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As a back-end developer trying to broaden my knowledge for a more front-end oriented position, I am struggling with a design.

I'm trying to create a form for the creation of a new company. A company has a name, a location, some contact information and at must have atleast one employee (name, function, ...). What is the best approach for this problem?

Like I see it there are two options...

  1. Allow creation of multiple employees on the initial input form
    • plus: user can do everything he wants, no need to open the company and edit employees
    • con: can be a lot when adding multiple employees?
  2. Allow to create only the 'main' employee and force the user to add the other employees via a details screen of the company
    • plus: fast creation of the main requirement, which is adding a new company
    • con: need to re-open the company and add employees one by one, which can be time-consuming(?)

2 Answers 2

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I would suggest you consider this in an object-oriented fashion. You need to create an instance of a company object, with all of its information, and then create one or more instances of employee objects, with all of their information.

If the company creation process requires at least one employee, at the end of that process, prompt the user to add the first employee. After they have finished adding the employee, they can have a control to add another one to go back to some higher level context to take some other action (if there are any other actions to take).

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  • Sometimes you see two buttons, "Save" and "Save and New" (or similar). The first saves the data and continues wherever the process leads to, while the second saves the data, clears all values from the screen, and let's you enter another instance. --- I would not really call this "object-oriented", though. I don't think people think in terms of what a computer scientist calls "objects"... Oct 19, 2016 at 6:42
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From the user perspective, your company doesn't need to have any employee. If it's a technical problem you need something like a fake name/filler for your backend but never to display to your user.

  • screen 1: create company
  • screen 2: add employee to company
    This could be I select a company and a create a new user, or I import an existing user from my list of users of all my companies
    The user could have a checkbox or something like that to set as current company CEO.

We're in UX If it's sometimes better to create user from company screen, and sometimes from user screen you should be prepare to do both, or find a way to move smoothly from one screen to another. On you phone you could create or navigate to add user from many places like email, call history or even contacts...

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