Role Based Access Controls

ABOUT

AppDynamics, a Cisco company, is an application performance monitoring company. The controller is our main product- where users can go to view their application data and troubleshoot when there's an issue. Accounts is a separate part of our product where you can take more administrative actions such as viewing license usage and managing users.

ROLE

Product Designer:
UX Strategy, User Research, Wireframing, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Prototyping

KEY MEMBERS

2 UX Researchers
Product Manager
5+ Engineers

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Currently, User Management lives in our old Portal experience. While the customer experience needs to be improved upon quite a bit, moving the old Portal experience to the new Accounts experience would mean that it would be built on a new tech stack, propelling us to a faster cadence of release features. In terms of customer experience, the Portal experience is outdated, inefficient, and difficult to extract the pertinent data and information. Moving to the new Accounts experience would give us the engineering foundation needed to design a more intuitive experience for our users.

Some of the biggest issues with the Portal experience are that Company Admins and License Admins (both have different responsibilities) don't have the same unified view, and they don't have visibility into actions the other admin takes.

Fig2. Company Admin view

Fig3. License Admin view

HOW WILL WE KNOW WE SUCCEEDED?

There were 3 main areas we wanted to track that would solidify if we had improved the current experience or not.

We currently receive more support tickets than we want. The less support tickets we get, the more our users are able to complete actions on their own.

Completing actions in the current User Management takes a lot of time. The more intuitive our flows are, the faster an admin can complete a task, the more time they have to take care of other important tasks.

Currently, the experience is not up to par with our customers' needs or with our competitors. If we are to better the experience, our users would be more likely to recommend the product.

DISCOVERY

Assumptions

Both company admins and license admins should have information into what actions the other admin takes. Without all of the pertinent data, it is difficult to make informed decisions and difficult to resolve any problems that come up.

Customer Needs

There were 3 main points that were brought to us when speaking with our customers. Our customers expressed to us that a unified user management view would help the communication flow between both admins, a more robust user filtering and searching capability would help narrow down to a specific user quicker, and better notifications around changes to user access would help keep admins informed early.

Fig4. Storyboarding exercise to understand users' pain points

Fig5. Collaborative whiteboarding sessions

HYPOTHESIS

The faster an admin can complete administrative duties, the quicker they can move on to more pressing responsibilities. With a simple, intuitve grid with all of the users' information, an admin can gather all the data they need quickly to make the decisions they need to.

EXPLORATIONS

Fig6. All actions, such as edit user, taken in modals

Fig7. All actions, such as edit user, taken in an embedded page

FEEDBACK:
Overall, this version had positive comments. While this version was better than what is currently available, it forced users to get through all the permissions every time they created a role, instead of using reusable sets of permissions.

FEEDBACK:
There were more positive comments when the modal was taken out. Overall, users felt it was clean, simple, and intuitive. It also wasn't as limiting as modals were, giving us more room to add other types of access in the future.

THE IMPACT

Unified View

Admins wanted a view that was the same for everyone. Now they have the ability to see all users, the roles attached to them, and what their status is. Knowing all the pertinent information about a user, it becomes easier to make decisions. For example, when an admin needs to disable a user that happens to be the primary contact for a specific license, they are able to see that information, get in touch with the right people, and transfer the license to someone else.

Robust Filtering and Searching

Admins can have thousands of users that have access to AppDynamics and its services. Without a way to filter and search for specific data, it becomes cumbersome to find the information needed. Now, admins are able to find what they are looking for quickly and efficiently.

For example, if an admin is looking for a specific user but only knows that they are a license admin of a specific license, they can use the filtering panel to quickly narrow down the list of users and find the user they are looking for.

User Access and Change Notifications

Without a proper trail of information about changes made to a user, admins won't have clarity into why a decision was made and by whom it was made by. With an audit history, we can keep track of that information now and give our admins more insights around specific users. They will also know who made specific changes to a user, and they can go speak with that person directly to learn more about it.

Through the notifications area, you can also customize the types of notifications you want to receive around this.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Because some of the engineering deadlines weren't met in the beginning, we had to divvy up the work into different milestones. While the first milestone is complete, we have not yet started on the other 2 milestones. The first milestone was focused on all single user actions- adding a user, editing a user, and viewing a user. You can also bulk disable users and bulk delete any pending users. The second and third milestone will focus on adding multi-user actions and audit history to User Management. There is also additional access that we want to add- Voucher information that is used for classes that can be taken through our University section.

User Management