Hardik Kumar

Overview

Context

I'm an admin!

Approach

Final Design

Reflections

Auditing 21 Adobe CC services to deliver enterprise-grade features

role

Product Design, Competitive Research, UX Audits

year

2022-2023

team

Project manager, Client lead, Design lead, Product designer (me)

problem overview

IT admins can't configure Creative Cloud services the way their orgs need, which severely limits enterprise adoption.

Imagine controlling the sharing permissions of a 5000+ member org using an on/off switch. That's a huge security and compliance risk for admins, so they end up disabling most Adobe CC services. This affects end-users downstream because they fail to get full value of CC.

solution

A new Trust & Safety Center in the admin console, that lets admins set up secure guardrails and confidently enable more services for their org:

Deeper monitoring of user activity (ex: a file was shared outside of the org) by setting up custom Alert Rules.

Decreasing risk of file and asset sharing, by selecting a default expiration duration for all publicly shared links.

impact

Audited 200+ use cases across all 21 Adobe CC services, and prototyped the top 3 features requested by 16 enterprise customers. Currently in development.

Because of this work, the Propelland team secured a $120,000 future budget to continue building out the roadmap.

context

Adobe does not provide admins enough granular controls to configure services for their org's needs.

Right now, a lot of your policies and security settings are a light switch: ‘It’s on, or it’s off’. We also don’t make storage available, and therefore, other background services that are trying to connect cannot.

system admin, disney

Originally, the problem scope was within product licenses, but our competitive research proved it to be deeper, and so we had to align 18 cross-functional stakeholders for our solutioning.

becoming my users

Without user interviews, developing strong empathy for admins was tricky… so I became an admin myself.

I personally audited and documented 200+ use cases across all 21 Adobe cloud services, to understand what admins could control.

competitor research

Our benchmark on navigation models, control provisioning, and experience patterns, revealed that Adobe significantly lagged behind other enterprise-grade admin consoles.

How can Adobe deliver enterprise-grade capabilities that help customers adopt CC services with trust and reliability?

Approach

What does the future of Adobe CC services look like?

feature roadmapping

Adobe had a laundry list of future features without a clear way of prioritizing them. My team and I advocated for a 10min card sort with admins to help stakeholders feel confident in roadmapping the highest-value features.

What if the admin console shipped with smart control presets, catered to the customer?

To increase trust in the system, I explored the idea of a security profile (a preset config of settings) based on what Adobe knows about an organization's usage. If an admin wanted to override this preset, we would give them fine-tune settings. Kind of like a gearbox.

early exploration

approved iteration

What if the system took pre-approved actions on its own?

Most enterprise admin consoles allow setting up rules that trigger notifications. I wondered if Adobe could go further by allowing the system to take the necessary action as well. The added feature was de-scoped at the time because of feasibility issues.

notify + act (de-scoped)

notify only (approved)

final design

We handed off the UX framework, all our research, and the prototypes for the top 3 features that would continually build trust with admins by providing them both smart default settings and a way for admins to override them. I also designed in-app pathways for end-users to request access to features and admins to approve/review these requests.

Preset profiles are summarized so admins can easily understand what’s best for their orgs

Changes to navigation were de-scoped, so the Trust & Safety Center evolved into a one-stop shop for all things security

Based on key UX themes like Sharing, Storage, etc., granular controls are provided to admins so they can fine-tune the profiles for their org

Preset profiles are summarized so admins can easily understand what’s best for their orgs

Changes to navigation were de-scoped, so the Trust & Safety Center evolved into a one-stop shop for all things security

Based on key UX themes like Sharing, Storage, etc., granular controls are provided to admins so they can fine-tune the profiles for their org

Preset profiles are summarized so admins can easily understand what’s best for their orgs

Changes to navigation were de-scoped, so the Trust & Safety Center evolved into a one-stop shop for all things security

Based on key UX themes like Sharing, Storage, etc., granular controls are provided to admins so they can fine-tune the profiles for their org

Admins can monitor specific events more closely by defining a trigger that sends them a notification

Rule creation flow is divided into 4 digestible phases, as it's a multi-step process, and scrolling was intentionally avoided to reduce error rate

The AND filter would further specify what an admin wants to track. Example - [if a certain user] shares a file externally

Admins can monitor specific events more closely by defining a trigger that sends them a notification

Rule creation flow is divided into 4 digestible phases, as it's a multi-step process, and scrolling was intentionally avoided to reduce error rate

The AND filter would further specify what an admin wants to track. Example - [if a certain user] shares a file externally

Admins can monitor specific events more closely by defining a trigger that sends them a notification

Rule creation flow is divided into 4 digestible phases, as it's a multi-step process, and scrolling was intentionally avoided to reduce error rate

The AND filter would further specify what an admin wants to track. Example - [if a certain user] shares a file externally

what went wrong

Research was painful

In chasing empathy for admins (and understanding how everything works), I spent weeks just scouring documentation and old data.

what i'd do differently

AI Research Partner

With access to AI tools, I would have more time to focus on prototyping more variations and stakeholder alignment.

Your team made more progress in 4 months than we did in a year. Plus, your audits revealed some use cases that we didn't think of before.

Years later, we still refer to your designs when we build out admin features - you did some solid work on that project.

engineering lead, adobe

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