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When assigning roles to a user, the admin uses a single search field with 2 available actions:

  • Search Roles that can be added
  • Search Users to copy role assignments from

Currently, the UI looks like this:

Copy assignments Choose role

How can this UI be simplified for the user?

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  • Does each user have one role, or can a single user have multiple roles? Mar 14, 2018 at 8:59
  • @MichaelHeraghty each user can have multiple roles. Mar 14, 2018 at 14:46
  • When copying another user's assignments, do the current roles get overwritten? Or do all of the new roles get added to the current roles? Mar 14, 2018 at 14:55
  • @MichaelHeraghty user's current roles get overwritten, for example, we edit user "A" which has permission to "add". We copy assignments from user "B", who has permissions to "Edit" and "Remove". In the final result user "A" now has two permissions "Edit" and "Remove". Mar 14, 2018 at 14:58
  • @Arminas_Grigonis Got it. So are there any defined roles (e.g. "Editor") or just individual permissions? Mar 14, 2018 at 15:09

2 Answers 2

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Role Assignment

Here is a suggested approach:

  1. In the search box, state that the user may search users or roles. Do not present any other choices at this point.

  2. When the user enters a search query, present the appropriate choices.

  3. When the user makes a selection, for example "UX Designer", clearly state the associated role. Offer a button to assign that role to the current user.

  4. A search query may return both Users and Roles, and that's fine. To enhance further, consider visually distinguishing users from roles -- for example add (Role) and (User) in parenthesis.

  5. If a User is selected, their role is displayed -- i.e. the behavior is consistent with scenario 3.

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  • This is close to what I would propose. You want to focus your workflow on the user's thought process: 1: Find the thing, 2: Take an action. The OP's original design muddles those distinct steps into one. Mar 14, 2018 at 17:52
  • 1
    Epic approach to this use case. I will try to implement this solution to my system and will show the result. Mar 15, 2018 at 7:35
  • Glad this helped. Hope it works out for you 👍 Mar 15, 2018 at 8:16
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Thanks for the screen shots. Looking at the images initially gave me a sense of anxiety and ambiguity. If you decide to keep this feature the way it is, then move the options to the top of the search box since they determine what the search box does.

Without context I feel as though the 'Copy assignments' is quite different from 'Add role'.

My advice would be to test a design where the search box only allows users to Copy user assignments. Then, for adding roles create a separate section that allows the user to view all the roles available and select the roles they want to add. The issue I see with 'Copy user assignments' is do users know all users or the users that they want to copy assignments from?

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