CloudForge Lockout Mobile App
- selinov
- Apr 10, 2014
- 2 min read
This is an idea I came up with a year ago but didn’t find the time to make a solid pitch to CollabNet management. I’ve recently taken the time to run through some ideation, explorations, and designs.
Whenever the idea of doing a mobile version of CloudForge came up there was usually a rather lukewarm reaction from he product owners and biz dev. The nature of the service simply did not lend itself to a mobile experience. We’re talking about IT in the cloud which takes a lot of serious decision making, analysis, and careful action. Mobile seemed so “on the go” to an organization with roots in SVN.
There was this one use case, though. Something that came out of the Customer Success department calls. There was a case for making it easier to lockout users when a vendor or employee was no longer on the team. This was the one instance when an admin was out to lunch and suddenly needed to rush back and start locking accounts. I thought that maybe a mobile app that did one thing really well would trump an app that tried to address even half of the options available in CloudForge. What if we made an app that just let you manage access permissions for users? This would address a known user pain point, start moving the service into the mobile space, and start getting the users hungry for more mobile access to CloudForge.
Ideation
Pulled out ye olde wipe board and started throwing out ideas. Yes, I keep a wipe board in my bag at all times. I’ve made the mistake of skipping this step in the past. The sooner I start running into issues, the better. #gallery-1640-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1640-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1640-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1640-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */
Information Architecture
Let’s start getting organized on exactly what this app will do. I broke it down into three main actions; lock, unlock, and reset.
Lock = shut out, no getting in, you’re done! Unlock = Oops! Ok, you’re not so done. Reset = Locked out until you reset your credentials… just in case someone knows another user’s credentials. It happens.
Wireframes
What you’re looking at here is a version 2.xx. As I ran the initial wireframes through some guerrilla usability I came across some issues. In fact, I ended up running into a menu selection issue on this version. Lemme know if you see it. 😉
Mock Ups #gallery-1640-3 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1640-3 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 25%; } #gallery-1640-3 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1640-3 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */
I tend to think of each step in the UXD process as a further exploration of the previous step. As I’m laying out a mockup I’m still open to feature ideas that did not exist in the wireframes. In this case there are four new ideas on the dashboard that did not exist on the wireframes.
The “New Locks” feature which would let the admin know that someone locked a user outside of this app.
Ability to hide/show the graphs, the ratio numbers (e.g.: 5/20), etc on the slide out controller.
Displaying the percentage of a node as a graph within the node icon itself. The green areas indicate that less than 50% of the total are locked. When the total hits 50% then the graph goes red. I’m thinking that a third state of yellow is not truly helpful.
A flip out filter control set rests at the bottom right. I like to indicate that something can be swiped. Exploration is great but I still prefer clearly marked functionality with this audience, engineers and product managers.
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