Role Management

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.

XenMobile - Workflow
CloudPortal Services Manager - Workflow
CloudBridge - Workflow
UI Hierarchy
Terminology Guide

 

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.

Concepts
Three concepts of Administrator, Role and Scope were introduced. Role will consist of a set of permissions (like restarting machine, shadowing machine, etc) and Scope will be a set of Objects (access to machines, delivery groups).

 

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.

  1. UI & Interaction Standards (Do the UI and interactions align with Citrix PD standards?)
  2. Flow (Does the product follow the standard role management flow: add admin details, select role, select scope?)
  3. Controls (Does the product allow all standard role management controls: Create, Edit, Copy, Delete?)
  4. Flexibility (Does the product allow flexibility: can we create custom roles, can we create roles from within the create admin flow?)
  5. Terminology (Does the terminology align with role management standard terms: Admin, Role, Scope?)
Product Standardization Assessment

 

Medium fidelity generic wireframes and product specific wireframes were created for XenMobile, App Orchestration and Command Center.

Managing Administrators
Creating Administrator Flow
Managing Roles
Creating Roles Flow
Creating Roles Flow - Adding permissions
Managing Scope
Creating Scope