Designing an Enterprise Application

What is an Enterprise Application?

Enterprise applications are the need of the hour. They do a fair bit of heavy lifting when it comes to streamlining business processes and functionalities. With remote mobility being the next frontier in enterprises & the advent of real-time knowledge transfers being instrumental in modern-day business, enterprise dependence on business applications is increasing at a rapid pace.

Enterprise applications can be categorized across a variety of platforms across corporate networks, intranets, or the Internet. Most of these apps are data-heavy and are specifically designed to meet the needs of employers and employees in a multi-layer organization. To ensure data security and proficiency, enterprise apps have to maintain stringent standards for cybersecurity and administration.

Designing an enterprise app is complex and requires stitching hundreds of separate requirements together to produce a product that is functional, assistive and delightful, all at the same time. Though it sounds really easy, in practice it is an extremely gruesome process and every designer that opts to be part of an enterprise app designing process should understand in entirety the commitment, patience, and endless hours it requires.

Why should we design Enterprise Apps?

“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design” - Dr. Ralph Speth, CEO Jaguar Land Rover

A well-designed enterprise app solves the real problems of real users with the help of user research. It understands user behavior, user requirements and preferences, and pain points that existing software has not been able to address. A well-designed solution is beneficial to employees, users, and organizations at large.  

Here are the primary reasons to redesign enterprise applications and we have illustrated each point by sharing the impact and reach achieved by one of our clients called Vymo:

Competitive Advantage

Agile enterprise applications give organizations the competitive edge to outperform competition that still deploys legacy applications. A lightweight application that is well integrated across different business departments is a better tool for revenue optimization than a legacy application that slows down the pace of work. Recent research shows, 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor as a result of a poor customer experience.

Impact:

One of our clients, Vymo, within few months of launch gained a huge market share with 40 clients in its portfolio, including the largest banks and insurance companies in India such as HDFC Bank, SBI Life Insurance, Bharti AXA General Life Insurance, and Infosys Finacle to name a few.

Data Optimization and Forecasting

New age enterprise applications utilize big data capabilities to unlock business insights and actionable opportunities. Most modern-day companies big and small are leveraging big data analytics to better understand the customer and build products and services that are closest to what they need.

Impact:

Vymo has been setting benchmarks and has won several awards in its field; it was recognized as the only Gartner Cool Vendor in CRM Sales from across Asia in 2017. Moreover, it was also named a notable vendor in the Gartner CRM Vendor Guide 2017 and was also shortlisted for AIR Agent App of the Year. Yamini Bhat, the co-founder & CEO of Vymo, was featured in the ET Startup Awards 2017.

Improves Efficiency

Enterprise apps are designed based on how the organization wants employees to work, not based on how employees actually work. To bridge this gap, a user-centric approach to design has to be employed. UX design can result in better and faster workflows that are easy on the users and hence improve the efficiency of the tasks they perform.

Impact:

Our client, Vymo, resulted in 30-50% higher sales within 3 months of launch.

Reduces Cognitive Load

Most enterprise apps have an excessive amount of information or data on the same screen. Most users struggle to find any information with ease. By designing the interface keeping in mind human beings’ ability to perceive and process information, we can ensure that they make fewer errors and access key information faster. Not all information is required all of the time. Context matters. UX design accounts for that.

Impact:

According to the study by the Annie data (Jan – Aug 2017) of the top 3 CRM apps, viz., Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Base,  less than 30% of the install base opened the app. However, Vymo boasts of having over 80% of the user base (over 50 – 100K) being highly active on the app.

Cost-Effective Solutions

Easy to use, intuitive interface means employees need little to no training. Also, an agile and design-driven system takes into account the scalability and technology aspects in consideration ensuring that the set-up and maintenance costs are optimized to a great extent. The cost-benefit of good UX design surpasses the investment. 

The recent research from Forrester shows that, on average, every dollar invested in UX brings $100 in return.

