What I Learned from Designing Enterprise SaaS
Before joining SmartRecruiters, I didn’t fully understand how designing for enterprise SaaS was that much different than designing for consumers. From my point of view, the key differences revolve around increased functional complexity and scale. For those of you who don’t know what SmartRecruiters does, we help companies find great candidates and allow hiring teams to collaborate. Companies like Bosch, VISA, and Ikea partner with us to attract, select, and hire people.
The design process looks more or less like this:
The beginning of this process is the most crucial because you want to make sure you’re addressing the right problem. In my experience, the first couple steps of the design process are more complex when dealing with enterprise features. There are just more things to consider.
Here are some of my personal findings on good enterprise-centered design:
Thinking of the Whole
It’s difficult to design enterprise software when you do not consider the other moving parts of the system. You will come across problems with poorly integrated workflows, inconsistent UI interactions and missed edge cases. One simple requirement may have 10 dependencies and another 2 that you haven’t discovered yet. When you have a functionally complex product, it’s easy to not fully understand all the nuances. This point isn’t necessarily specific to enterprise-centered design, but it’s a tall order when you are working with a large, robust platform built for various types of users. Which brings me to my next point…
Internal Champions
Simply put, understanding your end user is a must to designing a useful product. There isn’t always a user researcher available to help you conduct interviews and compile a list of recommendations. Most of the time, you’re the one who needs to do the user research groundwork, but spending 45-minutes on a call with users and writing a summary afterwards is time-consuming, not to mention the amount of time it takes to coordinate and schedule the call in the first place. That’s why utilizing your internal resources is a great way to get specific feedback on existing or desired features. Resources that come to mind are individuals in Sales, Customer Success, and Implementation. These colleagues of yours talk to customers and prospects on a daily basis. They know exactly what the end user complains and raves about. They are an invaluable resource because they have a wealth of customer knowledge that has been developed and pruned over their tenure at the company.
Managing Personas
Designing for a few different types of users is manageable, but imagine having to come up with solutions for sixteen. Enterprise software typically has a diverse set of users. Here are a few that I’m designing for — Hiring Managers, Recruiters, Coordinators, Administrators, Interviewers. Each of them have very different workflows, but all of the workflows need to function seamlessly together so they can collaborate and make great hires. Creating a summary of all the different types of personas is a great start. The next step is to build relationships with each type of user. I recommend dedicating time to checking in with each persona type regularly. This will help you empathize and connect with your users. Be sure to utilize internal folks. It’s your job to understand the user. How else are you going to be their advocate?
Consistent UI
Consistency is difficult. The Nielson Norman Group mention consistency as one of their “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design”. Companies hire design resources whose primary job is to help maintain and enforce design consistency across their product suite. You have multiple designers working on different parts of the platform. Even with a design system in place, it’s easy to accidentally create new components and behaviors because you couldn’t find an existing element that best suits the requirements of that particular feature. While I don’t believe in “one design fits all”, it is important to have some sort of checks and balances so that UI elements stay on the right path and are consistent with the rest of the platform. My recommendation here is to dedicate design resources, who know your style guidelines, to hold regular check-ins on your work. Yes, this means more meetings or time spent going back and pushing pixels, but your product will be all that much better for it.
Curious about design at SmartRecruiters? Reach out to us at design@smartrecruiters.com. We’re also hiring!
Other places you can find us are on Twitter @SmartRecruiters, @ShefaliNetke @triciflores @chanishere149.
