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
"The Homeowner Playbook helped align teams across product, marketing, and operations by giving everyone a shared research fact understanding."
Katie HansenFinding the unknown in the known: Harnessing meta-analysis and literature review
March 12, 2025
"Please read our code of conduct; we want to ensure everyone feels safe and respected in this community."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
June 9, 2021
"Sponsor sessions are not just salesy sessions; they’re actually really fantastic sessions put on by your peers."
Uday Gajendar Louis RosenfeldDay 1 Welcome
June 4, 2024
"Agents do a lot of jobs simultaneously with completely different mental contexts."
Sean Fitzell Sarah Han Kayla FarrellCraft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps
March 12, 2021
"Don’t schedule your pilot during the holidays — our first pilot had one graduate because it went through December."
Marjorie Stainback Kelsey KingmanTransforming Strategic Research Capacity through Democratization
October 24, 2019
"Companies had to relearn their customers during COVID because behavior had fundamentally changed."
Janelle EstesUX Research Trends
January 28, 2021
"AI intelligence is too cheap to meter, or we can call it McKinsey interns too cheap to meter."
Matt WebbContext Window: Five Futures for AI
June 11, 2025
"Building ecosystems of interconnected tools that work seamlessly is crucial for modern, fast-moving organizations."
Kate Towsey Basel Fakhoury Oren Friedman Graham GardnerParticipant Recruitment and Management Tools
March 12, 2026
"We set a goal to hire at least 25% of early career roles from underrepresented demographics. This year we reached 37%."
Kurdin Bazaz Liz Rytting Alex KarrCulture, DIBS & Recruiting
June 10, 2021