Higher employee satisfaction

The systems are built and sold with a promise to make the everyday life of users easier and more productive. It is absolutely essential that simplified interfaces are part of the human-computer interaction. When a digital tool is assistive rather than being burdening, users are willing to use it. 

Good software can directly impact in lowering the stress levels of employees, resulting in better productivity and improved employee satisfaction.  

Impact:

Vymo boasts of helping some of the world's largest enterprise field teams get almost 2X productivity uplift.

Challenges of Designing an Enterprise Application

UX driven enterprise apps can undoubtedly create wonders, but, the path to success is quite frankly full of hurdles and requires a lot of time from both parties, i.e., the entrepreneurs and designers. Here are some challenges that arise out of building a new enterprise application from scratch.

Cross-Platform Integration

While designing the UX for an enterprise application, all kinds of inputs are to be considered. Will the enterprise app integrate different types of processes, software, and frameworks and remain user-friendly to different employees across different verticals? It’s certainly not an easy goal to accomplish. 

Most companies buy lots of different software at the time of developing an enterprise app without bothering about integration challenges at the time of deployment. A UX designer’s primary function is to build a smooth interaction between all these frameworks.

Time-Consuming Development Process

Developing an enterprise application is a time-consuming activity because of all the moving parts. The journey from ideation to development to testing and launch could be a long and tedious process. Quantifying this change is hard especially at the start, but goal setting is important to ensure that precious hours are not wasted on unwanted processes.

Research and Research

Since an enterprise application is built to suit the needs of a wide variety of people across functions, the early stage is extremely crucial. This requires designers to spend time with the users to be able to understand the real pain points, underlying usability challenges, new opportunities while balancing the organizational goals. Second, part of the research also includes understanding the marketplace, the current industry, different competitors and stakeholders' objectives. Only after deriving the insights from all the above-mentioned data, designers would be able to move forward.

Lessons in Adoption

Since an enterprise application is built to suit the needs of a wide variety of people across functions, the early process of adoption is going to require initial training and lessons in building usability. Employees will need demonstrations of how the new application will make their lives better. This will include asking a lot of questions and answering many more.

Iterative Process

Designing an enterprise app is an iterative process. No one can nail down the features and usability in a single shot. The app will have to undergo several phases of design and development which will be an ongoing process depending on the complexity of the software.

How to create the best color palette for your products

Introduction:-

Colors form an integral part of the world we live in. And more often than not, our feelings, emotions and even taste can be validated with colors! According to an article written by Charles Spence in BioMed Central 2015, five color-taste studies were conducted and their results indicate some startling results. For example, the colors black, purple and violet are widely associated with bitterness. White and blue is associated with the salty sea. Yellow and green represent a sour taste, because of its obvious recall to limes and lemons. Sweet is linked to pink or red.

Truth be told, colors can have a major influence on people’s purchase decisions. Most brands are associated with one or more colors; organizations have embraced color psychology as a major driver in their branding strategy. Why? Because people are drawn to certain colors for certain reasons and they carry associations with objects and tend to feel them.

As designers, we need to pay detailed attention to the colors we choose while designing a brand. Colour creates contrast, hierarchy, balance & rhythm. Choosing the right color palette is really important as it not only creates interest but also creates an emotional or subconscious connect with the people.

Understanding colors is an understanding product 

Research indicates that 85% of the decision made by individuals towards choosing a product was based on colors only. Colors carry an emotional value; each color emotes different feelings and perceptions; these aren't general emotions that are associated with it but the whole nature itself is built around it and perceived in a psychological aspect. For example:

1. Red communicates energy, power, and passion
2. Green communicates ambition, growth, freshness, and safety
3. Blue communicates tranquility, confidence, and intelligence
4. Yellow communicates happiness, intellect, and energy
5. Black communicates power, elegance, and mystery
6. White communicates cleanliness, purity, and perfection

Question and Considerations before choosing a Colour palette

Before I get to explaining how to pick colors and go on to explaining the color wheel, let’s be clear about a few fundamental questions that we should ask ourselves even before jumping on to the branding elements of the product. The questions would give you a sense of direction and make life simpler:

Am I designing for a brand new product or an established brand?

