Enterprise Apps

The challenges of enterprise design

I often get asked: "What's the difference between designing for enterprise and consumer?"

UX on an enterprise scale is far more complex to design for. There are often intertwined dependencies between legacy systems, integration issues between products and partners, role based workflows, and security concerns that transcend the standard login and privacy issues associated with consumer applications. Most importantly, enterprise systems are forced upon users where consumer apps are not. In either case, the design process remains pretty much the same.

I really enjoy working in the enterprise space because it lets me work with the customers directly in a way that makes it obvious to see the benefits of the improvements I design. Looping them in to do design thinking exercises, having them actively help in the problem solving sessions as a PARTNER is very satisfying to me.

The upside? Customers who are forced to use the system at work are more likely to take more interest in providing relevant and thoughtful feedback. They are empowered in the ability to make their work lives easier. Building relationships with customers help build better products.

Case study: Adaptive Insights
At Adaptive Insights, I was in charge of redesigning the sheet application (among other things) from the ground up. Before I arrived, customers were frustrated by the dated aesthetics, the cumbersome workflows, and overly complicated processes. I was initially the only ux designer at Adaptive and a few years later, I was managing a team of graphic designers, ux designers, and documentation specialists to create something "magical". As the lead, I was supporting roughly 15 scrum teams both local and overseas including a design agency helping us run the user studies.

Over the past 6.5 years, I've been an, IC, a lead, a mentor, and a manager on Adaptive's major initiatives like the re-branding, a new design system, integration, planning, consolidation, modelling, sheets, and, most recently, the creation of our newest react based component library.

What I started with

This is what our product looked like when I started. It was dated, required a lot of clicking, and the workflows were quite convoluted. In addition, asset maintenance was frustrating with over 500 icons spanning at least 4 different styles.

This screen is used to build a report. Unfortunately, there were pretty big discoverability issues around building hierarchies of accounts, inconsistent navigation and hidden functionality.

The application was a conglomeration of legacy systems, products from companies we acquired, and newer stuff in transition. All of the design work prior to me joining was done by the engineers.

Consistency

One of the biggest problems with our application is that it is built on older frameworks and they have evolved over the years. With new technology being brought in over time, consistency problems crept in and were not properly addressed early on.

To mitigate this, a solid design system was the basis of all UI and UX work moving forward.

The images on the right showcase a very common problem -- inconsistencies in messaging. Adaptive has 9 distinct messaging styles and they appear in different places under different circumstances.

Ask me later for a peek at the design system that was created to solve this issue.

Basic navigation

Another common complaint centered around the nav system. Customers told us that it was hard to navigate, difficult to scan, and took up a lot of real estate.

Our main goal during the redesign was to keep everything simple and clean. That meant reworking the IA, re-grouping things, and simplifying the layout by reducing redundancy and clutter.

The original design had 3 levels of navigation. Main tabs, secondary actions, and a bookmark bar.

Top: Before, Bottom: After

If you'd like to see the design system for this, head on over to the specs section.

Test results

Testing was initially done internally with peers from various groups including executive management, sales, customer service, etc. I didn't count this research in the final tally but the user findings mirrored the thoughts and reactions from our customers. The results below were compiled from 1:1 user studies conducted at Adaptive Live.

4 of 5 users gave the navigation a positive score (5, 8, 7, 9, 10) and thought it was clearly better than the existing system
5 of 5 users gave overall changes a positive score (8, 9, 9, 8, 9) and thought the improvements were good and would improve efficiency and make adoption easier.

An Updated UI

After compiling and validating the test results, I dove in and started designing the high value changes identified in the study. After doing some quick mockups on whiteboards, balsamiq, and sketch, we finalized on the design here.

After testing the new UI, we found that there was a marked improvement in usability, a dramatic drop in user error, and a higher level of confidence that what the user built produced output that the user expected.

Some of the enhancements were better drag and drop targets, better layout, unhiding the filter, easier access to report elements, and improved element hierarchy management.

Parallel work

In addition to the overall re-design work, I also lead the accessibility initiative and stylesheet cleanup.

I was able to improve overall usability with additional keyboard shortcuts, accessible colors, higher contrast, and better labeling. This improved our RFP process and was the deciding factor in a number of contentious higher-ed sales.

Validation took approximately 2 weeks of testing across multiple display devices and with stake holders such as the executive team, pre-sales, support, and customers.

Concepts

In addition to re-working existing functionality, we were also tasked with looking at new ways of presenting data to the user.

Our user interview findings revealed that customers had a hard time onboarding. They didn't know exactly what to do or where to start. Unfortunately, every business has their own internal process so we weren't able to create a generic one that applied to all our customers.

With that in mind, I worked with Rob, our founder, and we looked at ways of creating useful personalized dashboards. Here's one of the OOTB concepts we came up with. We even explored gamification!

Teamwork

These improvements impacted every part of the application, requiring a collaborative effort involving multiple designers, documentation writers, and cross-functional teams. I dedicated significant time to building trust across these teams, understanding their constraints, and ensuring timely delivery.

Teamwork was crucial—coordinating efforts across different groups and securing buy-in from executives and customers was essential. To facilitate this, I organized and led design thinking sessions with stakeholders, pitched ideas to executives, and developed a comprehensive roadmap to guide the project.

The entire initiative took just over a year to implement, and the results were highly positive. Our design efforts played a key role in helping us maintain the #1 position in usability for several years running according to the CPM Technology Value Matrix by Nucleus Research.