Octopart Partner Portal
User management
The design of this team management page looks simple, but it took a complicated journey to arrive at this solution. Several factors contributed to the headache:
This Octopart Partner Portal page is meant for Octopart Sellers to manage their team, however the team login credentials are managed through Altium Identity. These two systems would have to work together
Octopart Sellers often have multiple brands managed by one person/group of people, so Organizations on Altium Identity would need to be tied to multiple Brands from Octopart
Without a dedicated Product Manager on the project, the Engineering Manager and myself teamed up to lead the product
We started by working with Account Managers to define the roles to include (Admin, Editor, Viewer), and then working through many user flows to define the happy path for managing teams.
Option 1
Altium Identity allowed for us to create any number of groups within an Organization on the backend and assign any combination of groups to each user.
In this first version, a Portal admin could define custom groups each with Contributor and Viewer roles. Then the admin could assign a team member a Brand, a group, and a role. Considering the actions taken within the Partner Portal are fairly straightforward, this level of complexity seemed excessive.
Option 2
My biggest win was convincing the Engineering Manager to simplify how Brands and Roles would be shown and managed in the Partner Portal.
Instead of allowing custom groups, we only have Editor and Viewer groups. A Portal admin can quickly assign any team member editing or viewing rights within a brand. This grouping feels closer to standard role based access control experiences, and facilitates our user experience.
In addition to thinking about the customer-facing experience, we also had to build a tool for Octopart account managers to connect the correct Octopart Sellers and Altium Organizations.
More about this facet can be found on the next page, Octopart Admin Experience.