Empowering user management with filters
Led research and design for a project aimed at streamlining workflows for organization admins and power users where I improved user, team, and workspace management to expedite common actions, particularly in bulk, by introducing filters implemented across the platform.
Company
Flowcode
Responsibilities
Enterprise strategy, Asset management, UX Research and Design
Timeline
6 weeks, Q1/Q2 2023
Team
Myself as Product Designer, 1 PM, 1 BE, 2 FE
Let's set the scene
Let's set the scene
Imagine this..
You’re an Admin in your organization and your company has acquired another company. You have 30 new employees and they’ve been invited to your company’s Flowcode organization, but haven’t been added to their dedicated teams. Some of the users have accepted their invitations, therefore, they’ve been moved to the Members tab.
It’s time to add them to their corresponding teams and you have to go back and forth between members and invitations tabs to find all 30 new employees. While some of the teams for the new users overlap, there’s no way to multi-select to take actions on multiple users, and so you have to do each user individually.
Admins don’t have a dedicated place to manage their organization
Admins have to be part of every team in order to manage groups of users due to an engineering limitations when Flowteams was built. And they have to navigate to see every nested team.
That’s a lot of time wasted navigating to find the right group of people.
How it’s structured
How it’s represented
Where we’re headed
As part of the platform overhaul shifting from nested-teams to workspaces, we’re creating a dedicated space where Admins can manage their org and efficiently perform key functions.
How might we …
Ensure admins are successful by designing experiences that enable seamless performances of key functions such as user management?
Analyzing Admin key pain points
From reviewing customer calls and our feedback log, I noticed two main themes:
Examining the current interface
Overview of the users are unclear
To make decisions Admins need a clear picture of the user they want to take actions with. As of right now, the users have to go into the teams tab and investigate each team to see what they belong to.
User management before
Perform one action with one user at a time
If you want to take actions on several users, you have to perform each action one by one, even if it’s the same action.
No filters available
Want to narrow your search and look at a subset of users? There isn’t a way to do so.
In order for our power users to perform key actions in bulk we first must help them locate the users, teams, and workspaces they want to take bulk actions for.
The fastest way to do so is by filtering.
Where else might filters live in the platform?
User Management
Search
Analytics
Form Management
Asset Management
From Research…
to Design
I researched filters best practices and explored different approaches. I need to ensure that the filter approach was suited for both table and grid view.
Exploring batch filters (Left) ; Exploring additive lozenges (Right)
However, this approach was not best suited for the table row since it increases the cognitive load by requiring the user to scroll through all the filter options when if a users wants to make a change to just one column.
Let’s put it to the test
I asked enterprise users to complete two consecutive task:
1) Filter to users that belong to the Southeast workspace.
2) Show me how you would add a second workspace called Midwest.
From our usability test, all users were able to easily filter and add a second workspace.
However, the sort by feature needs improvement since it won’t work with the grid view.
After
Improved users view at a glance
You can see everything the user belongs to at once in column view rather than having to navigate into different teams to see the users that belong.
Filters
Admins can navigate to a subset group faster than ever to review and take action.
Introduced bulk actions
Admins can now multi-select users and take actions such as adding them to a team at or deactivate accounts at once.
These enhancements are crucial because they represents a tangible improvement in the user experience by offering intuitive and time-saving approaches to accessing and managing information.
This aligns with my commitment to delivering experiences that not only meet expectations, but drive satisfaction and productivity.
Results
Filters have been incorporated and launched across our platform in Global Search, Unified Asset Management, and have been adopted by the Analytics team where they led to a 20% increase in customer engagement and satisfaction.
Alana Macedo 2023 ©