· Essays

Design in Enterprise

The evolution of UI/UX in enterprise companies, illustrated with GIFs.

This post was originally published on Medium in 2015.

The value of design in a consumer app is fairly well appreciated today— design, branding, and user experience have a meaningful impact on customer happiness and retention.

For enterprise companies, however, it would be easy to underestimate the power of design. Many of these tools operate behind the scenes or on a server farm, so visual design isn’t a priority.

Yet some of the best enterprise companies took design to heart. Their websites are an extension of their brand, and they use design to personify an otherwise faceless product. Stalwarts like Oracle and SAP might not have the most attractive sites, but new players leverage design to connect with their customers and differentiate themselves from their older and slower competitors:

Some takeaways for enterprise companies:

  1. Plan an annual redesign. Most of the sites above completely overhauled their websites at least once a year. While some of the changes are visual, the general UX of the page also improves. A lot changes in the design world in a year’s time, and a lot also changes in enterprise. Redesign your site to reflect that.

  2. Photos of people help humanize your brand. Some of the above use stock photos (e.g. VMware), others use custom photos (e.g. Rackspace), and others use illustrated people (e.g. Joyent). In every case though, it seems like the company is trying to put a human touch on an otherwise amorphous product offering.

  3. Today, whitespace, color, and photos are preferred over dense text. This is partly a broader web design trend, but even enterprise companies that have complex offerings are putting documentation and features on separate pages, leaving the homepage free for calls-to-action, customer testimonials, and eye-catching photos. Consider Salesforce’s site in 2010, VMware’s site in 2010, or Heroku’s site in 2012 versus their sites today.

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