Building a permissions system that scales
Senior Sign is a paperless admissions platform for senior living communities. Originally built for small community teams, the platform needed to evolve as larger operators adopted it, bringing more complex user-management needs and stricter compliance requirements.
I led the end-to-end redesign of user management and permissions, creating a more centralized, granular system that gave organizations greater control over access while reducing reliance on developers.
SCOPE
System
Permission Design
TEAM
4
Me, 2 Devs, 1 QA
Before
After
The problem
The product was outgrowing its permissions model.
I started noticing a spike in customer support issues through a CS Slack channel I’d set up to track recurring feedback and surface product trends. Digging into those issues alongside Sales’ shift toward larger, enterprise-level operators revealed a growing mismatch: we were selling to organizations whose access-control needs our product wasn’t built to support.
I investigated the problem from three angles.
With some enterprise customers at risk of churn, this quickly became a priority. User permissions were still rudimentary, making it difficult to manage access across larger teams and multiple communities. We needed a solution that could address the immediate customer risks, remain intuitive for existing users, and be delivered quickly within the constraints of our current architecture. A full role-based access control (RBAC) system was the longer-term ideal, but wasn’t feasible within the available time and resources.
The approach
Treat permissions as a system, not a collection of settings.
I brought together customer feedback, Customer Success insights, and the platform audit to identify the underlying problems and prioritize the redesign.
Three principles guided the work:
Centralize control
Give administrators a clear, consistent place to manage users across their organization.Make access explicit
Make roles, permissions, and community access easier to understand and manage.Build for scale
Support complex organizational structures without making routine user management dependent on developers.
The solution
01: Centralize user management
I brought user management into a centralized company-level experience, giving administrators a clearer view of users across their organization.
Rather than navigating fragmented pathways or relying on Customer Success and developers for routine changes, administrators could manage users from a single place.
02: Make access scope visible
For operators managing multiple communities, understanding who had access to which locations was essential.
I designed the experience to make user access across communities easier to understand, distinguishing company-level management from community-specific views.
This helped administrators better understand the scope of access without needing to navigate disconnected screens.
03: Introduce granular permissions
I designed a more flexible permissions model with three roles: Super Admin, Admin, and Staff.
Granular controls covered six areas:
Managing users
Managing packets and templates
Managing community contact information
Accessing company reporting
Signing on behalf of a community
Creating custom packet types
This moved the system beyond broad, one-size-fits-all access and gave organizations more control over what different users could do.
04: Address gaps between permissions and enforcement
The existing platform had permission logic that wasn’t consistently enforced, creating potential compliance gaps.
The redesign addressed these weaknesses by aligning permission settings with the actions users could perform, including sensitive workflows such as signing on behalf of a community.
The goal was to make access control meaningful at the system level, rather than relying on settings that didn’t reliably restrict behavior.
05: Migrate the existing user base
The new system needed to work for the customers already using Senior Sign, not just new accounts.
The implementation included migrating more than 13,500 existing users into the updated permissions model across 600+ communities.
This made the work more than a new administration interface: it established a foundation for managing access across the existing platform at scale.
Validation
Fast, internal validation through task-based usability testing.
Time constraints and customer sensitivity meant external usability testing wasn’t feasible within the project timeline. Instead, I used task-based usability testing with internal stakeholders to validate the prototypes before implementation.
Testing covered core workflows, including:
Adding users and resending invitations.
Enabling, disabling, and deleting users.
Understanding roles and permissions.
Navigating company-wide and community-specific user views.
Understanding which users could access which communities.
The sessions surfaced opportunities to improve terminology, information visibility, and user confidence. Feedback included requests for clearer user-group labels, more useful information in the user table, and visibility into activity such as last login.
I used these findings to refine the experience and address areas of confusion before handoff.
Before / After
Before
Fragmented pathways for managing users
Developers needed to adjust user roles
Limited ability to scope access
Permission settings weren’t consistently enforced
Difficult to understand access across communities
Unrestricted invitations created access risks
After
Centralized company-level user management
Administrators could manage access themselves
Granular permissions across key product areas
Access controls aligned with user actions
Clearer visibility into company + community access
A more controlled approach to user management
Outcomes
Less operational overhead. A stronger foundation for growth.
The redesigned permissions system reduced routine developer intervention and made user management more scalable.
Beyond the immediate operational improvements, the project established a stronger foundation for managing access as Senior Sign continued to grow.