Improving confusing product permission settings UI with explicit / implicit multi options

Question

I have a product permission settings component that allows users to include/exclude companies' current and future products. Many users find the current UI confusing based on feedback.

Below is an low fidelity example of how I improved the current component. The minor changes I made was adding the ability to include all/exclude all, hide inactive, and icon description on the summary. Current users are somewhat familiar with this flow, but for new users, I want to know if the icon description is sufficient to assume how it works.

Using Checkboxes and familiar UI elements

I explored an alternative design below using familiar checkboxes for each product and company. A toggle is available to explicitly include/exclude all future products from that company.

My questions:

• Is the checkbox format more intuitive for individually selecting products?
• Does the company-level toggle for future products make sense? Does it look ugly?
• What other suggestions are there to improve the UX and clarity?

I'm looking for feedback on these or other approaches to simplify our product permissioning for users while still meeting functional needs before further developing a solution.

Answer 1

From what I understand:

• you have a list of companies with multiple existing products
• for each company you also have the option of future new products
• you want to allow the user to pick any combination of those options

Based on that, my suggestions would be:

1. Use the solution from 2nd mockup, keep the checkboxes, but remove the toggles on the right.

2. Add another checkbox right below each company name with a label like "Future new products" and maybe make the label look a bit distinct (italics, icon, etc.) so that it won't be confused with an existing product.

3. After each company name, add in brackets the number of selected products, plus future products if also selected, like this: Company name (3 products + new products) or Company name (all products). This will give a better overview of what is selected.

4. Remove "Companies" checkbox and add a title "Companies and product subscriptions" above the search box. After the title, add the toggle "Include all" which should disable all other checkboxes for companies.

5. Move "Expand all" next to "Show inactive" so that you can have only 3 lines of content:

   • title + include all
   • toolbar with search + expand + show inactive
   • accordion with all companies

6. Remove "search" label and use an input field with an icon and placeholder, that's the common practice.