“Bug 1742: Screwdriver stuck in device”, why UX matters in B2B
Have you ever had a user so frustrated by your system that they smashed something into their device? Perhaps you haven’t seen anything quite as extreme, but I can assure you it does happen. If you make software for business, particularly for use by field employees, you have to invest a great deal of effort crafting and testing the user experience if you want to actually deliver on your value proposition. If you don’t, a combination of improper use and outright sabotage of your product could prevent the potential benefits of your product being realised and get your competitor in the door.
“But they aren’t decision makers”
When we set out to build a product for business customers, it is essential to identify how it will deliver value to the customer organisation. For example a product may increase transaction speed, automatically perform repetitive work or facilitate data collection. In order to design the product, we must map the process flows that customers use and plan software functions to support those use cases. However, too often business product development focuses heavily on process mapping and cramming in functionality while under investing in the research, design and testing of user interactions.
An argument I have heard against investing in user research, screen design and usability testing is that users are not ‘decision makers’ within the customer’s organisation and that the ‘decision makers’ only care about functionality. If you sell your product to the CIO, why does it matter what a technician thinks of the data entry screen? The problem with this approach is that ‘decision makers’ do care a great deal if it is reliable and delivers the value that was promised. Building a reputation for reliability and ability to deliver value is where the user experience matters.
While the company may not actually care if users enjoy using your product, users that don’t like a product are likely to use it incorrectly and they will blame you for every problem under the sun. The laundry list of problems caused by your product will filter up to the ‘decision makers’ and you are likely going to be turfed out without a renewal. By contrast, users are less likely to blame a product they love for problems that occur and are more likely to use it to its fullest potential. In the absence of bad news and with popular support in the organisation, a renewal is an easy choice.
Building products for users, not the CIO
We build products for the global mining industry and have a diverse group of users including engineers, truck drivers, technicians and managers. Our products promise to provide value to customers through improved control and visibility over the work that is being done. However we also recognise our users have important jobs to do and we are building software to help them collaborate with their colleagues to do their work more easily and effectively.
Delivering improved control and visibility over work wouldn’t be possible without users choosing to plan work and collect data using the product. Because we want our product to be useful, we invest time and money researching the needs of each type of user, testing our product with them and making changes to ensure users always choose to use our product. There would simply be no way for us to deliver the value promised to the customer if users felt that our product was too horrible to use and reverted to Excel and pieces of paper.
My advice is simple, think beyond the sale and focus on delivering a valuable, positive experience to everyone within your customer’s organisation. Once you get your user experience and value proposition right, you might even follow in the footsteps of Atlassian and Slack by selling directly to the teams that will love and value your product. Once a team loves your product, they will sell it to the CIO for free.
