Resilient Enterprise Design
Summary
What is resilient enterprise design, and how can you incorporate it into your own enterprise organization? Craig Villamor is the VP of Product Experience & Design at AppDynamics and he talks about applying context and practicality to enterprise UX design to build resiliency.
Key Insights
-
•
Enterprise design must account for complex organizational contexts, not just individual user happiness.
-
•
Resilience in design means creating systems that flex and adapt under stress rather than breaking.
-
•
Customization is essential in enterprise software for companies to express their brand, culture, and workflows.
-
•
Loss of design control due to device variety and user customization requires influence over user behavior rather than strict enforcement.
-
•
Design principles are crucial to reduce indecision and provide a clear framework for decision-making in complex projects.
-
•
Prioritizing clarity over consistency can lead to better user experience outcomes.
-
•
Successful platforms often start by solving specific, concrete problems before generalizing widely.
-
•
Design systems function as living products that maintain consistency, flexibility, and scale across an ecosystem, including users.
-
•
Making it significantly easier to do the right thing drives adoption and behavior change in design.
-
•
Modeling real-world scenarios and anticipating customization scenarios helps create resilient, flexible enterprise applications.
Notable Quotes
"In the enterprise, it’s really about make me effective taking into account non-user personas as well as the individual."
"My boss might be looking over my shoulder and see nothing but red and think I’m not doing my job."
"Designing for the real world means dealing with practical constraints and making refinements in the face of compromise."
"We’re really passionate about our craft but we’re not in control — that’s a shared hallucination we must give up."
"If you design for everyone, no one is satisfied — start with specific solutions then generalize."
"The highest paid person’s opinion, or HIPPO, often makes decisions in the absence of principles and insights."
"Make it difficult to create ugly presentations — make it ten times easier to do the right thing."
"What happens when a user customizes the UI? Does the experience break? This is the question to ask."
"A style guide is an artifact, but a design system is a living, funded product with a roadmap serving an ecosystem."
"Resilient design needs to bend without breaking — to survive stresses while still delivering value."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Our work as service designers is to help people see their own complex system more clearly, learn from conditions, and take the next right steps."
Jen BriselliLearning is the north star: service design for adaptive capacity
November 19, 2025
"We need to break out of the 30 years of design that has been geared around relational databases."
Ren PopeBuilding Experiences for Knowledge Systems
June 6, 2023
"Natural language processing is basically about figuring out how to math words."
Karen McGrane Jeff EatonAI for Information Architects: Are the robots coming for our jobs?
November 21, 2024
"I haven’t gone more than one day without seeing a new gen AI tool that promises to do it all with a single prompt."
Maverick Chan Claire LinFrom Doodle to Demo: AI as Our Storytelling Partner
October 23, 2025
"Systems Thinking can give us this new lens to think about research in the middle of complexity."
Sarah FlamionComplex Problem? Add Clarity by Combining Research and Systems Thinking
March 31, 2020
"Plans are useless, but planning is everything — that’s what war gaming is about."
Terry BuckmanWargaming (An Introduction)
August 10, 2023
"If distress does happen in sessions, it’s easier to talk through it using humor or a personable approach."
Samuel Proulx Laur BaekInclusive Research: Debunking Myths and Getting Started
March 12, 2025
"Reliable access to veterans and other users is fundamental to running quality, inclusive research across many teams and products."
Shawna Hein Kevin HoffmanCreate a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
November 17, 2022
"It’s really helpful to ask for meeting agendas in advance to attend only ceremonies where UX dependencies exist."
Chris HodowanecAgile + User Experience: How to navigate the Agile landscape as an UX Practitioner
November 16, 2022
