Airtable

Enterprise Hub

I led several naming workstreams, created an account structure taxonomy, and partnered with product design to think through navigation, terminology, and IA for an expanded version of the Airtable admin panel that enabled scaled administration at large organizations.

Role Content Design
Team Product Design, Engineering, PM, Marketing

Problem

Large enterprise customers faced administration challenges. The existing "organization" account structure wasn't robust enough, forcing customers to either create multiple organizations (management burden) or consolidate everything (visibility issues for some admins).

Solution

Enterprise Hub introduced new account structures and administrative control levels, inspired by Slack's Enterprise Grid model. The feature enables:

  • Scalable administration for large organizations
  • Delegation of responsibilities to line-of-business owners
  • Standardized settings enforcement
  • Uniform security policies

My key contributions

Product naming

When I joined the project, the working name for the feature was "Enterprise Grid," as we were modeling it after Slack's offering. However, this was creating a lot of confusion on the team because folks were using "grid" to refer to both the new account structure we were introducing and the overall feature name (i.e. "With Enterprise Grid, you'll be able to have a grid that contains multiple organizations.").

Because "grid" is not an intuitive term, I assembled a thorough competitive audit, led namestorms with key stakeholders, and ran UserZoom validation studies. After presenting proposals to product leadership, we landed on:

  • Organizational units as the new account structure
  • Enterprise Hub as the feature name, to emphasize the centralization value prop

This preserved 2 out of the 3 of our existing account structure terms while aligning with competitors.

Account structure comparison

Most competitors used the term "workspace" as the second layer of the account structure, but it would've been too much change management for us to mirror that because of the existing meaning that "workspace" had in Airtable (it's the primary billing unit for self-serve paid plans). I also pushed to keep "organization" as the top layer account structure so it wouldn't have a plan-dependent definition—customers would "unlock" an additional account structure that sat below an "organization" instead of having the definition of "organization" change.

Expanded admin panel

I partnered with Product Design to introduce contextual info display based on an admin's scope (super admin at organization level or org unit admin). This included:

  • Net-new Organization page for super admins (central IT users who needed full visibility)
  • Nav redesign to support the introduction of org units
  • Clear and guided user administration flows

Key content considerations

Contextual scope cues
The info on any given page was contextual depending on the scope (organization vs. org unit) that the super admin had selected. I aimed to consistently reinforce that in helper text.
Super admin clarity
Defining the actions that super admins could take on users was tricky, and there was legacy code that created nuances with our existing actions. I advocated for always clarifying user admin actions in confirmation dialogs.
Naming the purgatory
I proposed and tested (via UserZoom) different names for what I ultimately dubbed the "unassigned org unit"—an important conceptual holding ground for users and workspaces that didn't have an org unit yet.

Settings redesign

I partnered with Product Design to redesign admin panel settings to support centrally-configured global settings and inherited defaults for org units. This included:

  • New settings nav paradigm to add settings detail pages
  • New settings tab IA and setting descriptions to scrub inconsistent and opaque terminology
  • New SME review process for future settings updates

Key content considerations

Inheritance control terminology
One of the settings we offered for super admins was the ability to "lock down" a particular setting so org unit admins couldn't edit it for their respective org units. I had heard IT admins use the verb "lock" when talking about settings in various customer calls, so I tested it in a UserZoom study and ultimately used it in our final designs, despite some pushback from internal stakeholders.
Establishing content patterns
Enterprise Hub overall led me to develop stronger content patterns in the admin panel, and settings was one of the places where this showed up more clearly. I aimed to use the same set of verbs and parallel sentence structures across settings that behaved similarly.
Platform team processes
Several other teams were touching the admin panel and adding settings, but they were doing so with no design guidance, which is what resulted in settings looking and sounding so inconsistent. I created documentation for other designers to help them write settings product copy and instituted an intake process that would allow them to request input from me and my product design partner.

Outcomes

Note that I don't have a lot of specific metrics from this launch, as we started to roll it out to customers late Aug 2023 and I was laid off mid-Sept 2023.

Received positive feedback from key beta customers
We only onboarded 6 beta customers onto Hub before I departed from Airtable, but they were able to migrate onto the feature and set it up with no major UX issues.
Scrubbed risky terminology from the product
Aligning our account structure terms upfront meant that we could reference our account structures throughout the admin panel clearly and accurately.
Made admin panel more cohesive
During this project, my admin panel content standards and patterns helped unify the different admin panel pages and made the content across them more connected and clear for our most valuable customers.