Access Control

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Context

I worked with Fox Digital Entertainment on a huge internal project known as Arches. The idea was to design and develop their own set of internal applications that they used to manage all of their digital assets like videos, images and live streamings because up to that point, they were using a lot of third party apps that made the user flow very complicated, with a high error margin due to manual processes that could be automated.

The first step was to create their own Design System. But not only using components and style guides, but also by creating interaction and design patterns that could work as a foundation for any app that anyone inside Fox Entertainment needed to built, so I helped to develop this Design System with a team of 5 designers.

After the first version of the Design System was finished, the first set of apps that would use it should be designed and built. And the very first one was Access Control, an app that would manage user access to every other app that was part of the ecosystem.

Challenges

The biggest challenge of this project was to define the logic about the user permissions to apps and features across all of the Arches ecosystem.

Other important challenges were:

• Interview and align stakeholders
• Discover our current user workflows
• Ideate and sketch potential solutions
• iterate and deliver

Actions

For this particular project, I worked with another designer. Together, we defined the design strategy that we would follow:

We facilitated a three-day workshop with stakeholders and the rest of the team, so we could define together each one of the artifacts and at the same time, be aligned with the same mision and vision for this project.

I took the ownership about the technical challenge. With the help of the development team, I was able to create a permissions diagram that would be flexible enough at any level, for any user, to grant access to any application, feature or tool in the whole Arches Ecosystem.

After we had enough information, I facilitated some ideation sessions with the rest of the team so we could have a brainstorm and sketching sessions and get to a potential solution together.

I was able to create some low-fidelity mockups that I tested with our users, iterate and quickly build high-fidelity prototypes to test again with their feedback implemented. Apart from minor updates, these were the final versions of the tool that were delivered to the dev team.

Impact

This was the first tool that was built using the Arches Design System, and it had to showcase the possibilities and flexibility that allowed anyone to build their own apps and tools using the styles, components and interactions that we defined as a team.

When I presented this to the whole organization, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive and everyone on the client’s side was very excited to start building their own apps for Arches.

About the Access Control itself, the feedback from the customer was very positive, highlighting how easy was to manage users, roles and permissions, and that this tool was going to be one of the main foundations for years to come.

Here’s some feedback from my team, and from the customer: