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Process Design Guidelines

The Process Design Guidelines describe the aspects that you should keep in mind when moddeling a business process in order to achieve an optimal user experience. The guidelines below help you to avoid common pitfals and mistakes. We therefore strongly advice you to follow these guidelines.

Start Small, think big

When starting to moddel a business process in BizzStream, it is tempting to add all kinds of bells and whistles. Do not do this! In our experience, you will model a much better business process if you start small. In fact, we advice you to create a Minimal Viable Product (MVP). A MVP of a business process model has just those core features sufficient to use it, and no more. The MVP is targeted at a subset of future users, such as early adopters thought to be more forgiving, more likely to give feedback, and able to grasp the vision. You use the MVP to engage your users.

Engage your users

Try to get feedback about about your business process model as early as possible. Your users will tell you what they do and do not like about your model, and this information helps you to further improve your business process. By talking to your users, you avoid building business process models that users do not want or find hard to use. You will find that the amount of time spend on talking to your users is far outweighed by the results of those conversations.

Rethink to optimize user experience

Most companies that want to digitalize take their existing business process as point of departure. This leads to the pitfall of forgetting about the user experience on mobile devices. However, completing a form on paper is very different from completing a form on a phone or tablet. Just transforming a paper form into a digital one is likely to lead to a poor user experience. Therfore it is best to rethink the process from the point of view of the user.

  • Is all information that you ask necessary? Sometimes information can calculated or be derived from other sources so that the user does not have to enter it.
  • Are all steps in the process needed in every case? If a step is only needed when a certain condition is met, you can skip it in all other cases. By doing so, you prevent that exceptional cases make the business process hard to use.
  • Is the business process overly complex? This is often the case when two distinct business processes are modelled as one. For example, a company lets employees enter hours worked and materials used on the same paper form. This complex paper form is than transformed into a complex digital form that has a poor user experience. In such situations, try to disentangle the business processes.

Prevent redundancy in rules

When modelling a workflow, you can easily add redundant rules to actions. A rule is redundant when it can be combined with another rule. For instance, there is redundancy when an action contains a Set Field Value rule and a Execute Script rule that updates the document. In this case, both rules save the document to the database. If the script also updates the field value, the Set Field Value rule ca be removed so that the document is saved only once and performance of the action improves.

Test all scenarios

To ensure that your business process works well, you need to test all scenarios. Do not only focus on "happy path" scenarios that feature no exceptional conditions. Bear in mind that the performance and user experience of a business process model is strongly related to the size of documents and the complexity of layouts. Business process models that work perfectly fine with small documents may become slow with large documents. Therefore also test scenarios with large documents.

Follow scripting best practices

There is a separate section on scripting best practices. We stronly encourage you to follow the advice given in this section to optimize the performance of your business process model.