Probably, you're talking about
role-based access control[
^]. Please, follow the link.
Design
Within an organization, roles are created for various job functions. The permissions to perform certain operations are assigned to specific roles. Members of staff (or other system users) are assigned particular roles, and through those role assignments acquire the computer permissions to perform particular computer-system functions. Since users are not assigned permissions directly, but only acquire them through their role (or roles), management of individual user rights becomes a matter of simply assigning appropriate roles to the user's account; this simplifies common operations, such as adding a user, or changing a user's department.
As Carlo Pallini had mentioned the best way to create multi-level-users application is to create table and there define privileges for each user. Depending on defined role, user can access to specific UI's (user interface) controls, methods, etc.
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