Brand New Product: Fresh branding might require you to understand the reasoning and the emotional connect of the brand. It will give you much-needed freedom to chose and play with your colors, unlike the defined products. I generally prefer to choose either monochromatic or complementary as they create more emotional value and a sense of purpose.

Defined product: One should understand the product and the guidelines it comes with. There might be many limitations or directions that we need to follow. So get acquainted with it. For example, Google or Microsoft has strict guidelines. In such cases, I choose Analogous/ Triadic palette as they allow me to stick to the prominent brand color while allowing me to play with the other colors from the wheel as an accent. It is like choosing a group of friendly neighbors to build a harmonious product.

Do  I understand the product?

What is the intent of the product? What does it want to communicate? What problem does it want to solve? Who will use this product?  These questions will lead us to shortlist the primary and secondary colors of the product.

Do  I understand the users well?

Who are the users we are targeting? What are there behavioral graphs? What their mental models like? How tech-savvy are they? What region do they belong to? What is their culture? Everything comes into play when you are deciding on the brand colors. Ask as many relevant questions as possible.

Am I accommodating the W3C principle?

Choosing a palette also involves accessibility as one of the major challenges for a product designer. As a designer, you must ensure that the product is accessible by all sets of color vision deficiency personas. Adding to that, textual contrast check is really important which needs to be done before adding any colored text over any background color. This allows us in covering the CVD people by providing them with an accessible product.

How do I choose the colors?

Finally, let’s decode the different sets of colors and principles that will always make life easier as designers. I always look up to the nature of the product when it comes to choosing colors but before you go overboard looking for inspiration you have to understand the basics of the color wheel. I follow Colour theory 101; there are many diverse ways of picking color sets that work together. I pick the combination best suited for me ranging from those that are easy to use till difficult to use. I’ll explain this further below:

Complementary -Easy to use

As the name suggests, these colors are placed adjacent to each other in the color wheel.  They complement each other perfectly. This color scheme works best for brands that are trying to communicate reliability and a sense of balance. It’s like the color blue says ‘you are beautiful’ to the color orange, which complements its attributes, and vice versa.

RunAdam or Paytm Money are good examples of the brands with complementary colors.

Monochromatic -Easy to use

These colors share the hues and tones of a base color. When you use shades of the same color, the ideal notion behind this is that it creates harmony and natural sync. Monochromatic color sets are easy to remember since the user can associate these shades with one another and still can remember what brand or product it is.

Farmrise would be a great example of a monochromatic color brand.

Analogous - Exercise Caution

The word analogous means ‘comparable’. By virtue of this, analogous colors refer to any set of colors on the color wheel that are immediately adjacent, ie, three colors left or right from the one of your choosing. As a set, these four colors will be considered as analogous colors. Analogous colors are preferred when there is a need to create a sense of harmony and contentment for brand design.

Paypal, Mastercard are good examples of brands with analogous colors.

Triadic - You can try

This method is akin to choosing colors that are evenly spaced in an equilateral triangle. These colors are selected from the wheel in such a way that they provide high contrast and rich vibrancy in design. How do we do this? By picking colors, (to the left or right) that are equally spaced from one another on the color wheel. For example, if you pick a specific color on the wheel, you can go ahead and pick a color that is three colors away on either side. These contrasting colors make for an effective, yet tough to create a palette.

Mozilla and  Burger King are good examples of the brands with triadic colors.

Triadic - Are you brave enough?

This is a four-color structure evenly spaced on the color wheel. This scheme is best suitable if you want to create an accent with colors, ie, you choose one dominant color and three accents supporting it. This color scheme is similar to triadic, which creates a vibrant and strong palette but is tough to handle.

Google & Microsoft is a good example of a Tetradic color scheme

My favorite tools:-

My suggestions towards tools that can be used to choose your palette:

Coolors.co - My favorite tool it's super easy to use and it can show you multiple analogous variations of a single hue.

