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
"You must remember this. A kiss is just a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh."
Susan Simon-DanielsWar Stories LIVE! Susan Simon-Daniels
March 30, 2020
"Design Ops teams exist in nearly all industries and for all design functions, growing rapidly year over year."
Laine Riley Prokay Lisa GordonCarving a Path for Early Career DesignOps Practitioners
September 9, 2022
"Contextualizing sound bites or clips is crucial; otherwise, they risk losing meaning when separated from their original story."
Bas Raijmakers, PhD (RCA) Charley Scull Prabhas PokharelWhat Design Research can Learn from Documentary Filmmaking
March 11, 2022
"About 200,000 digital health products exist, but only 1% of 1% have FDA clearance for accuracy."
Daniel J. RosenbergDigital Medicine Design
September 26, 2019
"If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together."
Dean BroadleyNot Black Enough to be White
January 8, 2024
"In order to lead change, you turn change itself into the product."
Doug PowellDesignOps and the Next Frontier: Leading Through Unpredictable Change
September 11, 2025
"The future belongs to designers who ask questions worth answering, not just answering questions already asked."
Changying (Z) ZhengPractical DesignOps: From Ideas to Tools That Teams Actually Use
September 25, 2025
"You don’t have to overhaul your process to be inclusive; small changes embedded across stages make a huge difference."
Gabriela BarnevaOperationalizing Inclusive Design in Design Ops
September 11, 2025
"There is always more work to be done than we will ever be able to do, so enabling others to participate is beneficial."
Dr. Jamika D. Burge Robert Fabricant Peter Merholz Noam Segal Teresa TorresA Genuine Conversation about the Future of UX Research
March 20, 2024
