A mature collaboration product, IBM Connections, needed a new role added -- that of a visitor to a company's protected environment. This role needed to provide both flexibility and security, in both Cloud-based and on-premises versions of the product. I was asked to develop a design that would capture all of the nuances required for this new capability.

Challenges

• Designed an overlay that would meet customer's needs in a variety of different contexts.
• Developed a model that would work both on-premises and in the Cloud, even though they had different business requirements.
• Helped explain very technical nuances to the numerous other people who worked on Connections, as this feature touched almost every page of the product.

What I did

• Met with numerous customers to hear their requirements, show them design ideas, and incorporate their feedback.
• Work to design the simplest overlay possible, initially, so that we could grow the plan as usage grew.
• Worked with other designers across the product, to make sure their designs could accommodate this role.
• Ran multiple usability tests on various aspects of the designs, to make sure the experience would be clear to end users.

My primary design requirements were:

• Users should always know when they were speaking with someone outside of their company, or sharing data with someone outside of their company
• In a multi-tenant environment (e.g., in a Cloud environment, where a user might have a home organization and also visit another organization), users needed to know which organization they were visiting
• Administrators needed to be able to control who could share information with people who were external to their company

In this design, I worked with customers to determine the wording that would make most sense to people when creating a new community:

Here, I wanted to be sure that users knew what organization they were currently in, for multi-tenant environments:

They needed to know how to go back to their home organization, know where they were, plus know that others would videw them as visitors.