Redesign

User Management Design
for B2B2C model

User Management Design for B2B2C model

Background

MAI Portal is a web platform that supports VR-based educational products, enabling users to manage content and accounts. As the business scaled, the original admin structure could no longer meet the needs of a growing, multi-layered ecosystem.

Responsibility

  • Defined core requirements and planned the overall project timeline

  • Led a team of two UX/UI designers, providing direction and feedback throughout the design process

  • Created detailed product specification documents to support cross-functional collaboration

Year

2022

Year

2022

Scope

3 Month

Scope

3 Month

Role

Lead Designer

Role

Lead Designer

Challenge 01

Who should be the admin?

The product supports two license types: Instructor and Student. Only instructors could manage user lists — but in reality, professors rarely handle tasks like adding or removing users.

This raised an important question:

Should we introduce a new license, such as "Teaching Assistant" or "Staff" ?

Admin isn’t a title—it’s a capability

At first, adding a new license seemed like a simple solution. But in reality, admin responsibilities could fall to instructors, teaching assistants, or even non-users like school staff—depending on the institution’s size and structure. Turning each scenario into a distinct license type would complicate pricing and blur role definitions.

So instead, we introduced a flexible admin tag. By decoupling permissions from roles, we made the system more scalable and intuitive—without disrupting existing plans or workflows.

At first, adding a new license seemed like a simple solution. But in reality, admin responsibilities could fall to instructors, teaching assistants, or even non-users like school staff—depending on the institution’s size and structure. Turning each scenario into a distinct license type would complicate pricing and blur role definitions.

So instead, we introduced a flexible admin tag. By decoupling permissions from roles, we made the system more scalable and intuitive—without disrupting existing plans or workflows.

Challenge 02

When internal teams become users too

The original portal was designed for end-users—not business or support teams. But as MAI’s operations scaled, the lack of internal-facing tools led to inefficiencies and duplicated effort.

  • Multi-layer communication: Slow request handling and delayed onboarding.

  • Manual license tracking: Extra workload, inconsistent records, and error risk.

Before: A single trial request could travel across four roles, three systems, and countless emails.

Instead of building a separate tool, we extended the existing Portal to support internal needs. This approach improved usability, boosted adoption, and reduced both training and maintenance costs.

Tiered Admin Model

While the action-based admin tag provided flexibility, it wasn’t enough. We needed to further define what each admin level could access and control. To support the complexity of our layered user ecosystem, we introduced a tiered admin model.

This model includes three levels of admins—MAI, distributor, and institution—each with distinct scopes of access and responsibility.

To support the complexity of our layered user ecosystem, we introduced a tiered admin model. While the action-based admin tag enabled more flexible permissions, we needed to further define what each level of admin could manage.

  • MAI Admin: manages everything across the platform—internal users, distributors, B2B institutions, and B2C individuals.

  • Distributor Admin: oversees their own team and institutional clients.

  • Institution Admin: manages instructors and students within their organization.

Dynamic Interface Module

Once a user is assigned as an admin, the interface dynamically adapts to reflect their level and responsibilities. Administrative modules—such as user management, license assignment, or institution setup—appear contextually in both the dashboard and sidebar, based on the user's admin tier.

By building the system modularly, we made it easier to maintain, test, and extend as new roles or admin actions are introduced in the future.

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