3 Crucial Rules for Enterprise UI Design

I’d like to share three fundamental rules that — across my three decades of enterprise product design improvement — have proven absolutely essential for achieving successful UI design in complex B2B environments.

No matter what you’re working on, if it’s on the enterprise-facing side of the house, this is what’s true:

1. Simplicity is not the goal — clarity is.

In enterprise systems, it’s easy for product designers, developers and stakeholders to mistake simplicity for minimalism. However, the real objective isn’t to make the UI simpler — it’s to make it easier for users to parse, comprehend and quickly respond to a necessarily dense, large volume of onscreen content and controls.

Imagine you’re working on an inventory management system with hundreds of filters and sorting options. The simple approach (and the one most common to commercial UX and UI work) would be to start looking at which options can be removed. Separating what’s needed first, in this step, from all subsequent steps that follow. Maybe “chunking” groups of related steps on separate screens. But as my last email demonstrated, doing so can actually hinder productivity — because now everything takes longer to get to and act on.

So instead of reducing volume, you focus on increasing clarity in the UI — by grouping related filters, using intuitive icons, providing clear instructions — ensuring users can quickly find what they need and execute on it, without hesitation or confusion. In my upcoming Enterprise UI Design Rules workshop, I’ll give you tips on how to strike the right balance between reducing clutter and maintaining functionality, so that clarity always leads the way.

2. Users WILL be change-resistant (to even the most broken system) — think small.

This is the great paradox of enterprise environments, the one that causes UXers and product designers the most agita: users will almost always prefer to stick with familiar, even flawed systems rather than embrace new, untested solutions. Why? Because the understanding and efficiency they have right now has been hard fought and won. They operate on habit and reflex, on instinctive pattern recognition — and anything that breaks that pattern breaks productivity. It makes things hard, frustrating and — if your job security is tied to productivity — it’s damn risky. This resistance to change is a significant hurdle, but it’s one that can be addressed in your work.

Consider most legacy CRM systems; they’re typically as cumbersome as they are inefficient. I’ve been hired by dozens of companies who made sudden, sweeping overhauls that seemed like a great idea at the time —only to have users push back, leading to a massive drop in productivity.

Instead, what I counseled these teams to do was to implement small, incremental changes, like improving the search function, making iconography clearer, separating primary and secondary actions, improving alignment in data entry forms. These small changes allow users to adapt gradually, fostering acceptance and even appreciation over time — because they all make the thing significantly easier to use without sacrificing users’ gained efficiency and understanding. During next week’s workshop, I’ll show you techniques for introducing UI changes in a way that improves use, minimizes disruption and maximizes user buy-in.

3. Atomic change (UI) wins the battle (and, eventually the war).

Sweeping UX changes like those I described above often come with significant risk and disruption, particularly in complex enterprise environments. Instead, making atomic changes — focused, small-scale, component-based UI improvements — almost always lead to more immediate, sustainable benefits.

Let’s say you’re tasked with improving the UX of a financial reporting tool. Rather than redesigning the entire interface, a series of atomic changes — enhancing the readability of tables, improving color contrast for better data visualization, strengthening, clarifying and reinforcing the visual relationships between navigation categories and controls — can make a substantial impact.

These small, targeted adjustments can eventually lead to a broader transformation of the UI (and the experience of using it) without overwhelming users. I’ll explore how to identify these opportunities and execute them effectively across 10 specific types of UI components in next week’s Enterprise UI Design Rules workshop.

The workshop will take place Saturday, Sept 7, 2024 at 11:00 AM EDT. It’s absolutely FREE to UX 365 members and just $97 for non-members.

The session will be recorded and everyone who attends will get lifetime access to that recording. By the end of our time together, you’ll have a robust toolkit of strategies to apply in your own projects, helping you drive meaningful improvements in enterprise UI design.

I look forward to sharing these insights with you — and putting an end to the struggle you’re likely experiencing almost every day. As I’ve said many times before, it really does not have to be this hard.

I’d love the opportunity to prove that to you; join me next Saturday and see for yourself.

Onward + Upward.