Inquiry - Guided vs Free Form

User Experience
1

What’s the argument everyone uses for a customer when it comes to having Guided Journey’s vs Free Form? Does it depend on the use case/the customer?

Guided Journey

  • Customer follows a direct path across the case lifecycle
  • Reduces error to speed up the resolution
  • Ensures compliance and consistency across channels
  • Optimize Pega’s Next Best Action

Free Form Experience

  • Autonomy and speed
  • Reduces friction and user can jump directly into where they need to go
  • Handle cases faster without going through multiple steps
2

It depends on both the use case and the customer.

I usually position it this way,

  • use Guided Journey when the process needs control, consistency, compliance or support for less experienced users
  • use Free Form when the users are experienced, the path is less predictable and speed/flexibility matters more than step-by-step guidance.

The real decision point for me is if the cost of error is high, go guided, if the cost of friction is high, go free form.

3

“cost of error” 100% - this is the big driver for me and important discussion with Client.

The flip side, is the cost of trying to control the process - if the client has always had “free form”, trying to hardcode a journey can involve errors and bugs.

Blueprint is a great way of mitigating this but you may want to have a balanced approach between free form and guided journey’s if the client is transitioning. Having been an SME in a long past life, we tried to build guided journey’s - if I had my time again, I would have built in a little more flexibility for those “edge cases”.