Design Thinking for Enterprise SaaS

In the age of speed, instant gratification, automation, productivity and delightful experiences etc, you would’ve bumped into a term that is aired more frequently than ever before: Design Thinking. What was mostly spoken about and leveraged in the circles of user experience and product management, the adoption is finally function agnostic — the utopian dream of the ones who conceptualized it. Simply put, its a mindset, a framework, an approach towards solving problems via human-centric innovative solutions that are iterative and non-linear in nature.

Easier said than putting it to force, it ain’t a silver bullet, especially in the world of tech and internet/cloud based enterprise products that range from helping airline companies monitor billions of flight bookings intended to go right to managing national databases that hold sensitive and personal information of billions of citizens. The enterprise user persona has a lot of differences as compared to a non-enterprise user persona, and hence the design thinking towards enterprise products has its unique guide-rails. What are they? read on!

Prioritizing and timing user-experience (Delight beyond the UI)

Unlike the B2C apps where you’d want to wow the users with its first look, enterprise apps need to be prioritized for the functionality and the associated robustness. I was once working on a software that helped content creators of world’s top fashion brands, used to make single and multi-pages visual catalogs. Their existing solution had issues with crashes and instability that led to a lot of rework, preventing them from pushing the visual catalogs to agencies and events on time thus losing the competitive edge. We created a dozen out of the box templates focused on fashion domain and tested it for highest possible resolution images and ensured a fail-free processing in the first attempt no-matter-what. This was a combination of designing the front end and the back end as such. The UX was rudimentary but the users trust was built in no time with their visual catalogs going on time 100% of the cases. We then followed it up with 3 UX releases month on month that not just added to the delight but also reduced the stress of the users by 2.5x with the use of typography, color palette and transitions

Driven by self-serviceability

There was an era when companies had elaborate training and onboarding plans for their users to get onto enterprise software. That has changed by leaps and bounds. You have to be cognizant of the fact that enterprise users are also B2C users subjected to tons of apps on and off work for thier needs. Be it the zippy performance or delightful user-experience, one thing they love the most is learning to use the apps by themselves. I was once involved in building an analytics platform for a lifesciences company and had to nail the landing page for the execs around the world to take daily decisions. User interviews gave me they key data each of them wanted to look at, but in that journey I learned couple of users mentioned Android’s feature that lets one customise the app widgets on their homescreen and they had come to expect sometime similar on all the other softwares they used! So we provided an option to toggle between the standard widgets and a configuration that each user would have per their need. The combo of configurability and self-serviceability ensured highest NPS we had received in a long time!

Creating the mezzanines

Most B2C apps have frequent updates and most users love it when done right. There is also an expectation to keep improving with updates. One of the reasons could also be at times there are experimental and half-baked features that are tried in A-B tests. Enterprise apps can’t afford too many frequent changes unless they are not impacting the user-experience. Given the fact that it does thru UATs and other audits, things are rather tighter. That is not to say you cannot experiment. I term an approach as creating mezzanines (a mid-floor between two floors). Here are some:

1. A-B test with the power users only to begin with as many decisions are top-down. They love it, trust it, they advocate it. These needn’t be only for B2C apps, move beyond representative users
2. Break a massive change into logical chunks in the flow (across releases) — too many changes in the flow might derail the users
3. Fire up a playground tenant that goes live on Friday and the users expect something refreshing they can provide inputs about. This will lead to data driven decisions as against other methods that aren’t fail safe
4. Never hesitate to gamify! Create leaderboards for playground tenant and incentivse. Creating an engagement will activate lead to genuince feedback and forgiveness towards issues

I had tried each of the above for a product of mine, and majority of the users reported to use our platform first everyday and there was 1.8x rise in productivity, their bosses reported!

Cognizant about the heirarchy of users

Unlike the B2C realm where the user experience considers various cohorts of users but sticks to a uniform user-experience for them all, enterprise software works different — it has a heirarchy driven by various roles and responsibilities with versatile and varied expectations. Hence your user-experience strategy too, must have layers likewise, but the goal is to nail the optimal and minimal amount of changes you have to make. A membership platform that I once worked on, had a considerable set of users from mid-east while the bosses were centralized in Europe, and the latter had needs to various integrations towards 3rd party platforms and the former didn’t. Right from the color, language, orientations, access, security and bringing in non-jerky movements between integrations learning about the 3rd party systems that we didn’t own, was critical for the success of the platform. It took couple of iterations to hit the sweet spot of optimal level of changes and patience for constant observance was the key

Summing up

As you’d have noticed now, the above covers all the popular phases of design thinking, and if done right for enterprise apps, it can yeild stellar results and eventually lead towards growing the top line metrics. AI, how could we forget it! GenAI should be sprinkled into the design thinking process to analyse, extrapolate, explode the number of options we can generate, draw insights hidden from our eyes, to name a few. Bottom line, moderation is the king. Experiment and find the sweet spots, and do it with regular cadance as that sweet spot is a moving target! In addition to delighting the users with great and immersive user experience, enterpirse apps must leverage design thinking towards making the users fly on wings of eagles — that is the feeling of empowerment, we have the potential to provide. May the force of design thinking be with you!