Designing experiences for Enterprise vs Consumer
Myths, beliefs, distinctions and similarities
As I was visiting Seattle, I learnt about the event hosted by SeaDUXX (Seattle Women of Design & UX), an initiative by Caryn Wille, Interaction Designer @ Google and Sara Hubbard, UX Designer @ Smartsheet. SeaDUXX was founded in 2017 with the idea to encourage, empower and support women & non-binary people by providing them opportunities to network, learn and mentor each other in design & UX fields. For someone, who is beyond motivated to start a career in Seattle, I registered for the event right away.
Yesterday SeaDUXX hosted a panel discussion with design experts to discuss some of the biggest, most obvious differences between designing for an enterprise product vs designing for a consumer facing product.
As someone who’s designed applications for enterprise companies, as well as small business and consumer products, I was attending this event with my own set of beliefs and after the panel discussion I have to say, I experecienced a breakthrough.
My takeaways
Designing for enterprise customers is different than designing for consumers
- The boss
The buyer is different from the consumer — the actual end-user didn’t get to decide on the purchase because it is a major cost to the business. Therefore, while designing for enterprise, focus of solving technical challenge with design values to improve efficacy.
- User Feedback
Unhappy enterprise customers can be vocal and haunting. Therefore for user experience researchers of enterprise design, it is comparatively easier to recruit participants not just because of the smaller user base but also because of the eagerness to be heard and make improvements in their current use case. On contrary, in Consumer design space, just identifying the right sample space and recruiting participants could be someone’s full-time job.
- Flexibility
Sometimes, enterprise contract could be dependent on ‘the feature’ you did not think of initially but it is necessary for enterprise, so as a designer you’ve got to deliver. In scenarios like these, one has to resist the pressure of doing right and might feel boxed (read ‘design jail’). Therefore to enterprise designers it seems that, cosumer UX designers have more freedom to the creativity. But do they really?
While concluding the panel discussion, a question was raised “What’s keeping enterprise designers from making delightful experiences?”.
I also do not have a perfect answer to that question but I do believe that the distinction between designing for consumer and enterprise applications is rapidly narrowing. Today, I observe more investments by enterprise computing companies in making their user experiences less painful. To add onto that, the enterprise design space is also getting competitive therefore the advantage that some existing enterprise software installs have enjoyed, that prevent organizations from switching over, is weakening with time.
Credits: The cartoons have been adapted from sketches by Tom Fish Burne.