Canva Colour wheel - This is my handy tool towards choosing the type of combination that I want to pick I'll be able to generate my combinations. I use the Canva Colour wheel to build my palette.

Hope this helps you in building a beautiful palette for your product, Happy branding!

What are the best UX Design Principles?

We live in a world that is surrounded by products and services of all shapes and forms. Digitally speaking, there is an application for most human functions that we perform in daily life and the larger part of these applications have only come into existence in the last decade. 

In order to build products that capture hearts and precious screen space, you must give the utmost importance to user experience design. The primary determinant of any software product is the metric for repeat use or ‘stickiness’. A ‘sticky’ product is generally one with exceptional user experience design that works so seamlessly that most users won’t even notice it. This article enlists some fundamental user experience principles that are crucial for beginners creating their first product.

Predict User Behavior

According to the first design principles, you as a product designer must understand user behavior in such depth that you can predict their behavior. An in-depth understanding of the user’s workflow will assist in the ideation and execution of a seamless UX/UI design that the user will not even know exists!

The functionality should flow logically without any kinks such that each step of the user experience gratifies the user with what they are looking for. While designing the user experience, we must aim to reduce the clutter and strategize the site navigation such that the user is able to get to what they want in the most efficient manner possible. There are various UX Research approaches that can be used based on the scope and goals of the projects, you can read about them here. 

Reduce Cognitive Load

Every Product designer worth their salt is trying to build applications that can reduce the user's cognitive load. But what does this term even mean? A lot of highly functional, well-meaning websites and applications try to offer users everything all at the same time. This means that when they are visiting your website, they are likely to be pulled in all directions, unsure of where the information they are looking for lies, unclear calls to action, unrelated trivia, et cetera. User Experience design principles dictate that we simplify the task at hand and design for the core activities that the user is trying to perform. Provide a clear road map, outline a clear call-to-action and provide a cleaner, sleeker user experience.

Oversimplify Functionality

Let’s think about this with an example. Think about any e-commerce website that you love and use often. Think about the product that you’re looking to purchase and how many different actions you need to perform from the time you’ve reached the website’s landing page to that of making a purchase. Chances are, these tasks can be achieved in three simple clicks or lesser. This is the hallmark difference between good user experience and a not-so-great one. Always think about the site functionalities as a process and attempt to help users achieve their objectives in fewer than 3 clicks.

Build the road to ‘Go Back’

Probably the best design element of any well functional website is the ability to go back and re-work a choice made by the user. Undo is a very powerful tool and helps users go back a step in the process without having to start from scratch. The ability to go back a step helps users retain their chain of thought, save changes and move forward in the direction that they deliberately want to engage in.

Clarify Call to Action

Website and applications are used to perform highly sophisticated as well as the most rudimentary of tasks in modern life. Hence, using terminology that does not clarify what task it fulfills will leave users confused thereby increasing the bounce rate of your website. Narrow down the options when asking users to make a decision on the application and provide context so that there is lesser room for guesswork. For example, when we’re submitting an application online ‘Save for later’ is less ambiguous to ‘Come back to this later?’

Allow for Differences in Skill-Set

While dabbling in product design you must ensure that you are accommodating users with different skill-levels that are accessing your website. This will include those who are accustomed to the site as well as first-time users. To enable this, the user experience must only include relevant information. Over-supply of content on a website has the tendency to clutter and reduce the visibility of relevant matters. You can enable short-cuts for more experienced users, however, the site must be just as intuitive for a first time user.

Manage Errors Effectively

System errors are part and parcel of any digital experience. However, the function of good design is to manage errors effectively without miffing current users. Error messages should be crisp and to the point couple with information on how to navigate out of the error. If this is not handled well, users can abandon your application in frustration. On the flip side, a relevant error message can lead to delightful user experience and retention of the user. These are the small things that often gets neglected during the design; here are the major 7 UX mistakes that we do as designers.