Table with Action Buttons Versus Turbotax Wizard-Like Experience

Process & Techniques
#1

Hello Folks,

Hope I found the right website and place to post this question.

I am working with a team to develop a web application where people can come and request access to various intranet applications.

For the “Requestor” side of things, we have a Turbo-Tax wizard-like experience. The idea is this, we ask them a series of tailored questions about which application, environment (Production, Development, or Staging), and specifically about the application they are requesting. Based on each answer to the question we tailor the next question.

At the end of the process we build the request and send the request to an approver.

This is where we are stuck UX-wise. The approval process is presented as a grid where the approvers see a listing of all of the requests. They then have a button at the end of each row in the grid where they can click on said button. That button leads to a popup where they can see details of the request and approve/deny the request along with an optional comment.

As a team we felt that we can have a wizard-like experience for the approval process as well to make things easy to use for both requestors and approvers but we are out of ideas.

Hope folks here have an idea on how we can approach this.

Thank you for your time.

#2

Here are some thoughts I have for the User Experience of the Approver role:

  • A Wizard is probably less desirable than a more “workflow” approach

  • As an approver I would like to see a que or listing of incoming requests - showing some kind of status like “new request” - looks like you have this part pretty well worked out - you might think about allowing the approver to take action even without opening the request - this way one could do bulk approvals or denials if you knew the request was routine or have otherwise prior knowledge of it

  • Does the requester include some kind of urgency or “need by” date in their request - how does the approver know how long they have to take action (Granted, users always put an urgent status on their requests but this issue can be worked)

  • I would also like to have access to all the past requests, regardless of their eventual disposition (approved, denied, sent back to requester for clarification, not yet acted upon etc)

  • How are approvers being notified that they have requests waiting for approval? Email, texts, phone message, and can the approver customize their individual notification options to reflect how they most want to be contacted? Could they select more than one like “send me a text and a email”

1 Like
#3

These are great points, @SteveCrow. We do plan on adding email notification for requestors when their requests are approved/denied.

We will add also a listing of past requests as well.

I have a one image limit so I can’t upload all the mockups. I will see if I can add links.

Thanks again!