What to do when your startup's product design is hideous
And any B2B startup built by engineers who hate designing things
Listen up technical founders, CTOs and the odd sales-focused entrepreneur who hires people like them…I can give you all the design wisdom needed to build great products.
We make enterprise software for regulatory and quality departments of medical device companies. If there was any industry where you think design might not matter, this would be it.
And you might be right. For the most technical, result-focused user design in terms of appeal doesn’t really matter. Ask any engineer that builds internal tools what their ideal application looks like and you will end up with a screen of 50+ buttons they can push in the exact sequence needed to work.
But in Enterprise, your customers are not just the expert end users. There might not be any technical users at all.
So how your product looks, and works matters.
In a 20 minute presentation, either a VP needs to be dazzled by smooth and shiny dashboards, or a disgruntled middle manager needs to feel that your thing will save them time, money, or headaches.
Here’s what can be done on a team level.
Redefine what design means (hint, most people don’t know)
Build a micro design loop into your product management process
In our world design does not mean the fonts and color schemes and what kind of shading we use on the buttons. It means how easy is it for for us to:
Show a new customer how to use our platform
Keep customers using it without frustration (and dare we say delight?)
That’s it. And this is how you can train your team to improve design day in and day out. Everything that gets made; for every screen, form field, menu item, and new feature you need to be asking:
What is the purpose of this screen?
Where do we want the user to look first, second, last?
How does the user know this screen ‘worked’?
Where do they go next?
If you can make obvious the answer to these four items then your ‘design’ will improve drastically. This is the 80-20 effect of enterprise design. Ignoring colors, re-imagined slick animations and the like.
Your application will demo better, and receive far more praise from customers if you can answer those four questions on every screen of your application.
Show don’t tell: A crusade against buttons and text
If you’re building fast (like us) it’s inevitable that buttons and text labels will start to clutter your interfaces. Engineers think in terms of click → action. The button nails this. The only problem is that once you get past 2-3 buttons on a screen only engineers will like using it. The rest of the mortal world will be overwhelmed and confused.
Here’s a quick example. Let’s say you have a field in a form called ‘Description’ that you want the user to optionally hide/show.
The button way: Slap a hide description/show description toggle button right above the description field.
The show way: Instead of adding buttons with more text, try blurring the description with the label ‘hidden’ over it, making that clickable to show the results.
Instill this in every engineer, and product reviewer
What I learned from reading a pile of top rated design books is that good ux is not that complicated. The best possible UX at the highest levels of innovation and design probably is, but we’re not there.
All good UX really comes down to is being aware of the main drivers of good experience (our four questions above), and constantly making our development and design choices based on the answers.