As mentioned in the previous article, business functions are divided into 4 categories. Among them, "active function" is the most workload part of the interface design. Each active function is a mapping of a customer/class of actual work in the system. Customer pairs include The requirements for business processing and management control, optimization, and improvement expectations are mostly included in the design of the activity function. Therefore, the quality of the activity function design is directly related to the final effect of the entire system. The design of the activity function is not simple. The design result must not only meet the customer’s business requirements, management requirements, and easy operation requirements, but also meet the software vendors’ requirements for structure, easy confirmation, easy development, easy reuse, etc. .
□ Activity function design: It is a design process that integrates the interface format, control definition, data structure, operation method and related rules that constitute the function.
1. The concept of activity function
□Activity: Refers to the actual work and behavior of the customer (Note: The node in the business process must be an activity).
□Activity function: Except for the "dictionary function" used to maintain the basic data of the enterprise, all functions used to input process data belong to the activity function. The activity function has the following characteristics (hereinafter referred to as: activity)
1) Granularity: The reference principle for dividing the size of an activity is that this activity can
accomplish an independent and clear business goal.
□ The size of the division is conducive to the user's job division arrangement.
□While meeting the user's business needs, it also meets the requirements of system design rules and operational efficiency.
The content of an activity is determined by the balance between the customer’s work habits and system processing efficiency. The final decision needs to be discussed with the user;
2) Function: The processing function of the activity is mainly composed of two parts: business processing function and management processing function.
□Business processing: refers to the functions of inputting, calculating, viewing, and displaying business data;
□Management processing: refers to the management rules loaded in the business processing process, these rules can ensure that the data meets the standard;
3) Function
□ Input of data, and operation functions including adding, deleting, changing, querying, etc.
□One of the important objects of customer business optimization (the other is process optimization). Good design results can improve user efficiency. At the same time, activities are also the main carrier for setting management rules. Most of the ideas of users and designers must be implemented on the interface of the activity.
As a window-style interface form, two parts of the design are required to complete an activity: business design and application design. The contents of these two designs are explained below.
2. Business design
Business design is a design from the perspective of customer business processing. The focus of this design is how to reflect the actual work on the interface. This is the core work of event design. This part of the design can be divided into two levels, one is the design of the business processing level, and the other is the design of the management level. Key point: Don't consider how to implement the interface at this time.
1. Design
at the business processing level For the design at the business level, refer to the customer’s original entity form format (or new design), and perform the following tasks:
1) Determination of business processing goals and business content planning.
2) Interface selection (card type, main detail table type, tree table type, etc.), field layout, etc.
2) Determine data definitions, data standards, data sources, data formulas, etc.
2. Management level design
In order to ensure the correct input of data, it is necessary to monitor the relevant rules of the data input process. These rules come from the enterprise’s management rules and regulations, financial rules, production process requirements, etc. (Note: database rules are not Calculate management requirements). Only by adding these management rules, this system can be called: management system.
Note: Regarding the difference between business and management, please refer to the blog post: "The basis of analysis methods — 2. The separation of business and management, the key to solving the problem".
3. Business design must be carried out from the user's perspective. The
key point of business design for activities is to look at the interface from the "business" perspective, because the user's cognition of the system mainly comes from the interface, and the core content of the interface is business data. Therefore, The pros and cons of the interface design directly reflect the designer's understanding of the user's work. The designer should regard this interface as a "window" for dialogue with the user, and constantly have a dialogue with the "role behind the window" when designing, as shown in the figure. 1 shown.
Figure 1 The relationship between business design and users
1) Dialogue users (see Figure 1-①Users of this function):
□What business content does the user want to accomplish with function 2?
□What information should the user provide to his leader②?
□What is the relationship between the data between this function 2 and upstream function 1 and downstream function 3?
□The restriction relationship between users①, upstream users③ and downstream users④ (data level, management level)? Wait.
Figure 2 The main content of business design
3) Dialogue leadership (see Figure 1-②User's leadership)
□What is the working standard of function 2? Does the existing business data meet the requirements?
□In order to ensure that the user's data input is correct, what kind of management rules are needed to ensure the measures? Wait.
Figure 3 The main content of management design
4. The difference between "function" and "task" As
can be seen from Figure 2 and Figure 3, the focus of business design and management design are completely different.
