An inside look of UX in B2B - With Daniela Aramu

I recently attended a meet up where I got into a conversation about UX in B2B and some of the misconceptions so I wanted to explore further and managed to secure an interview with Daniela Aramu who runs a successful UX team in a B2B company.

I hope you all enjoy..

Hi, my name is Daniela Aramu and I’m the Head of UX in one of the market leading global benefits management and employee engagement software companies.

I am an Italian designer who after wondering around Europe building and heading up design teams in a variety of organisations, landed back in London and made it my permanent home. London energy and inspiration is unbeatable!

I’ve designed, defined and launched commercial products on a global scale in fast-paced environments across mobile, web and applications for almost 20 years now.

I’m passionate about multichannel approaches to products as it gives the opportunity to craft the experience from all angles allowing for rounder and more engaging products.

I believe in building multi-disciplinary design teams, mentoring talents and seeing them reach their full potential as designers and innovators.  

1. B2C is often seen as sexier work than B2B – what are your thoughts on this?

It very much depends on how you define sexy and what is interesting for you.

B2B used to be the ugly cousin of the sexier consumer products. But as work and personal lives blend together more and more, the need for a radical rethink of design in B2B becomes very apparent. People are not willing to accept that just because it’s a productivity tool it can be unappealing. They want the same ease of use and attractive experience when they use Spotify as when they use a meeting room booking system or when they’re selecting their work benefits.

There is more to that:

First, B2B products tend to form longer lasting relationships and therefore the impact of design on end-users and clients is more intense and rewarding.

Second, software contracts with clients generally span between 2 and 5 years. If you mess up the quality of the product and it does not meet clients’ expectation, you will lose your client. Unless your competitor also messes up, it’s going to be very hard to get that client back! The quality of the B2B product needs to be so much higher than consumer products and mistakes are so much more costly that you just need to avoid them.

Third, you need to design with extreme flexibility in mind and with a constant look at scalability. You need to think of the needs of your current clients and geography but also at the possible needs of prospective clients and the expansion to a more global market.

Finally, there are so many rules and regulations in the financial world that create limits to what you can do. Breaking those rules is not an option, working within those rules makes solving users’ problems just a tad more complicated (and with a tad I mean a lot more complicated).

With technology integrating more deeply into peoples’ lives, the bar of expectations in terms of ease of use, aesthetics and simplicity is raised to an exceptionally high level. B2B products might have a different nature, but the end-users are the same people that also buy a new iPhone, a new car and the latest gaming console. That is their life and their expectations. Any product should fit with that, including business products. It’s just more challenging to design for business products hence it’s much more interesting.

2. How do B2B project processes generally differ to B2C?

We do try to keep the design process for B2B products as close as possible to a user centred

approach. However, one of the main complexities of B2B projects is the number and variety of stakeholders internal and external: you just never have that many and with so much variety in B2C projects.

In addition, those stakeholders might not have the end users really at the centre of their thinking when they require functionalities but might rather be motivated by company financial and transformational goals. To add to that, you generally don’t have a direct access to the end user unless you manage to create a very good report with your clients (and I would highly recommend to whoever is entering this area to do just so).

Although as a designer you are the voice of end users, you might not know them so well and

that makes the discussion just a little more tricky. You work hard to create that report and get access to end users, or in extreme cases talk to users that are similar to your target.

Use DATA!

We use a lot of data on how the software has been used, the drop points in the experience and we hypothesis…then we test our hypothesis. Generally, that helps having more constructing conversation with clients but also within your own organisation.

I find that if you really understand your clients’ goals (all of them, not just the one that they are willing to explicitly tell you), align expectations and get them to believe that you are doing your best to make them succeed, then projects can be hugely successful and relationships with the client extremely rewarding.

3. It must be harder to get people to see successful B2B projects you’ve worked on if they’re not part of that company. Is that ever frustrating?

As long as I know I am doing good work, making peoples’ lives just a little bit easier, then I am ok. To be honest, at the end of the day there are always ways to show some of your work. You might not be able to use your clients’ brand or content, but you can always create fake brands to show the product, the flexibility and power of the design.

When you cannot show the final product, you can always show the process that allowed

you to create that design which, in my opinion, is a lot more powerful than the pretty picture at the end of it.

4. How easy/difficult is it to get businesses to allow people time to go and participate in testing and research?

No, it is not that easy to get access to clients’ end users for research or feedback, most of the time is not even easy to get access to the clients for feedback (unless something is going wrong). Having said that maybe I am being a little unfair. There are some clients that are keen to get involved and to get their people involved. But as a 3rd party service provider, we are just one of the many that they use so if they were to give time to all of us they would probably not have time to do the main job.

The important thing is to seize the moment - if they have availability you need to be ready to grab it. In most case it means that you will be going to them, you will be bringing your own recording equipment and you need to be willing to take the time that each user is able to afford for you. That means focus your research on the most important questions and be flexible to change the protocol if you are not getting what you need from the time you have.

As I mentioned before, it is good to create that report but it is also good to make them see the advantage of being involved in the design process: the more they get involved, the more likely it is that their needs will be addressed in the final design. I tend to find that is an argument most clients can understand very well.

- Is it easy to get businesses to understand the value of the process?

That very much depends on the organisation. Generally, if an organisation have a design team of their

own, it makes the discussion a lot easier. If they do not, well then there is some hard work to do. You revert to showing them the ROI in terms of time and money…two things that companies are most sensitive too.

- Is it harder to recruit UX’rs for a B2B company?

Honestly I think it is just hard to recruit UX’rs in general. Finding the right balance between skills, motivation and culture fit is just difficult. I’m picky but mostly because getting the wrong person is just not fair for the company I am hiring for, the team that person will be in and the candidate themselves as they’ll be quitting their job and be unhappy in the new one.

I’ve always managed to find great people who fit both professionally and culturally.

If Daniela's insight has inspired you to make the move into a B2B company, feel free to reach out to find out about any opportunities we have at the moment.

Daniela Aramu - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/daniela-aramu-880228