Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Joanna Ngai Credit: Unsplash

Here’s how to avoid or fix these common mistakes

Mistake #1: Ignoring the benefits of beautiful design

Too often, great visual design is undervalued based off the argument that design is “more than how it looks”. While design does factor in usability and functionality, aesthetics also play a major role in clarifying and meeting users expectations for how things work. It is a slippery slope to neglect making enterprise design experiences beautiful and may end up justifying a sloppy end product experience.

The surprise is that we now have evidence that aesthetically pleasing things work better and are easier to learn — the Aesthetic-Usability effect. Products and user interface that look good are perceived as more valuable, more functional and easier to learn.

All of these outcomes are highly valuable for complex enterprise products.

Visual design can also communicate to the user that you respect their time and attention.

Contrast two designs— one where the imagery is crisp, engaging and set against a clear call to action, and the other where there is a mix of seven fonts against a set of stock photos with the call to action somewhere in the mix.

Which is more professional? Which would appear more trustworthy? Visual design aids in clarity and helps draw attention where it’s needed without being overwhelming.

2. Overlooking integration into legacy systems

Legacy systems are old, inflexible technologies put into place due to business needs. They tend to be fragile and risky to overhaul as replacement is extensive, difficult and costly.

What does this have to do with my shiny new product you may ask? Acknowledging that existing ecosystem of tools your users wrangle, you can build with integrations in mind. Often, businesses may not be willing to go down a road with yet another solution that can’t integrate with their existing tools or provide some way to carry over parts of the legacy system into the new system.

In other words, how does the product you’re designing connect with other products and services users already use? No matter what you’re working on, your goal should be to help direct users toward a smoother journey in accomplishing their tasks.

DevOps tools ecosystem Credit: Blazemeter

3. Lacking knowledge of the relevant business domain or ecosystem

It’s not enough to understand the user, designers need to understand the business.

Enterprise products are typically much more complex than consumer applications are tailored for a specific business domain. Therefore, designers who seek to make user-centered experiences must develop a level of understanding of the relevant domain so they can get rid of any vagueness or obscurity around how their users actually work.

4. Forgetting to clean up feature overload

Before you think about adding another feature to the product, ask yourself: “How does this added feature meet the needs of the user?”

The common problem with featuritis is the motivation. Often teams feel compelled to constantly out-feature competitors or prioritize clever ideas that might not actually be useful for a majority of users.

Having too many advanced features moves further away from the goal of optimizing for the most common cases and improving overall product clarity.

Designers should prioritize making sure the content on a page is digestible and questioning assumptions that “More features = Better experience”.

5. Making performance an afterthought

Design teams spend so much time focusing on crafting a polished design and integrating research that they might overlook the performance of the final experience. Things like page load and how quickly you can fix errors are parts of the experience that are felt and not necessarily seen.

Here are some case studies of how performance has affected engagement and conversion:

According to WPO stats and case studies, sites that load faster are known to lead to higher engagement, improves conversion and ultimately increased revenue, designers can’t ignore the impact of performance on user experience and business metrics.

Ultimately, designers should weigh aesthetics and performance and to avoid overlooking the unseen attributes that make design work well.

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Thanks for reading! Enterprise design problems aren’t easy. If you want to learn more, check out A Designer’s Guide to Enterprise UX

Want to give your portfolio an upgrade? Check out my latest set of tips for Design Portfolios.

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Top 5 Design Mistakes in Enterprise UX was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Top 5 Design Mistakes in Enterprise UX

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