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Enterprise B2B UX Design

 

Anyone who has had the opportunity to design a product that helps other people do their work knows that, in addition to following the foundations of good design processes and UX principles, this field has many particularities and brings specific challenges.

Despite handling billions of dollars throughout the world, lacks specific content and training so much, partly because is backstage focused, where the end customer or the company buyer doesn’t see it, the very person that usually buys the product or service and brings the money.

The world and markets have evolved, and users increasingly demand better life and work experiences. Cloud-based SAAS products are much more common these days, giving small businesses and enterprises access to a list of competitors. Big tech companies can develop their own products internally, or buy externally (and develop customizations), depending on deadlines vs. cost decisions, but always sicking for productivity, and hopefully enjoyable work-life.

Definitions

What is it?

Enterprise B2B User Experience is the design of software that helps people do their work more effectively and enjoyably, increasing business productivity and profitability. It can be built for internal company efficiency or sold externally to other businesses.

👨🏽‍💻 Design of software that helps people do their work more effectively and enjoyably, increasing business productivity and profitability

Terms & Sectors B2B B2B2C SAAS Platform Tooling Intranet
Definition Design for businesses that build products and services for other businesses Two companies providing complementary goods or services to reach the same end consumer Site as a service are software products and services that are delivered as a service over the Internet (cloud-based) Seamless and consistent UX for a set of products provided by an ecosystem of businesses and people It helps businesses to do their work on specific internal processes, including project management, file-sharing, and video calls A private secure network website used to enable workers to communicate, collaborate, and share company documents
Example Alibaba, Microsoft FF: Farfetch.com marketplace, Transport: Uber, Hotels: Booking.com, Workday(employees) Management: Jira, CRM: Salesforce, Comms: Slack FF: Farfetch Platform Solution (FPS) for Tenants, Microsoft Office FF: Fashion Concierge, Salesforce customizations FF: My Farfetch, Portals, wikis, Microsoft Sharepoint.

Why is it important?

Good enterprise B2B UX design helps businesses be more productive, efficient, and successful but also improves the quality of life for workers and customers, and makes the world a better place since we spend one-third of our life at work. The impact of enterprise B2B UX can be felt at several levels:

🌎 Impact workers > companies > society

  • People: workers can easily complete their tasks, having at least a hassle-free day, and hopefully enjoyable. On the other hand, customers can receive better products and services.
  • Companies: be more productive and successful.
  • Society: It can help to improve the quality of work life and make the world a better place

Who are the B2B users?

It is based on profession, team, roles, responsibilities, and tasks. Use cases are always related to the permissions he has.

  • User persona vs. buyer persona: the designer can also help increase the marketability of the product, highlighting features and benefits for the business to influence the buyer of the product, which is usually not the same person that will actually use it (the employee)
  • Worker vs. end customer: for marketplaces B2B2C, designers need to build products with features for workers to support what they need to offer for the end customer, i.g. Customers want to have a very customized, segmented offer with discounts for them, so workers need a Promotion tool with segmentation and build promotion features.
  • Internal user: we can think about internal as an intranet scenario, but also if your company is proprietary of their own tools, so as pros your users are right on the other desk, and easy to find, but as cons you need to be very empathetic when handling with agendas, internal secrets, teams/company challenges.
  • Multiple users: Designing for multiple user types, roles, business units, and professions. JTBD and personas can help in different moments to discover and structure all requirements and use cases.

Challenges

  • Complexity
    • Complex flows and multi-tasks: In order to accomplish professional goals at work, workers need to navigate through complex flows, perform multiple tasks, and use many different features.
    • Complex ecosystem: An ecosystem of tools that needs to work together consistently (internal and external), and its constraints on having multiple distributed teams building each part of the total.
  • Training & Documentation: The complexity usually brings the need for extra information, documentation of how to use the software, manuals, help centers, and even special training, and keeping track of updates and time to do this is a common challenge.
  • Understand the business: UX designers need to understand the business that they are designing for in order to create a user experience that meets the needs of the business, and it’s more prominent in B2B.
    • Business size & structure org chart: for enterprise-level companies the work involves knowing who is the right person to talk to, knowing the org and the teams, so you can know your users and workflows, and dealing with some politics to get things done.
    • Field particularities: each company you are designing for has particularities, and It’s important to get used to them, and understand it will get you empathy, some shortcuts, better communication with specific “language” and eventually better results.
    • UX maturity level: there are 6 levels of UX maturity (check here), In enterprise B2B UX design, the maturity level can range from absent to user-centric. In the early stages, efforts focus on increasing visibility, avoiding non-UX tasks, educating about UX design, and integrating design into company processes. In the mature stages, specialized teams are formed (UX content, writing, research, product design, service design), and no features or products are developed without UX involvement.
  • Bureaucracy of purchase: B2B products usually have long sales cycles, because company buyers usually don’t use (and don’t know) what they are buying, they have to follow complex decision-making processes with higher positions approvals.
  • Legacy software: enterprise complex organization leads to constantly having to decide if buy vs build, or even buy new vs adjust workflow. It is really common for companies to have old legacy apps because It is not easy to move data and change workers workflow in big teams, so you will have to keep trying to improve some features there while trying to convince them to actually have a new one with appropriate design and develop.
  • Security: In an enterprise environment you have challenges to protect sensitive data, manage access permissions, prevent data breaches and cyber-attacks, and ensure compliance with regulations.
  • Desktop focus: usually the user is working on a desktop device, but we can have mobile apps for traveling use cases or urgent consults. Legacy software doesn’t even have mobile.
  • Backstage job: designers work with apps that usually are not in the hands of the end customer, or are seen as a tool to accomplish the real goal, so the designer work is commonly underrated in the “shadows” (so if you want to be in the spotlight, maybe is not for you), even worse, in small companies with low ux maturity they may not receive any recognition.
  • Portfolio vs NDA: A non-disclosure agreement exists so companies can secure their innovations and product secrets from competitors. See more here

Solutions (HOW)

Here are some ideas for solving the most commonly mentioned challenges.

