Special Challenges of UX in B2B — Part 3: Getting Everyone on Board in Time
Summary
UX professionals face several special challenges in the business-to-business (B2B) sector. This article is one of three covering one of those challenges of UX in B2B: Timing.
Getting everyone on board in time to prioritize user experience design for a project can be challenging because all involved parties need to stick to a large number of organizational and regulatory requirements to begin with.
This article is a sample chapter from the Book “Level Up! UX in B2B” written by Tom D. Wolf-Bauer you can find on Gumroad & Amazon. Illustration by Franziska Arends.
Getting everyone on board in time
Considering all the people involved in the complicated and highly dynamic process of developing, marketing and delivering a B2B product, it is not unlikely that rather new methodological and cultural topics like UX will be given less consideration than others in the course of a product development and launch.
It is important to recognize that stakeholders on both sides of a business deal — supplier as well as buyers of a B2B product — are interested in reaching agreements on the specification and purchase of the product or service before their budget runs out or is reallocated due to some kind of company-internal reorganization.
Reaching such an agreement is not easy anyway, because that in itself involves a large number of organizational requirements that must be met by all parties involved.
So, compared to B2C, other value aspects can determine the criteria for technology investment decisions in the B2B industry (Ahola et al. 2008; Sundberg, 2015).
Focused benefits can be, for example, the following (Sundberg, 2015):
a) Product related regards product performance, reliability, quality and customization.
b) Delivery related regards on-time delivery, flexibility of delivery.
c) Service related regards product-related services, training programs, after-sales services.
d) Relationship related regards image, trust, mutual goals.
Accordingly, targeted tradeoffs may include, for example, direct costs related to price, indirect costs related to delivery delays, repair and maintenance, and transaction costs related to time, effort, energy, installation, coordination and communication with the supplier (Ravald & Grönroos, 1996; Lapierre, 2000; Cannon & Homburg, 2001; Möller & Törrönen, 2003; Ulaga, 2003; Sundberg, 2015; Almquist et al., 2018).
In this context, some people claim that UX can be regarded as a part of customer value in the entire product lifecycle, while the challenge for the supplier is to identify which benefits and tradeoffs are the most prominent value enablers or disablers (Sundberg, 2015).
In the end, the product must function reliably and relatively efficiently, it must be secure in terms of data security, it must be legally secure, it must be cost-effective, and ideally it must be put into operation before the collaborating IT departments or the next big one reorganization in one of the companies involved throws everything back on the heap.
And such reorganizations are the rule rather than the exception as organizations and companies always need to change, adapt, and evolve as their environment and markets are always changing (e.g. Lazonick, 2009; Beauchamp et al., 2016; Heidari-Robinson & Heywood, 2016; Girod & Karim, 2017; Paterson & Waters, 2021; Gagné, 2021).
So from this perspective, and given all these interdependencies, it seems perfectly reasonable to narrow down one’s circle of stakeholders and project participants as much as possible, which may also mean that some rather new topics such as user experience design may be given a lower priority.
In addition, everyone involved on all sides would have to have a clear idea of the processes currently taking place in their companies in order to be able to reduce the complexity arising in a project in a targeted and coordinated manner — but that is not so easy.
And I think it is rather rare, due to this overflowing complexity of large organizations, that a distinct awareness (let alone exact knowledge) of one’s own processes, and how they work in detail, can emerge. One could just as well say that it is a constant challenge for all those involved to specify the current state of their own organization and to orient themselves to it.
And the ambiguity that this creates can then be part of the reason why it can be extremely difficult not only to organize change and progress, but also to make it measurable and communicate it.
And even if some people had such a precise plan of everything, there’s probably a good chance they wouldn’t share it, for example simply to protect their own team or budget — perfectly understandable from an individual perspective. And after the next restructuring, it may all start over again anyway.
So, as always, time and timing play a decisive role. And accordingly, UX efforts in a company that does not yet operate in a user-centric manner, for example, would always be too slow to play along and intervene in these dynamic processes at the right time to achieve significant changes in the interests of the end-users.
And sometimes things are even more complicated, for example, when a company makes indirect profit from collaborative management of the aforementioned complexity of B2B environments in the context of product trainings.
That is, it may be that a certain prior knowledge or know-how is required to use a certain B2B product, which is then sold as a service in the form of introductory courses or training for the continued use of these products.
And who wants to give up a proven and well-run product training business just because someone claims that it would be much better for the company to simplify the use of the products by investing a lot of money in UX?
So, overall, B2B relationships can be described as long-term and complex which comes with a very interesting set of challenges.
And the aforementioned three challenges are meant to provide the context for my book, which is meant to be a sort of collection of tips on how to address these and other special circumstances in the B2B environment as a UX professional.
But there is more than just these special challenges compared to B2C environments. You see, I think there are also very basic challenges that simply come with the underlying, social science methodology associated with UX design. Maybe I will share those here, too, sometimes.
Until then, thank you very much for reading!
This article is a sample chapter from the Book “Level Up! UX in B2B” written by Tom D. Wolf-Bauer you can find on Gumroad & Amazon. Illustration by Franziska Arends.
Literature References
Ahola, T., Laitinen, E., Kujala, J., & Wikström, K. (2008). Purchasing strategies and value creation in industrial turnkey projects. International
Journal of Project Management, 26(1), 87–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2007.08.008
Almquist, E., Cleghorn, J., Sherer, L. (2018). The B2B Elements of Value. Harvard Business Review, March-April, 2018. URL:
https://hbr.org/2018/03/the-b2b-elements-of-value.
Beauchamp, R., Heidari-Robinson, S., & Heywood, S. (2016). Reorganization without tears. McKinsey Quarterly. URL: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/reorganization-without-tears
Cannon, J. P., & Homburg, C. (2001). Buyer–Supplier Relationships and Customer Firm Costs. Journal of Marketing, 65(1), 29–43. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.65.1.29.1813
Gagné, N. (2021). Weathering the Storms of Corporate Restructuring. In Reworking Japan (pp. 205–241). https://muse.jhu.edu/book/81034
Girod, S. J. G., & Karim, S. (2017). Restructure or Reconfigure? Harvard Business Review, 128–132, URL: https://hbr.org/2017/03/restructure-or-reconfigure
Heidari-Robinson, S., & Heywood, S. (2016). ReOrg: How to Get It Right. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. https://store.hbr.org/product/reorg-how-to-get-it-right/10072
Lapierre, J. (2000). Customer‐perceived value in industrial contexts. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 15(2/3), 122–145. https://doi.org/10.1108/08858620010316831
Lazonick, W. (2009). Corporate Restructuring. In: The Oxford Handbook of Work and Organization. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199299249.003.0029
Möller, K. E. K., & Törrönen, P. (2003). Business suppliers’ value creation potential. Industrial Marketing Management, 32(2), 109–118. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0019-8501(02)00225-0
Paterson, S., & Walters, A. (2021). Selective Corporate Restructuring Strategy. SSRN Electronic Journal. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3924225
Sundberg, H.-R. (2015). The Role of User Experience in a Business-to-Business Context. Doctoral Dissertation, Tambere: Tampere University of Technology. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Role-of-User-Experience-in-a-Context-Sundberg/744834d26b0fe1a361faaae6fdc4e536d09ef45d
Ulaga, W. (2003). Capturing value creation in business relationships: A customer perspective. Industrial Marketing Management, 32(8), 677–693. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2003.06.008
