September 3, 2024 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #472
This newsletter issue was sent out to 198,321 subscribers on Tuesday, September 3, 2024.
Editorial
Chances are high that much of your work isn’t spent on lovely SaaS products or public-facing digital products. Perhaps you are working on internal systems in healthcare, banking, education, or accounting. Or perhaps you are creating an internal tool for your colleagues and management. In other words, you are working in enterprise UX — helping people do their work effectively.
Well, in this newsletter, we want to dive into just that — enterprise UX. It is not a particularly widely discussed topic, a topic that’s often neglected or overlooked, but is very challenging to design for. Hopefully, you’ll find a few useful bits here and there that will make you more confident and comfortable when dealing with complex, legacy-ridden applications.
On our end, we are packing for the upcoming SmashingConf 2024 season — starting in our lovely hometown in Freiburg. Here are our next adventures this year:
- SmashingConf Front-End & UX (New York, Oct 7–10)
- SmashingConf UX & Design (Antwerp, Oct 28–31)
Ah, and we’ll be workshopping complex UX challenges online in our upcoming Interface Design Patterns UX Training as well, launching in November. There are a few friendly tickets left there as well!
Happy designing, everyone!
— Vitaly
1. Breaking Down Enterprise UX Design
Whether it’s a customer service rep who needs to access orders, a sales team member who needs to track sales or a project manager who needs to see what tasks are assigned, all of them rely on enterprise applications. And as distinct as the user groups are, as complex are the tasks that professionals use to get work done.
A wonderful primer to get you familiar with designing for enterprises comes from Stuart Silverstein. In his guide, he breaks down enterprise UX design, exploring enterprise applications, the discipline of enterprise UX, the differences between Enterprise and Consumer, and how to approach the complexity. Valuable tips for everyone who needs to get a handle on a large app. (cm)
2. Designing Data-Heavy Enterprise Apps
Unlike B2C users, enterprise users can’t choose whether or not they want to use a particular product. They have to use the one their company agreed to use. So how can we as designers make their lives easier? That’s the question that Ovidiu Boc attempts to answer in his two-part guide to designing data-heavy enterprise applications.
In the first part, Ovidiu highlights the differences between enterprise and B2C products and how we can master three of the trickiest challenges that enterprise applications bring along: loading data, handling errors, and displaying data.
The second part is dedicated to accessibility, designing for speed and repetitive use, and planning for scalability. Whether you’re a product designer working on an enterprise application or a designer thinking about joining an enterprise team, Ovidiu’s guide will help you create the best experience for your users. (cm)
3. The Nuances Of Enterprise UX
The term ‘enterprise software’ often evokes images of outdated, awkward interfaces and maybe even 90s flashbacks. Let’s do better. To get you ready for designing enterprise applications that make a positive impact on employee’s everyday workflows, Naveed Ahmed wrote an 11-part article series in which he explores the various aspects and intricacies of enterprise UX.
For the article series, Naveed draws on over a decade of experience designing UX for enterprise software. His aim is to pass on the insights he has obtained during this time to make enterprise product design more accessible for newcomers to the area and empower designers to steer the direction of the next generation of enterprise software. The perfect foundation for everyone looking to build or enhance their enterprise UX skills. (cm)
4. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Deep Dive On Accessibility Testing dev
with Manuel Matuzović. Sep 23 – Oct 7 - Inclusive Design Patterns For 2025 free
with Vitaly Friedman. Sep 24 - Accessible Typography for Web & UI Design Masterclass design
with Oliver Schöndorfer. Oct 10 – 18 - Cascading Style Systems: Resilient & Maintainable CSS dev
with Miriam Suzanne. Oct 14 – 18 - Interface Design Patterns UX Training (Autumn 2024) ux
with Vitaly Friedman. Nov 1 – Dec 2 - Advanced Design Systems workflow
with Brad Frost. Nov 12–20 - Figma Workflow Masterclass design
with Christine Vallaure. Nov 14–22 - Jump to all workshops →
5. How To Run UX Research In B2B
B2B and enterprise are environments where it is hard to run UX research. It might be due to NDAs, security concerns, or the fact that there are no users you could interview yet. How can we make the most out of UX research under such difficult circumstances?
Vitaly summarized practical tips and techniques to help you make UX research successful in strict B2B and enterprise environments, even when there’s no access to users. With a list of do’s and don’ts and useful further reading resources, you’ll learn to overcome the frustration and build long-term B2B relationships to positively impact how people work. (cm)
6. Complex Application Design
To better understand the nature of complex applications, the Nielsen Norman Group conducted a series of research studies with users, UX designers, and researchers. They not only delivered precious real-world insights into why users struggle with enterprise applications, but also served as the foundation for a framework that helps designers build better complex applications.
The framework divides complexity into five layers, ranging from Integrative Complexity caused by complex back-end architecture and legacy systems to Institutional Complexity caused by the cultural structures that exist within an organization. As the Nielsen Norman Group suggests, you can use the different layers to break down complexity relevant to your work — as part of an exercise in domain modeling, as a field-study observation tool, or as a method for discussing your work with colleagues. (cm)
7. Designing Enterprise Health Products
The expectations and demand for digital health services are growing, yet there are many digital health products out there that are poorly designed and built. To make a positive change and develop digital health products that live up to the highest standards, the team at Hanno has worked exclusively with healthcare companies for 11 years. In The Hanno SaMD Playbook, they share valuable insights into their process.
The playbook focuses on designing and building software as a medical device (SaMD). You’ll dive deeper into research, design, engineering, and testing, just like dealing with releases, feedback, and compliance. Precious insights that combine the team’s experience from designing consumer-facing experiences with knowledge of the medical space. (cm)
8. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. Have you checked them out already?
- Success at Scale by Addy Osmani
- Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
- Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
- Check out all books →
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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