Design Principles

Pitchly is a powerful platform for data management, collaboration, and workflow building. But in order for it to succeed at all three, it requires a set of common product principles on which not only our platform is built, but all Apps should adhere to as well while providing value to users.

These best practices will be evolving over time, but we list here some of the top ones.

Real-time everywhere

One of the biggest benefits of Pitchly over other software vendors is its real-time nature. We believe with the emergence of web technologies, like WebSockets, there is an opportunity to solve two problems that have been hard to solve for databases as long as they've existed:

• Keeping data in sync across an entire business, making sure no one acts on out-of-date information

• Preventing conflicting information from overwriting data someone else has entered

Making your App function in real time, where it makes sense, contributes to our mission of making business tools easier to use, and as a result, making those businesses more productive because they can trust the data in Pitchly (and your App) is always accurate.

Permissions

Pitchly, as a platform, covers the permissions that organizations can set to restrict who has access to what data in their databases. But it may not cover the permissions you want to give users in your App.

Our Documents App, for example, has a special "design" permission, specific to Documents, that allows Pitchly admins to choose who has the ability to create new document templates. But this permission only exists relative to that App. Other Apps will likely have their own permissions to enforce.

It is on you to examine the users in an organization (which can be done via our GraphQL API) to determine who should be able to do what inside your App. If you want, you can align your permissions with Pitchly user roles, to say for example, "only Pitchly admins should be able to do X." Or you can create your own logic, saving the individual userId with your App-related permission in your own database.

The choice is up to you, but we recommend making sure the users of your App are informed of the permissions they have selected. Controlling who has access to what company data is particularly important, and our clients trust us to do what's right with it.

Interface (UI/UX)

During mobile app development, you are often given standardized UI components with which you can build your app. They give your app a certain look and feel that is consistent with the rest of the operating system, resulting in an overall positive user experience as the user switches between your app and other apps or the home screen.

Web development doesn't really have that standard toolkit by default. Well, it does, but it sucks. Because of this, we have created a standard UI library that includes all the components you might want to use in your App, such as lightboxes, popups, tooltips, toasts, buttons, dropdowns, etc.

We highly recommend you use these components while building Pitchly-facing Apps inside our platform, to ensure users have a consistent and pleasant experience.

We will be posting links to these UI components in upcoming updates. For now, please contact us to learn how you can get access to these design components.