INKR Access

Overview

For INKR’s admins and hiring managers who need to onboard and manage hundreds of freelancers worldwide, INKR Access is an identity & access management system (IAM) that provides a centralized hub for managing access to all INKR enterprise products.

Unlike previous attempts at a user management system that requires various spreadsheets and calls, INKR Access features a user-friendly front-facing interface that walks new users through the onboarding process and allows them to provide their information directly to the system.

I spearheaded the initiative and single-handedly handled the end-to-end design of this product.

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Problem Definition

To ramp up its catalog, INKR has been acquiring and localizing a lot of comic titles. As a result, the costs of producing and publishing comics pages have gone up significantly and need to be managed.

All cost-incurring activities at the time were tracked by project managers via spreadsheets, and as the volume increased dramatically, they found themselves spend more and more time with these book-keeping activities, as opposed to actual production.

Our first initiative was to establish an automatic and systematic way to track all cost-incurring activity on our current systems. However, we hit multiple roadblocks:

• Each of our systems was using a different identity system. It will take a lot of engineering and resources to tell whether different accounts belong to the same person.
• Some of the tools that our team was using such as Photoshop and Illustrator are third party and not cloud-based, therefore it’s impossible to track down its usage.

To solve this once and for all, the solution would be to centralized everything into one place, so that every activity can be properly tracked, audited, and accounted for. However, that would be too huge of an undertaking, a multi-year effort that we were not sure was going to be worth it. For a startup with limited resources, we were hesitant about such a big project.

Therefore, we set out to narrow down the scope to something more manageable. We believe that by achieving quick wins, we can kickstart the virtuous cycle and motivation for the longer-term goal.

One of the low-hanging fruit that we can pick is reducing the overhead cost of onboarding and managing external users on these systems.

Scope and Constraints

INKR Access is an enterprise product with the aim to provide a centralized hub to manage access to other enterprise products, in which new users will be able to register and follow a path to provide their information into the system, reducing the back-and-forth and overhead cost of onboarding new users.

We believe that this will have the immediate effect of cutting down a significant portion of the current overhead cost of onboarding new users.

The authentication and authorization service we are using is Auth0, with it also came specific requirements that need to be taken into consideration when designing, mostly in the login and admin experience.

Identifying Users

We’ve identified the people who need to gain access to CMS and LS as follow:

• Content Partner Team Members: personnels from INKR’s signed partners that need to log into CMS and LS for various purposes (monitoring production/localization, financial reports, downloading relevant data, etc.)
• Freelancers: hired freelancers that need to gain access to CMS and LS to carry out tasks assigned to them by their respective managers.
• Admins: People who need to grant access to others and monitor their activities into CMS and LS.
• Recruiters: Internal team members that need to grant access to their hired freelancer, such as content executives.
• Finance: Internal team members that need to see immediate report of user activities on CMS and LS, such as accountants, managers, and so on.

Two of the above users that should get the most attention are Freelancers and CP Members, who are the most numerous. To reduce the repetitive tasks of onboarding these users into the system, we’ve narrowed down the user journeys that we want to tackle.

User Journeys

There are 2 types of users (CP Members and Freelancers) as well as 2 entry points that can happen: organic and invited. Therefore we identified 4 user journeys to cater for:

Information Architecture

Based on the touchpoints illustrated above, I put down the screens and their required information.

Wireframes & User Flows

While creating the information architecture, I also come up with rough wireframe to visualize the solution. Then I combine it with the overall flow to get this.

Mockups

Using Figma, I visualized the user journeys with the first rounds of mockups. The design system used is the Ant Design, the same one used across CMS and LS.

Development

After meeting with other stakeholders from the infrastructure team, web front-end team, and project managers, we reached a consensus on multiple business rules and technical constraints that affects the design.

This feedback is used to update the design for several other rounds. I also elaborated the design for corner cases, empty states, error states,…

Finalized Design

After several rounds of iteration, the design is deemed fit for implementation. During implementation, I will need to be on standby to support if there is any problem related to the design.

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Result

After 1 month of implementation and adjustments, the system was launched to all users on the other two products, CMS and LS. There were some hiccups with the migration processes, services were out for a few days, and there was not a cohesive communication plan for the new releases, leaving many users confused. However, we eventually rectified these issues.

Early feedback from managers showed that INKR Access significantly reduced the effort that they have to do to onboard new users, freeing up their time for more important tasks.

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