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
"Proactive measurement before release combined with post-release evaluation is the ideal approach."
Jack MoffettUX Metrics That Matter and The Future of our Design at Scale Conference: A Community Conversation
September 22, 2022
"It's unwise for us to intervene when we're not equipped to close the doors that would be opened in doing so."
Sarah FathallahLessening the Research Burden on Vulnerable Communities
March 30, 2020
"Brand is not just what you say, it’s what you do — your product and design live and breathe the brand."
Jemma AhmedBringing together market and user research
October 17, 2019
"Life has a way of working itself out."
Maria GiudiceEmpowering change: Reigniting purpose, passion and impact in research
March 13, 2025
"There was a lot of communication needed around roles, especially since our software developer was external and not always involved in day-to-day decisions."
Dr Chloe SharpUsing Evidence and Collaboration for Setting and Defending Priorities
November 29, 2023
"We saw one insurance form took 14 minutes to fill, and that was longer than competitor journeys, helping identify a clear target for improvement."
Caroline VizeThe State of UX: Five Lessons from 2021 to Accelerate Digital Experience in 2022
March 9, 2022
"We wrote our toolkits in plain English so people understand the tactics without getting lost in jargon—they can learn the jargon later."
Toby HaugDiscussion
June 9, 2017
"The biggest gain is about getting value out sooner, with an 80 percent efficiency improvement from design to running app."
George Abraham Stefan IvanovDesign Systems To-Go: Reimagining Developer Handoff, and Introducing App Builder (Part 2)
October 1, 2021
"AI should be a force multiplier handling repetitive tasks, not a replacement for human judgment."
Erin Weigel Petra RajkovTesting and Experimentation Tools
March 12, 2026
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What strategies motivate cross-functional teams to input their research findings into a centralized repository?
Why is human storytelling stewardship still essential despite advances in AI and research democratization?
How should product teams approach AI-generated insights to ensure research rigor and avoid bias?