Enhancing the UX of Legacy B2B Apps
Improving ease of learning, efficiency and overall customer experience
- Problem: A powerful B2B web application enabled companies to automate software deployment processes, but users had a hard time learning the tool and using it efficiently. How to simplify this complex enterprise app that had evolved over the years without dedicated attention to UX?
- My roles: Freelance UX Researcher and Designer, UX Mentor, UX and Service Design Consultant, Workshop Facilitator
- My Responsibilities
- Identify UX quick wins for an important upcoming launch.
- Strengthen Human-Centered Design processes and capacities in the company.
- Introduce Service Design Thinking and methods.
- Client: IT company (confidential)
- Deliverables: Competitor Benchmark Report, UX Expert Reviews, User Test Reports, UX Guidelines, Vision Prototype, User/Customer Journey Maps, Site Map, User Stories, Personas
- Outcome: After implementing the quick wins, ease-of-learning and efficiency improved significantly according to user feedback. User comments on the vision prototype were enthusiastic. The customer journey mapping workshops helped to improve a customer-oriented collaboration between different roles and departments.
Challenge: How to improve the UX of a complex legacy B2B web app?
My client’s product was a powerful B2B web application designed to automate software deployment processes. However, over the years, the app had evolved with new features added but without a dedicated focus on UX and users struggled to learn and use the tool efficiently.
I was brought in as a UX freelancer shortly before an important annual launch to support the in-house team in identifying and addressing key usability/UX issues. Afterwards, I continued working with the client as a UX and Service Design consultant and mentor to help consolidate human-centered design processes and strengthen internal design capabilities.
Background Information
While I cannot disclose specific details due to confidentiality, I would like to share some general information about our approach and key learnings. I chose to include this project in my selected case studies, as I believe there is significant potential for human-centered design to make people’s lives easier in enterprise/B2B contexts (and I’d be happy to contribute).
Approach: Overview
UX Quick Wins
To determine quick wins, I identified the top use cases, collected existing user feedback, conducted agile usability tests, and performed expert UX reviews.
Quick wins included, among other things, using more action-oriented labels (calls to action), decluttering the interface (removing unnecessary buttons and duplications), reorganizing the navigation menu and flattening its hierarchy, and applying intelligent defaults.
Strategic UX Guidance
One of the main issues that made the current app difficult to learn and inefficient to use was its lack of task-oriented organization. Understanding what the app actually did was a primary research challenge.
Drawing on our findings, I began by creating a user journey map that clearly outlined user goals and the steps needed to achieve them. This served as the foundation for a reorganized site map, which guided the redesign. I also developed general UX guidelines based on user needs to further support the design process.
Vision Prototype & Reverse Engineering
I mentored an in-house junior UX designer in crafting a vision prototype to guide future steps. Beforehand, we conducted competitive research to gather inspiration on current trends and best practices. After successful user testing, we reverse-engineered changes to the existing system based on this future-state prototype, involving coworkers through design studio workshops.
We chose this approach because the current app's information architecture did not support efficient user flows. Therefore, we considered the future state to be a better starting point.
From UX to CX: Service Design Thinking
Recognizing the software's complexity, I advocated for a service design perspective and facilitated our first customer journey mapping workshop with various departments.
The goal was to improve the customer onboarding experience, starting as early as the sales meetings. The workshops helped clarify the customer journey and identify ways to align efforts across teams.
Outcome
After implementing the quick wins, ease-of-learning and efficiency improved significantly according to user feedback. User comments on the vision prototype were enthusiastic (even in greyscale-state).
The internal customer journey mapping workshops helped to improve a customer-oriented collaboration between different roles and departments, even though they were quite challenging at first since they revealed that people had very different definitions of the same terms, among other things.
Advocating for Enterprise UX/CX/EX
I believe that in B2B and internal enterprise contexts, there is still much work to be done in terms of UX/CX/EX (User Experience/Customer Experience/Employee Experience). There’s tremendous potential for cost savings and reducing support calls by enabling people to complete their work more efficiently, with fewer errors, and with greater joy.
For designers (like me) who are passionate about simplifying complex systems and enjoy addressing UX from a strategic, organizational, and service design perspective, the enterprise context is highly stimulating. Working within a space full of constraints demands quick creative thinking and strong interdisciplinary collaboration. Moreover, when starting with a multitude of UX issues, improvements are particularly noticeable: seeing the smiles of people during redesigned experiences is incredibly gratifying.
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