A New UX Paradigm

For the original story read: https://kilofeet.com/blog/no-code-low-code-hierarchical-data-views/ TLDR: I struggled to show relationships during a client onboarding session and had to do it manually. It led to this idea.

View Builders Reign Supreme

Most sufficiently large or complicated b2b software products have a view builder. There are also a new wave of “easier-to-use” solutions that allow you to build internal tools with views.

Companies like airtable & notion come to mind.

However, they are usually single table (or entity) views. They lack the ability to visualize relationships.

What if there was a way to view the hierarchy of data. In this example, I pull screenshots from gingkowriter.com which is an extremely effective writing tool.

Relationship View Builders: Self-Referential

Let’s use an employee roster as an example. Most no-code or low-code tools would enable you to generate a 1-dimensional view of the data. The most common view is a table with relevant fields.

Imagine instead defining a card with the fields you like (which you can do in notion.so). Yet, instead of a 1-dimensional view — you configure one of the fields as the relationship field. Using the employee roster, maybe there is a field called “Reports To”.

This allows us to build a visual hierarchy. Click on an employee and automatically highlight up-and-down the chain.

employee roster turned multi-dimensional instead of a 1-dimensional

Relationship View Builders: Multi-Entity

Let’s evaluate what this might look like for a multi-entity arrangement of data.

In a really simple CRM example you might have account, opportunities, & todos as a hierarchy. This example shows what might happen if you click on an account to see everything related to it naturally.

crm relationships visualized multi-dimensional

A call to action ➡ Please adopt this pattern

Although, we could keep this idea a secret and refine it on our own. The truth is that we believe the whole of the software industry would benefit from this approach.

saasrock.com is leading the charge and has this as an active development item. Will you adopt this? If yes, I’d love to hear from you at twitter.com/ckluis or linkedin.com/in/ckluis.