Switch to a consumer grade product experience

How we crafted learnability, efficiency and ease of use for our enterprise users.

Applications designed to meet the complex needs of a large enterprise are often loaded with features and functionality to meet the diverse needs of different clients. But the end-users of this system do not necessarily have to deal with this complexity. Software products aimed at enterprise users could still be designed like consumer products which are easy and intuitive to use.

One of the challenges for the redesign of Engage+ was to make it very easy for marketers at enterprise brands to create their campaigns and messages.

A few devices that we have employed in our application to make it quick to learn and easy to use are listed below.

Making it intuitive & easy to use

1. Use of ‘inductive text’ to explain the functionality in context

Short text explanations are provided under each text label to enable quick learning of the functionality of an interface element.

Inductive text below each label explains the functionality for user to quickly understand the business scenario and usage.

2. Use of cards instead of drop downs to surface choices upfront

Drop-downs tend to hide the choices available to a user. They are meant for data fields where the number of choices can run into hundreds like say ‘Country names’. Where the choices are less than ten, it would be worthwhile to show them upfront for user to quickly pick one in a single click.

Converting dropdown items (left) to cards (right) allows for easy perusal and quick decision making.

Cards allow for one click access to choices while the short text explanations aid informed decision making.

3. Use of illustrations to illuminate the context

Illustration can create a mood and evoke the right emotions. They are required to break the monotony of workflow applications. They also aid quick identification and recall of areas within an application.

Adding visuals helps quick identification of the context and also avoids the monotony of text heavy screens

4. Create infographics to explain complex concepts

Often a visual explanation can aid the understanding of a complex concept. The combined use of visual explanatory graphics along with text explanation of how things work can aid cognition.

Infographics along with text aid understanding of complex concepts.

5. Use side panes to retain context

Retaining the page where an action was invoked while surfacing the work items in a side pane can help in maintaining the context of the user and reduce disorientation.

Side panes help retain the context where the action was invoked.

6. Build custom widgets for increased efficiency

Sometime an existing interface pattern may not be efficient to the context of use. Create a more efficient component when it is more frequently repeated across the application.

A dropdown requires scrolling and multiple clicks to select time (left). A time selection slider (right) enables user to set time in just 2 clicks.

A two month calendar view (right) is more efficient when selecting a date range or period.

As enterprise users use consumer mobile applications on their phones for personal use, they expect enterprise products at work to provide a consumer grade user experiences. Product, technology and design teams need to put in that extra effort to align with these shifting needs and aspirations.

Google is working hard to bring the consumer grade product experiences to its Google suite of products.

“We’re taking those consumer-grade product experiences that have been adopted by billions of people and bringing them into enterprise.”

- Amy Lokey, VP of user experience,
Google Cloud enterprise group

The Feedback

After 3 months of rolling out the product, we have received a Net experience score of 8 from internal users. The product is being rolled out to all our clients and we are confident of an equally good rating from all of our users.

The net satisfaction score as captured from internal users after 3 months of usage.