Project Overview
- Role: Lead UX Designer
- Timeline: 1 month sprint
- Platform: Enterprise edge cloud services
- Team: Product manager, engineering, UX
Product Walkthrough
Initial visual walkthrough of the EdgeNexus IAM flow. Final polished UI screens will be added in the next update.
Challenge
IAM is the first trust-critical workflow administrators touch on cloud platforms. We had to design the entire experience from scratch under aggressive timelines, while handling complex entities such as users, roles, policies, and permission hierarchies.
- Limited domain familiarity in security-heavy workflows.
- Need for intuitive UX in high-stakes admin actions.
- Pressure to ship quickly without reducing quality.
- Clear differentiation from legacy IAM experiences.
Research & Discovery
Competitive analysis across AWS IAM, Azure AD, and Google Cloud IAM revealed a common pattern: form-heavy, page-heavy workflows that hide relationships users actually care about.
- Forms increased cognitive overhead for assignment tasks.
- Multi-step journeys slowed down everyday changes.
- Permission relationships were hard to understand at a glance.
- UI patterns did not match mental models of access flow.
Core User Flows
We mapped complete journeys for three admin modes: create, manage, and exception handling (deletion, detachment, conflict states).
- User management: create users/groups, assign roles/policies, manage status states.
- Role management: define custom roles, attach policies, resolve inheritance conflicts.
- Batch actions: apply changes across multiple users or groups safely.
Design Direction
Instead of legacy forms, we designed a visual canvas approach aligned to how admins reason about IAM: entities and relationships, not isolated fields.
- Pill-based entity assignment for users, roles, and policies.
- Drag-and-drop relationship mapping for fast configuration.
- Visual clarity on who gets what access and through which path.
Key Innovation
Permission creation moved from a 5-7 step, multi-page path to a compact 1-2 step, in-context workflow with immediate validation feedback.
- Fewer navigation jumps and less context switching.
- Faster edits with clear visual confirmation.
- Reduced assignment errors in security-critical tasks.
Impact
- Created a clear product differentiator versus legacy IAM patterns.
- Delivered end-to-end IAM UX within an aggressive 1-month timeline.
- Improved speed and confidence for permission administration.
- Strengthened first-touch trust for enterprise platform onboarding.
Design Learnings
- Industry standards should be analyzed, not copied blindly.
- Competitive research is a strategic input when domain context is thin.
- Mental-model-aligned UI dramatically improves enterprise usability.
- Strong constraints can sharpen innovation instead of limiting it.
Note
Final UI visuals and design screens for EdgeNexus IAM will be added once the production-ready assets are finalized.