Issues with products that have multiple tiers/versions/variants

  • There’s no indication for which version/tier/model of an option a p/c relates to
  • There’s no clean way to link to multiple versions of an option

Take Imaginary calendar app for Android as an example. It has freemium, pro, business A and business B versions. Each version has a different download link in the Play store and no website that lists all versions. Adding each separately will create a lot of options and make it harder to overview differences between versions or compare to other options.

The approach so far has been to list the “feature complete” version and mention other versions as pros/cons. But that has some issues. What if there’s no “feature complete” version and there are only sidegrades (business A & business B)? Which one do you link to? What happens with option titles? How do we relay to the user, that the option title is referring to all versions “meta”? So it’s Windows vs OSX, not Windows The Corporate Edition vs OSX The Completely Fair Edition.

Basically the UI needs to match with how we want data represented on the site that can be intuitively understood by the user.

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You’re right. But this is a tricky one…

It most likely is, but is definitely an issue when it comes to Android, as many apps have multiple versions of which the free version is usually the name of the app itself, which is going to cause confusion with users thinking we are talking about the free version instead of the app in general (all versions).

I’ve considered multiple get it here urls for different places to get a given model/version. But this would be multiple products which would each have multiple get it here urls…I’d love to solve this one without requiring users to manage all that…

I don’t know that users would have to manage it, maybe more the mods. Users add what they can and the mod cleans it up to (if it needs) have multiple links. I think the harder question is, how do we get users to understand that an options is meta and not a single product especially when single product names are the same as the meta name of an item.