Create privacy feature from o-1 for admins

Leveraged iterative design methodologies and collaborative implementation to deliver 0-1 privacy features for admins, driving the acquisition of 3 new customers within the first month.

Industry
Business Intelligence

Role
UX Researcher, Product designer

Contribution
User interviews, Stakeholder workshops, Rapid prototyping

Value
Ground-up innovation, User-first, Data-informed strategy, Design sprints

Challenge

As a customer, users wanted granular control over who could access, edit, delete, or embed various data connections within their Astrato tenant. This level of control was crucial to enhancing security and privacy while reducing clutter by ensuring that users only see relevant data connections and views. Our objective was to design a seamless and intuitive way for admins to manage these permissions, improving both security and usability.

What I did?

As the Product Designer leading this project, I was responsible for driving the design process from concept to launch. My core contributions included:

Conducting comprehensive comparative and competitive analysis to understand the market and identify opportunities for innovation.
Leading design sprints and facilitating collaboration across design, engineering, and product teams.
Conducting insightful user interviews to gather pain points and insights from end-users, including BI developers and admins.
Creating wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes that were intuitive and aligned with user needs and business goals.
Collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure design consistency across products and platforms.

"Conduct UX research and design an intuitive permissions management system to enhance data security and user control."

Design Process

The design process began with a lack of pre-existing insights into how other platforms managed data connection permissions. To bridge this gap, I collaborated extensively with stakeholders, including product managers, developers, and other cross-functional teams, as well as users. We sought to understand how existing solutions addressed similar challenges and what gaps we could address in our design.

Empathy - Driven Research

I conducted in-depth user interviews with 10 users from competitor platforms. This research revealed several key pain points, such as a lack of clarity in managing permissions and an overly complex interface that hindered usability. These insights helped shape our design direction, focusing on creating an intuitive solution that would address these pain points while adhering to the technical constraints of the platform.

Design Sprint 1: Defining the Problem and Initial Solutions

The goal of Design Sprint 1 was to explore solutions that gave users granular control over their data connections, empowering them to manage permissions and access levels.

Problem Definition

The sprint began with collaborative stakeholder sessions to understand the problem. I conducted interviews with BI developers and admins from competitor platforms, uncovering pain points related to data connection permissions, including lack of visibility, difficulty in managing large user bases, and unintuitive interfaces.

We synthesized these insights into a How Might We (HMW) statement: "How might we empower users with granular control over their data connections to enhance both security and usability?"

Ideation and Prototyping

After gathering all the ideas, we moved into prototyping. I began creating wireframes for the most promising concepts, focusing on providing a clear, simple, and scalable interface. The key features we wanted to explore were:

Select & Click Interface: A simple interface where admins could click on a user and select which permissions to grant or revoke.
Scalable Design: The interface had to be able to handle a growing number of users and data connections as the platform expanded.
Searchable Interface: Given that organizations may have hundreds of users, it was important that admins could quickly search and filter through them.

Testing and Validation

I tested the wireframes with internal users to validate the concepts. Feedback revealed that users appreciated the simplicity of the interface but highlighted the need for better searchability in large datasets. I iterated on the designs, refining the wireframes based on this feedback.

Methods used:

User Interviews
Personas
Competitor Analysis
First MVP Ideation

Design Sprint 2: Refining the Solution and Finalizing the Design

Design Sprint 2 focused on refining the high-fidelity design and addressing technical and usability concerns raised during Sprint 1. The goal was to create a fully functional and polished solution that could be tested further and implemented.

Methods used:

Feedback Analysis
Solution Refinement
Hi-fidelity Prototype
User Testing
MVP Launch

Incorporating Feedback and Refining the Solution

The first task in Sprint 2 was to integrate the feedback from Sprint 1 and refine the designs. Based on user testing insights, I revised the initial concepts to make the interface more scalable and intuitive. This involved making design adjustments to ensure the system could handle large user bases and large data sets without compromising usability. Key adjustments made included:

Enhanced Search Functionality: We designed an easy-to-use search bar that allowed admins to quickly find specific users or data connections, even in a large dataset. This was crucial for organizations with hundreds or thousands of users.

Permission Grouping: We grouped permissions (view, edit, delete, etc.) in a way that made it easier for admins to manage and understand. Users would now be able to set permissions for a group of users in one go, improving efficiency.

Collaborating with Development and Product Teams

The next step was working closely with engineering and product teams to understand technical limitations and refine the designs based on these constraints. Regular communication was crucial during this phase to ensure that the design could be implemented without any blockers.

We used an agile approach to ensure that the design was flexible and could evolve as new requirements emerged. For example, during this sprint, we discovered that certain permissions might need additional technical configurations to work smoothly across different data environments. I worked with developers to ensure that the interface was adaptable to these configurations.

High-Fidelity Prototyping and User Testing

Once the high-fidelity mockups were ready, we returned to user testing. We tested the refined prototype with internal users and stakeholders, including admins and product managers. We wanted to ensure the feature was not only functional but also intuitive for users who might not be familiar with complex permission systems. Some additional features tested included:

Granular Permissions: Ensuring that users could easily select and assign permissions for individual users and groups.

Interface Responsiveness: We wanted to ensure that the interface was responsive, with quick load times and smooth interactions, especially for admins managing a large number of users.

User feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Admins reported that the design was easy to navigate, and they appreciated the flexibility and control it gave them over data connections. However, users suggested the addition of a confirmation step when changing permissions, which we incorporated into the final design.

Preparing for Launch and Final Adjustments

After testing and refining the design, we were ready to prepare for launch. In this phase, we finalized the design specifications and worked closely with the development team to ensure the feature was implemented according to our design vision. We also updated the design system to include new components and guidelines that would support the new permission management feature.

I continued to monitor user feedback and worked with the QA team to identify and resolve any issues before the feature went live.