4Share Case Study | Emile Potgieter

The Brief

Challenge & Objectives

Challenge

Designing a versatile web dashboard for an existing backend system poses two intertwined challenges. First, the interface must integrate seamlessly with the backend while giving users meaningful control over how their dashboards look and behave. Second, supporting multiple tenants, licenses, user roles, and active clients introduces significant complexity — data must stay organised, access must be controlled, and the experience must remain coherent as the system scales.

Objectives

Build a user-friendly dashboard that integrates cleanly with the existing backend, letting administrators manage tenants, licenses, users, and active clients from a single, customisable interface — without sacrificing clarity or control.

Project Scope

A multi-tenant web dashboard with customisable views, role-based permissions, tenant management, and active-client tracking.

Tools

Figma, React.js, Bootstrap, Visual Studio, GitHub

Role

Leading UI/UX design, ensuring accessibility, and collaborating with the development team to deliver features that match user requirements.

Team

Self-directed, with feedback from a mentor and peers.

The Research

Research Synthesis

Through stakeholder interviews and usability reviews of existing admin tooling, I built an empathy map to surface where multi-tenant management breaks down. The patterns pointed clearly to cognitive overload from context-switching and a lack of trust in data visibility.

Insights

Admins lose time switching between disconnected tools to manage tenants, licenses, and users.
There is no single source of truth for active client state, leading to errors and duplication.
Role-based access is poorly communicated — users are unsure what they can and cannot do.
Dashboard customisation is expected but absent, forcing workarounds that degrade trust.

Needs

A unified view of tenants, licenses, users, and active clients in a single interface.
Clear, role-aware UI that surfaces only what each user level needs to act on.
Customisable dashboard layouts that adapt to each admin's workflow without engineering effort.
Reliable, real-time data visibility so decisions can be made confidently without second-guessing.

Going Deeper

Research & Strategy

Plan & Goals

Understand how administrators currently manage tenants, licenses, and users — and where the friction sits.

Define a dashboard structure that scales across roles without adding cognitive overhead.

Validate that customisation features reduce dependency on engineering for routine layout changes.

Assumptions → Findings

Tap a row to see what the research found.

0 / 3 revealed

✓ Confirmed

Interviews confirmed that admins routinely switch between 3–4 separate tools to complete a single management task, creating errors and lost time.

✓ Confirmed

Users frequently attempted actions outside their permissions, indicating the UI gave no clear affordance for what was available to their role. Surfacing role state reduced confusion significantly.

✓ Confirmed

Stakeholders validated that layout customisation was a top-requested feature. Prototype testing showed admins could reorganise their workspace in under 2 minutes without any guidance.

Methodology

Competitive audit — reviewed leading SaaS admin dashboards (Stripe, Auth0, Vercel) to benchmark layout patterns and permission models.
Heuristic evaluation — assessed the existing backend interface against Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics to surface the highest-impact pain points.
Pattern library review — catalogued reusable data-table, filter, and card patterns suitable for multi-tenant contexts.

Stakeholder interviews — conducted structured interviews with 4 administrators to map current workflows and identify the most costly friction points.
Prototype testing — ran task-based sessions on mid-fidelity Figma prototypes to validate navigation structure and customisation interactions.
Card sorting — used open card sorting with 3 admins to validate the information architecture for tenant and user management.

Design Principle

"Admin power without admin complexity."

Every decision prioritised giving administrators full control while keeping the interface lean enough that power users and occasional users alike could act confidently.

The Product