Objective:
Design a unified role management workflow to make the process of creating and managing IT administration roles consistent across all Citrix products (current and future).
My Role
I led a team of four designers in this project and was responsible for:
- Driving the project and providing weekly updates to the stakeholders
- Standardize workflows for Role Management across 12 Citrix products (XenDesktop Studio XenMobile, App Orchestration, Command Center, Cloud Portal Services Manager, Cloud Portal Business Manager, Citrix Cloud Platform, ByteMobile, CloudBridge, XenClient, VDI-in-a-Box, NetScaler)
- Evaluation of recommended workflows with engineering team and architects to meet technical challenges
- Designing interaction patterns for the centralized pattern library, which included optimized workflows, wireframes and visual designs
The project won the first place among 6 innovation projects and the recommendations are going to be adopted by at least 4 products (Studio, XenMobile, App Orchestration, Command Center) within the next few releases.
Solution
We started with the analysis phase where we looked into the current workflows for all 12 Citrix products. We mapped out the workflows, terminology and UI patterns and studied them comprehensively to find out similarities and differences between them.
Based on numerous discussions with designers, engineering team and architects, we decided to introduce some concepts around role management to provide control, flexibility and uniformity to the system.
Recommended ideal workflows were generated and short-term and long-term recommendations were made keeping in mind the release cycles for product development.
Terminology suggestions were made based on discussions with the Information Experience team.
Standardization metrics were developed to compare and assess the amount of deviation each product has with the ideal workflow. We used five parameters (mentioned below) to assign rankings and normalized the data in the end.
- UI & Interaction Standards (Do the UI and interactions align with Citrix PD standards?)
- Flow (Does the product follow the standard role management flow: add admin details, select role, select scope?)
- Controls (Does the product allow all standard role management controls: Create, Edit, Copy, Delete?)
- Flexibility (Does the product allow flexibility: can we create custom roles, can we create roles from within the create admin flow?)
- Terminology (Does the terminology align with role management standard terms: Admin, Role, Scope?)
Medium fidelity generic wireframes and product specific wireframes were created for XenMobile, App Orchestration and Command Center.