Enterprise Apps Begin to Stress Design
Design has been a hot topic for the past few years. Everyone is trying to come up with a sleek look that captures users’ attention and keeps them engaged. Clean visual dashboards, intuitive but fun icons, sleek response, and the use of white space have all invaded consumer software design during the past five years or so.
Now companies are beginning to understand the importance of design when producing products for internal and enterprise use.
Before, the assumption seemed to be that a product for enterprise clients and internal employees needed to be functional but didn’t necessarily need to be pretty or keep up with the latest design trends. That sentiment is changing. From SD Times:
As Xamarin’s Friedman told his user conference audience, enterprise apps are starting to “suck less” thanks to the consumerization of IT. There’s a newfound expectation that apps won’t just function, they’ll be beautiful and immersive.
Everyone is so inundated with design these days—from the hardware they use to the mobile apps and websites they access—that users have come to expect modern looks and feels in anything they interact with, especially software. This drive toward design has become so big, in fact, that some companies are beginning to focus on design as a way to take on major competition.
Gigaom’s Katie Fehrenbacher recently wrote about the trend toward good design in enterprise apps. From Gigaom:
[Server Density] is a company that manages data about servers and is selling its service to the folks that are supposed to make sure their company’s servers stay up and running and work efficiently. Not exactly the stuff of iPhones and smart watches. But Server Density is using layouts like heat maps (see image on Gigaom) to figure out the best way to show the data to the people who need to see it.
As a small upstart in an industry dominated by a couple of big well-funded competitors, [Server Density founder] Mytton tells me that design is a major way they can compete. It’s much harder for a small startup to compete on the sheer number of features, as features can easily be copied, Mytton explains. But their design, in terms of how those features are implemented, is much harder to copy.
Design isn’t just for consumer apps anymore. Companies creating internal systems or enterprise facing software need to focus on design almost as much as functionality if they want to stay competitive and have people actually use their product. Fehrenbacher goes on to note:
As Designer Fund partner Ben Blumenfeld said during our interview with him last month, design is starting to make its way into many new aspects of society, including the traditional realm of big businesses and companies. Influenced by the strong design practices of tech industry leaders like Apple, and accustomed to using new design-friendly services in their personal lives, company employees now expect the same level of usability that they get with their iPhone or with Instagram.
