Enterprise UX Design Guide

Enterprise UX has been defined here and there; mostly, this field is focused on software people use at work. We use the term ‘software’ when describing what enterprise UX applies to because the word implies a depth of interaction and pure power that the term ‘web app’ just doesn’t quite carry. Enterprise software can also be referred to as B2B SaaS (software as a service) as well.

If you find yourself suddenly designing these complex software applications, you’ll need to get situated with the type of thing you’re working on and integrate and emphasize some parts of your existing UX workflow. There are unique parts of the UX workflow for enterprise applications, it’s not the same as what you’d expect for a consumer app or web project.

Pencil & Paper is a global product design studio focusing exclusively on designing great experiences in work contexts and has set the standard for UX patterns in complex workflow-heavy experiences like data tables, filters, dashboards and others unique to the specialized software we use at work.

Consumer apps vs enterprise apps

Traditionally, consumer apps have taken up the UX budget because when individual consumers table flip about the UX and leave, this has a real and immediate impact on businesses. Cancelling or unsubscribing from a consumer experience is very simple and can happen in a minute or less in many cases, so UX has been a necessity.

Enterprise applications have been deliberately set up to avoid speedy cancellation. Signing longer-term contracts and having more expensive setup processes: many products rely on the dynamic of being ‘hard to leave’ rather than being hyper-relevant, useful and enjoyable to use. However, there are a lot of products in the enterprise space which are month-to-month commitments, and thus the barrier to exiting them is lower. Effectively this puts them within the same playing field as consumer products, so having good UX becomes really important.

New startups are also forcing established B2B SaaS products to step their UX game up, as their “MVPs” and early versions are much more slick, easy to use and generally less clunky than incumbents. These new companies have less difficulty building and maintaining features due to less tech debt, so established, clunkier products are feeling the competitive heat🔥 (slash burn).

It could be argued that consumer digital experiences are also elevating our overall UX standards, so the perception of the UX quality by customers is causing more dissatisfaction by virtue of what they are comparing their work UX to.

So what do you get when you combine the refinement of consumer experiences with vastly more complex and in-depth interaction requirements and a LOT more data?

Enterprise-grade User Experience: User experience which combines the high standards (including fine aesthetics, transitions, and pleasant to use qualities) with the complexity of enterprise use cases to create robust, scalable, and high-quality interactions.

Unique processes for enterprise UX design

Working on complex products demands an emphasis of certain parts of the UX process and requires specialized expertise. You can use this guide for yourself or if you are vetting an external design team.

Efficient and comprehensive onboarding

Being able to efficiently parse, gather and synthesize complex information is key to thriving in an enterprise software environment. These domains tend to be intricate and involve subject matter experts (SMEs) as well as potential legal and compliance frameworks to get familiar with (very important in biotech and fintech!)  

At P&P we onboard to new enterprise UX design projects so often that we have it dialled in to the max.  Here's a look at some of our onboarding processes:

• Info extraction: Extracting information about the business, technical stack, product vision, subject matter, product demo (if it exists already), user intro and data mapping
• Documentation: We consume any documentation on these topics we can access
• Mapping: We organize and map out the information we found based on specific SMEs for each topic of interest
• Playback: We review and replay all of our findings to the greater team

Every client we work with goes through P&P's Context Mapping Process which only takes 1-2 weeks with the help of modern tools. We also cover: Product demo, User overview, Technical Overview, Business & Product Context, and Data Mapping

Interdisciplinary collaboration

The subject matter, complexity of the software and lots of other variables make it so truly you can’t do it alone. Collaboration needs to be second nature whether that’s between designers, SMEs, BAs, devs, product managers or QAs. People’s collective brains need to be leveraged to make something good come out of the other end. 

The product squad is really tightly knit on good enterprise software teams. We explore the product manager & designer relationship in this article, but key relationships also need to exist between design, product, dev and AI engineers or ML engineers.

It’s also key to identify the right subject matter experts, who can contribute to the shaping of the product direction the most. More is not always better, though in super technical fields, like biotech, you need a few PhDs in the room most of the time.

