If you’ve ever worked with corporate software, you are likely to come across something like this. Rules! The use case for this project is a simple one – Allow a user to query the database in a simple, intuitive yet robust fashion. A classic rules engine came to mind and I started researching the possibilities.
To make this concept work with our use case and have something ready to be tested, a lot of research was involved. To see how others were designing rule builders for their purposes. After that, I hit the sketchbooks and solidified my approach. Axure wireframes, prototyping and Usability Testing came next.
Unfortunately we ended up not using this concept for our use case. The primary reason was that users would be unfamiliar with the different variable that we offered and would need the UI to educate them on the fly. We agreed that if our querying requirements got any more complex, we would come back to this approach.
