When I first started using VWO, I encountered many instances that made me wonder: Are enterprise applications (B2B) really different from consumer applications (B2C)? How does the difference affect the designer and the design process?
Here are some of the projects I’ve worked on over the years that I hope will be helpful to designers joining corporate teams or working on them.
What is an enterprise application?
Here’s the wikipedia definition – an enterprise application is computer software designed to meet the needs of an organization, not a single user.
Some enterprise products that you may use or encounter
In today’s enterprise environment, most enterprise applications are complex, extensible, distributed, component-based, and critical. Enterprise applications are all about displaying, manipulating, storing (often complex) large amounts of data, and using that data to support/automate business processes.
With enterprise tools, you build products that help organizations and employees work better.
Note: While there are subtle differences between B2B and Enterprise; In today’s software ecosystem, however, differences are more or less irrelevant, and for the purposes of this article, I’ll treat them as the same.
How is enterprise application design different from B2C design?
Enterprise application design is not entirely different. All the principles of good design apply here, too. However, there are some differences when designing B2B and B2C products.
We can imagine producing A car and building an airplane, and while both are marvels of engineering that get people from POINT A to point B, there are clear differences in usage, manufacturing time, testing and safety specifications, user expectations, purchase and ownership. All of this affects design and process.
Similarly, the difference for B2B applications is the unique challenges it presents.
The challenge:
1. Functional complexity
“If I had 60 minutes to cut down a tree, I would spend 40 sharpening the axe and 20 cutting it down.” – Abraham Lincoln.
B2B is often more complex than B2C applications due to myriad factors such as multiple data states, visualization options, administrative rights, multi-user collaboration, and integration with other software. Every design decision made to satisfy one requirement affects many other requirements, sometimes in unpredictable ways. A seemingly simple feature addition must go through various checks and edge case considerations.
Take the complex functional requirements of JIRA
How to handle:
What is the solution to complexity? Make the complex simple, of course. Do not confuse this with simplicity or minimal user interface. It’s about simplicity with proper planning and process. No matter how tight the product cycle, time must be spent on design thinking before you start designing
And provides you with a sequence for collecting requirements and planning. In fact, that’s part of the design.
It’s a natural tendency to jump straight to Sketch, Figma, or Photoshop when you’re confident in a solution, but most of the time it’s too early. It may take some time to clarify the overall context and meaning of your design. Through the research and planning stages, all possibilities are identified and all edge cases are addressed. Once you’re ready, let your ideas generate an interface.
The right planning and build process will always pay longer and result in a consistent, error-free product experience.
2. Design with an employee’s mind
“People buy products to make themselves better.” – JTBD
The mentality and behavior patterns of enterprise users are completely different from those of ordinary B2C users. Business users often have other agendas besides wanting to be productive, such as career development, learning, and success within the organization. Designing for working professionals requires a good understanding of their work environment, workflow, environment, vision, problems, and their current solutions.
How to handle:
It is important to understand the needs of users, not only the products, but also their jobs and careers. Talking directly to end users, researching their field, and experimenting with their current methodology can go a long way toward developing empathy for your users.
In addition, users are often so used to their existing workflows and routines that they find it difficult to imagine what they really want. They may tell you about features and options, but they can’t show you the path to product innovation.
A guiding principle for corporate teams is to understand customers’ current pain points and prepare products that address them later. Once designers truly understand their users’ long-term goals, they can do more. Instead of focusing on what users say they want, focus on what they actually do, innovate from there, and build lean prototypes based on your ideas and test them with users.
3. Solve high-cost conversions
“The best, perhaps the only, true, direct measure of innovation is change in human behavior.” -Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Slack.
Often, enterprise users may be too comfortable and complacent with existing workflows to see the other products they need. And even if they wanted to switch, it would require the approval of the leader and the approval of many people. Not to mention, migrating existing data can be a pain for companies and their employees. Unlike consumer applications, enterprise applications have much higher switching costs.