Artful facilitation of discussions and synthesis of documentation are key skills you need for this process. Great enterprise designers know how to derive relevant context from specialized people, map it out and play it back. If you're curious about collaborating with us, pop over to our services page and explore.

Significant data complexity

Most designers lack the experience of working with real, hardcore data—You can peruse any design showcase platform and see a huge lack of real data representation in favour of simplistic design concepts. While we love a good pretend representation of data, this is a big differentiator between those more comfortable with consumer experiences than enterprise or B2B SaaS contexts. In the wide world of business, it's necessary to translate data into action for robust designs that work. (And it’s no easy feat, our article on dashboard design is just a drop in the bucket). This is where a truly specialized team of enterprise UX designers shine. 

In enterprise UI design, you need to design any data vis around a variety of users with highly different motivators—An IT person would care about different things than an HR who works on retention in an organization, and the data experiences need to reflect this diversity.

🤓 Do you need the pros to step in for a data dashboard design? Explore our Data Dashboard services.

Complex workflows

Understanding and designing for enterprise often means you're working with nuanced scenarios that will influence your approach and strategy. What’s nice about interviewing people about software they use at work is that they often have a flow or set of tasks they do regularly that they can explain to you with ease. Looking “over their shoulder” and mapping that out can be significant in unlocking design recommendations and vision.

Focus on:

• Workflows: The steps users take to get their work done
• Leverage user journeys: These are kind of amazing as a tool to use regularly because their information is so succinct in this format. You can also do them at various scales, from “sending an invoice” to “selling a house”
• Prepare prototypes with specifics in mind: The data that you populate in a clickable prototype might just distract and famboozle users (needless to say, trash your lorem ipsum). If data and content isn’t representative, some people really can’t get past it. Be sure you’ve removed anything that’ll seem weird or jarring, lest you waste a session of someone’s time.

UX copy is specialized

With more technical subject matter, you cannot get away with lorem ipsum or placeholder text like you might in consumer products. UX copy and the precision of that copy is serious business in enterprise UX. As you’ll see in user testing, the words on the screen can distract people to the point that your session isn’t recoverable.

Enterprise UX tips:

• Audit your copy: Whether it’s in-app copy, help and tooltips and user manual documentation, you want to assess out how things are being described to users, pay attention to the verbs for actions and industry-specific words
• Inheriting language: Matching mental models is super interesting in enterprise software, you might inherit vocabulary from another product that feels bizarre but actually works for users. For example, in SAP they refer to people as “objects” so HR products might use this same language (a painful descriptor for a human-centred designer 🫠).

Luckily in this current age, our access to specialized jargon and smart placeholder content is more accessible than ever. We recommend using LLMs to give you high-fidelity mock data whenever possible for realistic prototyping.

Advanced interactions

Users of enterprise products may depend on them every single day as their main tool for work, so strong design makes a great impact on their day-to-day. The right design can catapult efficiency, reduce rage and bring out that person's full work potential, whereas weak UX can have amplified, real-world ramifications, ie: allowing them to make critical errors with no way to retract it. This is especially crucial in areas like fintech and biotech.

In general, enterprise UX often deals with workflows that have multiple steps, actors and timelines at play. There’s a lot of inter-dependence between these factors, and things can get weird fast. Accounting for edge cases and nuanced "unhappy paths" is fundamental, as is communicating the right system status in a timely and responsive manner.

The stakes in these tools aren’t superficial; they don’t just cost the personal energy of a person, decisions in software may be life or death (think the world of medicine and transport). Our responsibility as makers of these products can’t be overstated. - Ceara Crawshaw, CEO of Pencil & Paper

Enterprise UX tips:

• Map unhappy paths: Approach this with gusto and check them over with devs, QAs, all the relevant people use flow mapping and other basic techniques
• Prepare for extremes: Data can take many forms, so make sure you cover those
• Consider batch actions: Integrate keyboard actions and batch actions into your interaction where it makes sense
• Appreciate the stakes: Think about when people would be worried, like sending a money transfer of $100k or giving permissions to their financial data. Make your UI react in accordance with that.
• System Status: Take system status seriously and spend time on hammering these out. There are states your system can get into that you never imagined!

