Product
Apr 3, 2023

Welcome to New Opal

Transforming Opal to be the most intuitive, clear, and fast identity management platform

Kudos to
Philip Walmsley
Lead Product Designer
Yolanda Zhou
Software Engineer
Audrey Li
Software Engineer
Author
Philip Walmsley
Lead Product Designer

My story to joining Opal is rooted in my access management challenges at previous companies. When working on a design project with an engineering team, I needed access to a Github repo. This task seemed simple, but I didn’t even know how to start or who to talk to. After a few days of poking around, I discovered a confluence page on filing a Jira ticket. After filling out the ticket, I was ignored for a few days. I was told I had filled it out incorrectly when I inquired about my ticket. After a few iterations (and plenty of lag time in between), it took me two weeks to get access to a single resource. This experience not only felt frustrating but also bewildering. How can something so simple involve so much time, energy, and process? My experience barely scratched the surface of the painful nature of access management.

When I joined Opal, one of my priorities was to implement a new design system. This process involved many conversations with our customers, advisors, and team members. Eventually, it became clear that there three guiding principles:

  1. Opal is intuitive - using Opal should be easy, accessible, and feel like a familiar product.
  2. Opal is clear - navigating Opal and addressing core challenges should be simple
  3. Opal is fast - completing new and routine tasks should be ridiculously fast.

Opal is Intuitive

Opal is a powerful product that addresses some of the most pressing challenges in identity. In the past, legacy solutions had built out complicated user interfaces to address a wide array of use cases. Opal is flipping this perspective – enabling organizations to solve complex problems with a simple user experience.

Creating intuitive experiences starts with combining elements of familiarity and designing a consistent experience across a wide set of use cases. That’s precisely what we did at Opal.

Opal’s new interface feels like a familiar yet modern take on the file system. This gives users the confidence and context to explore their resources and groups. We needed to provide a consistent experience whether users requested engineering infrastructure or business solutions. Our new design unifies the disparity of permissions, groups, access levels, and data models across a wide variety of solutions.

Opal’s new interface feels like a familiar yet modern take on the file system. This gives users the confidence and context to explore their resources and groups. We needed to provide a consistent experience whether users requested engineering infrastructure or business solutions. Our new design unifies the disparity of permissions, groups, access levels, and data models across a wide variety of solutions.

Opal is clear

By centering Opal’s design framework around the file browser, we make it easy to focus on what is important and understand where you came from.

The right column shows you what you should focus on - whether it's an engineer trying to request access to Kubernetes role, a team lead completing a user access review, or a security manager configuring security policies.

The left columns will always provide users the comfort of navigation, so they can understand where they are in the product, see breadcrumbs to traverse complex file structures, and understand the bigger picture.

By centering Opal’s design framework around the file browser, we make it easy to focus on what is important and understand where you came from.

Opal is fast

Unlike other products, such as Netflix, Opal’s success is not measured by length of sessions or frequency of usage. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Our product is actually designed for you to spend as little time as possible. When you use Opal, we want you to feel powerful and capable, completing routine tasks or discovering new insights as quickly as possible.

Unlike other products, such as Netflix, Opal’s success is not measured by length of sessions or frequency of usage. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Our product is actually designed for you to spend as little time as possible. When you use Opal, we want you to feel powerful and capable, completing routine tasks or discovering new insights as quickly as possible.

Conclusion

We are extremely proud of what we have accomplished with our new design framework. We strongly believe in shipping software when it is ready, not when it is done. Anchored by the core pillars of intuition, clarity, and speed, we have re-designed Opal as a category-defining product. However, this will be a continual journey to grow and iterate with our customers. If you are interested in learning more about my design philosophy, please chat with me, or if you want to see Opal at your organization, please get in touch with our sales team. Thanks for reading!

About Opal

Opal is the unified identity platform for modern enterprises. Opal aggregates identity and access data to provide visibility and defense-in-depth infrastructure for mission-critical systems. Enterprises can discover anomalous identity risks with the product and remediate them in minutes. The world's best companies trust Opal to govern and adapt sensitive access.

Want to see it yourself? Contact sales@opal.dev or book a meeting here for a personalized demo.

Philip Walmsley

Interested in Opal?

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