How to handle:
The two biggest ways to convince a business to switch to your product are –
-
The product is more functional than the competition.
-
Redefine existing workflows to make them faster, better, more efficient, and more engaging to users.
The second method is the glitter in the design. Productivity, workflow, and ways of doing things are very important to an organization. Take a close look at their current solutions and figure out where they are struggling to consider faster workflows, increased efficiency, and lower costs. Innovation in these areas often leads to solutions that convince companies to take a big leap forward.
Always look for opportunities to update traditional methods into more efficient and relevant ones.
Prioritize new features
“The electric light is not a constant improvement of the candle. “- Oren dead
For enterprise products, building new features almost always takes precedence over enhancing the existing user experience. It is common to have a dedicated design sprint at the beginning of a product, but once the product is launched, functional requirements start pouring in. Paying customers kept asking for new features, and the product team had to create a busy road map. At this point, it becomes particularly challenging for designers to convince stakeholders to invest time and resources in improving user experience and design.
How to handle:
Think and visualize the scenario from the perspective of the stakeholders. They often feel that any sprint, week or month not spent building features or adding features amounts to some potential loss of revenue. In this case, it’s important to get people to understand the effect of improving features, and that effect usually has a bigger impact on revenue than adding more features. You can highlight success stories, preferably by talking directly to top management and getting their support. Design improvements always require careful analysis of pain points and experimentation with new ideas, which of course takes time and innovation.
Once you have the company’s approval, you can sprint for small wins within a time frame, always trying to measure the impact of new ideas, and gradually build trust in your design and make bigger improvements.
5. Maintain user experience consistency
“Every element should be well thought out so that it’s easy to make and easy to fix.” – Leo Fender
According to a survey of more than 3,000 corporate designers, the biggest challenge facing corporate design teams is improving consistency in the user experience. Unlike consumer products, B2B products typically have long product cycles that run asynchronously and are often done collaboratively by distributed teams.
Each designer faces similar challenges to other teams and is likely to introduce product variations, such as changes in details such as components, design patterns and even colors. These problems tend to multiply as the team size or product size increases.
How to handle:
Many companies have made the transition to build design systems for long-term consistency and scalability. A design system is a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled together to build any number of applications. It usually includes:
· Guidelines (design principles, code conventions and editorial guidelines)
· Visual network (color palette, printing scale, ICONS, etc.)
· UI mode (form, button style, page mode)
· Usage and maintenance guidelines
When corporate teams were asked if they had design systems, about 55% said they either had them or were building them. This is a positive sign. It is important to note that the design system is never 100% complete. It is built for the long term, designed to evolve over time.
Designing a system is an important step in ensuring a consistent user experience.
Some general advice on enterprise design
Enterprises are evolving, and enterprise software is no longer clunky and boring. Today, users expect the same performance and experience as consumer applications. They appreciate a nice UI and don’t want to read the documentation before they start. Next generation technologies such as VR, ARTIFICIAL intelligence and voice already exist in our lives and will soon enter the workplace. For enterprise software, these exciting moments and the range of things designers can do are endless.
Hopefully these three guidelines will help you:
- Embrace flexibility and modularity
Design all features with an evolutionary perspective, not just focusing on creating custom components for current needs, but equally focusing on adapting those features to future needs.
- Establish order and process
This usually requires great collaboration, solid customer research, actionable problem statements, and focused design iterations, but that’s hard to achieve every time. The best approach is to establish a repeatable process and improve on it with each cycle.
- Think holistically
Always pay attention to whether your design and feature additions affect the overall product and company vision. Taking a holistic approach to everything you build, add, and update automatically creates a consistent product experience for your users.
Designing for B2B and Enterprise SaaS
My entrepreneurial team product MadPecker, mainly do BUG management, test management, application distribution website :[[www.madpecker.com]], friends in need welcome to try, experience! This article is translated by MadPecker team product manager