Oddly, in our field of user experience at large, we have a lot of superficial introductory interaction education, and not a lot of complex, in-depth scenario-based education resources. Most of us are winging it, building off consumer product patterns, and testing as we go.

Advanced interactions are the point where most designer-less dev teams get fully blocked when trying to move forward with their product. This is often the point where they seem design help from specialists. Explore our design services if this sounds like you.

Expressing design rationale

If you assume that your features and functionality are more complex than average, this means your brain and the “why” of what you’re doing needs to be even more clear. The “why” can be based on a myriad of variables, technical constraints, laws, user needs, best practices, data, etc etc.

Express yourself clearly in two ways:

• ‍Verbal articulation: Verbally articulating the ins and outs of your ideas, interactions and rationale couldn’t be more important. When you collaborate and actively work with other people your words matter. When things are complex, the crew can get discombobulated easily, wrap that in the context that designers dip in and out from detail to abstraction and you’ve got a perfect storm for useless and confusing conversations (which are SUPER expensive). This is a key differentiator between designers who work on highly complicated things, and designers who do not.‍
• ‍Design rationale documentation: The why of what you do needs to be written somewhere when the time comes (we have an article which explores documenting design rationale, giving you solid principles and ideas for your team).

Design documentation

Document it or it didn’t happen. Interestingly enough, getting good at capturing complexity requires your creative hat to come on…or your sparkly creative shoes, depending on your vibe. (Check our UX Documentation Guide)

Written documentation or mockups aren’t enough in enterprise UX. You need to express the logic of the system, flow, industry, and versions/released in the right way as a matter of second nature. You also need to write words that others can understand and use to implement, train, and build off of. You chose the combined ways to express this logic, often written documents combined with visuals work very well.

Design documentation tips:

• Use flowcharts or visuals to describe abstract things: There’s really efficient ways to communicate things, if you’re talking about logic, flow, or dependencies, leverage a flow chart to do the heavy lifting for you
• Write all the time: Your memory probably sucks and product conversations are hard to follow sometimes as you’re zooming in and out of abstraction all the time – if you build a paper trail into the work it helps PLUS people collaborating with you will know what’s happening
• Collaborative documentation: Write stuff with your interdisciplinary friends and capture where your thinking has gone

Generally speaking, many designers are limited in this area, as most designers work in environments where quick sprint deliverables are prioritized, so quick output is where the skills are most developed. It takes concerted effort and discipline to get really good at this skill. It's worth the effort given that much of design is expressed through writing (prompts, background documentation, PRDs).

Innovation & Modernization

For enterprise UX, there are two main scenarios we find companies in. Either they need to innovate and drive the future of their industry, differentiate so they can grow, or they need to modernize their reliable product people rely on. Sometimes these scenarios are totally separate and other times they are a mix of both.

Redesign Assessment Checklist - Incremental improvements or full-on redesign? Download our checklist.

The difficulty here is that resourcing the design thought on these different scenarios can be tough. Lots of companies approach us with a bad experience, either they have absolutely no design resource or an over-extended single designer, they can't get the design work done. Sometimes it's not easy thinking differently from "how things are done" for the entirety of the product team, so hiring a trusted external partner is key to success.

It's critical that the correct design partner is selected. Companies sometimes make the mistake of hiring a company that specializes in consumer apps and isn't comfortable with enterprise-grade UX and all it entails. This causes the project to fail or for the product team to get the idea that "designers don't get it" when it comes to complexity. This outcome is entirely preventable.

Wrapping up

Whether you’re entering the enterprise software world for the first time, or you’re brushing up and stepping your game up, hopefully this breakdown of enterprise UX inspire you and spark some exciting possibilities for your work life.

It’s a challenging world of UX, and gives us so much connection to our collaborative side, our analytical reasoning side, and our courage to take on challenges we have no clue how to solve at first.

We embed with product teams to deliver sprint goals, provide fractional design leadership and help companies conceive of and deliver the future of their product every day. Our expertise in enterprise UX means we deliver results at lightning speed and are very comfortable with messy data, complex workflows and mysterious personas. Get in touch with us to discuss where you need design help.