SAP had a software concept idea to retarget customers who had left a specific website or page; this retargeting would be done across different platforms. When I began working on the project it was just an idea, explained to me as a broad conceptual idea, which I then had to digest, interpret and visualise into a desktop format.
I designed this ‘Rules engine’ as a way to visualise complex ‘IF / Then rules’ involving multiple nested clauses. The user can drag and drop to perform the nested task.
These rules encapsulate business logic surrounding when we retarget a customer with either emails or targeted adverts. This will be based on their user-behaviour on one of or websites. We originally opted for a more colloquial language in the rules engine but the development implications outweighed the cost of the project, so we stuck to a familiar pattern. Our developers were not keen on the idea of writing a bespoke natural language processor.
A basic rule
The rule below shows what a marketeer would enter to create an email campaign based on user’s browsing behaviour.
If they browsed items over £60 we will send them a free shipping offer.
A complex Rule
The Or condition has two nested rules that the criteria in both of those rules must be meet for the promotion to be activated. Creating a nested rule is easy. A user just needs to write a rule as normal and then drag it into the desired location. The summary at the top auto updates to spell out the full rules logic. We found that this additional information cleared up any doubt that our users had about nested rules.