COMPLEX FEATURE DESIGN: ROW LEVEL SECURITY (RLS)
Company: Tableau
Project: Designing Data Security & Navigating Organizational Ambiguity
Role: Senior UX Designer
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The Result: Establishing Core Security UX and Resilience
Row-Level Security (RLS) was one of the most requested features in the Tableau community. Its core function is to restrict the rows of data a user can see in a published workbook based on their server login. However, achieving this required admins to manage highly complicated, low-level permissions and policies. The strategic goal was to translate this complex technical requirement into an intuitive, scalable UI framework that allowed administrators to control data access granularly without requiring deep technical expertise.
The How: Architecting the UI Framework Amidst Ambiguity
I was brought on early in this long-running project as the product design lead, collaborating with the Principal Designer, engineering, and PM teams. My primary responsibility was to transform the extremely complex RLS features into a functional UI and UX.
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Managing Technical Ambiguity: The project involved significant back-end work (security policies, extracts, Published Connections), resulting in constant ambiguity and shifting requirements. I managed this complexity by designing the basic UI framework and core CRUD actions for RLS, conducting continuous reviews with all stakeholders to anchor the design amidst the constant flux. We successfully implemented 3–4 alpha releases, which allowed the scrum teams to break up the work into manageable units, providing critical momentum.
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Navigating Organizational Challenges: A major systemic challenge was the lack of clear approval structure, resulting in hundreds of stakeholders providing input but no single final decision-maker. I escalated this organizational issue to upper management for resolution, demonstrating my ability to advocate for process clarity necessary to ship high-visibility products.
The Result: Establishing Core Security UX and Resilience
Despite organizational challenges and a subsequent company-wide re-org that reassigned the team, I made significant progress on the RLS feature within a year. I finalized the main UX for RLS, created the interaction paradigm for tables and extracts, and established the foundational design for security policies. This work successfully poised the project for its MVP release. This experience proved my ability to design within extreme technical complexity and ambiguity and my capacity to lead UX efforts on mission-critical data governance projects.
