When you develop your first Product Guide, you might face the question whether to start creating the advisor concept or prepare and upload the product data first. Read these tips when you are not sure where to start. Anyway, both steps are necessary and at a certain point required - the only question is where to start.


There are two different approaches to create your Product Guide: You can either proceed...


Concept-Driven:
Create the advisor concept, add the product data later

Steps: Create the advisor concept first with all Questions and Answer Options to define your ideal advisor process - and later on (or in between) upload your product data.

Data-Driven:
Start with the product data, then create the advisor concept

Steps: Integrate your product data first, and afterwards Create the advisor concept. Eventually refine the product data.


Recommended for:

  • If you already know which Questions and Answer Options you want to create.
  • If you just simply want to test how a certain idea of an Advisor Concept will look like.
  • If you don't care about the product data at the beginning.
  • If you don't have fitting product data already and produce them suitable for the advisor concept later on.


Recommended for:

  • If you already have a product data file and want to develop a Product Guide concept that perfectly fits your product data.
  • If your product data already (or almost) meets the Product Data Feed Requirements
  • If you want to avoid asking Questions or showing Answer Options in the Product Guide that might not be reflected in the product data.

Follow-up actions:

  1. After defining the concept, you can upload your product data.
  2. Connect the Questions to data attributes and the Answer Options to the corresponding attribute values.
  3. Most probably, you will need to refine or change your advisor concept since some aspects might be reflected differently in your product data.


Follow-up actions:

  1. Create the Product Guide concept.
  2. Attach Questions and Answer Options to product attributes and their values by setting the data binding.

(lightbulb) In any case, creating great Product Guides with good usability and recommendation behavior requires a close link of the advisor concept and the corresponding product data. It is always an iterative process - the Workbench is designed around the idea of providing you full flexibility to start wherever you like, no matter if you want to work data-driven or concept-driven.

Still not sure how to start?

If you are not sure whether to start with the advisor concept or the product data, it is typically advised to start with the advisor concept. This makes sure to focus on the user, and afterwards adapt the existing data. When working in a concept-driven approach, you might also create an idealistic test product data file based on our Template and Example Data Files with e.g. only 10 products. This will help you to quickly understand and model the dependencies from advisor concept to product data. Later on you and excentos can use the idealistic data definition to check how to transform or extend your existing product data file best to this example file.

See also

Look at the Product Guide Concept Manual for a guideline and our best practices to effectively create great Product Guide concepts.


Next Steps

Depending whether you want to build your Product Guide concept-driven or data-driven, it is also suggested you access the documentation in that order.

And once you have started, simply switch between the two views because anyways, it's an iterative process.

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