Better Lives Through Enterprise Design
Deb Kawamoto
My goal as a designer has always been to make people’s lives better.
In the positions I held before becoming a designer at Yammer, I made shopping for a car fun or saving for a house simpler. When I was looking for my next challenge, it was easy to find consumer products with pleasing design, but much harder to find good design and usability in business products. And I saw that as an opportunity. So three years ago, I decided to join a company where my job would be making communicating between coworkers better.
Many designers wouldn’t consider that enterprise software could be an exciting field to work in, but I’ve found that I actually prefer this to consumer design. Here’s a few reasons why this work can be so rewarding…
Your design will be used, all day, every day.
If making an impact and leaving an impression are important to your sense of job satisfaction, try building something that users have to interact with eight hours a day, five days a week, and still enjoy using. At Yammer, we have to build a product that people want to use, because people can use our product for free. It matters to us that people are getting value from what we design, and we validate that by A/B testing newly released features. As a product designer, in previous jobs it was always hard to know if what I was doing really mattered to the end user. I knew I was meeting the needs of the internal stakeholder, but how did I know if it was really making an impact on the users? At Yammer, I always know whether the work I’m producing is providing value or not.
You’re enabling a revolution.
Historically in the realm of business software there’s been a priority on delivering required features over providing a good experience to the user. Interfaces were cluttered with all the bells and whistles that IT saw as required features. This resulted in tools for employees that were overly complicated and confusing to use—whether they liked it or not
In this new era of enterprise tools, there is now an aspect of choice. The customer isn’t IT anymore: it’s the regular employee. The world’s workforce now has a multitude of options for what they can use, they’re used to choice, and they’re more demanding of a quality experience.
At Yammer, we focus on the people who use our product, and measure the value of that product based on usage, not what IT demands. This focus on the user has resulted in companies completely moving off email because they’re such fans of Yammer’s experience, and employees creating their own flash mobs to promote awareness of Yammer. And the strength lies in the power of employees to choose, adopt, and evangelize something they like.
You‘re really making people’s lives a little better.
We spend a third of our lives at work. And according to a recent Gallup poll, over two-thirds of employed Americans either hate their jobs or are so completely disengaged that even incentives and extras can’t extricate them from the working man’s blues. But why are so many people so unsatisfied with their jobs? It might be because they lack a connection to the larger goal of their workplace, they feel like they don’t have a voice, or they just don’t have the tools and information they need to do their job correctly. Yammer and other products like it can provide a solution to all of that, empowering people to connect more with their work by giving them access to information they never had access to before. My day-to-day work helps give people access to information and coworkers, context and conversations, and allows them to make better decisions and, hopefully, reengage.
So designing for an enterprise product is more rewarding than you might expect. As a designer, I want to make an impact, solve big problems, and make people’s lives better. Yammer—as a company and a product—allows me to do all that, and to help empower the rest of the working world as well.
Deb Kawamoto is Director of Product Design at Yammer. In addition to that, she operates a popcorn machine near her desk for the benefit of her colleagues.