For an activity, is it only used as an "interface function for inputting data"? Or think of it as a "task to be completed"? It depends on the designer's design philosophy. If it is the former, then the focus should be on the number and definition of the fields. If the latter is the case, while paying attention to the number and definition of the fields, it is also necessary to pay attention to whether the business has been optimized? Has work efficiency improved? Are there loopholes in the management rules? When these are no problems, it can be determined whether the fields and definitions meet the requirements.
Three, application design
After completing the previous business design content, the focus of application design is not on the business content (see the core part "business processing area" in Figure 4), but to consider how to build a "human-machine-human" working environment, so that Users work comfortably, operate easily, have high processing efficiency, and are intelligent. Application design is equivalent to outsourcing a layer of "operable functions" for the aforementioned business design results. Users use these functions to complete operations such as viewing, inputting, and controlling business data. Application design includes menu bar, toolbar, scroll bar, button (addition, deletion, modification, check, etc.), upload/download, other links, etc.
Figure 4 Application design content of the interface
It can be seen that the focus of business design (Figure 2 and 3) is completely different from the focus of application design (Figure 4).
The focus of application design is to design "functions" from the perspective of "applications", that is, to transform the functional content of business design into system components for expression. It can be said that the value of the system's customers can be expressed by users through application design results. Therefore, the result of application design is directly related to customer satisfaction.
Note 1: UI design, art design, etc. are all part of application design.
Note 2: In the actual software design, the content of business design and application design can be completed in one go, but when learning interface design methods, these two parts should be understood and mastered separately.
4. Design result verification
The above design results must be verified. There are two verification methods: business verification and application verification.
Figure 5 Use case for verification
1. Business verification-writing business use cases.
Business use cases use business data to write a story script equivalent to data. The data used in this use case can associate all the activities and functions that need to be verified, and then follow the actual running process. Deduction, as shown in Figure 6, the data in the business use case should flow from "contract" to "delivery" (business process), and corresponding management rules (approval process) should be included at the same time.
2. Application verification-writing application use cases.
Application use cases are based on business verification to verify the operation process, including: multi-person collaboration according to processes and roles, whether the operation process is easy to use, whether the input is intelligent, and whether the processing There will be endless loops, system notifications, warnings, terminations, etc., how to initiate and take effect.
Note 3: The business use cases and application use cases mentioned here are different from the test cases used in the inspection after the development is completed.
□ Business/application use cases: Designed based on the user's actual business processing flow, not only with business data and management rules Check, and check whether the push and flow between multiple functions are smooth. The focus is not on the existence of "coding bugs".
□ Test case: focus on checking whether the function is correct, whether there are coding bugs, etc. It is not a test in terms of "business, management, and operability".
Five, record template
After mastering the design method, we must finally explain the recording method. The recording form of the interface design results is very important. Traditionally, there are many recording forms that use long text to describe. I advocate the use of structured and standardized recording forms, that is, the use of engineered recording forms (similar to the design of manufacturing and construction industries). This form is easy for customers to understand and confirm, and programmers to understand and develop. The following is recommended A group of templates record the form of design content. Since 4 templates are a group, it is also called "4-piece design". The 4 templates record the following contents respectively:
■Template 1—interface prototype: give the layout of the interface business content and the location of the fields.
■Template 2—Control definition: record the names of all fields, field content, and related rules in a table format.
■Template 3—Rule Description: Use the body of the article to describe the complex rules in the prototype in detail.
■Template 4—Logical Graphics: Use graphics to express complex logical relationships within the function that are difficult to explain in words.
Figure 6 The record template of the design results (design a 4-piece set)
By the way, it is very easy to develop a software design-assisted recording system using this method of recording, which is also the advantage brought by the structured recording format.
■Summary
Many people may have this idea: the interface design for the activity function is the most common, there is nothing difficult, and there is no technical content, just arrange the fields required by the customer, from the "technical This may indeed be true from the perspective of realization. But if you look at it from the perspective of "customer value", the designer here is to test: can you improve the efficiency of your customers' work through functional design? Check for the correct handling of the business? Can it solve the customer's difficulties, problems, and pain points? Or even bring benefits to customers? This is the real meaning of the event function design!
■The next article in this series: Interface Design Method — 3. The Design of Dictionary Function
For a detailed description of business design and application design, please refer to the book "Dahua Software Engineering—Requirements Analysis and Software Design".
