This Glossary lists all relevant terms and concepts that are specific to creating and maintaining Product Guides or Guided Selling solutions.
| Name / Concept | Notes | Example |
|---|---|---|
| WORKBENCH USER INTERFACE | ||
main menu | The menu on the top in your web-browser. See Workbench views overview | |
| navigation bar | The navigation bar with context-specific actions on the left side of your web-browser. | |
| view | A view displayed by the Workbench to show data or perform certain configuration tasks. | |
| GENERAL | ||
| account | Typically associated with a customer company | demo, playground |
| user | User of the Workbench associated with an account | |
| role | Collection of permissions to perform certain actions or view certain data in the Workbench. Every user must have one or multiple roles. | |
| permission | Atomic access right to a specific action (like Create Question) | |
| DATA | ||
| data feed | The file that contains your product data. When Product Guides are rolled out to several countries / markets, excentos distinguishes between the Master Data Feed containing the product base information and the Offer Data with prices and availability. | product-assortment.csv, productdata.XML |
| data source | Source of product data (local or URI file) | product-assortment.csv |
| data attribute | Attribute of the product data source | price, brand, weight |
| data attribute value | Value of a specific entry (or 'data cell') of a data attribute in the data source | 700,- € (in the "price" data attribute), Asics (in the "manufacturer" data attribute) |
| product | Record (or 'row') of a data source | |
| product field / product attribute | Defined aspect of a product associated to one (or more) data attributes in the data source | price |
| product field value | Product specific value(s) of a product field | 700,00 |
| PROFILES and FIELDS | ||
| profile field | Defines an aspect within a domain specific user model, that serves to specify a certain user requirement. It determines the features (or constraints) for appropriate products. For this purpose a profile field is typically associated to one (or more) product fields (of the product data schema). | |
| profile field domain | Domain of a profile field, specifying the set or range of valid profile field values | 0 - 10.000 |
| domain type | Specifies the type of a profile field domain (discrete, continuous, ordinal, numeric) | numeric |
| profile field value | User specific value (or constraint) for a profile field ( → concrete value selected by the user), typically associated to an Answer Option | <= 500 |
| user profile | Specifies the product requirements a of an user by means of a constraint set associated to the fields (of a given product guide) | |
| ELEMENTS OF A PRODUCT GUIDE | ||
Product Guide | Instance of a product advisor visible in your website. Simplification of a former concept of hierarchy of project, system and application. | |
| Product Guide concept / advisor concept | The Product Guide concept or advisor concept defines how all the (complex) buying decisions the user needs to make are presented to the user and how this is put into an effective selection process that is actually fun to use. It consists of all elements of a Product Guide described hereafter. | |
| Question Flow, advisor process | Sequence of Stages and Facets of a Product Guide as well as the logic of the visibility of each Stage, Question and Answer Option. The Question Flow defines which Question and Answer Options are presented in what context and which order to the user, this is also called: the advisor process. | |
| Stage | Collection of Questions in one Stage (i.e. one step in the Product Guide process) | Stage 1: Your requirements Stage 2: Your budget |
| Question (or Facet) | A Question (or more general: Facet) is the handler for a question/answer combination within a Stage of a Product Guide. The Question can be a real question (e.g. "what is your preferred brand?" with several Answer Options such as "Mustang", "Levis") or also a directly selectable option (e.g. for Boolean yes/no Facets such as "I want Bluetooth"). That's why, more generally spoken, they are called Facets. | Stage 2: Price |
| Answer Option | One or several Answer Options of a Question. More technically: Set of selectable value(s) (or constraints) presented to the user; associated to the domain of the profile field (could be empty e.g. for text search fields) | 10, 20, 30, ..., 100 € |
| explanation content | The content used to explain and describe the Stages, Questions and Answer Options. The explanation content can consist of text, images and illustrations. | |
| RECOMMENDATIONS | ||
| product recommendation | Presentation of one product in the recommendation list of the Product Guide. This is where all the intelligence of the excentos recommender comes in and presents the relevant products for the user's buying needs. | |
| product recommendation card | The widget (or user interface element) that contains one product recommendation. Depending on the client theme it is displayed in a certain layout together with some product attributes (e.g. product name, price, manufacturer, articleID etc.) and a reasoning which describes why the product either fits or not. | |
| recommendation list | List of product recommendations (structured by recommendation groups) | |
| recommendation group | A group of several product recommendations within the recommendation list, e.g. | "Top Recommendations" (products that fulfill all user requirements) or "Alternatives" that don't match all of your requirements |
| Reason | A Reason is an argument why the product is recommended to the user. It reflects the user requirements (i.e. selected Answer Options relevant to a certain product attribute). There are 4 types of Reasons: | |
| Pro Reason | Shown if the relevant product attribute of this recommendation matches to the selected Answer Option. | "+ your selected brand (Mustang)" |
| Con Reason | Shown if the product attribute does not match the selected Answer Option. | "- different brand (Levis instead of Mustang)" |
| Nearly Reason | Nearly Reasons are used if a product recommendation almost fulfills the corresponding selected Answer Option. | "~ a bit more expensive than expected (800 € instead of 750 €)" |
| Fill Reason | The Fill Reason is used if a product recommendation shall show "neutral" product attributes, no matter whether the user selected a corresponding Answer Option or not. | "Features: Front Suspension, Disc Brakes" |
| theme | The Theme defines the look and feel of your Product Guide and has a certain layout. You can style the theme according to your needs. See the list of our themes here. | |
In order to increase the readability of the Glossary and the Workbench documentation, capital letters are used for Guided Selling-specific terms, and lower-case letters for all other terms.
If you are looking for the description of widgets and user interface elements, please take a look at our User Interface Portfolio and the widgets of the User Interface Portfolio. Not all of the User Interface Portfolio elements are available in Workbench clients.
