Entity Interaction Interface for Unified Cross-App Navigation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Software application bundles with an app-centric approach face challenges in providing a consistent user experience due to inconsistencies across multiple applications with distinct user interfaces, making navigation and data access complex and inefficient.
Innovation Solution
An entity-centric paradigm is adopted, utilizing an organizational graph to connect entities via relationships, allowing users to navigate based on their interactions and relationships with entities, with applications being contextually exposed to provide a unified and consistent user experience.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If an app-centric approach is used with multiple software applications in a bundle, then each application can have its own distinct functionality, but the user interface consistency and navigation efficiency deteriorate due to multiple distinct UIs
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an entity-centric interface as an intermediary layer between the user and multiple software applications. This interface uses an organizational graph to represent entities and their relationships, allowing users to interact with data and functionality across applications through a unified, consistent interface rather than switching between multiple distinct application UIs.
2Adaptability or versatility
If multiple software applications with distinct user interfaces are used, then diverse functionality is provided, but navigation complexity and time to access information increase
Solution Approach 1:
The entity-centric interface serves multiple functions across different software applications through a single unified interface. The organizational graph structure allows the same interface to navigate across CRM, marketing, sales, and support applications while maintaining consistent interaction patterns, eliminating the need to learn and switch between multiple application-specific navigation systems.
3Ease of operation
If an entity-centric paradigm with organizational graph is implemented, then user experience consistency and navigation efficiency improve, but system complexity increases due to graph structure and contextual exposure logic
Solution Approach 1:
The organizational graph structure enables the system to automatically determine contextual relationships and expose relevant applications and entities based on the current state and user interactions. The graph naturally computes relationships and exposures without requiring complex manual configuration or control logic, allowing the system to self-organize and adapt to user needs.
Data Source
AI summary
An entity-centric approach has been proposed to provide a consistent user experience in accessing a unified software applications suite effortlessly. Entities are connected with one another. The entities and the connectivity between them are reflected in all three functional layers of 3-tier client-server architecture. Every entity has a set of attributes and each attribute represents a data item or record of a particular type. The data items or records are represented in the form of card(s) as determined by contextualization and access control engines. Interactions capture entity communications across the unified software suite. The entities can communicate or interact across various channels like mail, call, messages, webinar, etc. An interaction screen is provided with a set of cards, that include information about an interaction card and its associated contact cards. An interaction instance along with a corresponding originator and receiver entities are highlighted and connected with a connector.