How to create an enterprise solution with a consumer mindset?

In today’s digital era, people have become accustomed to seamless and intuitive user experiences when interacting with various digital platforms on a daily basis. As a result, employees now expect enterprise solutions to be just as intuitive and user-friendly as the consumer apps they use regularly. In fact, today’s users are the decision makers and advocates for products in their companies, influencing buyers such as CISOs, and Execs.

Overall, the expectations for enterprise solutions have evolved, and companies that fail to prioritise good UX may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage, facing user dissatisfaction, decreased productivity, and adoption challenges. A world-class design not only differentiates the product apart from its competitors but also minimizes user confusion and frustration, resulting in fewer support tickets, reduced demand on customer service teams and thus, ultimately reducing the total cost of ownership.
Now, let me share a few ingredients that will help you bake one of the best enterprise solutions.

1. First time user experience (FTUX)

A common misconception that I have seen in enterprise design is that organisations must rely heavily on sales engineers to get involved and assist customers with onboarding. However, this practice hampers the opportunity of designing self explanatory and intuitive products. Similar to how no one taught us how to book a cab using Uber, how to message someone on Facebook, or how to find a place on AirBnb, our goal should be to design products that are so easy to use that they require little to no documentation.

• Guided workflows — To achieve this, design a clear and intuitive onboarding process that guides users through the initial setup and familiarizes them with the solution. Utilize visual cues, tooltips, and on-screen prompts to direct users, ensuring they feel confident and supported throughout the process.
  Below is an example from our FTUX/Guided workflow modal:

• Bridge Step / What’s Next? — Enterprise solutions are often complex and require a lot of tasks to be performed in order to achieve one goal. Often, these tasks are inter-connected but distributed at different pages within the system because it is impractical to club all the tasks within one big wizard. This is where the bridge step comes into the picture.
  The bridge step helps maintain contextual continuity by providing a clear and logical transition between different stages or tasks. It ensures that users understand how their current action or task relates to the overall flow of the experience. The bridge step can offer clear instructions, visual cues, or explicit calls-to-action to guide users through the transition. This proactive guidance helps users feel more confident and empowered as they navigate the complexities of the system.

2. Basic + Advance (80–20 Rule)

In the world of enterprise solutions, each customer has unique and diverse use cases, making it tricky to build a one-size-fits-all solution that would work both for small and large scale businesses. When designing enterprise solutions, it is important to prioritize addressing the 80 percent use case, which represents the most common and critical tasks that the majority of users perform. Focusing on this 80% would allow us to keep the UI simple and intuitive.

However, that doesn’t mean that we will miss out on the remaining 20 percent of use cases. A simple trick would be to use the “Advance and Basic Options” in the UI. By default, the entire UI would be focused on solving for 80 percent of the use cases, maintaining a streamlined and straightforward flow. But then, we would provide an option to switch from basic mode to advanced mode that will empower power users to perform their more specialized and critical tasks.

3. Pre-Configurations (Recommendations/Default Values)

Good user experience design is about providing users with seamless, enjoyable interactions with products. By anticipating user needs, designers can create a more personalized and user-centric experience. This section has two parts to it:

• Remember my choices — Remembering user choices allows for a more personalized experience. By retaining and recalling user preferences, such as language settings, preferred layout, filters applied, viewable columns for a table, or sorting applied on the tables, the UX design can tailor the interface to match individual user needs and preferences. This personalization fosters a sense of ownership and makes the user feel more connected to the product. This approach also reduces the cognitive load on the users, leading to a smoother and more efficient experience

• Default values / Pre-selections — Pre-selections refer to pre-selecting certain options or choices for users before they interact with UI or complete a task. These pre-filled values act as guiding points for the users, encouraging positive outcomes. When options are pre-selected or pre-filled, users are more likely to accept or proceed with those choices reducing decision paralysis and minimizing the task abandonment. This leads to minimal drop offs and thus improved conversion rates for businesses.
  It’s essential to leverage usage data and patterns to inform the default values and pre-selections that we are providing to the users continually. However, it’s equally important to balance pre-selections with user control and flexibility. Users should have the ability to review and modify pre-selected options as desired, ensuring that their preferences are respected.

4. Excellent Design System

Last but not least, you need to have a world-class design system that not only helps you to build consistent, scalable products but it is a vital ingredient to build emotional connection with your users. In a saturated market, a well-crafted design system can help a brand stand out from the competition. By incorporating unique and meaningful illustrations, micro-interactions, animations, and transitions, the design system can evoke emotions such as joy, surprise, or excitement. These emotional connections are key for a long term engagement.

Life is indeed too short to settle for boring products

In today’s fast-paced and competitive market, standing out from the crowd requires more than just a good design — it demands a world-class design product. Here at Rubrik, we utilize the techniques mentioned above to design world-class data security products. If you have any insights or experiences with additional ingredients that have contributed to your success, we’d love to hear about them.

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