Impersonation in Blue: It’s Not What You Think!

In The Latest Blue Updates, one of the newest enhancements is the ability for survey administrators to impersonate users. Impersonation allows project administrators and creators to log in as and have access to the user interface of a survey participant or report viewer to provide them with guidance and instruction, or to troubleshoot their environment when they report an issue.

Does this scenario sound familiar?

You’re a Blue Administrator who’s published a project, and you’ve done all your verifications to ensure everything is good to go.

• All the data looks good
• The evaluation tasks appear ready in the Management screen
• Email notices have gone out
• And – if you use a Learning Management System (LMS) – you’ve also checked to make sure the tasks are showing up properly in the LMS.

Everything is working as it should!

Or so you think, until you start to hear from some participants that they don’t have access to some (or all) of their evaluation forms, not even in the LMS. As the Blue Administrator, you log into Blue to check the project’s Management view, search the tasks listed for the ‘problem’ participants, and here you can see all their assigned evaluation tasks. According to this perspective, then, everything is working properly, and they should have access. So, how do you reconcile what you see as an administrator with what the end-user is stating? Do they not know where to look, or are the tasks missing?

So, how do you reconcile what you see as an administrator with what the end-user is stating?

If you work with an LMS, you can get a truly accurate picture of what specific users see by using an impersonation option. Depending on the system, this function might be called Impersonation, Student View, Log in As, etc., which allows you to emulate that user’s access without needing their login credentials. You can then verify whether the tasks are visible or not and take any necessary corrective actions.

Because this functionality is so useful and because all Blue clients don’t use LMS systems, we have now added impersonation behavior to Blue’s administrative interface.

With this new release of Blue, you will be able to use the Impersonation feature to select a user’s account to “log in as,” verify what tasks and/or reports are displayed and finally end the debate over what you think that user should have access to versus what’s actually visible. No user login credentials are required, and the views are displayed within Blue’s administrative interface to allow you to switch between end-user and administrator windows easily.

Because this functionality is so useful and because all Blue clients don’t use LMS systems, we have now added impersonation behavior to Blue’s administrative interface.

What about user privacy?

Given the potential for access to sensitive information, this feature must be activated system-wide before it is available for use, and the System Administrator needs to identify which power users will be granted this privilege.

If you’re a Blue administrator and need more details about how to enable and use this feature, please see the following Help Center article.

If you’d like to learn more about Blue, contact us today.