Choosing the 'best' among good designs - an illustration

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Choosing the best while you’ve many good options!

While designing a solution, sometimes it’s difficult to decide which design is better when you’ve various options to fulfill a business requirement. Both options apparently look similar but obviously one of them is better than the other. So how can you decide between the two? Maybe we can look at a scenario and see what would be the best decision…

Scenario

You’ve to build a qualification catalog where you’ve two languages English & Arabic and you’ve to maintain the four facets i.e. Listening, Speaking, Writing & Reading, all with certain rating say 1-6. You can design the catalog in two different ways either to

1. Create English and Arabic as Qualification Groups and Create the four dimensions as Qualifications or
2. Create four dimensions as Qualification Groups and the two languages as Qualifications.

 

Where’s / What’s the difference?

Apparently its (2 X 4) or (4 X 2) scenario and the result looks same i.e. 8, mathematically speaking 🙂 But wait it’s not an Arithmetic question, it has much to do with HR Administration who’re maintaining the employees’ profiles.

Let’s look at the catalog first how it looks like, maybe we could find the difference between two approaches! 

2 X 4

4 X 2

Well, I see the first option (2 X 4) better, though the second option isn’t bad either. Anyways the question is ‘how to find-out the real difference?’ The answer is simple, try to maintain the qualification in employee’s profile and you’ll see the 1^st option is easy to maintain. Since ‘seeing is believing’, look at the screenshots below from Qualification Profile. 

Option 1 

Option 2 

The option 1 which is to maintain different dimensions of a language is more easier than maintaining the language from each dimension as shown in option 2; this seems obvious. What do you think?

The Conclusion

To decide between various solutions and choosing the best, the formula is simple; we just have to put ourselves in end-user shoes. By doing so we could clearly see the best among ‘all ok’ solutions. 

Do you think differently? You’re welcome to comment!

Note: The qualification catalog is maintained in Transaction OOQA while the employee’s profile in transaction PPPM.