Authorization Groups for Asset Management

Implementing user groups on a data management platform to make it faster and easier to manage access.

Problem statement

Managing access to data on our platform presented a significant challenge for data owners, consuming considerable time due to its complexity. Key customers had voiced a need for a more efficient method to handle data products.

Solution

In response to this feedback, we introduced user groups as a solution to simplify and improve the data access management process.

Key personas

This project focused on several key personas within customer organizations

  • Handles setting up access to data products and manages the data.

  • Establishes data access processes and oversees the health of the data program.

  • Searches for data useful for their research and requests access when needed.

Lead designer 

my role on the project

My responsibilities

  • Guiding the product design at the early development stages.

  • Developing and proposing UX strategies for customer challenges.

  • Aligning internal stakeholders around the project.

  • Refining designs into high-quality deliverables.

  • Collaborating with engineering and product management through implementation and feature delivery.

Scope & constraints

There were three product decisions that helped us to limit the scope of the project.

  • Segmented persona focus: The project was structured into separate phases, each aimed at addressing the needs of a different persona, starting with the data owner and administrator personas.

  • Staged feature release: The initial launch of the feature introduced groups at the organization level, with plans to include individual data product groups in subsequent phases.

  • Backward compatibility: The newly introduced groups were designed to be compatible with previous access control methods.

Product Definition Process

  • Customer feedback highlighted the urgent need to update our access control system. We risked losing key customers who struggled with configuring access to their data products, which were vital to their data governance programs. This feedback was meticulously documented in a product requirements document (PRD).

  • The project began with an intensive half-day workshop focused on access control best practices. In this workshop, my responsibility was to bring the product design perspective.

  • Following the workshop's insights and the PRD, I crafted a design proposal. This proposal conceptually addressed customer needs by outlining a new access role structure, suggesting updates to existing systems, and introducing UI concepts for the new approach.

  • After creating the initial proposal, I engaged in several rounds of iteration with product and engineering teams refining and finalizing the concepts.

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Design Process

Once the product and UI concepts were finalized, I dove deeper and worked with Engineering to develop project phases and designs for each phase. Here are the phases we saw at the start of the project:

    • Restructuring organization architecture to accommodate groups.

    • Introducing the new concept of a group, including default groups, lists of groups, group pages, and new group functionality.

    • Restructuring data product pages to accommodate groups.

    • Using groups to propagate data access in bulk.

    • Viewing existing groups and group members.

  • Providing a clear view to each user on their data product access.

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The main challenges I faced during this project

  • Adapting to ongoing change. The project lasted for more than two years. Within this time I had to keep in mind the tactical and strategic aspects of each project phase in order to produce a coherent user experience at each step of development. 

  • Technical limitations. Because the project started with an extensive product definition phase, focused on the future vision, I had to adjust the designs multiple times due to technical limitations that were uncovered during active development. 

  • Stakeholder alignment during the early stages of the project, including alignment around key concepts and their representation in the platform UI.

Outcomes

The first phase of the project successfully moved all current customers to a group-based system for managing data products.

A 120% increase in customer satisfaction

A 133% increase in sales conversions

The project is still underway and promises significant improvements in how all users experience our data management platform.