Is this an app? A UX tool? Help me be less dumb.

[Kenny F'ing Powers]

Will try to make this concise:

My company offers two solutions that share a good amount of functionality bleed over. This has caused the sales team - and some on the solution team - to struggle when trying to determine which product is best for the customer.

I would like to create a tool for the sales/solutions team with a cool user interface that provides:

• Specific questions to determine product fit (product A or B)
  • Questions will be weighted - some are more impactful than others in determining solution fit.
• An interface that slides in two directions with each question answered; product A on left, product B on right.
• The further to one side of the slide, the better fit for that product. Slide doesn't - and most likely wont - go all the way to one end.
• After submission of all questions, an overview of:
  • Their answered questions
  • Why those answers moved the slider the way it did.

With the overview out of the way...

HELP ME.

I don't even know where to start. I can provide all of the questions and answers for the tool, but I'm not even sure what technology I'd leverage to build a tool like this. My company is huge, and I may actually have either the resources (people/technology) to get these accomplished already.

What type of software/coding is required for the above type of tool?
I don't know what I don't know. What other questions or considerations do I need in order to build this?

 

[Scott Cooper's Grand Slam]

My company is huge, and I may actually have either the resources (people/technology) to get these accomplished already.

Your company definitely does. If you have the questions and the weights, you can hand them to your internal tech team and get an estimate how how long/how much it would take to build. At the risk of being That Guy, you could probably give this to an intern/jr. worker and have them mock up a low-fidelity proof of concept in a couple days. If you gave this to someone in house, they could design the UI and help you decide whether this lives inside existing app(s) on the sales/solution teams, or whether this is a separatge website.

Zero snark intended: you're essentially designing a Buzzfeed quiz. "Based on your answers, here are your results!" I'd do this is a simple website, but I'm biased toward simple websites.

 

[Hendu for Kutch]

This sounds like it can be as simple as a standalone HTML/javascript web page. The functionality sounds pretty straightforward.

If your sales team is very mobile-based, you could create an app for it, but that seems like overkill for what you want. Just a quick standalone site that they can bookmark or save a shortcut to would work.

The trickiest part would be getting the weighting correct to make it useful, but that's not a technical problem really.

Visually, you could run them through the questions in a slideshow format, with a bar at the top showing the current lean based on answered questions. Something like this....

Product A   ---------x------------------------------------   Product B



           Does the customer lover buttertarts?



                        YES        NO

<                                                                      >

Then at the end give them a weighted score and summary page of pros and cons for each product given their answers.

 

[luckiestman]

My invisible friend says:

Start simple. Use a web framework like React for the interface. The slider can be a visual component reflecting weighted logic in JavaScript. Store questions and answers in a database; SQL or NoSQL, depending on data complexity. Consider user experience: ease of use, clarity, responsiveness. Security is crucial; ensure data protection. Analytics can track usage, improve recommendations. Begin with a prototype, gather feedback, iterate. Seek internal resources; developers, UX designers. Prioritize clear, maintainable code. Collaboration tools like GitHub will help. Start building, learn as you go.
….

This answer isn’t much different than what Scott said above

 

[Hendu for Kutch]

That sounds like overkill for something so simple, but just my opinion. This is a simple vanilla javascript site from the description, with no real sensitive data to protect and a fairly static set of questions just meant to be a tool to help sales people make a decision. Unless there's some need to store these answers for analysis and/or plans to expand this tool to be something much bigger in the future, I wouldn't bother with frameworks and databases at all.

You give this to a UX designer and a junior web developer and you'd have it back in two days.

 

[pokey_reese]

Agree with Hendu. Depending on how many questions there are, you could literally just store the whole shebang as a JSON like dictionary right in the code, probably no need to add infrastructure.

 

[Kenny F'ing Powers]

So, I've been hacking through using glitch.com and chatgpt to start building something out. Basically just using HTML, CSS, Javascript for the process.

I do see an area in glitch for JSON. The Javascript is recording answers and throwing them into a table at the end of the form. Would JSON be better for that process? There's no sensitive data being stored if that's a consideration.

 

[AlNipper49]

JSON is nice because it’s super flexible, I don’t think that future proofing should occupy of ton of resources for you at this point, but JSON is a bit more flexible should you ever need. The JSON will handle complex data structure better.

With that said, processing out JSON might be a bit more work than a regular table. Not a lot but maybe a step or two more. The downside of assuming the need for complex data storage and not needing the complexity.

Both are equally as secure (they’re both just plain text)

 

[Scott Cooper's Grand Slam]

So, I've been hacking through using glitch.com and chatgpt to start building something out. Basically just using HTML, CSS, Javascript for the process.

I do see an area in glitch for JSON. The Javascript is recording answers and throwing them into a table at the end of the form. Would JSON be better for that process? There's no sensitive data being stored if that's a consideration.

Just a word of caution on the bolded: I don't know much about glitch.com, but be careful when using ChatGPT for work stuff. "Everybody's doing it," you say, and you're not wrong. But ChatGPT's licensing and IP stuff is weird (in my professional opinion). It would suck if suddenly ChatGPT, OpenAI, Microsoft or whomever owned the rights to whatever you're building because you used ChatGPT for it.

It's also possible that I'm a worrywart.

 

[Kenny F'ing Powers]

Just a word of caution on the bolded: I don't know much about glitch.com, but be careful when using ChatGPT for work stuff. "Everybody's doing it," you say, and you're not wrong. But ChatGPT's licensing and IP stuff is weird (in my professional opinion). It would suck if suddenly ChatGPT, OpenAI, Microsoft or whomever owned the rights to whatever you're building because you used ChatGPT for it.

It's also possible that I'm a worrywart.

Thanks for this response.

Yeah, what I'm building is incredibly generic and contains no proprietary info. Unfortunately, high turnover in sales leads to repetitive questions and Id like to provide some kind of tool to eliminate that pain point.

 

[Devizier]

Get the bones going, but you’re not wrong in considering UI. If you want useful engagement it will need to be minimally intrusive, easy to use, etc