Resilient Enterprise Design — EUX 2017

Last month I had the opportunity to talk about enterprise design at the 2017 Enterprise UX Conference in San Francisco.

The consumerization of enterprise software has brought welcome improvements to the experience of many enterprise applications. But has the concept of consumerization been overhyped and oversimplified? While there are many opportunities to bring consumer concepts to enterprise software, it is important to not lose sight of the unique challenges and needs of enterprise software customers and users.

Every enterprise is unique and as a result every implementation is unique. Customization is a critical part of the implementation of enterprise software, but with customization comes a lack of control over the user experience, presenting a significant challenge to enterprise designers and design teams. When we put the user experience in the hands of our users and customers, how can we ensure that they create great experiences?

In the face of these unique challenges, enterprise software design needs to become resilient, bending to the needs of customers and users without breaking the experience.

Resilient application design is comprised of four key concepts:

• Design Principles to drive design decisions
• A platform mindset that focuses on solving specific problems, then generalizing
• The implementation of a Design System to create flexibility, consistency and scale throughout your ecosystem
• Exercising influence in the absence of control — making it easy to do the right thing helps drive users to make better choices and create better experiences