Setting up the scope of the study
Context
Through my experience working on the design of SaaS applications, I always had to find solutions for users to be able to handle a large amount of data with a high level of entanglement.
In this UX case study, we are going to see how we can address this topic through the design of a user management application.
Description
Let's consider an application that has the concept of users, roles and user groups:
Users represent individuals that use the system.
A user can have one or more assigned roles.
A user can belong to one or more user groups.
A user group can contain users with different roles.
The core functionality that this application needs to allow is:
Add, remove and edit users, roles and user groups.
Manage the roles assigned to users.
Manage the users contained inside a user group.
Constraints
The application may have 10,000+ users, up to 100 different roles and up to 200 user groups.
The application should be usable by experts and novices.
7 steps to assign the right solution to the right problem
Through my experience working on the design of SaaS applications, I always had to find solutions for users to be able to handle a large amount of data with a high level of entanglement.
In this UX case study, we are going to see how we can address this topic through the design of a user management application.
Problems
User management is currently done manually in the database by developers
Limited resources : only users with knowledge in SQL and access to production database can manage users
Time-consuming
Can only be done using a PC with database client installed
Searching, adding, removing and editing specific groups of users can only be done through complex queries
Prone to errors
Not easy to have an overview on users (KPIs, statistics, evolution,...)
No alerts to anticipate potential issues
Opportunities
Make it easy to manage users so that people with no technical knowledge can take care of it
Provide tools to advanced users so they can perform deeply technical actions in a fast and secure way
Provide analytics so that system administrators can anticipate issues and plan actions
We should now understand who are we designing the application for and ask ourselves :
What are the categories of people who have significantly different motivations for using this product?
As it is often the case in any SaaS application, we must address here both expert and novice users.
Working of the personas for each of them helps to understand how they differ.
The novice user
Can work from the office, from home or from wherever he wants
Most performant equipment would be a laptop with wifi but could also use a tablet or even a smartphone with low connectivity
Performs actions on-demand
The expert user
Mainly working at the office
Uses a PC with good internet connection and a wide screen
Usually performs actions during a planned release or maintenance operations
Now we want to understand the needs that our application needs to fulfill.
I started to write some user stories for each persona in order to explore the user's context.
In front of each user stories (or group of user stories), we will then be able to list ideas and understand what we could build to fulfill those needs.
