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
"Design without implementation is just theory; feedback loops must turn user needs into action."
Ed MullenDesigning the Unseen: Enabling Institutions to Build Public Trust
November 16, 2022
"There’s no reasonable prediction that AGI will exist in our lifetimes."
Steve Krug Louis RosenfeldDon’t Make Me Think 3.0: What Endures and What Evolves in UX
March 11, 2026
"Ethics is a very important part of any user research team and should be a foundational part of how you evaluate work."
George Zhang Molly StevensUX Research Excellence Framework
March 11, 2021
"We have to meet them where they are. Designers need to learn the language of business. That’s a very, very important lesson."
Robert SchwartzWe're Here for the Humans
June 9, 2017
"Eco Grader helps people understand where they can improve their website’s sustainability using real metrics."
Tim FrickThe journey of building a sustainable design practice
April 23, 2025
"Nine out of ten teams fail their first experiment, which is normal but can be demoralizing."
Alissa BriggsHow to Coach Enterprise Experimentation
May 14, 2015
"When I walked into the office, my team was ready to quit because they were taking rude user emails personally."
Husani OakleyBias Towards Action: Building Teams that Build Work
June 14, 2018
"There’s so much knowledge in organizations; research is not the sole source of truth, and we need to catalog and integrate that information effectively."
Sharon Banh Dave Hora Marieke McCloskey Alicia ZhongReimagining research: What does the field need to grow? [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
October 16, 2024
"Design ops is actually all about fragility. We do stability, security, planning, but can we add more experimentation and comfort with ambiguity?"
Silke Bochat5 Antifragile Strategies for a DesignOps 2.0
September 23, 2024
