Multiple role playing under single login

Question

I can start with simple example,

User 'A' have to play multiple roles such as Manager, Team leader, and developer under the single sign in. By default, I am a manager when I am logging in, but I should be able to switch my role to team leader role and see the respective content with very minimal click.

I would suggest going with tab UI to switch role option rather than having drop-down at the right top corner such as Gmail account switch option. Is this efficient way of approach or any UX flaws in it? Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Besides it's hard to evaluate the difference other than seeing them online, dropdown and tab identation seem both good solutions. Hence, I would reccomend giving Roles as a seperate Navigation (if it's possible & on top preferably) with the roles listed when on hover (other then direct dropdown) to be able to give user the sense of account change rather than waiting him/her to check other tabs under his/her control.

By this way it's user's responsibility to check and see everything presented under the role. Otherwise there might be missing scope by some of the users not aware of the using this platform I suppose (experience from a couple of similar uses cases).

Answer 2

I'd like to point out an whole other approach to the problem. One Person has multiple roles, the question is, if this person actually slips in different roles during the usage of the application or does the user just have multiple roles that are changed fluidly during the usage. I assume that a user is e.g. manager AND teamleader during the whole day and not manager in the morning and teamleader in the afternoon.

Said so, my suggestion would be not to change roles but to show all the information the user has access to according to the different roles. So the user has to deal with only one UI. All needed information/functions are always shown so the user does not have to deal with the (from users point of view abstract) roles.