Complex channel based navigation modal

Question

The application I am re-designing has a channel management modal for managing its customers. The admin hierarchy is as follows:

1. My Company Admins
2. Channel Admins
3. Resellers Admins
4. Customer Admins
5. End Users

Each Admin can access and manage the account of the customer type below it and manage their own account through the same interface. Therefore Channels manage Resellers, Resellers manage Customers, Customers manage themselves and their users and End Users only manage themselves.

Each customer account has a customers list page, a number of settings pages and a user management list page. Each User within the user management list page has a number of settings pages.

The brand colour of the top bar and the logo change depending on what customer is being managed.

The idea is that My Company, Channels & Resellers switch between customer accounts using the search box at the top or via a list of customer under a customers section. Once a customer has been searched for and selected the brand in the top left corner changes to the brand of the customer being managed and all the navigation below the breadcrumb becomes the navigation for the customer being managed(Similar to how Facebook is navigated). The breadcrumb shows where the customer being managed is in the hierarchy and what page they are managing within the customer account.

Managing a customer

Managing a customers user

The feedback that has been generated so far is as follows:

1. It is not intuitive to use the search to switch between customer accounts
2. The three column structure for managing users takes up a lot of screen space
3. Is the breadcrumb necessary as it takes up a lot of vertical space?
4. It is not clear to click the first breadcrumb pin to get back to managing your own company
5. The breadcrumb separates the top bar with the sidebar making the icon for collapsing the sidebar feel disconnected.

I am looking for guidance on how to better achieve this channel management navigation. Complete deviations from what I have here are welcome but if there is a way of salvaging this design modal that would be preferred.

Answer 1

1. Intuitive for whom? (you're just limiting search results/parameters as per account, right?) One user will have one account most probably so that confusion shouldn't arrive...

2. How many users are there? If the number is high then don't use this pattern and open a complete screen or something else, see image below

3. Breadcrumbs need not take this much space :) but are good for usability in such products

4. Are you promoting brand here? No need for logo/image, use text only...

5. Didn't get you point.

Answer 2

It feels to me like the breadcrumb doesn't match up with the columns.

I tried tracing the levels back and got as far as Users, but I can't see how you got to Users from Customer?

If you're going to have two steps in the same column, such as the step from Users to User Management, I feel like this should be clearly separated out. Greying out the unselected options could work.