Internship Project at ALTR Summer 2022; Product Design for Administrator and Organizational Settings
In Summer 2022 I was taken on as an intern at ALTR. ALTR is a SAAS provider that focuses on data security and data governance. They ensure that individuals have the capability to understand, protect and manage their sensitive data through a no-code solution. My internship position was the UX/Product Intern. My internship began with me learning about the product and where the product lies in the tech world. I was instructed to gain a high-level understanding of what ALTR’s product is, how organizations use it, the competitor landscape, where the product began and where ALTR sees the product going in the future. I gained access to the company’s Pendo, Jira, Confluence and Figma files and familiarized myself with these applications. During the internship I was first tasked with learning how to use the product myself and identifying any pain points in the product and UX design. From there, I would pick a part of the product that I identified had issues, and use that as the starting point for my project. I would then go through an entire process of research to shipment of a solution to the issues found in the part of the product I chose to conduct my project in. I then would create a project proposal from my research, design a solution and ship the final solution for production in ALTR.
In my learning and researching phases, I gained hands-on experience with ALTR product and various other integrations that the product uses such as Snowflake. I was not very familiar with data governance software's before this internship, but through my research, I built a strong understanding of the unique capabilities ALTR provides to users. My knowledge around the entire data ecosystem grew tremendously during this time, and this was vital to my ability to create functional and intuitive designs once I got to the design portion of my project. Being able to understand the technicalities behind ALTR's interface, as well as basics into SQL and Snowflake, I was able to more closely view the product in the eyes of the users it is intended for. My learning and research phases involved using Confluence to keep track of notes and share with others. I gained expertise in clean and concise note-taking techniques and proficient in researching, not only the product, but the competitive landscape as well. This allowed me to familiarize myself with interface design in organizations in similar SAAS and data-centered environments to assist in my own designs in the future, as well as help identify any noticeable differences or difficulties navigating ALTR's interface in comparison to others.
My research lead to extended documentation that greatly benefitted me in the later parts of my project when I needed rationale and validation for design choices. In addition, these notes kept in the ALTR's confluence provided the business with information to assist in their future decision making. Using this desk research, my own personal experience walking through the product, and video recordings of real customer's using the ALTR product for the first time, I was able to identify issues that users might experience in the product. From there, I then had to choose a specific part that I wanted to tackle during my internship — although it would have been nice to undertake all of the problems I identified, I only had a few months with ALTR, and I felt that it would be more beneficial to the organization to hone in on a specific issue, and create an in-depth solution that would last through all of the future iterations of the product. With all of this in mind, my project proposal formed, and it took place in the administrator/organizational settings portion of the interface.
My proposal consisted of a meeting with the entire product team, where I presented a PowerPoint presentation about issues I had discovered in this portion of the product. It was formatted in the flow of:
During the proposal, I advocated for real-time feedback as we went through each topic. This allowed for collaboration and easy identification if others in the team agreed that these were issues, how feasible my solutions would be and other ideas for solutions as well. The end takeaway from this proposal ended up being that my project would be in 2 parts.
Part 1 of my project took place in the administrator settings. Below is an example of the interface of where my project took place to help give a better understanding of my redesign. The pictures showcase the initial interface before my redesign.
In my project proposal these were the identified issues in this part of the product:
My solutions to these issues were as follows:
All of my designing took place inside ALTR's Figma where I gain proficiency with their design system, creating my own designs and using a Jira plugin to tie my designs to the proper tickets.
Next we went into the Ideation phase where I worked with the PMs and with the dev team to see the feasibility of my solutions. The ideation phase included solving all of these identified issues, but also brought up additional concerns we had to factor in such as:
Below you can see the final designs that are currently in product, (with last names censored for privacy concerns). These designs corrected all of the initial issues identified and made adjustments from the ideation design to ensure it could be implemented. The final design involved sorting by most recent date of action (whether that be login, resending an invitation or deactivating a user) instead of alphabetical last name. This is important as now users can see who has been on their ALTR platform in the organization and know who has seen sensitive information or made changes to relative thresholds or column access policies. It has text changes that more clearly show the user what action has taken place on what date — such as changing the status of active to “last login” to ensure there was no mistaken that that date corresponds to the user currently being active on the ALTR platform, but rather correctly indicating that the date corresponds to when they last logged into their ALTR platform. We have non-date options for those we could not pull the dates from and those are default sorted below those with dates. Further we have changed the date format to be clear no matter what region of the world you are from. These changes give the user more information about who in the organization has been most recently active, if any new individuals have accepted an invitation to their organizations ALTR account or when certain users stopped having access to their organization in ALTR. All of this information assisting in the managing and recording of who has seen or altered an organization’s data in ALTR and when they might have started or stopped being able to do so.
My next part of my project took place outside of product design and Figma and lead me to Confluence. While researching the administrator settings, it became evident there was confusion among many members of the organization as to what authority the various administrators had in ALTR and how they compared to one another. I spoke with individuals on all of the different teams at ALTR that would know this information and unfortunately got conflicting answers from different individuals. It was evident this was a concern because if those inside the organization didn't understand how each role worked and what authority these roles had, then how could we expect the users to? This became a pressings issue and I knew I wanted to undertake this in my project as well.
During this time I worked cross functionally with the PMs and dev team, as well as other higher up individuals in the organization that assisted in the original creation of the product. I ensured that the controls that the Head of Product, CEO and CTO wanted each role to have were in place, then, I went to check with the dev team to see how these roles and various abilities functioned in the code itself. After many meetings and back and forth communication, we landed on a company-wide understanding of the various roles in ALTR and their capabilities inside the product. Then, I partnered with a member from the Dev team to create a fleshed out table that showcases in a clear manner what controls each role has. This documentation serves as a source of truth for the employees in ALTR, as well as helped the team write what would be in the documentation for the front-end users. The table created is shown below, but specifics into the documentation are left our for organizational security measures.
RBAC Documentation:
During this project I was able to research, create and ship a product from start to finish. I got to work cross functionally with PMs and Dev teams on a highly technical product that gave me the ability to create solutions for data-centered SaaS interfaces. I got to work on RBAC solutions and create meaningful documents that will continue to be used inside the organization and create designs that current users are experiencing in the product today. My knowledge and skills in Figma, Jira, Confluence and Pendo all increased significantly. My research, presentation and communication abilities all grew during this time as well. This project showed me what I prioritize in my UX design methodology, as well as a showed me a different type of UX that I can do that differs from what I was taught in my masters degree. I believe my physics background, data science classes and business intelligence education allows me to excel in my ability to design for technical interfaces like the one ALTR has. I hope I am able to showcase more of my technical UX design skills in similar projects in the future.