Managing Rosters and Company Accounts

Question

Can anyone suggest examples of sites with UIs/workflows that allow individuals to create and manage accounts that are linked to umbrella entities, such as a company? We're looking to refine the online account creation tool for a membership organization that sells company memberships but provides each employee linked to a member company with their own login.

We'll need to do things like:

• Ensure new individual accounts aren't already in the system and suggest possible matches.
• Ensure new individual accounts aren't creating a company that's already in the system and suggest possible matches.
• Allow existing individual accounts to update their company account, either company profile info or company rosters (add and delete other individuals in the company).
• Allow guest/nonmember account creation

Users of the organization's current workflow struggle to understand the process and find it confusing and inefficient.

Answer 1

This is a broad question, I think you need to define the problem a little more before you can answer this. Here is what I would do:

Define your users or personas

I think, from the above, you have described 2 users - the Membership Admin and the Member Employee. There may be more. List the types of different user that will be using the system and define them in a little more detail

• give them a name, or at least a role title (e.g. Membership Admin) - you may be surprised out how much clarity just using common names provides in discussions
• describe what they are trying to get out of the system or why they use it (e.g. the Membership admin is responsible for creating, updating and removing accounts for member organisations

Define the use cases for each persona

For each persona above, describe the top 2 or 3 things that they will be trying to accomplish (e.g. As a Membership Admin I want to create accounts for new companies that sign-up).

Prioritise the most important use cases

Don't bite off more than you can chew, if you are starting from scratch then try and tackle only a few things at a time - for example you might want to just handle the Membership Admin use cases first. This allows you and your team to focus.

I think following the above steps will give you clarity on where to start - you can then start thinking about UI, workflow, similar tools and patterns and hopefully start sketching some things out. If you are still stuck at this point, come back here with some more specific questions and I am sure you will get a lot more answers :)