Our own experience with Iguana X

In an early prototype of Iguana X we did try to create some value for customers by giving some extra fields which would allow customers to say:

• The source system

• The destination system

• The nature of the data being transmitted - HL7 events etc.

Seemed like a good idea at first - customers we demoed to liked it. I thought it was a good idea. One customer asked if we could also add a field for customer ID to make it easier to search for interfaces related to customers.

Where the design idea fell down was when we tried to implement filtering on the dashboard to see channels. Then things got super complicated. The issue is how does one answer this question:

• How can a customer filter interfaces on the dashboard based on these 3 (or 4?) extra fields.

And that is where the design complexity exploded - it became very complicated thinking up how the UI would work to allow the user to filter on these extra fields. We eventually gave up and instead got rid of these extra fields (which we found we were mostly leaving blank).

Instead we implemented a much simpler more flexible way of meeting the same need by using “hash tags” which can be used to label interfaces in the description field. Vastly simpler to implement and infinitely more flexible in terms of giving a tool to customers to address many different needs - and also much easier for us to implement and make a consistent positive experience.