Remote Gate Access
Project Overview
Access Control is an a micro front end feature that allows storage facility operators to control their facility's gates remotely. Access control is currently being released across the Storable FMS products. As the designer on SiteLink, I assisted the Access Control dev team to determine how it should integrate and function in SiteLink. The example below is specifically the MyHub product (The web based version of SiteLink.)
Why does Storable's Access Control exist? Storable's facility management softwares are notorious for integrating with many 3rd party features to fill in the service gaps of the softwares. Storable has a goal of bringing these features in-house.
Process
The process for this product is such:
- Determine all possible use cases for Access Control in MyHub
- Define how users experience the MFE screens
- Remove past UI for gate controls
- Determine where settings would live.
- Reporting
Access Control Menu
The design team determined that our MFE's should feel as natural as possible to the products where they are embedded. For this reason, the access control MFE has was divided into 4 separate pages: Activity, Accessors, Controls, and Settings. To align with the MyHub styling, the access control menu was placed in the left navigation. The example below shows the menu navigation and application of the MFE.
.gif)
This menu styling is different than in other places such as StorEdge (sE.) The example below displays how Access Control is styled there. The pages are placed in a horizontal tab at the top of the page.
Move In Flow
MyHub users setup their tenant's gate pin upon move-in. The move-in flow is for when walk-in's become tenants. Due to technology constraints and because of how MyHub was built, the path of least resistance for implementation was to launch the 'Create Pin' modal as its own modal after the 'Move-In' modal. Although this is less than ideal, and setting up the gate pin would make the most sense on the move-in modal, just allowing for Access Control to be used in MyHub is a huge win for our customers.
.gif)
Lead to Lease
Another use-case that needed to be accounted for was the Lead to Lease user flow. The lead-to-lease flow is for when leads (website contacts, phone calls, referrals, etc.) transition from leads and become tenants. Much like the Move-in flow, the access control modal appears after a tenant profile has been made and moved-in. Right before they become a tenant, their desired pin (Or default PIN) is assigned.
.gif)
Access Control Limitation
The implementation of Access Control has gone really well and customers have enjoyed the integrated app. The app has some pros and cons. For many of our customers, the pros outweigh the cons, but a major flaw is how Tenant Gate codes are stored. Due to seperated tech stacks, tenant gate codes are not stored in the tenant profile. Instead, they are stored in the access control MFE. A future update would be to place the tenant gate code settings inside the tenant profile.
Additional Notes about MyHub
Why does MyHub have a Move-in flow and Lead to Lease flow? Like many legacy products, in MyHub there are a multiple ways to do the same task. These two paths, although similar don't leverage the same components or pages even though they are so similar! Historically, anytime a client asked for an avenue to do a task, a new way was made. Disparate teams and feature requests led to redundant feature sets and multiple workflows. It is obvious why the most efficient SiteLink and MyHub users have certain pages and work flows locked down. For instance, it is common to lock down the 'Move-In' flow and force any new tenant to be a lead first.
Duplicative tasks leads to tech debt and more future work for implementing features. This is a major problem with MyHub/ SiteLink software. This leads to one asking, why does MyHub exist?
Why Does MyHub exist? MyHub was initially built as a new, better, version of the desktop SiteLink. However, the two apps never attained parity and users have not moved to MyHub. What is lacking is a clear value proposition for using MyHub. The use of a lean model canvas would have helped define MyHub's offering for its potential users. A few questions that I asked operators were, "What do you use MyHub for?" "Where do you use MyHub?" "What features do you wish you could access from anywhere?" The overwhelming response to these questions was reporting, select move-in flows, gate access, and tenant messaging.
