F-Type Data Consumption
Interaction model
Actuate's new "freemium" product, F-Type, employs limits on the data users can consume within each 24-hour period.
Each time they run a report, it uses up some of their free data and once they've gone over the limit, they're locked out until the next day. This encourages them to purchase additional data capacity. They also get a couple of initial "grace days" when exceeding their limit doesn't result in a lock-out.
But as we developed the software, it quickly became apparent that product managers, marketing folks, engineers, and the UX team all had very different ideas about how this system would work.
The confusion was causing us to lose development cycles, so I put together a guide to the data consumption model that everyone could refer to.