Sight Machine has partnered with machine makers to sell their software and their hardware as a package deal to product factories. For simplicity, let’s call those  machine users.

However, catering to multiple machine
users at the same time brings about
scalability and privacy challenges.

SCALABILITY CHALLENGE

Sight Machine provides each customer a personalized software environment to build dashboards and conduct analysis.

In the current state, each machine user will need their own Sight Machine environment. This makes it difficult for machine makers to keep track of multiple machine users at the same time.

To reduce redundancy and improve scalability, my new design enables machine makers to use one environment to manage all their machine users.

PRIVACY CHALLENGE

However, this unified environment brings about a major privacy challenge: 

Now different machine users can view sensitive information on each other's dashboards.

We need to protect the information of each machine user by providing varying levels of access to dashboards.

IMPROVING SCALABILITY AND PRIVACY

I crafted a role-based access control experience
for machine makers. Now, in a single environment, machine makers can build teams for each group
of machine users, assign permissions to different members, and manage multiple machine users.

INITIAL RESEARCH

I started by trying to understand how other
B2B2B software handles multiple users at
the same time. Below are some examples of
how other software manage permissions
across groups of users.

UNDERSTAND MACHINE MAKERS

To better understand their priorities and concerning
managing multiple customers at the same time, I
conducted four observational interviews with machine
makers to think about design considerations.

INITIAL SKETCHES

Building an understanding of what the nesting
structure looks like for teams and machine users
Identifying where role-based
access control sits in the realm
of all other Sight Machine settings.

ZOOM Co-Design Sessions

Leading design sessions with
low-fi/mid-fi prototypes: 


01  Being able to create a group
       for each machine user

02  Each group can have multiple
       roles (execs, factory floor workers)

03  The ability to edit these groups
customer groups and access cards
for each machine user
flippable cards for team
editing
pop-over for adding new
users to groups

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE IS DIFFICULT

One of the key pieces of feedback from co-design sessions was that it was difficult to understand how things flow together. For example, where exactly are teams managed?

USER FLOW 1

creating a new team and adding members to this team

USER FLOW 2

editing a pre-existing team

USER FLOW 3

setting up a new user profile with the right permissions and access

INTEGRATED WITH CURRENT SIGHT
MACHINE ECOSYSTEM

There are so many pages that need to fit together - both new ones for
role-based access control and also pre-existing platform settings.
I made the decision to create an all-encompassing settings page.

HANDOFF FOR ENGINEERING

This shows how I present my work to engineers. Alongside design documentation that I provide, I give UX 
flows as prototypes/videos and design specifications, either via Zeplin or manually.

ACHIEVING USER GOALS

01 Enabling machine makers to manager
      multiple users at the same time

02 More self-service for machine makers
      without compromising privacy

USER METRICS

01 Number of machine makers using RBAC

02 Number of new onboard machine makers

03 In-platform customer satisfaction surveys, HEART metrics
WHAT I LEARNED
This project had a lot of stakeholder constraints and was difficult to handle with the multiple parts. I learned how to work on such a project as a solo designer and a lot of times I was also my own product manager. Although, this was being designed with the first machine maker in mind, I also learned that it's important not to overfit to one customer (being customer centric vs. user centric).
FUTURE STEPS
I will be doing a lot of customer calls with machine makers as customers are onboarded to role-based access control (RBAC) to better understand pain points, hear about their experience so far, and determine any patterns in usability to improve RBAC in Phase 2 of this project.

There were also a couple features that were not implemented in Phase 1 of this project that I want to come back to, such as bulk editing machine users (granting them the same facility access, role access, etc.)