UX Design
Enterprise UX Design: Opportunities and challenges of scale
You’re reading Part 3 of the 11-part series on designing UX for enterprise software products. While each piece is edited to stand alone, the series as a whole provides a comprehensive perspective. You can see the complete list of articles at the end of this piece. To start from the beginning, the main article is here.
My love-hate relationship with scale in enterprise product design has always been double-edged. I’ve worked on SharePoint, a product boasting over 200 million users, where even slight UX changes had massive implications. I designed UX for OneDrive, a central part of Microsoft 365, that hosts billions of files. Additionally, having worked on Microsoft Teams, with its 300 million users, I’ve seen the scale and impact of large user bases firsthand.
At Adobe, I was designing a product targeting a multi-billion-dollar total addressable market in a sector that’s been around for two decades. While at Red Hat, our team tackled creating a visual code browser for tens of millions of lines of code. (Check out the footnote)
While this sheer scale was always exciting, it also came with its fair share of challenges that sometimes proved frustrating.
The nature of scale
I love scale because it magnifies the impact of one’s efforts. It is humbling and empowering to know that your design can make a difference in the daily lives of millions of users.
Large-scale products bring complex challenges that excite many designers. A vast user base streamlines design research and makes concept validation and user testing more effective. The large amount of telemetry data generated by such products helps in quicker understanding of usage patterns. Products with such broad user base have a significant community support promoting easier adoption through several early adopters.
When addressing scale, it’s crucial to recognize its inherent challenges too. While the complexities of large software can be exciting, they might sometimes be too intricate to attain the desired user experience within the set timeframe.
Large products often have extended development and release cycles, meaning today’s design might only be implemented many months or even a year later. By then, evolving user and design trends could render the design outdated. As a result, teams must continually anticipate trends to remain relevant and timely.
Usual Outliers
Enterprises have lots of data, and designing UX for them can get tricky. Designing a screen for a limited data set may be straightforward, but addressing tens of millions of data points introduces specific challenges. For instance, developing a search function for a list of ten million items requires innovative search filters, understanding of search behaviour, good perceived performance, and creating new UI paradigms. This means not just making a good UI design but also employing smarter engineering techniques for the best user experience.
Another issue introduced by scale is handling unconventional workflows. In software with a vast user base, even a tiny percentage translates to a significant absolute number. For instance, 0.1% of Google Workspace’s 3 billion users equates to 3 million users. In the enterprise context, these mere outliers start being substantial. Building features and fixing issues for, what might seem like a negligible percentage of users, can extend design cycles by a considerable amount.
When we focus on these outliers, it’s not just about paying attention to a smaller group; it’s about embracing inclusivity and attention to detail in our designs. By tactfully addressing these unique cases, we inherently streamline and improve the overall user experience. It’s like the old saying goes: when you take care of the extremes, the middle takes care of itself.
Beyond the technical challenges, stakeholder management emerges as a significant responsibility. Large products necessitate collaboration with extensive, inter-dependent teams and stakeholders. For many designers in enterprises, the actual design work might constitute only a part of the workload. Most efforts are channelled into coordinating with partners, engineering teams, product management, and leadership. Considering that the typical ratio between design and engineering stands at approximately 1:10, ancillary tasks and non-design work become particularly pronounced in larger teams.
The need for a robust process
Addressing scale effectively requires robust design processes and documentation. Enterprise product cycles often extend over years. While a startup might accomplish a task in a month, a larger entity might need four due to the product’s scale. Without meticulous documentation of design decisions, processes, and feedback, keeping track of ‘design’ becomes impossible. A solid process not only ensures transparency but also strengthens trust with stakeholders.
Furthermore, a well-designed design system is essential. Today, many organizations that build products, irrespective of their size, are developing their UX design systems. Thanks to products like Figma, this process has become easier and democratized. A comprehensive design system, consistent with brand guidelines, can significantly enhance product experience. It’s essential to remember that a design system is a dynamic entity. If a product’s development cycles last 10 years, its corresponding design system should evolve alongside it.
Designing enterprise products for scale calls for a layered UX approach, enabling phased releases of the ideal experience. This method must tightly align design strategy with software development and product release cycles, ensuring efficiency and coherence throughout. As the products iterate and evolve, it should also be ensured that removal or degradation of a feature over time doesn’t disrupt the overall product experience.
Lastly, as designers, we must bring our adaptability and versatility to our design. Even after weeks of refining a design, unforeseen challenges can arise. There might be moments where the designer may have to prioritize function over form. Predicting every potential hurdle is tough, but that’s part of the process. Being strategic and being open to design refinements by embracing techniques like graceful degradation, or even revisiting the drawing board if necessary, will keep our designs dynamic and relevant.
Footnote: I’m not saying that my designs were directly experienced by all the gazillion users I mentioned in the introduction, but being part of such large-scale products certainly presented the opportunity and potential for my features to reach and impact a major chunk of that audience.
PS: And, apologies for no visuals in this piece. I will blame it on ‘the challenges of scale’ of writing a series of articles and the resulting creative block. ️🤷♂️ 😄
Series: The Nuances of Enterprise UX Design
This article is Part 3 of my 11-part series on designing UX for enterprise software products. While each piece is edited to stand alone, the series as a whole provides a comprehensive perspective.
The complete list of articles (with detailed insights) and their release dates are below.
All articles:
- Part 1: Main article: The Nuances of Enterprise UX Design
- Part 2: Dichotomy of end-users and customers
- Part 3: Opportunities and challenges of scale (📍You are here!)
- Part 4: The role of domain knowledge
- Part 5: Understanding user behaviour and adoption
- Part 6: Enterprise users are human too
- Part 7: Less is more; not necessarily in Enterprise UX.
- Part 8: Dogfooding for better UX and product quality
- Part 9: Enterprise UX and the value of integration
- Part 10: Designing Enterprise UX for All
- Part 11: DesignOps, the future of design operations (⏳ Releasing By Fall 2024)
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