The Distinction Between Designing for Enterprise vs Consumer Customers

I've been in the VC world for a year now, and what I've come to learn and appreciate is a variety of terms that although initially didn't make any sense to me (like "pre-money valuation" or "clean cap table") are much less hazy now. But a set of terms that I had thought I understood from the get-go -- "enterprise" customer and "consumer" customer -- have been a constantly moving target in my mind. It wasn't until I sat with design executives Ethan Batraski (VP of Product Design at Box), Dan Harrelson (Design Director at GE Software), Etan Lightstone (Director of Design - UX at New Relic), and Tim McCoy (Director of Design at Pivotal Labs) for a media round table that I hosted for Outcast did I experience a breakthrough.

Rather than bore you with the details of how I got to my newly enlightened state, let me tell you what I finally figured out that day while doing my best Pat Sajak impression as the moderator:

Designing for enterprise customers is different than designing for consumer customers because:

• The buyer is different from the consumer -- the actual end-user didn't get to decide on the purchase because it is a major cost to the business. This hit home for me because I recalled that while at RISD, I worked to modernize the systems there so we brought in an ERP upgrade that disrupted everyone's lives there. Nobody who actually uses the system got to choose the system. In addition, we were already locked in to an existing vendor so it would have been too expensive to completely change to a different one.
• The time from purchase to implementation takes much longer than the time to download a consumer app. Committees are put into place to ready the organization, integration specialists are brought in, training for the new system rolls out, and it might take months and years for the new system to start to work.
• The people who use the system know exactly what kind of improvements they need to get their work done, and help to spec future upgrades by doing so. Because the user base isn't generally soaring in the millions for enterprise IT, like with a consumer app, it's more likely possible to listen, plan, and execute. The same couldn't easily be done from a list of every Candy Crush gamer's feature requests lists as it's impossible to know how to begin and end.

Designing for enterprise customers is needing to get better at designing for consumer customers because:

• Customer expectations are increasing for enterprise computing experiences to be at par with their fluid and friendly Facebook-like world. This pressure didn't exist before because people weren't using computers as much as they are now. Enterprise computing companies didn't need to invest the extra money required to make their user experiences less painful -- so they didn't.
• The advantage that some existing enterprise software installs have enjoyed, that prevent organizations from switching over, is weakening. It used to be difficult to "cheat" and to use a better system than was installed organization-wise because you were constrained by how IT ran the internal network. If you didn't like the speed of remote disk file storage available to you in-house, you used to be stuck; but adding a Box drive was easy. Slack is another example of an "invasive species" in team-collaboration tech that managed to creep into companies and achieve rapid adoption because it far beat (by design) what is available internally to many companies and organizations.

My other takeaway from a leadership perspective was how the design leader at an enterprise software tech company needs a much deeper and broader understanding of computing to be effective in their role, as compared with a consumer tech design leader. This means, to me, that there is a huge opportunity for new design leaders to emerge in enterprise IT -- because the people who can succeed in this space will be relatively few in number. There's plenty of room in enterprise IT to define what it means to be a designer in what is going to be a heavily disrupted arena over the coming decade. I left the event feeling lucky to get to meet a few of those still rare leaders out there. A write-up from the event was composed by Rachel King at ZDNet and is visible here.