When web based businesses outgrow the single user paradigm

 

What I'm thinking of here is when someone develops a web based service, and you have a login so you can do your whatever on the website. Then they get bigger and introduce multiple users, but there are still signs that the architecture still has the concept of a single founding user.

PayPal

PayPal is an example of this. It started off as a payment service alongside eBay so people could pay for their auction wins. As such there was just one user - you - for your account. Then PayPal for Business came along and of course you need multiple users for a given business. However it still has a single all-powerful user who can do everything. That's fair enough in some ways, but if that person leaves the company you can't transfer the powers to another user, you have to just rename the main user and change their password.

Campaign Monitor

This is where the screenshot above comes from. "My" templates contains all the templates associated with our account, not just the ones I created. I can only guess that when it started off it was intended as a tool for a single person to send out an email newsletter.

FormAssembly

When we first signed up with this they said to use a non-personal integration-type user as your login. Then they insisted on separate users, citing security reasons (which is fair enough), but with quite a price hike at the same time.

No billing user

This is another sign of small beginnings. If you're the person who set up the account to do the thing, but you don't have the power to approve invoices then some small sites just email the invoices to you. There's no option to have a separate user (or even just an email address) for sending the invoices to. 

Counterexamples: Stripe, Facebook and Adobe

All of these have the concept of a single user that can access different setups (Stripe) or keep their personal and work personas separate (Facebook and Adobe). 

Praise where I can - Google docs sensible toolbar hiding

I've recently come across Marcin Wichary's Unsung blog, and I'm enjoying it a lot. It's about "software craft and quality", and I find pretty much everything he posts really interesting. Some of it is about retrocomputing, which often piques my interest. I plan to blog about some of those things at some point. I thought I'd take inspiration from the blog and post about some good UI work rather than just moaning about ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h highlighting failures^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h areas for improvement. (Of which, there will be several I suspect, once I get started.)

I use Chrome's vertical tab feature, and it's very useful. However, at the width my screen is the full Google docs toolbar can't be seen. Rather than just show as much as it can, and hide the rest behind a "3 dots" menu, it hides all the related icons and displays them all in one go. This means that I don't have to hunt along the toolbar to see if the one I want to use is visible or not - I know that everything to do with paragraph formatting is behind the three dots.