with a utopian button for all complex processes: “Make good” (let’s paraphrase a little bit of the well-known Internet meme).
Thus, our reflections on the design characteristics have come to this form:
- A lot of common website templates, as many as possible.
- Visual manipulation of output blocks
- Easy setup
- Simplicity of editing
Distribution is free, commercial basis:
- Additional services
- Professional version with additional features
- Shop of paid templates
- Shop of paid “modules”
- Automatically integrated advertising
We will take the word module in quotation marks because the data structure and the system of managing this data can be absolutely arbitrary, for simplicity of presentation we will consider that the module is a set of data structures, data management system and output system.
In other words, the concept of stand-alone modules in some way conflicts with the above mentioned Bitrix concept.
It’s said – Done.
A prototype of the interface of the future constructor was created, as well as a prototype of the interface. Then ten tasks were formed which, in our opinion, will be faced by our users.
I will not quote specific texts, I will just say that they were more or less detailed technical tasks for the production of simple, corporate sites for the needs of companies engaged in specific activities, part of the tasks was invented, part is dictated by our statistics of our orders.
The tasks were compiled by an independent manager, so we excluded the possibility of intersection of functions of the prototype system with the proposed tasks. By offering 10 different people to play with the prototype, we identified the main problems.
After a long stage of testing and making corrections we finally got 10 sites. We can not say that the sites were the same, or visually similar, but what to hide, a little closer look at them could be confidently attributed to one root, the visual details of data management gave them one root.
Without despair, we began to implement additional settings, thus confidently moving towards a complex control system, thus eliminating the very idea of “One Button”, maximum “Buttons” and a template.
Thus, working with the designer we had to balance between the two main characteristics of the product
- Uniqueness of the solution for each specific TOR
- Limited number of settings reducing the entry threshold for the editor
Having tested the prototype on template tasks, we suggested that the focus group perform the following task.
Results of work with this information have completely stopped work on the “one-key” constructor as realization of unique mechanisms born by human imagination is impossible, or without an abundance of infinite settings of destroying “non-professional” consumers, or without studying and the subsequent choice of one of hundreds variants of realization of mechanisms.