Principles of Enterprise UX Design

Rules that help me design enterprise products

Principles are rules of thumb that help me make decisions. Most principles I’ve read are either too specific (meet accessibility requirements) or too general (understand your customer) to qualify. Principles shouldn’t tell me what decision to make or offer basic design process recommendations, they should provide me with guidelines to make quick and accurate decisions.

The following is a running list of my enterprise SaaS design principles. I’ll keep updating it.

My User Is Not My Customer

UX designers love to create delightful experiences for our users, but what we’re paid for is to design products that sell. Users and customers are rarely the same in enterprise design, so my priority is to understand my customers and the outcomes my product needs to provide them. Every pixel I design is a decision and each needs to connect to those outcomes or it doesn’t belong in my design.

Enterprise Designs Order of Operations

Each design project has a nearly infinite number of decisions to make. Some are more important than others, so the order of operations creates a prioritization framework.

1. Valuable
   Successful products create value for both the customer and the business. I need to understand this value before designing my product to deliver it. I like to think of this step as answering the questions “What superpower am I providing my users?” and “Why will my customers pay for that superpower?”
2. Usable
   Superpowers aren’t so super if no one can use them. Products feel intuitive when their design matches their users’ mental model, but with enterprise products, I also need to understand my user's environment. This includes their workday, priorities, and external factors like industry regulations so I can design my product to fit seamlessly into their workflow.
3. Practical
   Every project has constraints. Design requires I understand those constraints so that my solutions solve a problem in Figma and in the real world.
4. Presentable
   Aesthetics come last because people typically don’t pay to see shiny buttons and cool color gradients, but products need to look professional or people won’t take them seriously.
5. Testable
   Any solution is a hypothesis until it’s been validated through testing. Once tested and finalized, decisions need to be documented and communicated to ensure consistency throughout the product.

Zoom Out

When in doubt, zoom out. Designers commonly get lost in the weeds by fine-tuning a solution but if the solution itself is wrong no amount of fine-tuning will do. Enterprise products get complicated fast and when in doubt it helps to zoom out. Maybe this means my solution approach is wrong, or I’m solving the wrong problem, or I’m asking the wrong question.

Generic design

Enterprise design requires designs to scale application-wide, not specific point solutions. So if I’m designing how users edit, I don’t just think about how they edit one thing, but how they edit everything. If more than one edit pattern is required, what rules determine when to use which pattern?

Healthy friction

Fast is slow, accurate is fast. The wrong mistake in the right industry can cause catastrophic damage, so I need to understand those mistakes and add healthy friction when necessary to prevent them. Things like deleting or confirming accuracy for certain critical information apply here.

The 99% Rule

Enterprise users are professionals. My priority is to maximize long-term productivity, not short-term delight. This creates the 99% rule, which states that I should design my product for the 99% of the time people use it, not the first time.

Progressive Disclosure

With multiple user personas, my designs need to be simple for casual users and complex for power users. Rather than present everything up front, I leverage progressive disclosure to enable my power users to access advanced functionality by digging a little deeper while not bogging down the application for everyone else with too much functionality presented upfront.

Don’t Reinvent The Wheel

Don’t fix what ain't broke. Great design is rarely new and instead takes existing patterns and applies them in new ways. The problems I solve should be new but my solutions should aim to follow common patterns. This increases the likelihood that my users will be familiar with them and confirms that they work.

That’s all for now. Feel free to critique anything or send me any feedback here or at hello@dylancooper.design