  • Research in B2B: Here are some particularities when researching users at work, for external SAAS, or internal tooling/intranets.
    • No users to talk to: Sometimes depending on the company phase (like a new startup), or the specific initiative moment, you cannot recruit participants, so you can rely on secondary research, desk research, competitor analysis, audits with heuristics, and UX laws.
    • Recruit participants: if you work with internal users take care of the relationships to have a continuous research approach and be always open to adapting to your participant’s willingness and schedule. If they are external like SAAS software, you can use recruitment companies or get some help with your commercial/customer support team for it.
    • Talk to users: Moderated interviews and user testing are essential to this work in my opinion. We can understand the intrinsic issues with usually complex given tasks, that have to work with all other ongoing features, but also with the relationships between this with the whole workflow and other stakeholders. So, explore more the “whys” with follow-up questions.
    • Usability testing: Be easy to use It is one of the most important things for a B2B product, so validate with users if they can understand, learn, and use your new feature.
    • Observe users: It is an excellent opportunity to actually see how the user works in locus. Observe the details and the unspoken issues with context inquiry and shadowing.
    • Asynchronous: It is not easy to stop a few workers (or contact them if SAAS) for every initiative, so we can use surveys, NPS, customer service talks, and unmoderated testing
  • Mapping and service design: Map complex flows, use service design as your ally, build user journeys, task flows, map requirements (JTBD is a good method), and use cases. Look at your service/flow as a smaller service/part as a whole, and find the connections, gaps between them, pain points, and needs that come from “outside”.
  • Complexity comfort levels: what is complex for you is not always for your users, so keep researching and mapping to know their priorities to organize information for them, and get used to the complexity of their work and the number of elements and features they need at once, but don’t forget about foundations (such as visual weight, IA, Hick’s law, etc), just adapt for your B2B user.
  • Help users: onboarding the main flow and features, build a help center so you don’t have to repeat explanations, use images and record videos (you can use Figma prototypes when features are not yet deployed)
  • Vision: design a vision with users, product, and engineering for the future, that helps keep a visual document of the goal, and every feature needs to be created with the vision in mind. This also helps when transitioning from legacy applications.
  • UI components & roles: we often use these following components, but in advanced ways to cover all use cases. Remember to use smaller white spaces and table row highs than B2C products (we need to squeeze in many things):
    • Data visualization: It is a visual representation of complex data to facilitate understanding to monitor and make decisions. Use Dataviz principles, such as selecting the right chart type (bars, lines, plots, etc.), color intentions (highlight, categorize, scale), reducing data-ink, and information architecture (prioritize info, right labels).
    • Dashboard: a group of data visualization, including tables, forms, and charts. The B2B software is basically a set of connected dashboards to manage different parts of the company.
    • Tables: monitor and manage an items list of your software, such as a list of customers, products, and promotions. Common elements: filter by, sort by, column vs. rows design, expandables, customize columns, pagination vs. load more.
    • Forms: a group of inputs to gather information about a person or a system item, such as registration, buying, or adding a new item. Really important to get it right, It can ruin the whole experience (see the book Web Forms). Show mandatory vs. fields, group by subject, use the related input size, and choose the right input (e.g. checkboxes can be better for the selection of small lists, and dropdowns for long ones).
    • Main actions: Basic use cases/flows to think about are: Add, edit, archive, delete – one or in bulk, and remember all of this for the different roles, e.g. a super admin will create/approve permissions, a manager can edit everything, and an assistant has read-only access to sensitive information.
  • Communication and collaboration: there are many stakeholders in B2B enterprise design. As a designer you should gather all information and knowledge of the business, users, and engineering into the same place, gathering everyone on the same page, using a collaborative approach and techniques, such as design together activities, presenting (or recording) to give visibility of your work, use the prototype and the design as a bridge to add reach a final solution
  • Future: the rise of emerging technologies can bring new ways of working, many opportunities for increasing productivity, and some specific challenges as well.
    • Visual design UI: Users are now more used to good UI / UX than a couple of years ago, they interact with many different apps all the time and I can see they expect more and more of the same or similar level of visual / interaction/experience from commercial customer B2C apps.
    • AI: a huge topic, but artificial intelligence refers to the simulation of human intelligence processes, including learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making, by machines or computer systems. It is a tool that can help automate repetitive processes of any enterprise software, reducing development time, and operational tasks considerably.
    • AR/MR: Augmented reality and mixed reality is a digital layer over the real world using headsets such as Meta Quest 3 or Apple Vision Pro. It allows users to have immersive and more meaningful online meetings and work relationships, users are not limited to glass screens, so they can have as many “monitors” as they want, and enables different kinds of interactions (drag-flying things and spatial UIs).
  • Conclusion: Enterprise B2B UX is a complex and challenging field, but it also offers many opportunities for UX designers. By understanding the unique challenges and opportunities of this space, designers can create products that meet the needs of enterprise users and help businesses achieve their goals.

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