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
"AI learns from the world, sometimes from untrusted sources, so it needs continual ethical iteration."
Jay BustamanteNavigating the Ethical Frontier: DesignOps Strategies for Responsible AI Innovation
October 2, 2023
"Just because you've been right in the past doesn't guarantee you'll be right in the future."
Steve Sanderson Alissa Briggs Jeff Gothelf Bill ScottDiscussion
May 14, 2015
"How might your team maintain its resilience through constant change?"
Kristin SkinnerTheme 2: Introduction and Provocation
January 8, 2024
"Good trouble is part of our craft—it's about making the right amount of disruption to improve healthcare."
Carol MassaDesigning Health: Integrating Service Design, Technology, and Strategy to Transform Patient and Clinician Experiences
December 3, 2024
"Choosing among so many UX tools is hard because every team and researcher is different."
JP Allen Carrie Boyd Malcolm EvansNavigating the UX Tool Landscape
March 11, 2021
"If you’re working at scale, many problems that seem like 'clock' problems actually have 'cloud' elements."
Sheryl CababaLiving in the Clouds: Adopting a Systems Thinking Mindset
June 6, 2023
"This AI stuff is a new design material, just like the internet or mobile was before."
Peter Van DijckBuilding the Rosenbot
June 4, 2024
"Omni ops might be 80% standardized processes and 20% function-specific to keep necessary flexibility."
Jon Fukuda Jake Burghardt Jose Coronado Natalie Dunbar Denise TillesAll the Ops: Successful cross-functional collaboration
September 10, 2025
"We had one researcher for every 10 designers, sometimes even one for every 15."
Marjorie Stainback Kelsey KingmanTransforming Strategic Research Capacity through Democratization
October 24, 2019
